Appendix C
A Plain-Language Primer on the Positions That Shape This Book
Could you, right now, have chosen a different drink this morning? A different shirt? A different word in the sentence you just read? The answer you give to that question shapes everything else in this book.
That may sound like an overstatement. This is, after all, a book about whether God will save everyone. What does your coffee order have to do with the fate of the human race? More than you might think. The free-will question sits at the center of the case for universal salvation, and it sits there for a simple reason: the strongest objection to the hope is built on it.
Here is the short version. In Chapter 5, we met Thomas Talbott's famous triad. Three claims most Christians want to hold: (1) God sincerely loves every person and wills to save them all; (2) God will in fact succeed in saving everyone whose salvation He wills; (3) some people are never saved. Any two of those sit together. All three cannot.1 The universalist keeps (1) and (2) and denies (3). But the critic replies: what about freedom? If people can say no to God, then God might not get what He wills, and (2) falls. This is the free-will defense of hell, and it is the single most popular philosophical argument for eternal loss.2
So the whole debate turns on what freedom is, what it can do, and whether it can hold out against God forever. That is why this appendix exists. Before you can follow the freedom arguments in Chapter 11, Chapter 13, Chapter 16, Chapter 17, and Chapter 18, you need a clear picture of what the main positions are, what each one claims, and where this book stands.
I want to give you that picture in the plainest words I can. No philosophy background required.
What You Will Find Here
This appendix covers three main positions on free will: hard determinism, compatibilism (soft determinism), and libertarianism (with its two sub-types). It also walks through three key debates in plain words, explains where this book stands, and closes with a glossary table of the terms you will meet in the main chapters. For the related topic of middle knowledge (God's knowledge of what each person would freely do in any situation), see Appendix D.
Philosophers have argued about free will for over two thousand years. The positions are many, and the labels can be confusing. But at the core, the debate sorts into three families.3 I will define each one plainly, then give an everyday example so you can feel the difference.
Hard determinism says that every event, including every human choice, is fixed by prior causes. Your genes, your upbringing, the chemical state of your brain at the moment you chose, the whole chain of events stretching back to the beginning of the universe: these together made your choice the only one that could have happened. Freedom, on this view, is an illusion. You feel free, but you are not. You could not have done otherwise.4
An everyday example. Picture a row of dominoes. You tip the first one, and the rest fall in order. No domino "decides" to fall. Each one is pushed by the one before it. The hard determinist says your choices work the same way. Your decision to read this page was the last domino in a chain of causes you did not set in motion and could not have stopped.5
Few Christians hold hard determinism, because it seems to make God the author of sin. If no one can do otherwise, then no one is truly responsible.6 As Kenneth Keathley observes, hard determinism makes the Holocaust no more Hitler's fault than a tornado or an earthquake. It becomes a natural disaster, not a moral crime.7
Compatibilism, also called soft determinism, agrees with the hard determinist that every choice is caused by prior conditions. But it adds an important claim: freedom and determinism are compatible. They can both be true at once. How? By redefining freedom.8
On this view, you are "free" whenever you do what you want to do, even if your wants themselves were caused by factors you did not choose. Freedom is the freedom of inclination. You act on your strongest desire. You are free if nothing outside you forces you to act against that desire. But you have no power over the desire itself.9
The Two Pillars of Compatibilism
First, your choices are shaped by your desires. You always choose what you most want in that moment. Second, your choices are causally necessary. Given who you are and your situation, no other choice was possible. But because you acted on your own desire, with no outside force blocking you, you count as "free."10
An everyday example. Imagine you are at a restaurant. You order the pasta because you want the pasta. No one holds a gun to your head. The compatibilist says: you acted freely, because you acted on your own desire. The fact that your desire for pasta was shaped by your genes, your childhood meals, and the smell from the kitchen does not matter. You did what you wanted. That is all "freedom" means.
The catch is this: if you had wanted the salad instead, you would have ordered the salad. But given who you are at that moment, you could not have wanted the salad. So the ability to do otherwise is only hypothetical, not actual.11
Compatibilism has a long history. Jonathan Edwards gave it its most famous defense in the Christian tradition.12 Many Reformed theologians hold it today. It provides real insights. But it also carries a serious problem, one that even its friends admit: it seems to make God the author of sin, since God determined the very desires that lead people to choose evil.13
Libertarianism says that freedom is something stronger. When you face a real choice, the prior conditions of your life, your desires, your brain chemistry, your setting, are not enough to fix which way you go. You are the one who settles it. You are the source of your choice, and you really could have chosen otherwise.14
Timothy Stratton offers a clear definition: libertarian freedom is the ability to choose or act such that prior conditions are not enough to causally determine your choice.15 Influences are real. Pressures are real. Reasons pull you one way or another. But on the libertarian view, none of these forces the outcome. You, the person, settle it.
