William Rowe

This chapter argues that the requirements for absolute moral perfection and freedom that theists traditionally ascribe to God cannot be met, and hence that traditional theism should be rejected. Robert Adams’ contention that God need not create the best world God can is explored and rejected, as is the claim by Norman Kretzmann (following Aquinas) that the fact that God cannot create the best possible world (because there is no such world) does not threaten God’s moral perfection. On the contrary, this chapter argues that if God creates a world but could create a better one, then it is possible for there to be a being greater than God; and so the fact that there is no best possible world and that for any possible world there is a better one means that we should conclude that God does not exist.

Can God Be Free? is a penetrating study of a central problem in philosophy of religion: can it be right to regard God as free, and as praiseworthy for being perfectly good? Allowing that he has perfect knowledge and perfect goodness, if there is a best world for God to create he would have no choice other than to create it. But if God could not do otherwise than create the best world, he created the world of necessity, not freely, and we have no reason to be thankful to God for creating us, since he couldn't do otherwise. William Rowe proposes the need for some substantial revision in contemporary thinking about the nature of God.

Can God Be Free? is a penetrating study of a central problem in philosophy of religion: can it be right to regard God as free, and as praiseworthy for being perfectly good? Allowing that he has perfect knowledge and perfect goodness, if there is a best world for God to create he would have no choice other than to create it. But if God could not do otherwise than create the best world, he created the world of necessity, not freely, and we have no reason to be thankful to God for creating us, since he couldn't do otherwise. William Rowe proposes the need for some substantial revision in contemporary thinking about the nature of God.

According to the Westminster Confession, “God from all eternity did... freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass. Yet... thereby neither is God the author of sin or is violence offered to the will of the creatures.” It is hard to see how these two points can be consistently maintained. Hugh McCann, however, argues that by placing God’s decisions outside of time, both propositions are perfectly consistent. I agree with McCann that God’s determining decisions do not make him the author of our sins. But I think that God’s determining decisions, whether temporal or outside of time, preclude our possessing the libertarian free will that McCann’s believes we do possess. In fact, so I argue, if we possess libertarian free will, then elevating God’s determining decisions outside of time only results in God’s eternal decisions being within our power to determine.

During the 19th-century controversy over human freedom, a controversy involving such figures as Locke, Collins, Clarke, Leibniz, Price, and Reid, two different conceptions of freedom were at the center of the dispute. The first of these, of which John Locke is a major advocate, I will call Lockean freedom, the other conception, of which Thomas Reid is the leading advocate, I will call Reidian freedom. The history of this controversy is fundamentally a dispute over which of these two concepts of freedom is more adequate to our common-sense beliefs about freedom and our general metaphysical and scientific principles. To evaluate the merits of each side in this dispute we must, as a start, have a clear understanding of these two conceptions of freedom. Lockean freedom is fairly well understood, Reidian freedom much less so, perhaps even misunderstood. My aim in this paper is to show that the standard account of Reidian freedom is incorrect, to provide a correct interpretation of Reid’s conception of freedom, and to show its importance to the question of the connection between moral responsibility and freedom.