Talking FREE WILL with Michael Preciado

Upcoming Episodes and Apologetics Updates

Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Eli Ayala, and today I have Michael Preciado with me. He is a super cool guy. I just recently well, I guess I don't remember the first time I reached out to him, but we've kind of been Facebook messenger friends.

I invited Michael on a while back to talk a little bit about his book on free will, but he was a little busy, and we were able to reschedule, and now he's here today. So what I want to do is I just want to jump right into introductory material on Michael, and actually, let me rewind.

I want to let people know that there are going to be some upcoming episodes that I think folks are going to find really interesting. I'm going to have Michael Laikona on on May 3rd to talk about the evidence for the resurrection.

And again, if you are one of my followers who is a die-in-the-wool presuppositionalist in your apologetic methodology, don't private message me and tell me Michael Laikona is an evidentialist. Yes, I know.

Okay, I know. And no, I'm not going to debate him on apologetic methodology. I'm having him on to talk about evidence for the resurrection. As you guys have heard me say in the past, just because we might disagree on methodological issues does not mean that we cannot learn from those different apologetic perspectives.

And so what I encourage folks, when we do have Dr. Laikona on, take what he has to say and contextualize it. If you're a die-hard presuppositionalist, presuppositionalize the evidence he gives. But there's still a helpful conversation to be had there.

I also am going to have Scarlett Clay, who is unknown. She's actually a friend on Facebook, and she posted a very interesting article that I found very interesting. It was an account of her experience at Biola University and how learning apologetics at Biola University actually led her to presuppositional apologetics.

How about that? Biola University is definitely not the center of presuppositional apologetic methodology, but her story was really interesting. I'm going to have her on to talk a little bit about the article that she shared.

I think it's actually going to be super interesting because it really allows us to highlight the importance of putting God first in our apologetics. Of course, that's true with respect to everything else in the Christian life, right?

Our relationship with God, our desire to display the holiness of God, the perfection of God, the goodness and greatness of God should be the center of gravity in our lives, in our apologetic, and in everything that we do.

That's super, super important. Well, all that out of the way, I think I'm also going to be moderating a discussion between Joshua Pillows, and I'm not going to pronounce the other gentleman's name. He's super nice, and I don't have time to look up his name, but it's a very hard-to-pronounce name.

We're going to talk a little bit about the Stroudian objection to the transcendental argument. We're going to get into some details of that. We're going to have a moderated discussion. I'll let you guys know the date on that in a future episode.

That's going to be super interesting. So if you guys want some background on what the Stroudian objection to the transcendental argument is, I would highly, highly recommend you listen to a few episodes back where I had Joshua Pillows on talking about the Stroudian objection.

Now, that might sound very abstract and completely impractical, but actually we talk about a whole host of things related to presuppositionalism and kind of details that I think would be helpful for anyone, even a beginner, to take some time and listen to.

So definitely want to check that out. All right. Well, without further ado, let me introduce Michael Preciado, and apparently I am the first person to properly pronounce his name. So, huh. Okay. There you go.

Before I put him on the screen here, he was recommended by Guillaume Bignon, who I always introduce as the French Calvinist philosopher. You have to mention he's French because when you think of Calvinism, John Calvin, he was a Frenchman.

So it just makes his Calvinism more authentic. But today we're going international here. We have the French Calvinist philosopher. Today, or tonight rather, I have the Mexican Calvinist philosopher. Okay.

So let me invite Michael Preciado on. How are you doing, Michael? I'm great. Thank you so much. How do you like that introduction? The Mexican Calvinist philosopher. My parents would be happy. That's awesome.

And the interesting thing is Michael and I have something in common. I think we do. He can correct me. But while I'm not a philosopher in that respect, I've never had formal training in philosophy. I am Puerto Rican, but I don't speak Spanish.

And to my knowledge, Michael Preciado is Mexican, but he doesn't speak Spanish. So there you go. That is true. Okay. That's awesome. Now that we have shamed our places of origin, let me give folks a little bit of background on Michael.

