The Eternity Solution to the Problem of Human Freedom and Divine Foreknowledge

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

The Eternity Solution to the Problem of Human Freedom and Divine Foreknowledge 165 THE ETERNITY SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF HUMAN FREEDOM AND DIVINE FOREKNOWLEDGE MICHAEL ROTA University of St Th omas Abstract. In this paper I defend the eternity solution to the problem of human freedom and divine foreknowledge. Aft er motivating the problem, I sketch the basic contours of the eternity solution. I then consider several objections which contend that the eternity solution falsely implies that we have various powers (e.g. to change God’s beliefs, or to aff ect the past) which, according to the objec- tor, we do not in fact have. I. WHAT’S THE PROBLEM? Say that a human being H is free in the libertarian sense iff at least some- times, (i) there are multiple possible alternatives for H’s action, and (ii) it is up to H which alternative gets realized.1 Th ere are some good reasons, I think, to believe that human beings are free in the libertarian sense. My main task in this paper, however, is not to defend the view that humans have libertarian freedom, but to discuss a problem for theists who be- lieve that humans have libertarian freedom. Regardless of your actual beliefs, suppose for a moment that you do believe that humans have libertarian freedom. And imagine that a friend of yours in the archaeology department asks you if you would be willing to help in an archaeological dig near Rome. You agree, and spend several weeks digging up artifacts in what was once a monastery in the seventh century A.D. You fi nd various artifacts that have not seen the light of day for 1300 years. And then you fi nd something exceptionally unusual. You 1 I take this approach from Peter Unger, “Free Will and Scientiphicalism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (2002): 1-25. EUROPEAN JOURNAL FOR PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 1 (2010), PP. 165–186 166 MICHAEL ROTA yourself uncover a box containing a well-preserved Latin manuscript, buried all these long centuries. Being a well-trained Latinist, you begin to read the manuscript, and, to your astonishment, fi nd that the manu- script contains a narrative of your entire life thus far. It names and de- scribes your parents, identifi es the day of your birth, and describes the subsequent course of your life – what career you have chosen, your pro- fessional accomplishments, and whom you have married. You would no doubt initially think that this was an elaborate joke concocted by your archaeologist colleague. But suppose that you had convincing evidence that this was not so – suppose that you somehow had convincing evidence that the manuscript had really been there, bur- ied in the dirt for 1300 years. Now, if you were indeed convinced that the manuscript was real, what would you think about your own freedom? How could you have been in control of your life, when the whole course of your life, including your most personal decisions, was laid out long before you were born? In such a situation, your belief that you had been in control of your life would be shaken, I should think. Such a scenario would seem to pro- vide good evidence that you did not have libertarian freedom. Th e traditional Christian theist has a very similar problem. According to traditional Christian theism, God has perfect knowledge of events that are future with respect to us. On the traditional Christian view, before I was even born it was true that God knew the whole course of my life. Although there is no manuscript describing my life buried somewhere in the ground, there is something else which might seem even more probl- ematic. A much more detailed, infallibly accurate account of my future life has been contained, as it were, in the mind of God, since long before I was born. How then, can any of my actions really be up to me? II. THE ETERNITY SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM AND FOREKNOWLEDGE In this section I’ll attempt to sketch a model according to which God can know all of our future actions, including our actions that are free in the libertarian sense. THE ETERNITY SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM 167 Suppose, with Boethius, Anselm, and Aquinas, that God is timelessly eternal. God is not located in the fl ow of time. He is outside time. Yet the events of all times are equally present to Him. Th e events of the temporal present are present to Him. But so are the events of last year, and the events of next year. Th ey are all eternally present to Him. If that’s right, then we can tell a coherent story about how God could know what you will do tomorrow without taking away your freedom. Suppose that you will freely choose to answer the phone tomorrow at 9am. Th en God knows (eternally) that you will choose to answer the phone tomorrow at 9am simply because He sees you doing it. And God does not see you choosing to answer the phone before you actually do so. Rather, for God in eternity your action is a present event, not a future event. In Aquinas’s words: “…all things which are in time are present to God from eternity…because His glance is cast over all things from eter- nity, as