Divine Freedom

We tend to model divine agency after our own human agency. Human agency involves a disconnect between essential being and existential being. It is in accordance with my nature to love God, for example, but I do not always do so. Other things intervene -- external influences, the vicissitudes of autobiography, etc. God, however, does not suffer this deficiency. In God, essence entails existence, and the divine activity is always in perfect accord with the divine nature. (This is entailed, among other things, both by divine simplicity and by divine perfection.)

If this is the case, then there is a correct way and an incorrect way to speak of God's freedom. God is free in the sense that God is unconstrained and unlimited by any external force. God is not the effect of any cause; nothing compels or prohibits God's activity.

But God is not "free" in the sense God could have acted otherwise than God has. If you were to "restart" the universe, God's will and word would be identical to what they in fact are. Given that God's activity follows perfectly from God's nature, to suppose a different activity means to suppose a different nature, another God. (And this is absurd, for God is the greatest being.)

As something of a side note, this sheds considerable light on the famous "Euthyphro dilemma," so called after a platonic dialogue by that name in which Socrates asks, "Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?" Is something good because God declares it, or does God declare it because it is good?

Both horns of the dilemma are problematic. If we opt for the first horn, then we get an entirely capricious account of goodness. Could God have decided to have "Torture a Child Tuesdays," on which inflicting as much gratuitous suffering on children is the truly moral thing to do? That is absurd; goodness does not simply depend upon divine whim. If we opt for the second horn, though, we end up asking why the good is good -- if not by virtue of God, then by virtue of what? Is there something apart from and prior to God that determines goodness? But this, too, is absurd.

The dilemma is premised upon a mistaken understanding of divine agency. The first horn recognizes that God is unconstrained and unlimited; there is no "good" apart from God. The second recognizes that God's affirmation of the good is not capricious and could not have been otherwise; "Murder your Mother Mondays" are indeed inconceivable. The two are reconciled in the divine unity of essence and existence. God commands the good because such commands, like all of God's activities, spring from God's nature, which is good, and cannot be otherwise.