An everyday example. You stand at a crossroads. The path on the left is familiar. The path on the right is new. Both are open. Nothing in the universe, not even God, forces your feet one way. You step left, or you step right, and you are the one who did it. The universe held its breath, and you decided.
Libertarianism comes in two main versions, and they matter for the debates we will meet in a moment.
Event-causal libertarianism says your choice is caused by prior mental events (your beliefs, desires, and intentions), but these causes do not determine the outcome. They make some choices more likely than others, but the final result is not fixed.16
Agent-causal libertarianism says something bolder. It says the person, the agent, is the cause. Not just a chain of mental events, but you yourself. You are what the philosophers call a "first mover." You set the chain going. In the words of Roderick Chisholm, you are "a prime mover unmoved." You cause events to happen, and nothing causes you to cause them.17 This idea stretches back to Aristotle, who taught that every event is brought about by one of three causes: necessity, chance, or agency. Agency is its own kind of cause, different from both.18
Why Agent Causation Matters
If people are agents in this strong sense, then our choices are not random events (like a coin flip) and not determined events (like a falling domino). They are something else: authored actions. This is the view that grounds moral responsibility in the deepest way, because it means the buck stops with you.
Now that you know the positions, here are the three debates that come up most often in this book. I will keep each one brief; the full treatments live in the chapters.
The strongest philosophical argument against compatibilism is called the consequence argument. The core idea is simple: if determinism is true, then everything that happens is a consequence of the laws of nature plus the state of the universe before you were born. You had no say over the laws of nature. You had no say over what happened before your birth. So you have no say over what happens now, including your choices.19
Peter van Inwagen, who helped develop this argument, puts the point sharply: if your actions are the inevitable result of the distant past and the laws of physics, then your "freedom" is only the freedom of a river to flow downhill. It is going where it was always going to go.20
Compatibilists have answers to this argument, and the debate continues. But the consequence argument is one reason many philosophers of religion, including the ones this book relies on, find libertarian freedom more convincing.
The most common objection to libertarian freedom is that it makes choices random. If your choice is not determined by prior causes, then what settles it? Nothing? If nothing settles it, then it is a matter of luck, like a coin toss. And a coin toss is not free in any sense that matters.
This objection has real force. Eric Reitan presses it this way: if a free choice is not grounded in the agent's reasons, beliefs, and desires, then what explains it? If nothing explains it, it is random. And if something explains it, then we need something to explain that something, and we are caught in an infinite chain of explanations. The only way out, Reitan argues, is to admit a random element in free choice.21
The agent-causation reply cuts through this. The libertarian says: the agent is the explanation. You are not a link in a chain. You are the one who starts the chain. When you choose for a reason, it is you who chose the reason, not the reason that chose you. And when you choose without a reason, that is not randomness. It is agency. The agent is in control. As Kirk MacGregor writes, agent causation guarantees that the person is in charge of the action. No infinite regress appears, because the agent is the stopping point.22
But Isn't an Undetermined Choice Just a Roll of the Dice?
No. A random event, like a quantum particle going left or right, has no author. Nobody did it. But an agent-caused event has an author: you. The event is not random, because it was not left to chance. And it was not determined, because nothing forced your hand. It is a third kind of thing. Aristotle, Epicurus, and Carneades all saw this distinction over two thousand years ago: necessity, chance, and agency are three separate categories, not two.23
In 1969, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt posed a famous thought experiment. Imagine a scientist has planted a chip in your brain. The chip does nothing unless you start to form the intention to vote for Candidate A. If you do, the chip fires and forces you to vote for Candidate B instead. But suppose you walk into the voting booth and freely vote for Candidate B on your own. The chip never fires. Were you free?24
Frankfurt's point is this: you seem free and responsible, even though you could not have done otherwise. The chip would have stopped you. So maybe the "ability to do otherwise" is not what freedom is really about. Maybe what matters is being the source of your action.
This is a clever argument, and it sparked a debate that continues today. Some libertarians accept the point and say: fine, what matters is sourcehood, not alternate possibilities. Others push back and note that in the thought experiment, the chip never activated. In the sequence that actually happened, nothing determined your choice. You still thought freely, weighed your options freely, and chose freely. The chip only blocked an alternative you did not try to take.25
For this book, the good news is that we do not need to settle the Frankfurt debate. Whether freedom requires the ability to do otherwise or only requires being the undetermined source of your action, either version supports the case I am making. Both versions are libertarian. Both say your choice is not fixed by prior causes. Both say you are the one who did it.26
This book holds libertarian, agent-causal freedom. It holds that you, the person, are the real source of your choices. Prior conditions influence you. They do not determine you. You could, in a given moment, have chosen otherwise. The full argument for this position lives in Chapter 13. Here I will give you the short version of why it matters for the hope this book defends.
