Theism and Hard Incompatibilism

Abstract

The aim of the article is to present and to compare the view on human freedom called hard incompatibilism with the contemporary Christian doctrine on human free will. Hard incompatibilism claims that human free will understood both in a libertarian and compatibilist way does not exist. One stresses in the paper that there is a similarity between hard incompatibilism and Christian wisdom rooted in the Bible and this similarity consists in the fact that humans are deeply dependent in their existence on external conditions. Hard incompatiblism identifies that conditions simply as the external or physical world and Christian wisdom points to God as an ontological and axiological foundation of human being and prospects. However, one argues in the paper that the doctrine of human freedom and responsibility for sin and moral evil is a crucial part of the Christian theology and philosophy. Thus, the Christian doctrine is incoherent with hard incompatibilism. There is a proposal, put forth in the last part of the article, how one can reconcile metaphysical indeterminism—which is coherent with hard incompatibilism—with the libertarian doctrine on the human free will, which is coherent with the Christian view on the nature of human freedom.