In the last piece, I laid out two arguments for libertarian free will. With these arguments established, we are in a position to go about the business of attempting to coherently reconcile divine sovereignty and libertarian free will. However, before we can embark on this task I need to say a word about causal determinism. It will be remembered that causal determinism is the position that says that every act of the “will” is a product of prior causes. In theological determinism God is the ultimate cause of every act of the will. Space does not permit me to offer a full critique of determinism, theological or otherwise. Others have done a far better job of this than I ever could, and the interested reader can readily seek their work out*. Rather, I will simply talk about defeaters in relation to causal determinism.

Defeaters are concept within epistemology that relate to our belief structure. Say you hold a certain belief; call this belief “X”. Now how committed you are to X is dependent on the evidence you have to support that belief. Suppose now that another piece of information comes along that calls X into question. If this new piece of information, this new belief, has strong enough evidence to negate your belief in X then we would say X is defeated. Defeaters are new beliefs, arguments, or pieces of information that force us to change our initial belief. A helpful illustration comes from Dr. Alvin Plantinga. In his work Where the Conflict Really Lies, Plantinga uses the illustration of seeing a sheep in a field. You walk past a pasture and see a sheep out in the distance. You normally trust your perception so you form the belief that there is a sheep in that pasture. Shortly thereafter, the owner of the pasture comes along. When you make a remark about the sheep in the pasture, he informs you that there is no sheep in the pasture, but there is a white sheepdog that looks like a sheep from a distance. With this new information at hand, you suddenly form a new belief that there is not a sheep in that pasture (Plantinga, 163). In this illustration, your belief that there is a sheep in the pasture was defeated by new information. This is how defeaters function. This concept of defeat can easily be applied to causal determinism. If we have sufficiently strong reasons to believe in libertarian free will then our belief in determinism is effectively defeated. The two arguments that I offered in the last piece depend on our acceptance of genuine morality. They show that if moral duties are real, then the will is free. This means that if we have strong reasons to affirm the existence of moral duties then our belief in determinism should be abandoned. Morality points us to free will, and that free will contradicts determinism. So we are left with a choice: accept moral duties, and the free will they imply, or deny genuine moral duties and retain our belief causal determinism. The choice is clear; determinism is defeated.

* For a full critique of fatalism and causal determinism see William Lane Craig’s The Only Wise God.

Plantinga, Alvin. Where the Conflict Really Lies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.