Thirdly: In the purity of the soul, the will is thus regulated.
Fourthly: This regulation, however, does not take place by the necessary governance which reason and sensitivity have over will, but by a self-subjection of will to their rules and inducements;—this constitutes meritoriousness,—the opposite conduct constitutes ill desert.
Fifthly: Our calculations must proceed according to the degree and fixedness of this self-subjection to reason and right feeling; or where this does not exist, according to the degree and fixedness of the habits of wrong doing, in a self-subjection to certain passions in opposition to reason.
Sixthly: Our calculations will be more or less certain according to the extent and accuracy of our observations upon human conduct.
Seventhly: Our calculations can never be attended with absolute certainty, because the will being contingent, has the power of disappointing calculations made upon the longest observed uniformity.
Eighthly: Our expectations respecting the determinations of Deity are attended with the highest moral certainty. We say moral certainty, because it is certainty not arising from necessity, and in that sense absolute; but certainty arising from the free choice of an infinitely pure being. Thus, when God is affirmed to be immutable, and when it is affirmed to be impossible for him to lie, it cannot be meant that he has not the power to change or to determine contrary to truth; but that there is an infinite moral certainty arising from the perfection of his nature, that he never will depart from infinite wisdom and rectitude.
To assign God any other immutability would be to deprive him of freedom.
Ninthly: The divine foresight of human volitions need not be supposed to necessitate them, any more than human foresight, inasmuch as foreseeing them, has no necessary connexion in any case with their causation. Again, if it does not appear essential to the divine foresight of volitions that they should be necessary. We have seen that future contingent volitions may be calculated with a high degree of certainty even by men; and now supposing that the divine being must proceed in the same way to calculate them through media,—the reach and accuracy of his calculations must be in the proportion of his intelligence, and how far short of a certain and perfect knowledge of all future contingent volitions can infinite intelligence be supposed to fall by such calculations?
Tenthly: But we may not suppose that the infinite mind is compelled to resort to deduction, or to employ media for arriving at any particular knowledge. In the attribute of prescience, he is really present to all the possible and actual of the future.
III. The third and last point of Edwards’s argument is as follows: “To suppose the future volitions of moral agents, not to be necessary events; or which is the same thing, events which it is not impossible but that they may not come to pass; and yet to suppose that God certainly foreknows them, and knows all things, is to suppose God’s knowledge to be inconsistent with itself. For to say that God certainly and without all conjecture, knows that a thing will infallibly be, which at the same time he knows to be so contingent, that it may possibly not be, is to suppose his knowledge inconsistent with itself; or that one thing he knows is utterly inconsistent with another thing he knows.” (page 117.)