The reason is this: if freedom is real in the strong, libertarian sense, then two things follow that shape the rest of the book.
First, the hope of universal salvation cannot be a proof. David Bentley Hart argues that the rational will, once it sees God clearly, cannot refuse Him, and so universal salvation is a matter of logical necessity.27 I admire Hart and use his work gratefully. But I cannot follow him here. If you can really choose otherwise, then God cannot guarantee your "yes" by metaphysical force. A genuine "yes" requires a possible "no." So the bare logical possibility that someone might refuse God forever cannot be ruled out by force. That is the honest open question this book faces in Chapter 17 and weighs in Chapter 29.
Freedom and the Line Between Two Universalisms
Hart is a source, not a counterfeit. He holds the creeds, affirms the cross, and confesses the Trinity. But his claim that salvation is necessary spends libertarian freedom. This book keeps freedom and pays for it: the conclusion becomes conviction, not proof. That is the parting, and it is what keeps the hope honest. The universalism defended in this book is not a deterministic system. It holds that God wins every heart by love and wisdom, not by overriding the will. For the full boundary between biblical universalism and its counterfeits, see Appendix B.
Second, if freedom is real, then God's strategy for saving everyone must respect it. God does not drag anyone into the Kingdom. He woos, draws, persuades, and purifies. He knows what each person would freely do in any situation (this is middle knowledge, and Appendix D explains it in plain terms). And He has all of eternity to work. So His approach is not force but what Jerry Walls calls optimal grace: the best possible appeal, fitted to each heart, at the right time, in the right way.28
This is why I believe the hope is not only biblical but reasonable. Not because freedom is an illusion. Not because God overrides the will. But because a perfectly loving and all-knowing God, with eternity to work, can compose for every person the most persuasive appeal a free creature could receive. The love does not force. It persuades. And I believe, with settled conviction, that it will persuade everyone in the end.
That conviction, held honestly and without overclaiming, is what the rest of this book argues for. The free-will question is not a problem to be swept aside. It is the ground on which the case is built.
What Libertarian Freedom Commits This Book To
Keeping libertarian freedom means four things for this book's case. First, the conclusion is conviction, not necessity (Chapter 2). Second, the case is cumulative and probabilistic, not a single deductive proof (Chapter 29). Third, the open question is faced honestly: a final "no" is logically possible, even if overwhelmingly unlikely (Chapter 17). Fourth, the only fallback, if the open question ever cut the other way, is conditional immortality, never eternal conscious torment.
The table below gathers the technical terms you will meet in the main chapters. Each gets a one-line definition in plain words. For the terms that relate to middle knowledge and Molinism, see the companion table in Appendix D.
| Term | Plain Definition |
|---|---|
| Agent causation | The view that the person (the "agent"), not a chain of prior events, is the real cause of a free choice. You start the chain; nothing starts you. See Chapter 13. |
| Alternate possibilities (the principle of) | The claim that a person acts freely only if that person could have done otherwise. Debated in the Frankfurt-case literature; some libertarians hold it, others say sourcehood is enough. |
| Compatibilism (soft determinism) | The view that freedom and determinism can both be true. Freedom is redefined as doing what you want, even though your wants are caused by factors you did not choose. See Chapter 13. |
| Consequence argument | The argument that if determinism is true, then no one can do otherwise, because every choice is a consequence of the distant past and the laws of nature, neither of which is up to us. |
| Determinism | The thesis that every event, including every human choice, is fixed by prior conditions so that only one outcome is possible. Comes in two forms: hard (freedom is an illusion) and soft (freedom is compatible with determinism). |
| Event causation | The view that every cause is itself an event caused by a prior event, forming a chain. On this model, your choice is just the latest link in a chain of prior mental events. Contrast with agent causation. |
| Frankfurt cases | Thought experiments (named after Harry Frankfurt) in which an agent seems free and responsible even though a hidden mechanism would have prevented any other choice. Used to challenge the principle of alternate possibilities. |
| Freedom of inclination | The compatibilist definition of freedom: you are free if you can act on your strongest desire. You may do what you want, but you have no power over what you want. |
| Freedom of integrity | The kind of freedom enjoyed by God and by glorified believers: the ability always to do what is right, with no temptation to do otherwise. Not a loss of freedom but its perfection. See Chapter 18. |
| Hard determinism | The view that determinism is true and freedom is an illusion. Since all choices are caused by prior conditions, no one is truly free or responsible. |
| Incompatibilism | The view that freedom and determinism cannot both be true. If determinism holds, freedom is gone. Libertarians are incompatibilists who affirm freedom and deny determinism. |
| Libertarian freedom | The view that genuine freedom requires that prior conditions do not determine your choice. You are the real source of your action, and you could have chosen otherwise. The position this book holds. See Chapter 13. |
| Sourcehood | The idea that what matters for freedom and responsibility is that the agent is the originating source of the action, not merely a link in a causal chain. Some libertarians say sourcehood alone is enough; others add the principle of alternate possibilities. |
You now have the map. The positions are on the table, the key debates are laid out, and the book's commitment to libertarian, agent-causal freedom is in front of you. When you meet these terms in the main chapters, you can come back here. When the argument turns on the difference between a determined choice and a free one, you will know what is at stake.
