Abstract

Is it consistent to maintain that human free will is incompatible with determinism in the natural world while also maintaining that it is compatible with divine universal causation? On the face of it, divine universal causation looks like a form of determinism. And the intuitions which lead to incompatibilism about free will and natural determinism also lead to incompatibilism about free will and divine determinism. Several thinkers have attempted to resist this conclusion. This essay critiques that view, with a special focus on how it is developed in the work of W. Matthews Grant (2016, 2019). Grant contends that we can understand all of God’s activity as an exercise of divine “libertarian” free will and can construe God’s actions as nothing over and above the (created) effects brought about. I argue that Grant’s attempted reconciliation of human free will and universal divine causation fails, and on two counts. First, Grant does not succeed in presenting an account of the interaction of divine agency and created agency which avoids occasionalism; second, even if we assume Grant’s account successfully avoids the charge of occasionalism, it fails to reconcile divine agency with created free agency. The latter is illustrated by exploring the nature of the determination relation required by incompatibilist, agent-causation based accounts of free will.