Michael Preciado is a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America. He is happily married and the father of two wonderful children. He holds a B .A. and an M .A. in philosophy, an M .Div. from Westminster Seminary C .A. and a Ph .D. in philosophical theology from the University of Aberdeen.

His interests are in the areas of apologetics, philosophy, theology, and preaching. He is a Reformed Christian and approaches all these areas from a confessionally Reformed perspective. Maybe we'll ask him a little bit about that.

His first book, A Reformed View of Freedom, The Compatibility of Guidance, Control, and Reformed Theology is due to be released. And that is false because it's already released and has been released, but I'm reading from his blog here.

So welcome. It is a pleasure to have you. Would you like to add a little bit to that basic introduction?

The Book on Free Will and Reformed Theology

Yeah. Well, thanks, first of all, for having me on. I really appreciate it. I've been able to watch a few episodes of your show, and I think you do a great job, and I really appreciate what you're doing.

A couple things. I recently came into the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, so I'm no longer part of the PCA. And, yes, as you noticed, it said in that blog that the book is due to come out. So that was obviously written a long time ago.

And if you go to my website, you'll notice that I've done absolutely nothing with my website. I've had it for a number of years now, and I just haven't had the time to do what I wanted to do. So that's why it said that the book was coming out soon when it, in fact, has been out for, oh, goodness, maybe a year now, I think.

Yeah, it has been. I remember purchasing it a while back. Let me give folks the title of that book again, just in case they're interested. The book is called A Reformed View of Freedom, The Compatibility of Guidance, Control, and Reformed Theology.

To my knowledge, Michael comes from a more analytic philosophical tradition in his philosophy. And so the book does come, if you can correct me, it comes from that perspective in addressing that specific issue?

Yes, that's true. All right. All right. All right. Very good. So if someone was in a bookstore and they found your book and they said, I like free will stuff and I like Reformed Theology. And, you know, you happen to be there at Barnes Noble.

We say, actually, that's my book. I wrote it. They're like, oh, great. What is it about? How would you kind of summarize what your book is about for someone who's never heard of you? Or maybe they have a passing interest in the topic.

Yeah, it's a great question. There are a number of things that I'm trying to accomplish in the book. One of them is to establish that there is compatibility between traditional Reformed Theology and a lot of the work, contemporary work over the past 60 years in analytic philosophy that has been done on the free will and moral responsibility question, particularly with regards to the compatibilist or the semi-compatibilist views.

So the idea is to alert Reformed theologians that there's nothing bad about this, that it's something that actually will be very helpful for them to use these resources and to mind them in order to start addressing issues that, you know, come up with the whole free will question.

Another purpose is that of late, maybe the past 10 years, there have been certain debates going on within Reformed Theology as to what Reformed Theology is with regards to free will. Is it theological determinism?

Is it compatibilism? Did Jonathan Edwards depart from the Reformed tradition? So I address those questions as well. And then thirdly, this is—oh, I'm sorry, go ahead. No, go for it. You finish your thought there.

I was just going to say that this is kind of like the first step in a larger project. The next book, Lord Willing, is going to be coming up with a model of Reformed view of freedom, so that I can then apply that eventually to a third volume, Lord Willing, that would be addressing things like the problem of evil.

Is God the author of sin? So this is very much a foundational level book that is going to be, Lord Willing, built upon.

Yeah. Well, what I appreciate about what you just mentioned there, you spoke about a free will, you spoke about Jonathan Edwards. These discussions on free will have such a broader context, right? You have philosophy in there.

You have theology in there. You have church history, right, surveying what people have said. Why is it important to know the background music of the debates on free will?

Yeah, there's a number of ways to approach that. If you're in the Reformed tradition, you'll want to know what your forefathers taught and what that looks like in terms of what is going on in the contemporary scene.

