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An incompatibilist, by contrast, holds that if I necessarily act in accordance with my strongest desires, and if those desires are causally determined so that I have no real possibility of having any other desires than the ones I have, then I am not free. The reason this is so, according to the incompatibilist, is that freedom requires "the ability to do otherwise," and if the determinist scenario is true, then people have no real ability to act differently than they do. What seem to be other possible actions are not real possibilities at all.
Compatibilists may respond at this point that their view does allow people to "do otherwise." The compatibilist says that people are often free to choose another action in the sense that no external power prevents them from doing so. We are not usually compelled by other people or outside forces to choose as we do. We are free to do otherwise in the sense that we could and would do otherwise if we desired to do so.
However, incompatibilists find this sense of "freedom to do otherwise" irrelevant, since the person cannot in fact have any desires other than the ones he has, given his previous causal history. Saying that I could do otherwise if I wanted to is like saying that a dead person could run away from her tomb if she wanted to. That may be true, but the problem is the dead person can't want to; she is dead. Similarly, the person with one set of desires can't have any others; she is determined.
In our fictional case, the racist protester is unable to alter his motives or inclinations. The compatibilist, however, does not think that this ability is required for freedom. Sproul contends that we human beings are in a state much like that of our fictional protester. We have certain desires and we are unable to change them. We suffer from a kind of illness, a moral inability to change our desires. Specifically, we are unable to desire the things of God unless and until God acts to produce those desires in us.
On the view Sproul defends, God's actions are in one way not unlike those of the evil scientists who are controlling the protester. Of course, there is a major difference; the scientists alter the protester's desires to make them evil, while God produces good desires. In both cases, however, the cause of the person's desires lies outside the person. Sproul explicitly says that if a person is to be converted, God must act to produce a new set of desires in the person. The person whom God is acting upon has no ability to resist or refuse God's activity.
One might think that what is needed here is some kind of cooperation between God and human beings. While conceding that we are unable to change without God's help, some would argue that each individual person is able either to accept or reject God's help. For his part, Sproul explicitly rejects such a view, stigmatizing it as "Pelagian" or "semi-Pelagian."
Sproul thinks that these issues are matters of the highest importance for Christians to get right. A great number of Christian authors who think differently, from Pelagius to Arminius, from Charles Finney to Billy Graham, are criticized rather harshly in Sproul's pages:
I agree with [J.I.] Packer and [O.R.] Johnston that Arminianism contains un-Christian elements in it and that their view of the relationship between faith and regeneration is fundamentally un-Christian. Is this error so egregious that it is fatal to salvation? People often ask if I believe Arminians are Christians? I usually answer, "Yes, barely." They are Christians by what we call a felicitous inconsistency.
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