those things exist in their own presentness”.2 So, you freely choose to answer the phone at 9am tomorrow. Because you choose this then, God knows that you choose this then. But just as my knowledge in the temporal present of what you are doing does not take away your freedom, so too God’s knowledge in the eternal present of what you are doing does not take away your freedom. God has perfect knowledge of all events that are future with respect to us simply because He sees them occur. Th e four key elements of the eternity solution, as I conceive it, are as follows: (1) God is timelessly eternal. Proposition (1) implies, among other things, that no part of God’s life is before or aft er any other part of God’s life. God’s entire life is present all at once in eternity. (2) For any time (including all times that are past with respect to us and all times that are future with respect to us, as well as the 2 Summa Th eologiae I.14.13c. Translations of Aquinas are my own. I use the text available at the Corpus Th omisticum website, http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/ iopera.html. 168 MICHAEL ROTA temporally present time), and for any event or substance tempo- rally located at such a time, that event or substance is present to God. (3) For any time (including all times that are past with respect to us and all times that are future with respect to us, as well as the temporally present time), and for any event or substance tem- porally located at such a time, God has immediate knowledge of that event or substance. (4) God knows events that occur in time because they occur, and not the other way around. (It is not the case that they occur be- cause God knows that they occur). Let’s call this set of four propositions the Basic Divine Eternity Model, or, for short, the Basic Model.3 III. OBJECTIONS RELATING TO POWERS I now turn to a group of related objections – each makes the contention that the Basic Model implies that we have powers that we do not, accord- ing to the objector, in fact have. 3.1. Counterfactual power over God’s eternal beliefs Suppose that an agent S performs an act A (say, makes a choice) at a time T1, but that at an earlier time T0, S had the power not to do A at T1. If God is eternal, then God eternally sees S doing A at T1, and so God eter- nally believes that S does A at T1. Now focus on that earlier time, T0. At T0, S had the power not to do A at T1. But if S had exercised that power, and not done A at T1, then either God would have had a false belief or God would never have eternally believed that S does A at T1 in the fi rst place. It is impossible that God have a false belief. So, if S had not done A at T1, then God would not have eternally believed something that He 3 I call this the Basic Model because it can be developed in diff erent ways, according to one’s view about the nature of time. THE ETERNITY SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM 169 in fact does eternally believe. Th us, the eternity model (together with the claim that at T0 S has the power not to do A at T1) implies that, at T0, (5) S has the power to do something4 such that if S did it, God would not eternally believe something that He does in fact eternally believe. Note that proposition (5) does not imply that S has the power to change or alter God’s eternal beliefs, at least not in the normal sense of the word ‘change’. Changing God’s beliefs would involve making it such that God once had one belief, and then later did not have that belief (or making it such that God once did not have some belief, and then later did have that belief). But there’s no question of that sort of thing here. If (fi rst situation) S does do A at T1, then God eternally believes that S does A at T1.
Recommended publications
  • The Search for the Source of Epistemic Good Linda
    © Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA METAPHILOSOPHY Vol. 34, Nos. 1/2, January 2003 0026–1068 THE SEARCH FOR THE SOURCE OF EPISTEMIC GOOD LINDA ZAGZEBSKI ABSTRACT: Knowledge has almost always been treated as good, better than mere true belief, but it is remarkably difficult to explain what it is about knowledge that makes it better. I call this “the value problem.” I have previously argued that most forms of reliabilism cannot handle the value problem. In this article I argue that the value problem is more general than a problem for reliabilism, infecting a host of different theories, including some that are internalist. An additional problem is that not all instances of true belief seem to be good on balance, so even if a given instance of knowing p is better than merely truly believing p, not all instances of knowing will be good enough to explain why knowledge has received so much attention in the history of philosophy. The article aims to answer two questions: (1) What makes knowing p better than merely truly believing p? The answer involves an exploration of the connection between believing and the agency of the knower. Knowing is an act in which the knower gets credit for achieving truth. (2) What makes some instances of knowing good enough to make the investigation of knowledge worthy of so much attention? The answer involves the connection between the good of believing truths of certain kinds and a good life.
