If God Can’t Violate His Nature, then Moral Responsibility Makes No Sense

Here is this argument by a Redditor.

If you think that God CAN violate his nature, or if you think he can do things like lie, then this argument isn’t directed to you.

I’m using the Principle of Alternative Possibility as my framework for moral responsibility. You are morally responsible for an action if and only if you could have made a different decision. if you could not have made a different decision, then you obviously aren’t responsible for that decision.

If God cannot violate his nature, that means it’s impossible for him to do certain logically and physically possible things like lie. I choose lying as an example because things like killing every human being on earth are apparently well within his nature, but lying somehow isn’t, in the Christian worldview.

But if there are things that are impossible for the most powerful being in existence, for the sole reason that they are not within his nature, then we must certainly be similarly bound by our nature. People get really upset when you claim that a certain decision was impossible for them to make, even if it seems physically possible, but the concept suddenly makes perfect sense to them when you talk about God’s nature.

The most common objection to this is that God’s nature is fixed, but human nature changes. But human nature only changes over time. You can’t change who you are, what you believe, or what motivates you at will, like flipping a switch. At the moment you make a decision, you are who you are, and you can’t be otherwise. So the idea that you could have made a different decision than the one you made in real life would require your nature to have been different than it was when you made the decision. The fact that you can imagine having made a different decision isn’t evidence of anything other than the ability of the human imagination to imagine impossible things.

The fact that it’s impossible for both us and God to violate our nature means that human decisions must always conform to the individual’s nature, just like God. Since we do not choose our nature, then our actions, which are directly controlled by our nature, cannot be not freely chosen.

The Rebuttal:

To refute the opening post (OP) while staying within the user’s specified framework, the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP). The premise that God acts in accordance with His immutable nature, one can expose a fatal flaw in the OP's leap from divine nature to human nature.

The OP's core argument is:

1. God cannot violate His nature (e.g., He cannot lie).

2. Therefore, actions are entirely determined/controlled by nature.

3. Humans cannot change their nature at the moment of choice.

4. Therefore, humans have no alternate possibilities and lack moral responsibility

The Fallacy of Equivocation: "Divine Nature" vs. "Human Nature"

The OP treats "nature" as a monolithic concept that operates identically in a necessary, supreme being (God) and contingent, finite beings (humans). This is a category error.  A category error (or category mistake) is a logical and semantic error where properties belonging to one concept are inappropriately ascribed to a fundamentally different concept. Examples: Questions like "What color is the number seven?" or "How much does the Pythagorean theorem weigh? are both category errors. 

• God’s Nature is Ontological Perfection: When theologians say God "cannot lie," it is not because He faces a restrictive boundary or an external constraint. It means God is the fundamental source of truth itself. A limitation only exists if there is a gap between what a being wants to do and what it can do. God’s will and God’s nature are perfectly unified.

• Human Nature is Inherently Flexible: Human nature, by definition, includes the capacity for internal conflict, deliberation, and moral variance. Unlike God, whose nature is unchangeably anchored in absolute goodness, human nature is structurally built to choose between competing desires, values, and inclinations.

Conflating "Influencing" with "Determining" (The Fallacy of the Switch)

The OP claims that because you cannot change who you are "at will, like flipping a switch" at the exact moment of decision, your nature dictates a single, inevitable output. This misunderstands how human choice works under PAP:

• Having a specific nature at T1 does not restrict a human to a single possible action. For example, a person’s nature might include both a selfish desire (to keep found money) and a moral conviction (to return it).

• Both options are entirely compatible with their human nature. The agent possesses the genuine power to elevate one desire over the other. Therefore, at the moment of choice, alternate possibilities do exist within the boundaries of that nature. The OP wrongly assumes a nature can only ever yield one logical output.

The Self-Defeating Nature of the OP's Determinism

If the OP's strict view of "nature" is true, the argument undermines its own premise regarding moral responsibility:

• If human nature strictly determines every choice, then the OP’s act of writing the post, evaluating the logic, and demanding intellectual honesty from Christians is also just an inevitable, passive byproduct of the OP's unchosen nature.

• Under this view, praise, blame, rationality, and debate become meaningless chemical echoes. If the OP believes humans are genuinely responsible for evaluating the truth of this argument, they must concede that humans possess a degree of agency that transcends rigid instinctual determinism

Summary Refutation

The OP assumes that for a choice to be free, an agent must be able to act completely outside of any nature whatsoever. But freedom does not require being a blank slate; it requires the power of self-determination that your nature allows. Because human nature inherently permits a spectrum of conflicting choices (unlike the unified perfection of divine nature), humans retain the alternate possibilities required for true moral responsibility.