Part 2: Wilhelmus à Brakel on Free Will - Man’s Free Will or Impotency and the Punishment Due Upon Sin

Brakel begins straightaway defining his terms: intellect, will, and judgment. Intellect involves judgment, along with conscience and comprehension. Judgment involves determining whether some proposition is true/false, some argument is valid/invalid/sound/unsound, some term clear/unclear, or some person/place/thing is [fill in your desired predication]. Judgment is involved with seeing whether or not something is to loved or hated. The Will is connected to ability. I agree. But Brakel connects it with the ability to love/hate. This is a sneaky move. Brakel seems to just make it an analytical truth that abilities are necessarily tied to affections. It will be a short, expected move if Brakel now wants to enslave the will to the affections. If he does, this will have to be demonstrated before I assent. He mentions that these terms are discussed more in chapter 10, so we'll have to hold off for more detail until we get there. Until then, any conclusions deduced, akin to Euclid and his axioms, are only as good as the axioms themselves. 


Brakel's first section is entitled: The Freedom of the Will: Not Neutrality but One of Necessary Consequence

Mentioned are man's will and how it's dependent on God. Man's being, activity, obligations depend on God's foreknowledge/decree. Of course, God's foreknowledge depends on God's decree for the Calvinist. I agree. But - as a Molinist - I still think God has Middle Knowledge prior to the decree. In that way, God retains meticulous providence and sovereignty, and creatures retain libertarian free will (in the soft sense). Brakel argues that foreknowledge cannot be thwarted. In a sense, yes; in a sense, no (Let me take a second to note that the book was published in 1700. In no way do I think we determine truth by the calendar. Truth is truth, and if a proposition is true, it is always true: it'll have to be indexed modally/temporally, of course. Needless to say, the literature on modality and foreknowledge has grown like an insolent Tropical Forest since 1700. Calvinists can't expect Molinists to change their mind if ideas like this are said almost matter-of-factly. The fact of the matter is that there has been substantial criticism of the idea that God's foreknowledge can't be thwarted. Indeed, it can't; but it also can in another sense. And this is the risk that Reformed Divines take. Pronounce that God's foreknowledge cannot be thwarted and you are at risk of being questioned on what you mean by 'can'. Now you are on philosophical ground. There is no problem with this. But you can't take with one hand what you give with the other. You can't approve of philosophy in one domain and disapprove of it in another. Philosophy is philosophy is philosophy. If you say God's foreknowledge can't be thwarted, then Brakel has an obligation to analyze the relevant modal notions. 20th-century philosophers of religion, not to mention non-religious analytic philosophers, have made great progress on such notions, progress that Brakel just couldn't have been aware of). The same applies to what Brakel says about God's decree. Of course, God's decree cannot be changed. This doesn't mean that the decree can't not change in other relevant senses. It also doesn't mean that the unchangeability of God's decree has any bearing on libertarian free will. 

That's all for now.