muhammad_isa
Veteran Member
That whole essay is irrelevant to my argument.There are issues with omniscience and freewill that have been discussed for centuries. As imaginary as a theistic God seems to be theologians have to act as if he's out there and the philosophy must be discussed.
Omniscience (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
3. Foreknowledge and Human Free Action
Knowledge of all true propositions would seem to include knowledge of all truths about the future, at least if there are truths about the future. Thus omniscience would seem to include foreknowledge. There is a long tradition, however, of philosophers who have thought that divine foreknowledge was incompatible with human free action, or, at any rate, they took arguments for the incompatibility seriously enough so as to require either disarming them or limiting what is involved in divine omniscience. (Similar reasoning might be given to argue that God’s foreknowledge is incompatible with some of God’s own free action. See Swinburne (2016 183) for a such a suggestion. We will follow tradition and consider only the application to human action.) Early discussions include ones by St. Augustine (On Free Choice of the Will, Bk. III, ch. 3) and Boethius (The Consolation of Philosophy, Bk. V). They each considered an argument that may be represented (where S is any person and A is any action) as:
Therefore,
- (1)If God has foreknowledge that S will do A, then it is necessary that S will do A.
- (2)If it is necessary that S will do A, then S is not free with respect to doing A.
It is somewhat controversial exactly what Augustine’s own response to this argument is (in his formulation it is foreknowledge of a sinful action and not foreknowledge of human actions more generally). An influential interpretation has been given by Rowe (1964) and criticized by Hopkins (1977), who both think that Augustine denies premiss (2) on the grounds that human actions may be free even if they come about by necessity. An alternative interpretation has been defended by Wierenga (1989: 60–63), who thinks that Augustine only explicitly argues against the conclusion of the argument. In any event, it is clearer that Augustine denies the conclusion than that he identifies a flaw in the argument. Boethius, on the other hand, accepts the argument but denies that omniscience includes foreknowledge. Instead, God’s perspective is that of eternity, that is, “the complete possession all at once of illimitable life”. In other words, God sees everything that ever happens all at once, so he does not, strictly speaking, know things ahead of time. (For a more recent defense of this view, see Stump and Kretzmann 1981.)
- (3)If God has foreknowledge that S will do A, then S is not free with respect to doing A.
Subsequent philosophers, however, beginning at least as early as Aquinas, identified a flaw in the argument. According to Aquinas (Summa contra Gentiles, I, 67, 10), the first premiss is ambiguous between the “necessity of the consequence” and the “necessity of the consequent”. That is, (1) may be interpreted as
or as
- (1′)It is necessary that if God foreknows that S will do A, then S will do A.
On the former interpretation the premiss is true, but under that interpretation the argument is invalid, that is, the conclusion does not follow. Interpreting the premiss in the second way results in an argument that is valid, but this premiss is false. Just because God knows a proposition, it does not follow that the proposition is a necessary truth; God knows contingent truths, as well. In either case, the argument fails.
- (1″)If God foreknows that S will do A, then it is a necessary truth that S will do A.
There is a second, more difficult argument for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and human free action. An early version was given by Pike (1965), and it has occasioned a voluminous recent literature. (For some of this literature, see the papers and bibliography included in Fisher 1989.) Developments of the argument typically draw on the following claims:
In virtue of (4), propositions reporting God’s past beliefs are accidentally necessary. If it is true that Eighty years ago God believed that Jones will mow his lawn tomorrow (to use Pike’s example), then that proposition reports a past event and, thus, is now accidentally necessary. Now from the assumptions that God is omniscient and that God believes p, it follows that p. If we strengthen the first assumption to hold either that God is essentially omniscient or that he is infallible (see section 2 above), the proposition God believes p by itself entails p, that is, it is not possible that God believe p and p be false. Let us develop the argument under one of these stronger assumptions. Then since God believes that Jones will mow his lawn tomorrow entails Jones will mow his lawn tomorrow, given that the former is accidentally necessary and that the latter is contingent, it follows, with the help of (5), that Jones will mow his lawn tomorrow is also accidentally necessary. But then, in view of (6), no one, not even Jones himself, is able to make it false that Jones will mow his lawn tomorrow. If there is nothing Jones can do to avoid mowing his lawn tomorrow, then he does not do so freely. This action was chosen arbitrarily, and so the argument is supposed to show that no action that God knows ahead of time will be performed is free; divine foreknowledge is incompatible with human free action.
