308 RELIGION, MORALITY, FAITH, AND REASONact other than as they did, think other than as they did, feel other than
as they did. Any suggestion to the effect that anyone might have acted,
thought, or felt at some time other than as they did think, act, or feel at
that time would be self-contradictory. If all truths were necessary
truths, there would be no way things could be other than the way things
were. The notions of responsibility and obligation, guilt and innocence,
freedom and agency, all presuppose at least the logical possibility of
alternatives. Logical fatalism is true and There are moral agents are
logically incompatible propositions; while there is not much
controversy concerning this point, there is considerable controversy
regarding what sort of world it is within which agents can exist who are
free in the sense required if they are to be morally responsible for their
choices and actions.
This discussion of monotheistic fatalism raises some interesting
questions regarding what is to come. If it is clear that the absence of
logically possible alternatives entails the absence of freedom, is there
any good reason to think the absence of all but counterfactual
alternatives – alternatives available in other possible worlds but not in
the real world, alternatives “available” only in a sense compatible with
the actions actually performed being in fact inevitable – does not also
entail the absence of freedom? If it is true that there is but one agent in
a fatalistic monotheistic world, is there any good reason to think that
there is more than one agent in a deterministic world?
Determinism not based on logical necessity
Let a tensed universal description (TUD) be an accurate statement of
everything that is true in the world at a given time. Each such
description should be viewed as tensed to some specific time that is
specified in the description. Let LN be a correct account of all of the laws
of nature, and LL a correct account of all of the laws of logic. Then
determinism holds: For any TUD tensed earlier than time t, that TUD
plus LN plus LL, entails any TUD tensed to time t or later. Thus, if
determinism is true, the past determines a unique future. There are
logical possibilities alternative to what happens at any given time; it is
simply not compatible with the laws of logic, the laws of nature, and
what has happened in the past that they be realized. So they will not
happen, and there is no more that we can do about that than there is we
can do about the truth of the laws of logic, the laws of nature, or what
happened in the past.