But also it's important to recognize just that our views today didn't just pop up today, right? They have a history. And there are lots of many, many theologians in the past that have parsed out these issues that are also great resources for a Calvinist or a Reformed theologian or Reformed philosopher.

And another aspect of my book is I'm trying to turn people back to that and say, look, these are things that we could use to mine from this and mine from modern day analytic philosophy and kind of bring these things together and hopefully come up with a very powerful defense of a Reformed view of freedom.

So those would be a couple of reasons why I think that's important.

Calvinism, Arminianism, and the Meaning of Free Will

Now, the issue of free will always comes up in discussions on Calvinism, Arminianism, Molinism, and all the isms that are associated with this topic. I think one common misconception from a lot of people, there are a lot of misconceptions about what Calvinism is, but one main misconception that I see is that Calvinists don't believe in free will.

We typically are described as those guys who, oh, yeah, those guys over there don't believe in free will. What would you say to someone who says you're a Calvinist, so you don't believe in free will? How would you address that issue from your Reformed perspective?

So if it was an Arminian that was asking me that, I would just do the same trick. I would say you're an Arminian. You don't believe in free will, right? Because basically the whole point is you're defining free will differently, and there's no reason to prefer one definition over another just from the get go.

And that's what typically Arminians do in my experience is they are assuming a libertarian view of freedom and then saying, you Calvinist, you don't believe in free will. Well, why can't we do the same?

Why can't we assume a compatibilist view of freedom and say, you Arminian, you don't believe in free will, right? Those kinds of things aren't productive.

Well, Michael, when I believe in free will from my Arminian perspective, it seems to be the face. It's what everyone assumes when you think of free will, right? You know, you're the one that has the idiosyncratic understanding of free will.

It's not really free. What the average person thinks of as free will, that's what we mean, right? The average person is on our side, right? How would you address? I mean, we hear these things all the time.

How would you address someone who's coming from that perspective?

Two ways. First, I would ask, well, how do you know that the average person believes that? I mean, have you surveyed every single average person in the world and come to this conclusion? And the typical answer is going to be no, they haven't.

Second, there is this whole field, and I'm going off the top of my head here so I might not get all the details right. There's this whole field called experimental philosophy. These are guys that go out into the world and do, like, surveys and empirical studies and stuff on what people believe, what are people's intuitions.

And one of the things that they found was that when you ask certain questions in a certain way, people's intuitions are predominantly compatibilist, not libertarian. And here's an example of that. If you make it very concrete, so if you make it abstract and you say, okay, you live in a determined universe, and Joe Schmo does X, is that guy responsible?

You're going to typically get more of a libertarian intuition. But if you say, look, you live in a determined universe, and some guy, Joe Schmo, came and murdered your kids, is that guy responsible? And the typical response is yes, he is responsible.

So those are compatibilist intuitions. Now, I would have to cite the studies and all that, of course, to justify all that, but that's basically what they found. And so that challenges just this whole idea that libertarian view of freedom is the common sense view.

Now, okay, so this is primarily an apologetics channel, but we're talking about a theological and philosophical topic which I think has apologetic import. And if you're Reformed and you're defending Reformed theology, that's, in a sense, apologetics.

You don't always do apologetics to unbelievers. Sometimes you could do apologetics to other believers, kind of those in-house discussions. That being said, an important aspect of doing apologetics is defining our terms, right?

If anyone is familiar with Walter Martin's Kingdom of the Cults, one of the first chapters in that book deals with scaling the language barrier. So, for example, when we speak with a Mormon, we might utilize or they might utilize the language of Trinity.

And we use the language of Trinity or salvation, but we don't mean the same things by them. So defining terms is vitally important, and that's no different when we're speaking theology, philosophy. So with that said, how would you define?

I mean, you threw some terms around here, libertarian free will, compatibilist free will. What is free will, what is libertarian free will, and what is compatibilism so that it can provide kind of an intellectual context for people who are listening?

Yeah, great question.

