Haven’t posted here in a while, but wanted to chime in here.
Free agency seems to me to be only compatibilism with a different name. How does it account for the existence of our seemingly brute “natures”? They either come straight from God as they are (which would make him responsible for any evil they contained) or there is some other truly independent causative power (i.e. our free wills) which have messed things up.
By they way, I would like to express again my concerns with the whole “Boethian” timeless view of God. By itself (as presented by Jason), I find the doctrine incoherent. For there must be some logical priority, even if we view time as a single “now”, among the acts of the free creatures throughout the space-time continuum. And if this is so, God cannot be interacting “simultaneously” with all those acts in such a way that violates that logical priority. The easiest way to see this error is this way. When Jesus foretells that Peter will deny him, it is asserted (on Boethius view) that he is able to foretell this, not because God has predetermined Peter’s acts, but simply because he “sees” them in his eternal now. However, the Peter that God would be seeing who is denying Christ would himself be a being who had already experienced the foretelling prophecy. In other words, before Peter is told the prophecy, he must deny Christ, but before he denies Christ, he has to have heard the prophecy. What is given with one hand on this theory is at the same time taken away with the other. The reply at this point is often - by Lewis and Boethius - that all God’s “acts” in eternity with his creation are really a single act, “incorporating” everything at once. But, even if this were so, this single act would have to uphold this logical interaction, for the temporally posterior acts of free creatures are dependent on temporally prior acts, not vice versa, and therefore what is temporally prior, even with time removed from the equation, is also logically prior. Thus, acts which occur earlier in time must be logically before acts which come later in time, and the latter are “dependent” on the former; not vice versa.
I do think there is a better view of divine atemporality, free will, and providence, which actually incorporates this Boethian view of Lewis’ with his more “open theistic” beliefs, in terms of God “risking” when he created beings with free will, the “two way traffic” of causation between God and creature and God’s impassibility (or lack thereof), and, perhaps the most enlightening metaphor he’s given us on the subject, his chess piece analogy at the end of the Great Divorce. For those interested I’ll post a short summary of that theory below from something I’ve written in the past.
"By combining various elements of CS Lewis’ views of God’s relationship to time, free will, foreknowledge and impassibility, I think I have something pretty close to a “Lewisian” response to the grounding objection in Molinism.
I have attached a diagram which explains it best, but, to put it in words, God’s knowledge is determined by the part of us which is eternal and not in time (which I labeled “soul”). There is a logical priority here which is, admittedly, only vaguely imaginable - like the eternal footprint in the sand - but I think the image does convey a positive idea. Once this “non-temporal” interaction - this “imprintation” - occurs, God’s knowledge is “affected”. This is possible only by the power of his omnipotence and act of self-abnegation which allows us creatures to be “more than receptacles”. I’m sure you know that any theory of genuine free will must allow for God in some way to be affected by his creation; I simply say that affect-ing must occur outside of and logically before time. Once this knowledge is “obtained” by God (this would be where he “learns” the counterfactuals of freedom), God can then “reveal” the soul (to him and to itself), in time, by giving it consciousness, etc, and perfecting it in whatever way he sees fit. His seeing its eternal nature, which has somehow “responded” to him outside of time, allows him to know how it would respond, were he to put it in time A under influences B. What God gains in eternity by looking at the soul is something that allows him to know how such a soul would look “unraveled”, as it were, in time. Perhaps the pictorial best explains it, however.
This idea is based off Lewis in the Great Divorce and his chess piece analogy. You will notice there that he has an “eternal nature” standing outside the board (which is time), and the board itself is that nature “dileneated” in time. This idea, combined with what he says in Letters to Malcolm about there being a “two-way traffic” of causation between creator and created presents the possibility of our eternal souls “causing” God’s knowledge of free counterfactuals outside of time and “before” we have been put in time. Finally, we “come to know ourselves” in time, as our consciousness of our own choices comes to us moment by moment (Screwtape.) As he indicates in the Great Divorce, our eternal souls can be viewed as making a sort of “single” choice or giving a “single” expression by eternally exercising our freedom in a certain way. This expression can be “broken up” in time.
I’m not convinced Lewis actually pictured or encountered the grounding objection, but synthesizing his views allows us to see a possible solution.
Thomas Flint called this view a kind of combination of open theism in eternity and determinism in time. That is a helpful way of thinking, I believe, so long as one remembers it doesn’t exactly capture it."