Gordon Clark: Determinism (Baker's Dictionary of Christian Ethics)

1973. In Baker's Dictionary of Christian Ethics. Carl F.H. Henry, ed. Washington D.C.: Canon Press. [Reprinted in 1988 by Baker Book House.] Determinism

DETERMINISM. See also Free Will. Determinism has many forms. The three most important are physical, logical, and theological.

Physical determinism or mechanism is most popularly associated with the term. Democritus in antiquity, Spinoza, Kant, La Place, and generally nineteenth century science, followed by behaviorism in the twentieth, hold that all motions, including the motions of human bodies, can be described by differential equations. Kant, who permitted freedom in the noumenal world, asserted clearly that men in the visible world, following their inclinations, are in no way free. Since the determinism is strictly mathematical, no statement of purpose is possible. Spinoza added, though this is not generally true of mechanists, that what does not happen is logically impossible.

The second form is logical determinism, of which the ancient Stoics and the nineteenth century Hegelians were separate examples. They were not mechanists; they allowed for purpose; and therefore they might be called rational or teleological determinists. The universal Logos controls all that happens, or Absolute Reason unfolds itself in history. Whatever happens, must happen; and, more consistently than in Spinoza, what does not happen is logically impossible. The Stoics added their theory of eternal recurrence (cf. Stoicism).

The Stoics also stressed ethics and held that the good life is a life of virtue. Mechanistic determinism may make morality meaningless (though Spinoza's great work bear the title of Ethics), but teleological determinism can be strongly ethical. Since too the Stoic Logos is God, this provides a transition to the third form of determinism, theological determinism; i.e., God foreordains whatsoever comes to pass. Note here that Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews, XVIII. i. 3) reports that while the loose-living Sadducees believed in free will, the meticulous Pharisees and the strict Essenes were determinists: "The Pharisees... live meanly and despise delicacies in diet, and they follow the conduct of reason... and when they determine that all things are done by fate, they do not take away the freedom from men of acting as they think fit; since their notion is that it has pleased God to make a temperament whereby what he wills is done, but so that the will of man can act virtuously or viciously.

Romanism holds to free will, and Erasmus made this his main point against Luther, who replied in his masterpiece The Bondage of the Will. Melanchthon in this as in many other pointed repudiated Luther. Calvin, Knox, the Irish Articles of Religion, the Westminster Confession, and the Reformed position as a whole was thoroughly deterministic. Arminius in the early seventeenth century repudiated the Reformed faith and took a step backward toward Romanism.

William Cunningham, "Calvinism and the Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity" (pp. 471-524), The Reformers and the Theology of the Reformation, London, Banner of Truth, 1967; John Gill, The Cause of God and Truth, Marshallton, Del., Sovereign Grace Book Club, 1957 (?); Jacques Loeb, The Mechanistic Conception of Life, Chicago, 1912; Augustus Toplady, Philosophical Necessity Asserted, pp. 784-819, in Complete Works of, London 1869.

Gordon H. Clark