Monday, January 9, 2017

Divine foreknowledge and free will


The classical interpretation of omniscience raises a few problems. One of the strongest is the question as to how one can reconcile a concept of omniscience where God knows the truth value of contingent propositions prior to their instantiation in the world.  If God infallibly knows that tomorrow I will perform some action, then I can't possibly will anything in contradiction to that knowledge. But then in what sense do I possess free will? One defense that can be raised is to claim that mere knowledge of a future contingent does not itself cause the event. A common example being that I can have true knowledge that the sun will rise tomorrow, but clearly my knowing that fact does not have a causal relation to the sun rising, as the argument goes this is also the case for god. However, I don't see how this actually responds to the argument. If I truly know that the sun will rise tomorrow, it is only because the sun does not in fact have free will.  The argument is about future contingents having a determinate truth value independent or prior to the proximate agents, not with what ultimately determines those truth values (they may even be brute facts for the sake of the argument). If it is true today that I will perform some action tomorrow then that proposition has a truth value, and what determines that value cannot be me, as the proposition is determinate prior to the my activity, in fact prior to my very existence. If an agent isn't the primary cause of the truth about its actions, I don't see what a classical interpretation of free will could mean.

Another defense is to claim that god, being timeless, sees the entire universe not as a sequence of temporally occurring events, but in one single "eternal now", but again I fail to see how this answers the objection. The argument is about logical priority, not temporal priority. If god and his knowledge are logically prior to the universe then the objection remains the same. If the actualization of some event is instead prior to god's knowledge of that event then god's knowledge, and by extension God, are contingent. Moreover, if god only knows our actions because we perform them, than this knowledge would be entirely useless for prophecy or providence, as he can only know an event after the fact.