Defining Free Will, Libertarianism, and Compatibilism

So one of the things you want to do when you engage in these debates is you don't want to beg the question from the beginning, right? So I don't start off by defining free will in a compatibilistly loaded manner.

I would basically just say, look, free will is the control condition of moral responsibility. Pretty much everybody would agree that control is vital to being morally responsible, and control is vital to free will.

So I would start there so that we have a point of entry so as not to beg the question from the beginning. Now that said, given the taxonomy of the different views out there with regards to free will, a compatibilist is just saying that determinism, defined as conditional or hypothetical necessity, is compatible with free will and moral responsibility.

A libertarian is a species of incompatibilist. So an incompatibilist says determinism is not compatible with free will and moral responsibility. Now, in the category of incompatibilism, you have libertarians and you have hard determinists.

A libertarian says free will and I'm sorry, determinism and moral responsibility are not compatible. Free will is true. Therefore, determinism is false. A hard incompatibilist or a hard determinist is going to say free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism.

Determinism is true. Therefore, we are not we don't have free will and moral responsibility. And typically what they mean by moral responsibility is moral responsibility in the basic dessert way. Okay.

What does that mean? So there are different ways of holding people responsible. One is called a consequentialist way, which is you try to deter behavior. So I would put someone in prison or a state would put someone in prison for the purpose of deterring future behavior.

So that's a more consequentialist view of moral responsibility. And a hard determinist would basically hold that view. A basic dessert view is saying you put someone in prison just because they deserve to be in prison for what they did.

So a hard determinist is going to not affirm a basic dessert sense of moral responsibility. Okay.

Does that make any sense? Yes. And when you say compatible so what view would you say you hold. Or what is the standard reform perspective on that out of that spectrum that you just provided for us?

So in my book I make the argument that basically the standard reform view is a compatibilist view, and I even make it a little bit more specific. And this might be a little bit more controversial. We can discuss this, but I would argue that it's even a semi-compatibilist view.

Now, semi-compatibilism, if you want me to kind of discuss that a little bit. Yeah, go for it. Okay, so semi-compatibilism is the view that if you define free will as a libertarian, then that is incompatible with determinism.

And so a semi-compatibilist is going to say, okay, fine. Just take that. You can have the term. Go ahead. Run with it. But determinism is compatible with moral responsibility.

Okay, I'm going to stop right there. Okay, so that's a subtle that's a very subtle understanding. Can you say that one more time? So you said that the semi-compatibilist will say, fine, Mr. Libertarian.

Free will is would you say can you just repeat what you said before when you made the distinction there?

In order to kind of get to the heart of what really matters, because what really matters here is moral responsibility. Not that free will does not matter, but, I mean, one of the reasons why people say you must have free will is so that you can be held morally responsible, right?

So a semi-compatibilist oftentimes will just say, look, I don't want to get distracted with these kinds of things. Go ahead. If you want to define free will as a libertarian, fine. You can take that term, and I will say I agree with you.

Libertarian free will is not compatible with determinism. But the real issue is, is determinism compatible with moral responsibility? And a semi-compatibilist is going to say, okay, take the free will, but determinism is compatible with moral responsibility.

Now, when you say take the free will, you're just granting them that's okay. But you're granting them the definition, not the hypothetical truth like, fine, even if that's true, this is true over here.

Which one are you doing? Are you just giving them the definition? Okay, fine. I understand what you're saying. Are you granting that even if that's true, it doesn't touch this other important area?

Yeah, so I'm saying basically if you're going to insist that free will must be defined in a libertarian way, I agree with you. Libertarianism is not compatible with determinism. And I could give the compatibilist definition of freedom, which I believe in.

I mean I think there is a compatibilist definition of freedom. But instead of arguing over the definition, let's just get to the heart of the matter. Let's talk about moral responsibility. Determinism is compatible with moral responsibility.

So let's just cut to the chase and do that. Okay, that's very helpful.

Yes, that's very helpful. And again, that highlights the importance of defining our terms, right? Especially when we're defending the reform position, sometimes our interlocutors use terminology in a very sloppy way.

