Destruction of divine judgment and libertarian free will
To begin, let me clarify what I mean by free will. I am not referring to the mere absence of external coercion (that is the weak version, compatibilism). I mean libertarian free will (LFW): the capacity of an agent, given exactly the same prior conditions (including their character, beliefs, desires, and brain state), to choose between two or more genuinely open alternatives. In LFW, the decision is not determined by prior causes, and the agent is the ultimate source of their choice. This is the notion that matters for ultimate moral responsibility, and therefore for any divine judgment that claims to be just.
My argument is divided into three stages:
- Libertarian free will is necessary for divine judgment to be just.
- Libertarian free will does not exist (nor can it exist).
- Therefore, if the God of classical theism (omnipotent, omniscient, creator and judge) exists, then He is unjust; or else that God does not exist.
Stage 1: Why LFW is necessary for just divine judgment
The God of classical theism not only creates the world, but also judges His creatures: He punishes or rewards them according to their actions. The Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions affirm that this judgment is just. But retributive justice — the kind that assigns punishment or reward based on desert — presupposes that the agent could have done otherwise. Punishing someone for an action they could not avoid is like punishing a stone for falling: it is violence, not justice.
A compatibilist theologian might object: "LFW is not needed. It is enough that the agent acts according to their own will, without external coercion. God can judge based on the character the agent has developed, even if that character is determined." But this objection fails for two reasons.
First reason: the problem of divine authorship. If God is the omnipotent and omniscient creator, then He not only determines the laws of the universe, but specifically chooses this universe among all possible ones. He knows exactly what character each person will have and what actions they will perform. In that context, the agent's "will" is nothing more than a cog in the divine design. To say that the agent is responsible because they act according to their will is like saying a robot is responsible for killing because its program dictates it. The ultimate responsible party is the programmer. Hence, even if we accepted compatibilism among humans, it would not work for God: He is the author of the will itself.
Second reason: divine judgment is retributive, not merely consequentialist. Some might argue that divine punishment has consequentialist aims: deterrence, reform, or protection. But the traditional doctrine of eternal hell is not consequentialist (it does not reform, it does not deter the already damned, it does not protect against anything that God could not avoid without torture). It is retributive: one suffers because one deserves to suffer. And desert, as Kant said, only makes sense if the agent could have acted otherwise. Without real alternatives, there is no merit or demerit.
Therefore, I conclude that if the God of classical theism exists and judges retributively, then LFW must exist. Without LFW, that judgment is necessarily unjust.
Stage 2: Demonstration that libertarian free will does not exist
Now I must prove that LFW is impossible. I do not need to prove universal determinism (although I think it likely). It suffices to show that any candidate for LFW fails, whether the world is deterministic or indeterministic. I will do this via two convergent arguments.
2.1. The argument from chance (against indeterminism)
Suppose the universe is indeterministic: some decisions have no sufficient causes. That is, given the same prior conditions (the same brain, same beliefs, same desires, same reflection), two different outcomes could occur. A libertarian would say: "There is freedom: the decision is not predetermined, and the agent can choose."
But let us reflect. If the decision is not determined by the agent's reasons, then it is not controlled by those reasons. That I have reasons for A and reasons for B, and the final outcome depends on an indeterministic event (e.g., a quantum fluctuation in a neuron), makes my choice a matter of luck. It is not my decision in the relevant sense; it is a coin toss that happens inside me. If there is no causal explanation of why I chose A rather than B (beyond "it was indeterministic"), then I cannot claim the choice as mine in a responsible way.
The libertarian Robert Kane tries to rescue this with the notion of "controlled indeterminism": in difficult decisions, both outcomes are consistent with my character, and indeterminism merely "breaks the tie". But the problem persists: if the tie is broken at random, then the final outcome is random. Why would I deserve punishment or reward for something decided by a quantum coin? The only difference is that the coin is inside my head. That does not make it less random.
Therefore, indeterminism does not produce LFW; it produces chance. And chance is not freedom.
2.2. The argument from non-self-creation (against determinism)
If the universe is deterministic, then each of my decisions is caused by prior states (my brain, my environment, my upbringing, my genes). Those prior states are caused by earlier ones, and so on back to the origin of the universe. I did not choose my genes, my upbringing, my environment, or the initial configuration of my brain. Nor did I choose the physical laws that govern all this. In other words, I did not choose the set of causes that determine me.