    [Show full text]
  • The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God's Assistance
    Philosophical Review The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God's Assistance. by John E. Hare Review by: Linda Zagzebski The Philosophical Review, Vol. 108, No. 2 (Apr., 1999), pp. 291-293 Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical Review Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2998307 . Accessed: 21/03/2014 15:30 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Duke University Press and Philosophical Review are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Philosophical Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 129.15.14.53 on Fri, 21 Mar 2014 15:30:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions BOOK REVIEWS ThePhilosophical Review, Vol. 108, No. 2 (April 1999) THE MORAL GAP: KANTIANETHICS, HUMAN LIMITS, AND GOD'S AS- SISTANCE. ByJOHN E. HARE. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, Claren- don Press, 1996. Pp. x, 292. The titleof Hare's book refersto the gap between the demand that mo- ralityplaces on us and our natural capacity to live by it. Such a gap is paradoxical if we accept the "'ought' implies 'can"' principle. The solu- tion, Hare argues, is that the gap is filled by the Christian God.
    [Show full text]
  • PHILOSOPHY of RELIGION Philosophy 185 Spring 2016
    PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Philosophy 185 Spring 2016 Dana Kay Nelkin Office: HSS 8004 Office Hours: Monday 11-12, Friday 11-12, and by appointment Phone: (858) 822-0472 E-mail: [email protected] Web site: www.danakaynelkin.com Course Description: We will explore five related and hotly debated topics in the philosophy of religion, and, in doing so, address the following questions: (i) What makes something a religion? (ii) Is it rational to hold religious beliefs? Should we care about rationality when it comes to religious belief? (iii) Could different religions be different paths to the same ultimate reality, or is only one, at most, a “way to God”? (iv) What is the relationship between science and religion? (v) What is the relationship between morality and religion? Must religious beliefs be true in order for morality to exist? As we will see, the philosophy of religion leads naturally into just about every other area of philosophy, including epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and the history of philosophy, and into particular central philosophical debates such as the debate over the nature of free will. This means that you will gain insight into many fundamental philosophical issues in this course. At the same time, the subject matter can be difficult. To do well in the course and to benefit from it, you must be willing to work hard and to subject your own views (whatever they may be) to critical evaluation. Evaluating our conception of ourselves and of the world is one of the distinguishing features of philosophy. Requirements: Short reading responses/formulations of questions (150-200 words for each class meeting; 20 out of 28 required) 30% 1 paper in two drafts (about 2200 words) o first draft 10% (Due May 13) o second draft, revised after comments 25% (Due May 23) 1 take-home final exam (35%) (Due June 4, 11 am) up to 5% extra credit for participation in class group assignments and discussion.
    [Show full text]
  • Parts of Persons Identity and Persistence in a Perdurantist World
    UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI MILANO Doctoral School in Philosophy and Human Sciences (XXXI Cycle) Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” Parts of Persons Identity and persistence in a perdurantist world Ph.D. Candidate Valerio BUONOMO Tutors Prof. Giuliano TORRENGO Prof. Paolo VALORE Coordinator of the Doctoral School Prof. Marcello D’AGOSTINO Academic year 2017-2018 1 Content CONTENT ........................................................................................................................... 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ........................................................................................................... 4 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................... 5 CHAPTER 1. PERSONAL IDENTITY AND PERSISTENCE...................................................................... 8 1.1. The persistence of persons and the criteria of identity over time .................................. 8 1.2. The accounts of personal persistence: a standard classification ................................... 14 1.2.1. Mentalist accounts of personal persistence ............................................................................ 15 1.2.2. Somatic accounts of personal persistence .............................................................................. 15 1.2.3. Anti-criterialist accounts of personal persistence ................................................................... 16 1.3. The metaphysics of persistence: the mereological account .........................................