And if we don't ask them to define their terms, we can kind of accept or reject something that we don't necessarily have to accept or reject. So I think that's a very important distinction you made there.

Okay, so let's talk a little bit about compatibilism. So I'm not a strong determinist. I'm not a hard determinist, right? Okay, so determinism would be a form of well, it's determinism. Compatibilism would say that determinism is compatible with moral responsibility.

Is that what you said? I couldn't catch what you said. Can you repeat that? So you said compatibilism is the idea that free will is compatible with moral responsibility.

Well, compatibilism is the idea that free will is compatible I'm sorry. Compatibilism is the idea that determinism is compatible with free will and with moral responsibility.

Okay, all right. And so when you speak to the Arminian or some flavor of libertarian free will, one who's familiar with compatibilism. Yeah, I know that's what you believe, Michael. But when I ask you how do you explain that compatibility, you guys always punt to mystery, right?

It's always a great mystery. And what will they do? They'll go straight to Chosen by God and quote R .C. Sproul saying, I don't know how it works together, right? It's like two tracks, right, that meet in the horizon or these pillars that somehow they look separate here, but in heaven they'll make you know, they look like the and I'm not saying that it's not mysterious.

I mean, we are I mean, the Arminian who disagrees or the Molinist or the libertarian who disagrees with the Calvinist position, go a little easy on us. Not that we don't have answers to these questions and explanations, but you are touching on a topic that is profoundly complicated as to how the transcendent God interacts with creation as it relates to his decree, our choices, and his plan.

It's not it's a difficult topic, okay? But in their defense, I do think that sometimes we can be too quick to punt to mystery, and I'm not saying there isn't a mystery there. But how would you make sense when someone says, okay, fine, you think that determinism and moral freedom and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism?

Explain that to me because it's a mess in my head. I can't possibly see how these things are compatible.

Mystery, Divine Transcendence, and Human Freedom

Yeah, and it's great that you brought up the whole issue of mystery because when if I have an opportunity in talking to somebody to do this in a systematic way where I start here and end here, I always begin with mystery.

Because the truth of the matter is God is infinite, and we are finite. So every single thing that we know from Revelation in Scripture is ultimately shrouded in mystery. God reveals I mean, to put it sloppily, God reveals certain propositions that have a systematic coherence, but we don't know everything else, right?

So we must begin with mystery. I always would like to begin with mystery because I sometimes think these debates end up sounding a little bit too rationalistic as though we're saying we have everything figured out when, in fact, we don't.

There's no way. God being infinite means that there's so much more, an infinite amount of knowledge more that we don't know that stands behind what he reveals. Can I cut in?

Yeah, go ahead. Can I cut in? Is that sort of like the Bible reveals to us that Jesus Christ is the God-man? He is truly God, truly man. There are biblical propositions that we can use to make this fit together.

But ultimately, ultimately, I cannot explain to you specifically how that ontologically works out. How is it that there is this one person, Jesus Christ, and who housed in his person are these two distinct natures?

So we can know what those doctrines are, give biblical support, show that it's not logically contradictory, but we can't actually tell you the ends. Is that what you're saying, that there's a revelation there, but there's a mystery behind it in a sense?

Yes, yes. Essentially, what I'm saying is God, to use John Calvin's language, God is speaking baby talk to us in Scripture in a sense. So it's kind of like if I have a three-year-old daughter, for instance, right?

If I were to sit here and try to describe to her what guidance control is or what is super lapsarianism, she's just going to kind of be, I don't even get what you're talking about, right? So you necessarily have to, I don't want to say dumb down, but accommodate your language to your child.

And the distance between me and my daughter is far closer than the distance between me and God. There's an infinite distance between me and God. So God accommodates, he speaks in baby talk to us so that we can know what his will is and what he has revealed.

But there's far more mystery beyond that. So in other words, I mean, I lost track of your original question, but I just wanted to make the point that I always start with mystery. Right, and I think that's important.

