One horn of this dilemma is the argument that if an action was caused or necessitated, then it could not have been done freely and hence the agent is not responsible for it. The other horn is the argument that if the action was not caused, then it is inexplicable and random, and thus it cannot be attributed to the agent and hence, again, the agent cannot be responsible for it. -Paul Russell: Freedom and Moral Sentiment, p. 14-

Paul Russel discusses the ‘Horns of the dilemma’ found when we get at the root of determinism and chance. Either way, the extreme of both views means that free agents do not control their choices. They are simply science experiments moved by the experimenter. The religionists hold to God as the great mover in the deterministic model, and the scientists welcome the randomness of nature and laws of physics as the great mover. I believe that both worship a golden calf. William James’ provides a third horn that can resolve the conflict in his 1884 ’The Dilemma of Determinism’.

Towards the middle of his article, he focuses on the great premise that builds the third horn.

The necessary acts we erroneously regret may be good, and yet our error in so regretting them may be also good, on one simple condition; and that condition is this: The world must not be regarded as a machine whose final purpose is the making real of any outward good, but rather as a contrivance for deepening the theoretic consciousness of what goodness and evil in their intrinsic natures are. Not the doing either of good or evil is what nature cares for, but the knowing of them. Life is one long eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

With the premise that we are experiencing ‘one long eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge’ to deepen our consciousness of the nature of goodness and evil, we can see how providence, free choice, and randomness explain God as the Most Moved Mover.

Chance means pluralism

No! better a thousand times, than such systematic corruption of our moral sanity, the plainest pessimism, so that it be straightforward; but better far than that the world of chance. Make as great an uproar about chance as you please, I know that chance means pluralism and nothing more. If some of the members of the pluralism are bad, the philosophy of pluralism, whatever broad views it may deny me, permits me, at least, to turn to the other members with a clean breast of affection and an unsophisticated moral sense. And if I still wish to think of the world as a totality, it lets me feel that a world with a chance in it of being altogether good, even if the chance never come to pass, is better than a world with no such chance at all. That “chance” whose very notion I am exhorted and conjured to banish from my view of the future as the suicide of reason concerning it, that “chance” is–what? Just this,–the chance that in moral respects the future may be other and better than the past has been. This is the only chance we have any motive for supposing to exist. Shame, rather, on its repudiation and its denial! For its presence is the vital air which lets the world live, the salt which keeps it sweet.

Though you may yourselves be adverse to the deterministic doctrine, you wish a pleasanter word than “chance” to name the opposite doctrine by; and you very likely consider my preference for such a word a perverse sort of a partiality on my part. … But the word “chance,” with its singular negativity, is just the word for this purpose. Whoever uses it instead of “freedom,” squarely and resolutely gives up all pretense to control the things he says are free. For him, he confesses that they are no better than mere chance would be. It is a word of impotence, and is therefore the only sincere word we can use, if, in granting freedom to certain things, we grant it honestly, and really risk the game. “Who chooses me must give and forfeit all he hath.” Any other word permits of quibbling, and lets us, after the fashion of the soft determinists, make a pretense of restoring the caged bird to liberty with one hand, while with the other we anxiously tie a string to it leg to make sure it does not get beyond our sight.

If chance then no providence?

But now you will bring up your final doubt. Does not the admission of such an unguaranteed chance or freedom preclude utterly the notion of a Providence governing the world? Does it not leave the fate of the universe at the mercy of the chance-possibilities, and so far insecure? Does it not, in short, deny the craving of our nature for an ultimate peace behind all tempests, for a blue zenith above all clouds?

To this my answer must be very brief. The belief in free will is not in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but fatal degrees. If you allow him to provide possibilities as well as actualities to the universe, and to carry on his own thinking in those two categories just as we do ours, chances may be there, uncontrolled even by him, and the course of the universe be really ambiguous; and yet the end of all things may be just what he intended it to be from all eternity.

The third horn is the Most Moved Mover

Let now the novice stand for us finite free agents, and the expert for the infinite mind in which the universe lies. Suppose the latter to be thinking out his universe before he actually creates it. Suppose him to say, I will lead things to a certain end, but I will not now decide on all the steps thereto. At various points, ambiguous possibilities shall be left open, either of which, at a given instant, may become actual. But whichever branch of these bifurcations becomes real, I know what I shall do at the next bifurcation to keep things from drifting away from the final result I intend.

William James then builds out the features of the Most Moved Mover’s interaction with us. I have reorganized his text into these premises.

1. [Freedom:] The creator’s plan of the universe would thus be left blank as to many of its actual details, but all possibilities would be marked down.
2. [Chance:] The realization of some of these would be left absolutely to chance; that is, would only be determined when the moments of realization came. Now, it is entirely immaterial whether the creator leave the absolute chance-possibilities to be decided by himself, each when its proper moment arrives, or whether, on the contrary, he alienate this power from himself, and leave the decision out and out to finite creatures such as we men are. The great point is that the possibilities are really here.
3. [Contigency:] Other possibilities would be contingently determined; that is, their decision would have to wait till it was seen how the matters of absolute chance fell out.
4. [Determinism:] But the rest of the plan, including its final upshot, would be rigorously determined once for all.
5. [Providence:] So the creator himself would not need to know all the details of actuality until they came; and at any time his own view of the world would be a view partly of facts and partly of possibilities, exactly as ours is now. Of one thing, however, he might be certain; and that is that his world was safe, and that no matter how much of it might zigzag he could surely bring it home at last.

The Most Moved Mover acts in time

Whether it be we who solve them, or he working through us, at those soul-trying moments when fate’s scales seem to quiver, and good snatches the victory from evil or shrinks nerveless from the fight, is of small account, so long as we admit that the issue is decided nowhere else than here and now. That is what gives the palpitating reality to our moral life and makes it tingle, as Mr. Mallock says, with so strange and elaborate an excitement. This reality, this excitement, are what the determinisms, hard and soft alike, suppress by their denial that anything is decided here and now, and their dogma that all things were foredoomed and settled long ago.

The third horn arrives as we see our journey with God happening in time. God can see the destination, but he is deciding on the path with us and ’nowhere else than here and now.’ In this journey, we get to have the opportunity of ‘deepening the theoretic consciousness of what goodness and evil in their intrinsic natures are.’

We get the opportunity to experience the goodness of God and to be proved in that goodness (Abraham 3:25) because His providence will guarantee that he will ‘bring [us] home at last’ in immortality and eternal life (Moses 1:39).

• randomness
• agency
• omniscience
• voices