    [Show full text]
  • European Journal for Philosophy of Religion
    EUROPEAN JOURNAL FOR PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION VOLUME 6 NUMBER 4 WINTER 2014 ARTICLES C.A.J. COADY Communal and Institutional Trust: Authority in Religion and Politics 1 John COTTINGHAM Authority and Trust: Reflections on Linda Zagzebski’s Epistemic Authority 25 Duncan PRITCHARD & Shane RYAN Zagzebski on Rationality 39 Trent DOUGHERTY Zagzebski, Authority, and Faith 47 Arnon KEREN Zagzebski on Authority and Preemption in the Domain of Belief 61 Jacek WOJTYSIAK Zagzebski on Models of Revelation 77 Charity ANDERSON Epistemic Authority and Conscientious Belief 91 Benjamin MCMYLER Epistemic Authority, Preemption, and Normative Power 101 John SCHWENKLER Tradition as Transmission: A Partial Defense 121 Matthew A. BENTON Believing on Authority 133 Damian LESZCZYŃSKI Inconsistency, Uncertainty and Epistemic Authority 145 Joshue OROZCO & Nathan L. KING Conscientious Self-reflection to the Rescue? 155 Linda ZAGZEBSKI Epistemic Authority and Its Critics 169 BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTICES Paolo Diego Bubbio & Philip Andrew Quadrio (eds). The Relationship of Philosophy to Religion Today Reviewed by Mark Manolopoulos 189 Justin Barrett. Born Believers: The Science of Children’s Religious Belief Reviewed by Aku Visala 193 Charles Taliaferro, Dialogues about God Reviewed by Ulrich Schmidt 199 Fraser Watts (ed.). Creation: Law and Probability Reviewed by Graham Wood 205 COMMUNAL AND INSTITUTIONAL TRUST: AUTHORITY IN RELIGION AND POLITICS C.A.J. COADY University of Melbourne Linda Zagzebski’s book on epistemic authority is an impressive and stimulating treatment of an important topic.1 I admire the way she manages to combine imagination, originality and argumentative control. Her work has the further considerable merit of bringing analytic thinking and abstract theory to bear upon areas of concrete human concern, such as the attitudes one should have towards moral and religious authority.
    [Show full text]
  • 1 Knowledge and the Motive for Truth Linda Zagzebski 1. the Motive For
    Knowledge and the Motive for Truth Linda Zagzebski 1. The motive for truth in our epistemic lives I assume that a self-conscious being is both conscious of the world and conscious of itself being conscious of the world. Because we are self-conscious, we reflect upon our own conscious states, not because we are especially interested in ourselves, but because we think that in doing so we can monitor and improve the connection between those states and their objects in the world. The material upon which we reflect is what we find in our pre- reflective consciousness--our memories, pre-reflective beliefs, and emotions. It also includes trust in the natural attunement of our faculties to reality. Trust is as much a part of our basic endowment as our faculties of perception and reasoning. Our pre-reflective trust is one of the things upon which we reflect when we attempt to monitor the relation between our conscious states and the world. When we reflect, we realize that we have no non-circular way to tell that our faculties have anything to do with the way the world is, so either we turn our pre-reflective trust into reflective trust, or we become skeptics. My view is that the right response to epistemic circularity is to trust reflectively. The point of reflection is to increase the trustworthiness of our faculties, but we can only do that by using those same faculties in an especially careful and directed way. Reflection makes the connection between our faculties and the world more accurate by increasing the coherence of the outputs of those faculties.