Let me just say this really quickly too. So does the Armenian, so does everybody else. Nobody believes that they completely comprehend God, right? So there's going to be appeals to mystery in every theological tradition.

The question is, where precisely do you locate the mystery? Where does the Bible locate the mystery?

Yes, and there's the disagreement and hence the different positions. So we all hold to some aspects of mystery. We disagree as to where that mystery is placed. Now, my original question was when you postulate compatibilism, free will is compatible with determinism or free will and moral responsibility is compatible with determinism.

The question was how? I see. I know that's what you believe, Michael. How do you make sense of it? Because in my mind, it sounds like a contradiction. How would you begin to unpack that for someone the best that you can?

So you do basically by starting with defining terms. When you say free will, what do you mean? If you mean libertarian free will, and by libertarian free will, like a rough definition would basically be that you are able to do A or B given whatever.

How can I put this? So you can do, you can have alternative possibilities regardless of what your internal state is and the whole facts of the world are, right? So in other words, let's put it this way.

It is a really good, interesting way of illustrating this. Peter Van Inwagen, it's called the rollback argument. And so basically the idea is this. Eli's eating French fries at T1, right? So T1 just means time slice one, right?

It's just trying to identify a moment in time. So Eli is doing that. Now, imagine if God were to roll back the entire history of the universe and then let it go again back to T1. What would Eli do? And you do that over and over and over again like a thousand times.

A libertarian is basically going to say that there's going to be a percentage of times when Eli doesn't eat French fries. There's going to be a percentage of time when Eli does eat French fries, right?

So there's nothing about Eli's state that determines for him that he will eat French fries, right? And that's why when you roll things back, you get different results.

Would that be related to the categorical and conditional distinctions of ability? So that if the libertarian, for example, will hold with respect to the ability, they would hold to a categorical ability.

So that all things being equal, they can do a different thing than they actually in fact do. Whereas the conditional ability to do otherwise would say that if the conditions were different, had he wanted to eat French fries or not to eat French fries, then he could have.

But reality, he didn't want to, so he didn't. Is that kind of what you're touching on?

In part, yes. So the categorical ability is an ability that the libertarian affirms. The question is, does the compatibilist affirm a conditional ability? Some do, some don't. I think there are other ways of articulating what it means to have an ability than the conditional analysis of ability.

Okay, so, okay. Go ahead, go ahead. No, no, I was just going to say, but substantially, I agree that there is an ability to do otherwise. The question is, how do we best analyze that? And the conditional analysis is one way of doing that.

Okay. Now, real quick, I just want to tell people in the comments, if you have any questions that you'd like Michael to address, leave them in the comments. And as we usually do at the back end of the episode, we'll go through the questions.

And if they look hard and Michael signals, I don't want to answer that one, we'll just skip over that one. He's like, no, no, I don't do that one. That's too hard. Okay, so, okay, so let's get back to the original question then.

So when I say, explain to me how free will, moral responsibility is compatible with determinism. You made the point, well, what do we mean by free will? And so you would make a distinction there. Well, are you talking about libertarian freedom?

Are you talking about compatibilistic freedom? So the person defines their terms. And if they're not defining free will adequately, then you need to kind of rest the conversation on getting those definitions straight.

Is that what you're saying? Yeah, yeah. I mean, so I don't mean to make this too unnecessarily complicated, so I apologize. But there are a lot of distinctions to draw here because compatibilists, in the compatibilist camp, we don't all define freedom in exactly the same way.

We all, we have different nuances. So I'm going to give a basic definition of it or understanding of it. But that doesn't mean I wouldn't want to nuance it if we were in some kind of debate or something.

So I would say if you define things in a compatibilist way so that determinism means hypothetical necessity and freedom means reason responsiveness. And I can unpack that, but if you do unpack that, then you see how there is no contradiction.

