Reflecting on the extent of God's providential knowledge, the Psalmist asks the Lord:
Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. (Psalm 139:7–8, NRSV)
Reactions to the Psalmist's theology vary: some feel comforted that God knows and directs their every action; others find the Psalmist's theological assumptions suffocating, since they apparently fail to recognize any ‘space’ for human action which lies outside God's knowledge or control. Eager to affirm human responsibility for sin, theistic accounts of divine causality – notably, Open Theism and perhaps Molinism – have often attempted to carve out such a space, by positing limits to God's knowledge of or causal contribution to free human choices. Yet equally, both Scriptural texts and philosophical arguments have inclined theistic philosophers to endorse robust accounts of divine providence, often including the doctrine of ‘Divine Universal Causality’ (DUC). As glossed by W. Matthews Grant, DUC holds that:
In Free Will and God's Universal Causality: The Dual Sources Account (hereafter, FW&GUC), Matthews Grant attempts to reconcile DUC with a libertarian account of creatures’ freedom. As the author recognizes, the position which he defends has roots in the Thomistic insistence that divine transcendence means that the mode of God's causal action allows God to cause creatures’ choices without compromising their contingency (see e.g. Aquinas, Commentary on ‘Peri Hermeneias’ 1.14; cited in Davies, Thomas Aquinas on God and Evil (2011), 74). This broad view has considerable precedent in recent literature, including e.g. Robert Koons (‘Dual agency: a Thomistic account of providence and human freedom’, Philosophia Christi, 4 (2002), 397–411) and Robert Matava (Divine Causation and Human Free Choice: Domingo Báñez, Physical Premotion and the Controversy de Auxiliis Revisited (2016) ). However, Matthews Grant presents perhaps the most sophisticated defence of this position in analytic philosophy, which adds much in detail and replies to objections.
To begin the monograph, the author briefly introduces DUC alongside the concept of libertarian free action, according to which an act is free if intentional, voluntary, and undetermined (i.e. ‘there is no factor both prior to and logically sufficient for the act’). As the author explains, the intention is to reconcile DUC with libertarian creaturely freedom by adopting a ‘Dual Sources’ account, according to which creatures’ actions are wholly caused by both God and their created agent. This reconciliation will require explaining, inter alia, how God's causation does not predetermine free human actions or morally compromise God through involvement in sin; these issues are introduced as the subjects of the following chapters. Matthews Grant provides motivation for his project in chapter 2, where he canvases reasons to affirm DUC including apparent support from biblical texts and four independent philosophical arguments. In chapter 3, he next rebuts an initial objection to the compatibility of DUC with Dual Sources: that the former entails the truth of occasionalism, according to which creatures fail to exercise causal agency.
In chapters 4 and 5, Matthews Grant completes the core aim of his project, which is to develop his Dual Sources model for the causation of creaturely actions in a way which allows creatures to exercise choices which are free in a libertarian sense. Crucially, in chapter 4, he lays out an ‘extrinsic model’ of divine causation (EM), according to which nothing intrinsic to God (i.e. His nature, or any accidental divine property such as a volition or decree) precedes or accounts for God's causation of created realities. Instead, following much Scholastic thought, God is not really related to creatures. Thus when God causes some created reality E, only the following exist:
a. God (with God's reasons [sc. for creating E])
b. E
c. The causal-dependence relation between God and E (58)
Given EM, Matthews Grant argues that although God directly causes creatures’ actions in their entirety (per DUC), these actions are not predetermined. Rather, God's causal action is indeterministic, and immediately concurs with the likewise indeterministic action of creatures to produce their free acts. As Matthews Grant acknowledges in a footnote, EM therefore notably differs from the ‘premotionist’ account of God's causation of creatures’ actions espoused by some Thomists following Domingo Báñez. Chapter 5 then attempts to defend EM from criticisms, and to render it more plausible by showing that it has considerable precedent in Scholastic thought; indeed, EM even plausibly follows from DUC.
Chapters 6–8 of FW&GUC extend the author's project, as Matthews Grant attempts to defend his Dual Sources model against potential criticisms, and then applies his model to the relationship between grace and freedom as understood in orthodox Christian theology. The first of these chapters replies to the contention that DUC implies that God is causally responsible for His creatures’ sins. The work in this chapter is again innovative, as Matthews Grant both defends a Scholastic ‘privation’ account of moral evil from some current objections, and replies to an argument from Leibniz which holds that pace privation accounts, if God causes the act underlying a sin, he is just as causally responsible for its occurrence as the sinner.
Chapter 7 continues to reflect on the responsibility which God bears for sin on Dual Sources, by considering the consequences which this model carries for the plausibility of the familiar ‘Free Will Defence’ (FWD) as a reply to the problem of moral evil. The argument here echoes Thomists including Brian Davies (Thomas Aquinas on God and Evil, 72–73) in claiming that given DUC, the FWD fails. Happily, this failure is not a significant cost for theists wishing to affirm Dual Sources. This is because even if God could have created creatures with libertarian free will who did not sin, He could not have caused the existence of some valuable actions or goods which are responses to sin, including ‘mercy, repentance, forgiveness, atonement, conversion from evil, [and] just punishment’ (126). These goods offer some rationale for God's permission of sin, but Matthews Grant further argues that rival accounts of divine knowledge and providence (i.e. Molinism and Open Theism) often ultimately appeal to existence of such goods – rather than the mere existence of creatures endowed with free will – to explain God's permission of sin. Finally, the chapter closes with arguments that God's permission of sin, as understood on the Dual Sources account, need not be morally inappropriate even if God in some sense ‘intends’ that sin occurs.