The chapters that lean hardest on this material are Chapter 11 (the free-will defense of hell), Chapter 13 (why the book keeps libertarian freedom and parts from Hart), Chapter 16 (Plantinga's transworld depravity objection), Chapter 17 (whether anyone could refuse God forever), and Chapter 18 (how a free "yes" can be certain). For the related question of how God uses His knowledge of what each person would freely do, see Appendix D.
The question this whole book answers is whether freedom is a friend of the hope or its enemy. I believe it is a friend. Not because freedom guarantees the outcome, but because a God who knows every heart, who has all of eternity, and who is love itself, will find a way to persuade every free creature without forcing a single one. That is the argument. And it starts with the kind of freedom you just learned about.
↑ 1. Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), ch. 1, "The Emergence of Three Different Pictures." Talbott deliberately strengthened proposition (2) in the second edition from "has the power to" into the stronger "will in fact triumph," closing the "God could but respects freedom" escape. The inconsistent triad is the philosophical spine of the book's affirmative case; see Chapter 5 for the full treatment.
↑ 2. The classic statement is C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1940), ch. 8, and The Great Divorce (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1945). Lewis's famous line that "the doors of hell are locked from the inside" shaped a generation of philosophical defenses. See Chapter 11 for the full examination.
↑ 3. For an accessible overview of the main positions, see Kenneth Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty: A Molinist Approach (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2010), chs. 3–4, which provides a clear taxonomy of hard determinism, soft determinism (compatibilism), hard libertarianism, and soft libertarianism (concurrence). My summary here draws on Keathley's framework.
↑ 4. Richard Double, The Non-Reality of Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), is a representative defense. Few philosophers hold hard determinism, but it serves as a useful foil for the other positions.
↑ 5. Keathley calls this picture "event causation": a chain of events where each cause is the effect of a prior cause, "much like a chain of dominos." Salvation and Sovereignty, ch. 3.
↑ 6. This is not merely an academic worry. If sin is the inevitable result of a causal chain God set in motion, then the moral weight of evil shifts from the creature to the Creator. Most theists find this conclusion unacceptable, which is why most theistic determinists are compatibilists rather than hard determinists.
↑ 7. Timothy Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2020), ch. 2. The analogy is sharp: if a person's choices are fully determined by prior causes, then even monstrous acts are no more "chosen" than a hurricane's path.
↑ 8. The label "compatibilism" is itself contested. Peter van Inwagen warns against using it to mean "moral responsibility is compatible with determinism," since this conflates two different claims; see van Inwagen, Thinking About Free Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 152. Stratton discusses the resulting confusion in Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism, Appendix C, "Libertarianism, Compatibilism, and the Art of Talking Past One Another."
↑ 9. Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, ch. 3. Bruce Ware defines compatibilist freedom as "freedom of one's strongest inclination, desire, and volition. That is, our freedom consists in our choosing and doing according to what we are inclined most, or what we desire most, to do." Quoted in Keathley, ch. 3.
↑ 10. Keathley identifies two central tenets: (1) a person's choices are dictated by his desires ("Edwards's Law of Choice," after Jonathan Edwards: "The will always chooses according to its strongest inclination at the moment"), and (2) all choices are causally necessary. Salvation and Sovereignty, ch. 3.
↑ 11. This is the distinction between actual and hypothetical ability to do otherwise. The compatibilist says: if you had wanted differently, you could have chosen differently. But given who you are and the situation you are in, you cannot want differently. Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, ch. 3.
↑ 12. Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will (1754). Keathley notes that it is "primarily through Edwards's Freedom of the Will that causal determinism became part and parcel of Calvinism's doctrine of divine sovereignty." Salvation and Sovereignty, ch. 3.
