Polemics

Is free will compatible with God’s knowledge of future events?

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From PhiloChristos blog.

Excerpt:

Suppose that God knows tomorrow, Ethel will boil some peas. “God knows Ethel will boil some peas tomorrow” implies that “Ethel will boil some peas tomorrow” is true. You can’t know something that isn’t true, so if God knows something, then it’s true. But the question is this: Is it true because God knows it, or does God know it because it’s true?

If it’s true because God knows it, then God knowing it is what causes it to be true. If God knowing what Ethel will do tomorrow is what causes her to boil peas, then she is determined to boil peas by God’s foreknowledge. In that case, she doesn’t have free will.

But if God knows it because it’s true, then it being true is what causes God to know it. This is the common sense understanding of the way knowledge works. Nothing is true because somebody knows it. Rather, the only way anybody can know anything is if it’s true already. In this case, Ethel can have free will with respect to boiling peas.

By the law of excluded middle, Ethel will boil peas tomorrow, or she will not boil peas tomorrow. One of the following two propositions is true:

1. Ethel will boil peas tomorrow.

2. Ethel will not boil peas tomorrow.

Regardless of which one happens to be true, the thing that makes it true is that it corresponds to what Ethel will actually do tomorrow. Let’s suppose that (1) is true. In that case, Ethel will boil peas tomorrow. Now we can form the following argument:

4. God knows (1) because it’s true.
5. (1) is true, because in reality Ethel will boil peas tomorrow.
6. Therefore, God knows (1) because Ethel will boil peas tomorrow.

See? It’s all up to Ethel. She has free will. But her having free will is perfectly consistent with God having foreknowledge.

I quoted most of the post, because it was so good. I really recommend you read the post and make sense of it for yourself.

9 thoughts on “Is free will compatible with God’s knowledge of future events?”

  1. It’s simpler and easier on the brain when you realize that foreknowledge is an anthropomorphic convention. God does not know because He has foreknowledge, He knows because he has perfect knowledge. He is already there in the infinite sense, past, present and future.

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      1. I was talking about her post, not yours. You just posted what she said. Why are you thanking me? :)

        You’re absolutely welcome. And go to bed.

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  3. I think the atheist rejoinder might be that if there are such future facts to be known, Ethel’s will is not free, because only one future can come about. So the atheist might admit that omniscience is not technically the problem, and would modify his contention to the idea that, if there are such facts at all, whether they are known or not, there is no free will, and traditional accounts of omniscience, which presuppose such facts, would, if true, indicate that there really is no free will.

    The post, it seems to me, comes close but misses the heart of the matter: that facts about what Ethel WILL do are entirely compatible with the fact that Ethel CAN do otherwise. The fact that there’s only one way things WILL turn out, doesn’t mean that there’s only one way things COULD turn out.

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  4. I posted a long exploration of free will and God’s foreknowledge last summer: “Clairvoyant science and the Deep Blue God.”

    Excerpt:

    When most Christians say, “God knows everything,” they are imagining “everything” too narrowly. “Everything” in fact encompasses much more than they think it does.

    My thesis is that God indeed does know everything, but that “everything” in God’s knowledge is infinitely greater than theology has classically conceived and Christians have conventionally thought.

    Classical theism, then, views the past, present and future as equally concretized in God’s knowledge. Thus, God’s omniscience equals his omnipotence, since unless God determines every detail of the world, something might happen that was not immutably known to God in advance. But a God who can be surprised, classical theism insists, is no God at all.

    But this is a very narrow understanding of what it means for God to know something.
    ….

    I can envision a future in which I have grandchildren. I can also envision a future in which I do not. I do not know either future absolutely, but I know them both potentially (or as Luther would put it, “contingently”). And if I can know them potentially, so can God. Luther is thus so simply proved wrong: if I can know something contingently, then necessarily God does, too, else we are left with the stunning proposition that I can know something God cannot know.

    Therefore: God knows contingencies (potentialities) as fully as actualities.

    Though God does not know absolutely my grandchildren, because they do not exist, hence are not actualities, God does know the nearly unlimited permutations of possibilities of a future in which my grandchildren are born (or not).
    …..

    God therefore cannot be “taken by surprise.” No matter what happens, God has already fully foreseen it and is just as prepared for it as if he had directly caused it.

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  5. No offense, but PhiloChristos’s reasoning is so logically flawed and inconsistent, that it’s pretty sad actually.

    “4. God knows (1) because it’s true.
    5. (1) is true, because in reality Ethel will boil peas tomorrow.
    6. Therefore, God knows (1) because Ethel will boil peas tomorrow.”

    … premise #4 is invalid, since it’s NOT TRUE NOW, that Ethel will boil peas tomorrow. It’s only true, when Ethel will actually boil those peas or it’s already true by predestination, causality or determinism.

    … premise #5 is invalid, since again it’s NOT TRUE NOW or even certain, that Ethel will boil the peas tomorrow. The truth value of this argument can only be determined tomorrow, when Ethel chooses to actually boil those peas.

    … premise #6 is invalid, since it’s NOT TRUE YET, that Ethel will boil the peas tomorrow. Ethel hasn’t done that decision yet, so it’s not true NOW. Also this premise flies in the face of all that we know about causality — namely, that an event is caused by events that happened before, not after, it. If God knows “ex post facto”, aka AFTER THE FACT, it’s not foreknowledge at all.

    … summa summarum: Free will and God’s perfect foreknowledge are not compatible. That’s simple fact, they are contradictory. The point is that because of God’s complete (but not necessarily absolute) knowledge, if indeed He “knows” something, then that’s the way it is, whether or not He directly caused it to be that way. If God “knows” a future event, that event must occur, whether or not He directly caused it. It is still predestined, even though we might think from our perspective we were exercising our freedom to choose (a classical argument from determinists and predestinationists). Our freedom is still only an illusion of freedom. And if that event must occur, and not just be a possibility, then either God was indeed the cause of the event, which results in theistic predestination, or God is not the cause of the event, which results in a form of naturalism (historical positivism) or at best deism, which is a theistic naturalism.

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