- (4)A proposition reporting an event in the past is forever afterwards “fixed” or “unalterable” or accidentally necessary.
- (5)A contingent proposition that is entailed by an accidentally necessary proposition is itself accidentally necessary (accidental necessity is closed under entailment).
- (6)If a proposition is accidentally necessary at a time, no one is able at any later time to make it false.
This argument requires a number of nontrivial assumptions. So there is no lack of places for an objector to attack, and, in fact, philosophers have tried various ways of discrediting the argument, none of them entirely convincing. Ockhamists (named after William of Ockham) try to defend the claim that many propositions apparently reporting God’s past beliefs are not wholly about the past, and thus are not accidentally necessary. Accordingly, Plantinga (1986) and some of the authors of the papers in Fisher (1989) on the distinction between “hard” facts and “soft” facts deny (4). But it has proven remarkably difficult to provide clear and persuasive principles for determining which propositions apparently about the past are not completely or really about the past.
An alternative defended by the sixteenth-century Jesuit, Luis de Molina, is to deny (5), the principle that accidental necessity is closed under entailment of contingent propositions (Freddoso 1988: 58). Of the assumptions required for the argument, however, (5) has seemed to many to be the least controversial, at least if we really do grasp the modality of accidental necessity. For a simple argument against (5), see (Wierenga 2016:102).
Finally, it remains open to deny (6), to hold that even if it is already accidentally necessary that Jones mow his lawn tomorrow, he nevertheless has it within his power to do something, for example, spend the day indoors, which is such that if he were to do it, it would be false that he mows his lawn (Plantinga 1986: 257). Jones can remain indoors tomorrow, and if he were to do that, the past would have been different; in particular, God would never have believed then that Jones would mow his lawn tomorrow. See also Mavrodes (1983) for a defense of the claim that events of the past are now preventable. Some philosophers object, however, to this sort of counterfactual power over the past.
We have just looked at three strategies for rejecting the argument. Some theistic philosophers, however, are happy to accept it. One position accepts the argument and gives the Boethian response, like that given to the first argument above, that God’s mode of existence is eternity, so he does not have foreknowledge. On this view, it does not matter that divine foreknowledge is incompatible with free human action, because God’s omniscience does not include foreknowledge (see, for example, Stump and Kretzmann 1991). Other philosophers have objected that regardless of whether God is eternal rather than everlasting, it does not suffice to reply to the argument simply by appealing to God’s eternity. Plantinga (1986), Zagzebski (1991), and others claim that an exactly analogous argument could be constructed using the premiss that 80 years ago it was then true, and so now accidentally necessary, that God eternally knows that Jones mows his lawn tomorrow. According to this revision of the argument, divine eternal knowledge would be as incompatible with human free action as divine foreknowledge is; so the Boethian response leaves the argument unchallenged.
In recent years perhaps the most widely accepted response to the argument is to accept it but to deny that omniscience extends to knowledge of the future. Geach (1977) held that apart from “present trends and tendencies” there is no future to be known. Swinburne (1993 and 2016) holds that omniscience does not include foreknowledge of future free actions. Hoffman and Rosenkrantz (2002) give a careful account of omniscience, intentionally limiting God’s foreknowledge to truths that are “causally inevitable”, where causally inevitable events are not free actions. Indeed a recent movement within philosophy of religion, so-called Open Theism, has been developed with the explicit aim of leaving the future “open”, and thus unknown to God, precisely so as to leave room for human freedom. Hasker (1989, 2004) has been a leading figure in this group, as have been the contributors to Pinnock (1994). In a similar vein, Mawson recommends that theists who think that God is in time should say “that God suspends judgment on everything that will actually happen in the future.” Instead, on this view omniscience extends to the future only in knowledge of “the probabilities of particular futures developing” (Mawson 2019: 38–39). We saw at the outset of this essay that one of the motivations for attributing omniscience to God is to be able to develop a doctrine of divine providence. But those who deny that God’s knowledge extends to future free actions will have the difficult task of stating or accepting a doctrine of providence, if God does not know what free agents will do.
It seems to rely on the same old fallacy that "there can only be one outcome, so we have no choice".
It is totally false. We DO have a choice, but the statement is misleading as it implies the choice that G-d knows we will make is being caused by the known outcome. It isn't.