In the last chapter of FW&GUC, Matthews Grant applies Dual Sources to some salient issues in Christian philosophical theology. First, he extends his EM model of divine causation by (doubtless, controversially) claiming that God knows created realities by causing their existence. Thereafter, he offers a novel take on the doctrine of Providence. He suggests that Dual Sources offers a way to understand the manner in which God freely causes some to accept His offer of grace, without rendering their initial acceptance of grace meritorious as per Pelagianism. Finally, the author claims that Dual Sources can yield a novel account of Predestination. Rather than consisting of a divine decree or knowledge that someone will be saved prior to their acceptance of grace, Predestination refers to the indeterministic causal control which God exercises over a person's acceptance of and perseverance in grace.
This short monograph constitutes an important and innovative attempt to elucidate and defend Dual Sources as a way to reconcile the doctrine of DUC with the existence of creaturely free will. While the reader may not always agree with Matthews Grant's conclusions, they are arrived at by the rigorous philosophical argument which readers have come to expect from modern philosophy of religion. Moreover, readers will appreciate the effort taken to ground arguments both historically (in Scholastic thought) and in a broader Christian theological context through citation from the Bible and doctrinal/spiritual texts (see especially the discussion of ‘divine–human dialogue’ on pp. 169–171). Given its content and style, as the author himself notes, this book is likely to appeal particularly to analytic or latter-day Scholastic philosophers inclined to endorse DUC and libertarian accounts of human freedom. Theologians interested in Predestination would also benefit from considering the novel application of Dual Sources in chapter 8. More broadly, FW&GUC paints a picture of God's causal action towards creation which should prove highly valuable to anyone working on this topic, even if the Dual Sources account will surely attract much further evaluation.
One inevitable shortcoming of an attempt to present such a significant argument so densely (i.e. in 181 pages, excluding footnotes) is that the reader may often be left wanting the author to develop comments at greater length. This brevity is most notable in the absence of a concluding chapter to tie together the occasionally fragmented material, which seems unfortunate given the author's considerable achievement in developing a detailed model for divine action which clearly merits further development and application. Other areas which might have benefited from further analysis include the relationship between EM and modern analytic accounts of causation and the author's account of divine knowledge of creatures.
On occasion, one also wonders whether consideration of topics at greater length might have yielded a slightly different development of Dual Sources. I briefly raise by way of illustration a criticism of Matthews Grant's argument in chapter 7. Contra the argument therein, it is not clear that Dual Sources is incompatible with the FWD. The author reaches this conclusion by claiming that FWD requires the following ‘FWD Assumption’:
Necessarily, if in antecedent conditions c, I was free in the libertarian sense to perform some sinful act a or to refrain from it, and I freely (in the libertarian sense) performed a, then there is nothing which God could have done such that, necessarily, had he done it, I would have freely (in the libertarian sense) refrained from a in c. (121)
On Dual Sources, he notes, FWD Assumption is false. God could have done something to freely prevent the agent from committing a: He could have failed to cause the agent to perform a. However, it is not clear that FWD Assumption is required for the FWD to succeed. In this respect, recall that the FWD was originally developed by Alvin Plantinga as a response to a logical argument from evil. Insofar as the FWD is employed as a response to such arguments, it merely needs to show that God's creation of creatures endowed with free will entails the logical possibility of (moral) evil. In such a dialectical context, someone employing FWD might instead maintain the truth of this ‘Modest FWD Assumption’:
Necessarily, if in antecedent conditions c, I was free in the libertarian sense to perform some sinful act a or to refrain from it, and I freely (in the libertarian sense) performed a, then there is nothing which God need by logical necessity have done such that, necessarily, had he done it, I would have freely (in the libertarian sense) refrained from a in c.
I cannot see any implication from the truth of the Dual Sources account that ‘Modest FWD Assumption’ is false; rather, Matthews Grant takes pains to show that on his Dual Sources account, God's causation of free human actions is non-deterministic such that His nature does prevent His permission of sin. Moreover, it is compatible with Dual Sources to hold that, for each instance of sin, it is not even very probable prior to that sin's occurrence that God would have prevented that sin. Accordingly, the proponent of Dual Sources might further appeal to the existence of creatures’ freedom to explain why the existence of moral evil is not improbable or uncommon.
In sum, FW&GUC is an innovative and sophisticated addition to analytic discussions of divine action and providence. Both those inclined to endorse and those inclined to dismiss claims that God's transcendent mode of causality allows divine causation of creatures’ free actions will benefit from considering the merits and pitfalls of the Dual Sources account.
