Freddoso on open theism

On the risk-taking account of providence, God lacks exact and infallible knowledge of the contingent future. Yet given His thorough familiarity with present causal tendencies and His clear grasp of His own providential designs, He is almost sure about how the future will tum out. In fact, He is even pretty sure about whether or not we human beings (including, presumably, Jesus Christ) will do freely what He intends us to do; but He is strong enough to make us do it anyway, if it suits Him. As Hasker puts it, "God is perfectly capable of making someone an 'offer he can't refuse'" (p. 196). So even if the world begins to go really badly, God, though disappointed, is fully capable of controlling the damage. What's more, His prophecies about future free actions-including sinful ones, such as Peter's denial of Christ-are almost sure to be fulfilled; and, once again, even if the improbable happens and God turns out to have been mistaken in so prophesying, He is powerful enough to put things back on track. Likewise, even allowing that some of His ends (e.g., the triumph of grace over sin) depend crucially on specific free actions being performed by specific human beings (e.g., Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah, Mary the Mother of God, Peter, Paul, etc.), He can be almost sure, given His unusually high degree of knowledge and power, that those ends will be realized. And if all this strikes you as excessively anthropomorphic and as coming dangerously close to turning God the Father into the Godfather, then according to Hasker you have not been sufficiently dehellenized. 

Not content simply to promote his own watered-down account of providence, Hasker heaps scorn upon the traditional account, according to which "our most ennobling achievements are just the expected printouts from the divine programming" (p. 199). In his zeal, he even resorts to the "Hitler" defense. (One can imagine a medieval Hasker conjuring up the "Genghis Khan" defense.) After running roughshod over hundreds of pages of the best scholastic theology by declaring ex cathedra that those who adhere to the traditional account cannot distinguish what God intends from what He merely permits, Hasker concludes that they "cannot avoid saying ... that God specifically chose Hitler to become leader of the Third Reich and instigator of the Holocaust" (pp. 199-200). Really now. More to the point, ask yourself whether Hasker's risk-taking account fares any better with regard to Hitler. Once Hitler accedes to power and gets the Holocaust rolling on its grisly way, even the risk-taking God, who is after all pretty knowledgeable, should have a crystal-clear idea of the further specific evils that are almost certain to occur. So if He does not intervene early on to stop Hitler, this can only be because of some worthy (though very hidden) purposes He has in mind. In that case, would it not be just as true on the risk-taking account as on the traditional account that "God has deliberately and with full knowledge chosen that these good purposes shall be fulfilled through a plan that entails the actual occurrence (not just the possibility) of specific evils" (p. 200)? Let's face it. Hitler is a problem for everyone. Finally, after implicitly saddling the traditionalist with Eleonore Stump's incredibly strong suggestion that the sufferings of each human person are outweighed by a greater good which those very sufferings produce for that same person, Hasker endorses Michael Peterson's more congenial 'risk-taking' theodicy, according to which a world created by God might be literally teeming with genuinely gratuitous evils. I would have thought-with, say, Aquinas-that the most plausible theodicies lie somewhere between Stump's and Peterson's. 

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/faithandphilosophy/vol10/iss1/10/ 

Preempting God

According to open theist William Hasker:

If we really, seriously believed that God would prevent any evil that did not have a greater good as its result, this would significantly undermine our own motivation to prevent or mitigate such evils. If I prevent some serious evil from occurring, I will actually prevent the greater good that, absent my interference, God would have brought about as a result of the evil in question. If, on the contrary, the evil would have no such good result, then God will not permit it, regardless of what I do or don't do. The failsafe option, then, is to do nothing, C. Meister & J. Dew, eds. God and the Problem of Evil: Five Views (IVP 2017), 160.

i) I don't think God permits evil only for the sake of greater goods. An alternate good will suffice.

ii) If I was a consistent open theist, I'd be more risk-averse. On that view, God is less likely to override the laws of nature or override the freedom of perpetrators. So why should I stick my neck out? The world of open theism is sufficiently hazardous, sufficiently random, without me further endangering myself for the sake of others. 

iii) I don't see how Hasker's alternative solves the problem he poses. If an open theist prevents, or endeavors to prevent, an evil that God would otherwise permit, then isn't the open theist acting as though he's wiser or better than God?

iv) From a predestinarian standpoint, if I intervene to prevent an evil, then that didn't frustrate God's plan. To the contrary, God intended me to intervene in that situation. God intended the consequences of my intervention. God intended the goods that flow from my intervention. So there's no tension. No need to second-guess my actions. 

