Free willing in God: A metaphor, not analogy, for divine creating

Abstract Contemporary classical theists routinely argue that God’s creative act is a kind of divine free willing or free choosing. This article argues that ‘free willing’ or ‘free choosing’ ( liberum arbitrium ) cannot be a proper divine act on the terms of classical theism. To advance this claim about classical theism at large, we take as our test case Thomas Aquinas’ argument that God freely wills this world, since it is so conceptually comprehensive and representative of much Christian thinking on these matters. We deploy Thomas’ accounts of divine predication, divine attributes, and the nature of free willing to show that when we correctly apply Thomas’ classical theist doctrine of divine perfection to analogically purify the concept of finite free willing – and so render it capable of being properly attributed to God – none of the defining characteristics of free willing remain to be predicated substantially of God; the attribution becomes equivocal. But such equivocations, in Aquinas’ account of divine predication, can still function as religiously useful metaphors, which is what we argue ‘God freely wills creatures’ must be on classical theist terms. Thus, our argument invites classical theists to re-examine the ‘divine-creating-as-free-choosing’ analogy, and to search for other, more adequate ways of analogically conceiving divine creating.