Now, a compatibilist would say that does not matter: freedom is acting according to my own desires and beliefs, without coercion. But here we are talking about LFW, not compatibilism. LFW requires that I be the ultimate source of my decisions. If everything I am and everything I decide is traced out by causes I did not choose, then I am not the ultimate source of anything. I am a link in a chain. The chain may be very complex, it may include reflection and deliberation, but all of it was already written.
Some object: "But deliberation is real, and in it I consider alternatives." True, but deliberation itself is caused. If the causes were different, I would deliberate differently. There is no "I" separate from the causes that can jump outside the chain.
2.3. Unification: the dilemma of LFW
Bringing both arguments together, we have a dilemma:
· If the world is deterministic, then everything is caused by factors I did not choose, and there are no real alternatives. Hence there is no LFW. · If the world is indeterministic, then decisions are not causally determined, but then they depend on chance, and chance is neither control nor responsibility. Hence again there is no LFW.
LFW aims to occupy an impossible middle ground: control without determination, responsibility without chance. No such point exists. Therefore, LFW does not exist. It is a phenomenological illusion (we feel we could have done otherwise, but that feeling is part of the causal mechanism).
Stage 3: Consequences — God is unjust or does not exist
If we accept Stage 1 (just divine judgment requires LFW) and Stage 2 (LFW does not exist), it necessarily follows that the God of classical theism, if He exists and judges retributively, is unjust. But classical theism asserts that God is essentially just (He cannot be unjust). Hence we reach a contradiction if we affirm that this God exists and judges. Therefore:
· Either God does not exist (at least not an omnipotent, omniscient, judging God), · Or God exists but does not judge (which contradicts Scripture and tradition), · Or God exists but is unjust (which contradicts His essence).
In any of the three cases, the God of classical theism — the one worshipped by orthodox Christians, Muslims, and Jews — cannot be as described. The only theologically coherent way out would be to abandon retributive judgment (for example, adopt universalism where all are saved without eternal condemnation) or to abandon omnipotence/omniscience (for example, a finite god or deism). But these are not the majority doctrines.
An important objection and my response
Someone might say: "God could have created a world with LFW, but you have shown that LFW is impossible. Therefore God cannot create the impossible. So He is not unjust for not giving LFW, because it is logically impossible to give it." This objection is interesting. My response is twofold.
First, if LFW is logically impossible (as I have argued), then the idea of just retributive judgment is also impossible. An omnipotent and omniscient God should know that. Therefore, if He nevertheless institutes retributive judgment (such as hell), He is acting irrationally or unjustly: He is demanding something that no creature can fulfill. It would be like creating beings who necessarily fail and then punishing them for failing.
Second, an omnipotent God, if truly omnipotent, could have created a world where LFW were possible even if it seems impossible to us. Omnipotence includes the ability to do the logically possible. My argument in Stage 2 aims to show that LFW is logically impossible (due to the determinism/chance dilemma). But a theologian might claim that God can make indeterministic control intelligible. To that I respond: then the burden of proof falls on the theologian to explain how such control would work without falling into the dilemma. To this day, no theory of LFW has resolved the problem of luck. Meanwhile, my argument stands.
Final conclusion
In summary: libertarian free will is a necessary condition for divine judgment to be just; but libertarian free will does not exist (it is incoherent). Hence, the God who judges retributively cannot be just. For consistency, we must either reject the existence of that God or radically reformulate our idea of God and judgment. I incline toward the first: the God of classical theism, as preached in the Abrahamic religions, is an untenable hypothesis. The illusion of freedom we experience is not a divine gift, but a product of our causal architecture. And to pretend that this same God judges us for following the script He Himself wrote is, quite simply, a moral absurdity.
Final note (clarification): This does not deny moral responsibility among human beings. We humans share the same ontological category: none of us created the others, we are all products of causes we did not choose. That is why we can establish compatibilist systems of responsibility, based on consequences, deterrence, and social order. But that kind of responsibility is not what classical theology attributes to God. God is not just another human; He is the creator. And we cannot apply the same criterion to the creator as to creatures. That is why the analogy fails and divine judgment turns out to be incoherent.