    [Show full text]
  • Presentism/Eternalism and Endurantism/Perdurantism: Why the Unsubstantiality of the First Debate Implies That of the Second1
    1 Presentism/Eternalism and Endurantism/Perdurantism: why the 1 unsubstantiality of the first debate implies that of the second Forthcoming in Philosophia Naturalis Mauro Dorato (Ph.D) Department of Philosophy University of Rome Three [email protected] tel. +393396070133 http://host.uniroma3.it/dipartimenti/filosofia/personale/doratoweb.htm Abstract The main claim that I want to defend in this paper is that the there are logical equivalences between eternalism and perdurantism on the one hand and presentism and endurantism on the other. By “logical equivalence” I mean that one position is entailed and entails the other. As a consequence of this equivalence, it becomes important to inquire into the question whether the dispute between endurantists and perdurantists is authentic, given that Savitt (2006) Dolev (2006) and Dorato (2006) have cast doubts on the fact that the debate between presentism and eternalism is about “what there is”. In this respect, I will conclude that also the debate about persistence in time has no ontological consequences, in the sense that there is no real ontological disagreement between the two allegedly opposite positions: as in the case of the presentism/eternalism debate, one can be both a perdurantist and an endurantist, depending on which linguistic framework is preferred. The main claim that I want to defend in this paper is that the there are logical equivalences between eternalism and perdurantism on the one hand and presentism and endurantism on the other. By “logical equivalence” I mean that one position is entailed and entails the other. As a consequence of this equivalence, it becomes important to inquire into the question whether the dispute between endurantists and perdurantists is authentic, given that Savitt (2006) Dolev (2006) and Dorato (2006) have cast doubts on the fact that the debate between presentism and eternalism is about “what there is”.
    [Show full text]
  • Does Ethics Need God?
    DOES ETHICS NEED GOD? Linda Zagzebski ntis essay presents a moral argument for the rationality of theistic belief. If all I have to go on morally are my own moral intuitions and reasoning and those of others, I am rationally led to skepticism, both about the possibility of moral knowledge and about my moral effectiveness. This skepticism is extensive, amounting to moral despair. But such despair cannot be rational. It follows that the assumption of the argument must be false and I must be able to rely on more than my own human powers and those of others in attempting to live a moral life. The Christian God has such a function. Hence, if it is rational to attempt a moral life, it is rational to believe in the Christian God. Whenever anyone begins a study of ethics, a natural question to ask is why should we undertake such a study at all. I am satisfied with the answer that ethics teaches us how to be moral and anyone who understands what morality is will thereby want to live by it, just as anyone who understands the meaning of an analytic proposition will thereby see its truth. But wanting to be moral, I believe, is not sufficient to justify either the study of ethics or the attempt to practice morality. The question, "Should I try to be moral?" is not the same as the classic question, "Why be moral?" The latter question is sufficiently answered by the response that morality is its own justification. Morality aims at the good and anyone who understands what good means will see that its pursuit is justified.
    [Show full text]
  • Taking Tense Seriously’ Dean W
    W. Zimmerman dialectica Vol. 59, N° 4 (2005), pp. 401–457 The A-Theory of Time, The B-Theory of Time, and ‘Taking Tense Seriously’ Dean W. Zimmerman† ABSTRACT The paper has two parts: First, I describe a relatively popular thesis in the philosophy of propositional attitudes, worthy of the name ‘taking tense seriously’; and I distinguish it from a family of views in the metaphysics of time, namely, the A-theories (or what are sometimes called ‘tensed theories of time’). Once the distinction is in focus, a skeptical worry arises. Some A- theorists maintain that the difference between past, present, and future, is to be drawn in terms of what exists: growing-block theorists eschew ontological commitment to future entities; pre- sentists, to future and past entities. Others think of themselves as A-theorists but exclude no past or future things from their ontology. The metaphysical skeptic suspects that their attempt to articulate an ‘eternalist’ version of the A-theory collapses into merely ‘taking tense seriously’ – a thesis that does not imply the A-theory. The second half of the paper is the search for a stable eternalist A-theory. It includes discussion of temporary intrinsics, temporal parts, and truth. 1. Introduction Sadly, the great metaphysician J. McT. E. McTaggart is now remembered mainly for what must be his worst argument: the infamous argument for ‘the unreality of time’. But even this ‘philosophical “howler” ’ (as C. D. Broad rightly called it1) includes enough insightful analysis to have made it a natural starting point for most subsequent work on the metaphysics of time.