Emergent Dualism

William Hasker’s chapter on emergent dualism in For Faith and Clarity is clear and lucid. The argument is easy to follow and flows smoothly. At times I was tempted to say, “Almost thou persuadest me to be an emergent dualist.” But at the end of the day I didn’t see what it offered me that a more traditional form of dualism didn’t. I guess I don’t feel the need to make my view more palatable to evolutionists and physicalist neuroscientists.

Hasker’s chapter consists of arguments against physicalist theories of mind, traditional dualist theories (e.g., Cartesian dualism), Christian physicalist views, emergent materialist views, as well as a positive statement of emergent dualism in light of the difficulties the aforementioned positions face and how emergent dualism fares in light of the critiques leveled against the aforementioned positions.

Rather than discuss all of this, I’d like to focus on just one small aspect of Hasker’s chapter. One puzzling feature arises when we look at one of Hasker’s (according to Hasker) strongest arguments against traditional dualism vis-à-vis the way he responds to one of the strongest (according to Hasker) arguments against emergent dualism.

Hasker thinks that the traditional dualist has “no plausible explanation” for the “dependency problem” (cf. p.249).¹ Simply put, the “dependency problem” is that Cartesian dualism would not lead us to expect the sort of dependency of the mind on the brain that we find to be the case. Given all that we know about this dependency, it seems to be difficult to maintain the type of independence traditional dualism seems to require. A paradigm case that illustrates this problem is, say, that of a blow to the head that causes changes in the mental life. Presumably, according to Hasker, this demonstrable dependency goes far beyond anything this theory would lead us to expect.

One thing I find puzzling in all of this isn’t the fact that Hasker seems to answer this alleged conundrum in the preceding paragraph in recognizing what Charles Taliaferro has called “integrative dualism.” According to this view “mind and body form an integral unit, so that I live through my body and my body’s life is my own life” (ibid). My problem is rather with how Hasker answers what he takes to be a significant challenge to emergent dualism.

Hasker notes that emergent dualism requires us to attribute to ordinary, everyday matter, viz., sticks, stones, bones, and ice cream cones, highly remarkable powers that can produce, when arranged just right, “emergent minds with the capacity to seek truth, enjoy beauty, perceive good and evil, and enter relationship with God." Apparently one critique has said this is impossible. That might be too strong of language. But another objector maintains that the view is “hard to swallow.” Hasker says, “He may be right; perhaps this view is a lot to swallow” (p.260).

So this view seems to force us to hold beliefs far beyond what “what we have been led to expect” (ibid). But somehow this isn’t a problem for Hasker since when God “chose to make humans…out of the dust of the earth, we may well suppose that [God] had the foresight to endow that dust with powers that would enable such a creation” (ibid).

In other words, when faced with the prospect of believing something to occur that “we wouldn’t expect” on Hasker’s thesis, he appeals to a “Goddditit”² view. But, when the traditional dualist has a similar problem, it is an objection “not easily met” (p.249). If Hasker gets to say “Goddidit” when things get tough, so does the traditional dualist. This is not to say that I find Hasker’s worries all that worrisome, myself, it is just to say that I see a bit of special pleading on his end.

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¹ His other example of a difficult objection to traditional dualism is the “continuity problem” (cf. p.249-50). Hasker thinks it difficult for the traditional dualist to claim that only man has a soul over against all the other creatures. I suspect I don’t owe an answer to one of his reasons why this view is troublesome for us, i.e., it’s “chauvinistic,” since one might say that his view not attributing minds to sticks, stones, bones, and ice cream cones is likewise “chauvinistic.” His stronger objection is that other animals are similar to us in both structure and function so why would we have minds and not them? Well, (a) that’s the way God chose to create, and (b) man is the imago Dei and , apparently, the soul is a means to exhibit certain features and functions of the imago Dei. Didn’t Hasker tell us one function of the soul (mind) is “the capacity to seek truth, enjoy beauty, perceive good and evil, and enter relationship with God”?

² I likewise don't have a problem with "Goddidit." I don't use this term as a pejorative.