Human Freedom and Divine Causation

Abstract This article presents a possible way of reconciling libertarian human freedom with universal divine causation. The argument is developed within an Aristotelian-Thomistic framework and makes use of the distinctions between act and potency, essence and existence, form and matter, and the four causes. The main claim is that God directly causes human acts in the existential order of causation, while what makes an act this act rather than another belongs to the essential order and depends on the created nature of the human agent. Divine premotion therefore does not have to determine a free act in a way that excludes libertarian freedom. The same distinction also helps explain moral responsibility. Moral evil lies in a defect of the form of the act, not in its efficient causation. God can therefore cause the existence of a human act without causing the defect by which the act is evil.