144 J.J. Haldane
eliminated in redrafting the cosmic design; yet he did it and in doing so
subjected himself to conditions which his beneficial designs made inevit-
able. (4) God so cares for his creation that he will not have it endure alone
the costs of its goodness; whatever it must suffer he will suffer. (5) This is the
ultimate demonstration of the justice of God: that he elects to endure what-
ever losses his creation may sustain.
9 Liberty and Providence
In discussing moral evil I have assumed that we are metaphysically free agents.
Jack Smart and others dispute this; as he puts it ‘I will not grant the theist the
notion of libertarian free will, which seems to me an absurd one’. The pre-
sumed absurdity derives from the following dilemma or ‘paradox of freedom’:
either an event is determined or it is random. If a movement is a purposeful
action it is not random; hence it is determined. In rejecting determinism the
libertarian is left only with randomness but that is the very antithesis of
intelligent behaviour. Thus the occurrence of actions is not merely compat-
ible with determinism, it requires it.
This last claim seems to me false in both respects. First, if universal causal
determinism is true then we are not free. If it were the case that the move-
ment of my hand as I write is wholly determined as the upshot of a series of
events leading backwards from muscle contractions to nerve stimulations to
brain events and so on, then I am not freely responsible for it. All that has
happened is that the course of world events has passed through my body. The
libertarian alternative is that prior to acting it was not determined what would
ensue. In the limiting case just the same antecedents might have obtained in
conjunction with different consequences. The difference between the out-
comes is ascribable to my power of free choice (in scholastic terminology my
liberty of indifference).
So far as the purported dilemma or paradox is concerned the claim that an
event is either determinedorrandom(in the sense of unconditioned chance)
remains an assertion which nowadays lacks even the support apparently once
given it by science. Clearly these are contrarypredicates – something cannot
be both determined and random – but it has to be shown that they are
contradictories– that it is not possible that something may be neither. Physical
theory no longer holds that all causation conforms to exceptionless laws, but
now regards sequences of events at the microphysical level as conforming to
patterns that are precisely instances of non-determined, non-random behavi-
our. This is because it views them as possessing indeterminate probabilities.
While I do not believe that the liberty of human choice is to be identified
with the indeterminacy of quantum systems, there is nevertheless a parallel