But if you define determinism as hypothetical necessity and then you define freedom as libertarianism with, as you mentioned, the unconditional ability definition, then there is a contradiction. Right.

So I would define it as a more reasons responsive freedom, as a reasons responsive in a reason responsive manner. And so then you can see that there is no contradiction there. Now, the libertarian is not going to be happy with that, of course.

But that's how you show the coherence between determinism and free will.

How Determinism and Moral Responsibility Fit Together

Okay. So, okay. So suppose you've ironed out the definition. So someone says, how can free will, moral responsibility be consistent with determinism? Well, easy. If you hold to a compatibilistic view of freedom as defined within the reform tradition, right?

If you understand free will within the libertarian context, then yeah, there's an inconsistency. So as a Calvinist, I hold to compatibilism. Okay. They'll be like, okay, well, well, fine. Let's continue down that route then.

So if, if I, if God decrees, we'll throw in this idea of God decreeing. Now, if God decrees that I will eat chocolate ice cream, I can't do anything other than eat the ice cream. How is that freedom? It just, it just seems like determinism, bro.

You know, I'm trying to make it sound like, let me say that again. It is determinism. Yes. Okay. Okay. Okay. So, but, but so then how am I free in any meaningful way? It seems like there's just not, and you know, forget about ice cream salvation, you know, God decreed I'm going to heaven or hell based upon a decision that was made before the foundation of the world.

How is that fair? How is that give me a chance to accept, you know, all these sorts of questions go into it. How would you respond to that? Here's two questions. How would you respond to that as a philosopher?

And then how would you respond to that as a pastor? I think those are two important questions.

Yeah. The pastoral question is the most important question, of course. So I would want to start by saying I want to distinguish between salvation and between everything else. Right. Okay. It is true, of course, that God, according to the reformed theologian, God elects us.

And because we are elect, we therefore in history embrace the gospel and are saved and God passes over the reprobate. And because he passes them over, they don't embrace the gospel in history and are not saved.

That's related, but a little bit different from other questions as to everyday life. You know, if I do a morally responsible act, does God determine that also? Well, I would say yes, but it's not in the same way.

Okay. So I want to I want to distinguish those two things. Now, if we're talking about determinism and the relation to free will and all this, we have to really define what that means. And then this is where I think, at least in my book, Richard Muller and another group that you haven't mentioned, but I mentioned in my book called the Utrecht School.

They define determinism in a way that it is not used in contemporary philosophy. They define basically determinism. Well, first of all, they don't really give a clear definition of determinism. They really just use the word.

And it's almost like they use the word to kind of tar you, right? Determinism, according to Robert Kane and many other people who define these things in contemporary philosophy, is just a type of conditional necessity.

So let's put this back up and say there are many different types of determinism. There's like a theological determinist. There's a causal determinist. There's a psychological determinist. There are many, many types.

But what Kane says, and he's right in analyzing this concept, is that what unites them all is that there's a certain type of necessity. And he calls it a conditional necessity. And the Reformed Orthodox would call it a hypothetical necessity.

And this is what that means. It means that given certain antecedent conditions, a person's action or the consequent of the antecedent conditions follows necessarily. But it's not an absolute necessity.

An absolute necessity would basically say that there's no other possibility. A hypothetical necessity is saying that if the antecedent conditions are different, then the action would be different.

So the conclusion is just as certain in all of the situations. It's necessary. But it's not right. But there is a sense in which there were other possibilities. That's right. And that sense needs to be carefully drawn out.

Now real quick, before you unpack a little bit more, folks who don't have kind of a philosophical training or perhaps knowledge of some of these philosophical issues, don't get so frustrated. I know a lot of people might think, well, wait a minute.

This is just too philosophical. Man, free will is just simple. No, it's not. Like you said at the beginning, these discussions and these terms have a history. And it takes work to unpack that history to get a sharper and clearer understanding of how we should understand these issues.

So I want to if people think this is a little too abstract for them, have patience. You could always read his book or you could listen to this episode again and take some notes. But these are very important.