Human Destiny - Divine will and human action

The problem of responsibility and power

Divine judgement appears to require responsible human conduct, while divine omnipotence appears to leave no action outside God's creative power. If a person's wrongdoing is wholly produced by God, why punish that person? If the person produces an action independently, in what sense is God the sole creator? These are connected questions about agency, justice and power, not merely whether God knows the future.

Qadar concerns divine determination or decree. Human agency concerns how a person acts from intention, choice and capacity. Knowing an act is different from causing it: an observer's awareness does not produce the observed movement. But a theology saying God creates the movement and desire faces a stronger issue than foreknowledge alone.

Different definitions of freedom produce different standards. Libertarian freedom requires that a choice is not wholly determined and that alternatives are genuinely available. A compatibilist account can call an act free when it expresses the agent's own intention without relevant coercion even if it is determined. An action can therefore be voluntary in one account without meeting the other's requirement of independent control.

To test the distinction, compare an intentional gift with a hand moving in a reflex. Both can belong to a world governed by God, yet only the gift expresses a considered intention. Whether that difference is sufficient for moral desert is the question the theological approaches answer differently.

Mu'tazili agency and divine justice

Mu'tazili theology makes divine justice a reason to affirm genuine human authorship of voluntary acts. If God commands obedience and punishes disobedience, persons need a capacity to obey and meaningful control over their conduct. Otherwise punishment would impose a penalty for what they could not avoid. Reason can recognise the wrongness of such treatment; justice is not whatever a powerful ruler happens to do.

God creates the person and gives the capacity, while the person originates a voluntary action. This differs from proposing a second equal God. Human power is dependent and restricted, but its exercise is not simply another action directly created by God in exactly the same way. The approach aims to make commands, praise, blame and repentance intelligible.

Suppose a person can either return a borrowed object or intentionally keep it. If the wrong act comes from that person's choice, blame responds to their agency rather than to God's forcing the outcome. This supplies a clear account of why moral trial can be fair. It also supports the claim that God does not command what a person is wholly incapable of doing.

An Ash'ari critic asks whether the voluntary action becomes an effect outside God's sole creative power. A Mu'tazili reply can say that giving creatures a real capacity is itself an exercise of divine power, not a failure of it. The critic then asks whether sovereignty includes creating every particular act or granting some agency. The dispute cannot be resolved by both sides repeating that God is powerful: they interpret the content of that power differently.

Ash'ari acquisition and Ghazali

Ash'ari kasb, acquisition, connects God's creation of acts with a human's voluntary participation. God creates the capacity and the action; the person acquires the action in connection with intention and choice. This is not a partnership in which God creates one portion and a human creates another. The aim is to preserve God as sole creator without treating every human movement as involuntary.

Ghazali's Jerusalem Epistle, the Third Pillar within section III of Book II of the Ihya, develops this account. The explanations here paraphrase the passage rather than quote it; the inspected English edition is Nabih Amin Faris's Foundations of the Articles of Faith (1962; online reprint 1999). Its first two principles affirm divine creation and distinguish voluntary acquisition from involuntary movement.

Applied to the gift, God creates the giving and the person's capacity and intention, yet the person gives intentionally rather than having their arm moved in a reflex. Ghazali regards that difference as real. A modern comparison can call this compatible with a form of compatibilist responsibility, but it should not silently replace his theology with a claim that people independently create their choices.