What is compatibleism?

This is a philosophical perspective typically promoted by Calvinistic scholars,

which claims that free will and divine determinism are considered compatible. So long as you define free will as acting in accordance with your nature or your desires.

Compatibilistic Calvinists attempt to maintain that people are free in the sense that they are doing what they desire.

However, this appears to be an insufficient explanation to maintain any sense of

true freedom, considering that compatibilist also affirm that even the desires and thoughts of

men are decreed by God. This is an important circularity in the claims by the Calvinist that humans

can be considered genuinely free so long as their

actions are in accordance with their desires, i.e. voluntary. Given the long-held Calvinistic

belief that all events and actions are decreed by God, then human desire, the very thing

the compatibilist claims allow human choices to be considered free, must itself also be decreed.

But if so, then there is nothing outside of or beyond God's decree on which human freedom might be based.

Put differently, there is no such thing as what the human really wants to do in any given

situation considered somehow apart from God's desire in the matter, i.e., God's desire as

to what the human agent will desire.

In the compatibilist scheme, human desire is wholly derived from and wholly bound to the divine desire.

God's decree encompasses everything, even the desire that underlie human choices.

This is a critical point because it undercuts the plausibility of the

compatibilist argument that desire can be considered the basis for human freedom. Imagine if a man

invented a love potion that he gave to a woman that he admired for years, who never had any affection for him.

But because of the potion, she fell in love with him. Would anyone consider this true love

simply based on the fact that the woman now desired the man? Of course not. When you define

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