You Can't Act Freely Unless God Causes You To

This week, my Guided Tour of the Summa begins to address St. Thomas Aquinas’s view of Divine Providence, especially as it relates to God’s causing the human will. Many people are surprised to find out that Aquinas thinks that God causes all things, including our free choices. A popular intuition, argued against by Thomists ever since, is that God’s causation of our free choices makes those choices not-so-free after all. I don’t intend to settle that centuries-long debate in one blog post, but I wanted to share an interesting line of thought from a popular 20th-century Dominican writer, Walter Farrell, O.P., in which he defends the coherence of God’s providence and our freedom. In it, Farrell strikingly asserts that, far from God’s providence being a hindrance to our freedom:

All attempts to explain this fact of human freedom on grounds other than divine action destroy that freedom and establish fatalism.1

Surprising, right? Here is how he gets there.

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First, Farrell has to establish freedom. His book is not meant to be a strictly scholarly work, but the account is relatively straightforward. If you are freely choosing something, you are choosing an end, and the means you will take to achieve that end, without having necessarily chosen it:

If there are a hundred theaters in town, I am free to choose to go to any one of them; if there is only one, I am still free in the matter of theater-going for I can choose either to go or stay at home.

This condition is frequently described in the free will literature as the ability to do otherwise. The details are controversial (because of course they are), but this will do for now: if you are free to do something, it was possible for you to do something else if things had been different in some way that has to do with your choosing differently.

That being said, even free choices are subject to the determination of the principle of non-contradiction. When you choose to sit down and read a Substack article on Catholic philosophy and free will (good choice, by the way), your freedom is not impaired by the fact that you cannot simultaneously choose to play a baseball game.2 Thus, a will becomes determined when it actually makes a choice.

Farrell argues that, if a will moves itself (rather than God or something else moving it), three broad possibilities are available to describe that action, all of which imply fatalism:

1) The will is at the same time undetermined and determined. Undetermined, because a determined will is unfree. But determined, because an undetermined will has not made any choice. Farrell’s point is that an undetermined will does not have the capacity to move into a determined choice of its own power, since by the nature of being undetermined it does not have that determination. You cannot be moved in a way that you are not already moving without being moved by an external mover for the same reason that you cannot spend 20 dollars you do not already have without someone giving it to you. Thus we get a contradiction, saying that the will is both undetermined and determined at the same time about each choice.

2) The will simply is determined. But then the will is not free, since it could not choose anything other than what it has been determined to choose.

3) The will is undetermined. But if a will remains undetermined, it never chooses, because choice requires determination.

So the will moving itself will not work. But what if something external, like bodily movements or external stimuli moves the will? Well, in that case, the body is moving necessarily in response to something outside of it. This is unfree for the same reason that a domino does not freely fall if another domino hits it.

So the will cannot move itself, nor can it be moved by external agency, without losing freedom. The only remaining choice to move the will is God.

You could frame the logical argument something like this (you can skip this if long logical arguments make your head spin):

1. (h) Human beings have free will.

2. If (h), then (m) the human will is moved.

3. Therefore, (m) (Modus Ponens 1, 2)

4. But if (m), then either (i) it moves itself or (o) it is moved by something else.

5. Therefore, Either (i) or (o) (MP 3, 4)

6. But if (i), then not (h).

7. Therefore, not (i) (Modus Tollens, 1, 6)3

8. Therefore, (o) (Disjunctive Syllogism 5, 7)

9. But if (o), then either (e) the will is moved by external, non-God forces or (G) the will is moved by God.

10. So, either (e) or (G) (MP 8, 9)

11. But if (e), then not (h)

12. So, not (e) (MT 1, 11)4

13. Therefore, (G) (10, 12 DS)

Farrell admits that the above is an indirect proof, which is to say that it simply eliminates all other options and, therefore, settles on the last remaining option. But that still has not shown how God’s causation allows our will to act freely. On this, he offers a few notes.

First, Farrell points out that our freedom is itself a reality that needs to be created. Therefore, when we say that God has created us free, He must also create that freedom insofar as He must create us with freedom. So, when God creates us free, and moves us through existence, he is creating us and moving us in our freedom.

Think of it this way: God is moving all things. But when He moves our wills from indetermination to determination, he is moving our free will. Farrell says that “He, the First Mover, moves things according to the nature He has given them; it is man’s nature, because he is rational, move freely.”5 God’s movement of us includes our freedom, and thus does not contradict our free will anymore than God’s giving souls to human embryos contradicts our ability to co-create human beings through the sexual act. Our wills requiring a source for its movement is merely to say that they do not necessarily exist, not to say that they are not free.

I thought this argument was interesting, though I can see a few ways that someone would push back initially. It is also a little short on explication of how, exactly God moves man freely. But, to be fair to Farrell, such an explanation would necessarily be controversial. I once had Every Dahm Thought tell me that metaphysics was like trying to hold sand; one moment, you think you have it, and then you lose it again. I find myself feeling this way anytime I read Thomists on free will and providence.

That being said, I think the logic of this argument is really interesting, and helpful for how Catholics should think about free will and God. It certainly moves us in the right direction, even if explaining it perfectly is elusive.

As for Farrell himself, he is of the opinion that this is the sort of thing that is unlikely to ever be fully understood on this side of heaven, writing:

As for the manner of the fact—how it can be done—to know that is to understand the divinity, to comprehend the infinitude of divine action. There precisely lies the mystery of the manner of the reconciliation of these two truths, a mystery that will forever be beyond the powers of the mind of man.6

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