The tentative title of my project is Free Will: Human and Divine.

In recent decades, the nature of human free will has received significant philosophical attention. What has received comparatively less philosophical attention is the relationship between human free will and various theological topics: What is the nature of Gods free will? How could a non-sinful creature, be it human or angelic, freely choose to fall? Will the redeemed have free will, and if so what will it be like? While many of these topics were addressed by medieval philosophers and theologians, the primary goal for my project will be to show how recent philosophical work on the metaphysics of free will can help address these theological issues. In previous work, Ive developed and defended an incompatibilist account of free will according to which (i) free will is a necessary condition for moral responsibility; (ii) free will is grounded primarily in the satisfaction of a sourcehood condition, rather than an alternative possibilities condition; and (iii) the satisfaction of the sourcehood condition nevertheless entails the satisfaction of an alternative possibilities condition at some point in the causal antecedents of the action. If awarded the Templeton Research Fellowship, my primary aim will be to extend this account to theological issues. While I will be building upon my previous work on free will, much of the new work will have application for other views of the metaphysics of free will (such as compatibilists). I envision the project as a book that will consist of the following parts: (i) (ii) (iii) (iv) (v) the nature of human free will an account of the development of human free will primal sin the freedom of the redeemed and the damned divine freedom

Part (i) will be a brief summary and defense of my previous work, which argues that the agent could not satisfy the sourcehood condition for free will if determinism (either causal or theological) were true. Part (ii) will take as its starting point the claim that while at least some human adults are morally responsible, and thus also free, we do not begin our human lives as free and responsible agents. How is it that this transformation takes place? This section will draw on research in psychology and biology to explain how the capacities required for freedom emerge through normal human development. While the present treatment will only provide a general framework for understanding the how this process takes place, I include it so that what follows in terms of human freedom is constrained by what can plausibly be claimed about the kind of organisms that we are. This part of the project will then be expanded in a future book project. The last three sections of the project address theological issues directly. Part (iii) addresses the question of how creatures that were created free yet morally good could use that freedom to sin. Whether or not they endorse the literal account of Adam and Eve, Christians face the problems of the introduction of sin into the world. For example, Christians face problems raised by what Scott MacDonald calls the Primal Sin: The fall of the angels constitutes the paradigm case [of evil-originating free choice] since, unlike Adams and Eves sin in the garden, the first angelic sin is entirely unprecedented. We can think of that first evil free choice as constituting primal sin. The first sin deserves to be called primal, however, not just because it is temporally first but also because it is something radically new in creation: the first evil appears against a backdrop of utter goodness. All things created by God, including the rational creatures whose free choices are the original evils, are wholly good and without flaw. There can be no context of defect or corruption into which the first sin fits. Good creatures with good wills voluntarily introduce evil into a world where there was none before. Primal sin is not only unprecedented but also seemingly unprepared for and unprompted.1 Not only is such a sin unprecedented and unprompted, it also seems to be completely inexplicable. How could a perfectly ordered being, as the Catholic catechism says, choose himself over and against God?2 Can a satisfactory account of the initial misuse of free will be given? And will one have to embrace voluntarism (roughly, the view that the will takes precedence over intellect such that the will is not constrained by the intellect) in order to explain how a non-fallen agent can sin?

Scott MacDonald, "Primal Sin," in The Augustinian Tradition, ed. Gareth Matthews (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1998), 110f. 2 Catechism of the Catholic Church, 398.

Part (iv) will seek to lay out how free will explore how free will might be understood, posteschaton, for the damned and the redeemed. Traditionally, Christianity has affirmed that those who are damned are confirmed in their sin, while those who are redeemed are no longer capable of sinning. Even leaving aside the issue of the compatibility between divine love and the traditional view of heaven and hell, the doctrines raise philosophical problems For example, if the redeemed are no longer capable of sinning, how can they still count as free (and, by extension, moral) agents? Likewise, why will the damned not freely be able to turn to God for forgiveness in hell? I will show how the traditional Christian view of the Last Judgment can respond to the potential objections raised by such questions without having to endorse theological compatibilism. Finally, in the final part of the project I will address Divine Freedom. While Gods freedom and creaturely freedom are different, the fact that humans are created in the image of God presumably means that our freedom reflects something about Gods freedom; but what exactly does it reflect? More specifically, what if anything can we learn about Gods freedom from the previously developed account of human freedom? I will show how a sourcehood based approach to divine freedom helps us avoid some of the purported problems of divine freedom, such as how an essentially perfectly good being could freely choose to create despite the fact that His nature requires Him to do what is morally best.