↑ 13. Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, ch. 3: "Compatibilism appears to make God the author of sin (a problem even its proponents recognize)." This is one of the reasons this book prefers the libertarian account.
↑ 14. Keathley defines libertarianism as "the view that the morally responsible agent is in some sense the origin of his choices, and that prior conditions such as circumstances are not the final determiner for that agent." Salvation and Sovereignty, ch. 3.
↑ 15. Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism, ch. 2: "Libertarian freedom is the ability to choose or act such that antecedent conditions are insufficient to causally determine or necessitate one's choice or action." This definition holds whether or not there are alternate possibilities available.
↑ 16. Event-causal libertarianism is sometimes called "non-deterministic causation." The agent's mental states (beliefs, desires) cause the action, but do not necessitate it. The view has the advantage of fitting neatly into a standard causal framework; its disadvantage is vulnerability to the randomness objection discussed below.
↑ 17. Roderick Chisholm, "Human Freedom and the Self," in Free Will, ed. Gary Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Quoted in Kirk R. MacGregor, Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2022), ch. 15. MacGregor identifies Chisholm's formulation as the standard statement of agent causation in the analytic tradition.
↑ 18. MacGregor, Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures, ch. 15. Aristotle (384–322 BCE), Epicurus (341–270 BCE), and Carneades (214–129 BCE) all distinguished agency from both necessity and chance, holding that human agents possess an "autonomous ability to transcend necessity and chance ... so that praise and blame are appropriate."
↑ 19. Peter van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), developed the consequence argument in its modern form. The basic structure: if determinism is true, then our actions are consequences of the laws of nature and events in the remote past; but it is not up to us what the laws of nature are, and it is not up to us what happened in the remote past; therefore, the consequences of these things (including our actions) are not up to us. Van Inwagen is a non-resident source; cited at book level without page pinning.
↑ 20. Van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will. The river analogy is a paraphrase of the general thrust of his argument, not a direct quotation.
↑ 21. MacGregor, Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures, ch. 15, summarizing Eric Reitan's argument from "A Guarantee of Universal Salvation." Reitan contends that if free choices are not grounded in reasons, they are random, and an infinite regress of explanations has no stopping point except a random element.
↑ 22. MacGregor, Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures, ch. 15: "Agent causation guarantees that [the control] condition is met for libertarian free agents. When a libertarian agent has a reason for acting, it is the agent qua first cause who chooses the reason, such that no infinite regress materializes." The agent is the stopping point that breaks the regress.
↑ 23. See note 18 above. The three-cause distinction (necessity, chance, agency) is a fixture of the classical tradition and is recoverable in the modern literature on agent causation. For an extended treatment, see Timothy O'Connor, Persons and Causes: The Metaphysics of Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
↑ 24. Harry Frankfurt, "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility," Journal of Philosophy 66, no. 23 (1969): 829–39. The example in the text follows the standard presentation and the voting-booth version used in Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism, ch. 3. Stratton adapts the thought experiment to the 2024 American presidential election; my version simplifies the setup for a general audience.
↑ 25. Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism, ch. 3. The key point: in the actual sequence of events, the chip never fired. The voter's deliberation was undetermined. She retained the mental ability to think otherwise, weigh the options otherwise, and attempt otherwise. Nothing caused her to vote as she did except her own agency. The Frankfurt case shows at most that alternative physical possibilities are not needed for responsibility; it does not show that undetermined mental agency is unnecessary.
↑ 26. This is an important clarification for the book's argument. Whether we define libertarian freedom via the principle of alternate possibilities (PAP) or via undetermined sourcehood, the core claim that prior conditions do not determine the choice remains intact. See Stratton's discussion of PAP-libertarians and sourcehood-libertarians in Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism, ch. 3, and the fuller treatment in Chapter 13.
↑ 27. David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), esp. the "Fourth Meditation." Hart's argument: the rational will by nature moves toward the Good; perfect vision of the Good (which is God) removes every motive for refusal; therefore refusal in the face of perfect knowledge is impossible, and universal salvation is metaphysically necessary. The book admires Hart and uses his work extensively but parts from him on this single point; see Chapter 13 for the full treatment of the parting.
↑ 28. Jerry L. Walls, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory: Rethinking the Things That Matter Most (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2015). The phrase "optimal grace" describes God's perfectly tailored appeal to each person. Note that Walls himself is not a universalist; he allows for the possibility of final loss. This book uses his concept of optimal grace and extends it into a universalist framework via middle knowledge. See Chapter 15 and Appendix D.