    [Show full text]
  • Endurantism Or Perdurantism?
    The embodied self: Endurantism or perdurantism? Saskia Heijnen Contents Contents ...................................................................................................................................... 1 Abstract ...................................................................................................................................... 2 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 2 1. Endurantism versus perdurantism in metaphysics .............................................................. 5 1.1 Particulars ......................................................................................................................... 5 1.2 Persisting particulars ......................................................................................................... 7 1.3 Temporal parts: a closer look ......................................................................................... 10 1.4 Wholly present: a closer look ......................................................................................... 14 1.5 Perdurantism and endurantism in action ........................................................................ 17 1.5.1 Fusion ....................................................................................................................... 17 1.5.2 Fission ...................................................................................................................... 19 2. Endurantism versus
    [Show full text]
  • Review of Michael Depaul & Linda Zagzebski, Intellectual Virtue
    Philosophy Faculty Works Philosophy 2006 Review of Michael DePaul & Linda Zagzebski, Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology Jason Baehr Loyola Marymount University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/phil_fac Part of the Epistemology Commons Recommended Citation Baehr, Jason. "Review of Michael DePaul & Linda Zagzebski (eds.), Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology." Philosophical Books 47 (2006), 81-85. Print. This Article - pre-print is brought to you for free and open access by the Philosophy at Digital Commons @ Loyola Marymount University and Loyola Law School. It has been accepted for inclusion in Philosophy Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons@Loyola Marymount University and Loyola Law School. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 1 This is not a final draft. Please quote only the final draft, published in Philosophical Books 47 (2006), pp. 81-85. Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology Edited by MICHAEL DEPAUL and LINDA ZAGZEBSKI Clarendon Press, 2004. viii + 298 pp. £37.00 This volume brings together several prominent philosophers from ethics and epistemology to discuss the interesting but historically underemphasized topic of intellectual virtue. Most of the discussion is set against the backdrop of virtue epistemology, a recent movement that gives the notion of intellectual virtue a central role in epistemological theorizing. The essays address a wide and rich range of issues, most of which revolve around three central themes: (i) connections between virtue ethics and virtue epistemology; (ii) the relation between virtue epistemology and traditional epistemological questions; and (iii) the so-called ‘value problem’ in epistemology (which is concerned with what makes knowledge more valuable than mere true belief).
    [Show full text]
  • Temporal Parts and Spatial Location
    Temporal parts and spatial location Damiano Costa Abstract. The literature offers us several characterizations of temporal parts via spatial co-location: by these accounts, temporal parts are roughly parts that are of the same spatial size as their wholes. It has been argued that such definitions would fail with entities outside space. The present paper investigates the extent to which such criticism works. Keywords: temporal parts, spatial location, events, four-dimensionalism, perdurance. § 0. Introduction Temporal parts of an entity – according to current vulgate – incorporate “all of that entity” for as long as they exist (Heller 1984; Sider 2001; Olson 2006). For example, a temporal part of Sam incorporates “all of Sam” for as long as it exists. One immediate consequence of this fact is that some “smaller parts” of Sam, like his brain and hearth, do not count as temporal parts of Sam, because they do not incorporate “all of Sam” at a certain time. A suitable definition for temporal parts must exclude such “smaller parts”. In this regard, two approaches have been put forward, a mereological one (Simons 1987; Sider 1997; Parsons 2007) and a spatial one (Thomson 1983; Heller 1984; McGrath 2007). On the one hand, the mereological approach says that such “smaller parts” of Sam are not temporal parts because they don’t overlap every part of Sam at a certain time. On the other hand, the spatial approach roughly says that such “smaller parts” of Sam are not temporal parts because a temporal part is of the same spatial size as its whole for as long as that part exists.
    [Show full text]