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Critique Of Determinism In The Light Of Immanuel Kant
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1.6 THEOLOGICAL DETERMINISM
Theological
determinism holds that since God is omniscient and omnipotent he has
pre-determined all that happen in the universe and the choice man has to
make. This has been a problem to Christian thinkers in the medieval
era. They were unable to reconcile God’s foreknowledge of future events
and man’s freedom. Jonathan Edwards, an American Calvinist and
theologian, saw human freedom as a contradiction. For him, there is no
question of human freedom since God is the ultimate cause and has
foreknowledge of all that happen in the universe.
It was St.
Augustine who first made genuine attempt to the solution of the problem.
According to him, God's foreknowledge of future human actions does not
in any way determine those future human actions. It does not deny man’s
freedom. Man still retains his freedom to do or not to do.
Another
version of theological determinism is the one taught by protestant
reformers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin. This version holds that
God has predestined some people for salvation while others are destined
for eternal damnation. Those who have been predestined for salvation,
God provides with his grace to enable them live a good life. They are
known as the elect. This version portrays God as being unjust.
1.7 PSYCHOLOGICAL DETERMINISM
Psychological
determinism is the view that our actions are determined by some
psychological factors such as instincts, motives, one’s environment and
other factors that are regarded as psychological. According to them,
nobody performs an action without a motive and these motives are effects
of prior causes, which are also effects of preceding causes, and so it
continues.
Most philosophers conceive of voluntary action as one that
is caused by such inner events as volition, motive, desire, choice or
the likes. John Lock in his view did not suppose that anything within
the mind is causally undetermined, nor did he think it necessary to
suppose this in order to preserve the belief in human freedom which he
thought misleading to label “freedom of the willâ€. He went further to
define liberty or freedom as “a power in any agent to do or forebear any
particular action, according to this determination or that of the mind,
whereby either of them is preferred to the other.†This means that a
human being acts freely provided he is acting according to the
preference of his own mind, and this is perfectly consistent with his
actions being causally determined.
For David Hume there is no
philosophical problem of free will. The whole dispute, he opined, has
been purely verbal in character involving only confusions in the
meanings of word. In his view free action is that which springs from
the free motive of the agent. He defined freedom as; ‘Being able to act
according to the determinations of one’s own will.’6
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