I went looking through some old Prosblogion posts on Sunday, and it occurred to me that something I said in the comments on one post needs to be more fully clarified. In the comments on this post, I said something about the problem of divine foreknowledge and human freedom reducing to the problem of logical fatalism. Jon Kvanvig responded that there's one difference when God is involved that means it's a further problem. When I said that problem doesn't occur if God is atemporal, he responded that atemporality doesn't solve the problem. I think he's right if you look at two different issues atomistically, but once you put them together I think what I'd originally said was right.
Here's Jon Kvanvig's comment about logical vs. theological fatalism:
The difference between this problem and the logical fatalism problem is this: any interesting account of what is strictly about the past will make "it has always been the case that I will mow my lawn tomorrow" not a claim strictly about the past. If, however, you think "God believed yesterday that I will mow my lawn tomorrow" is strictly about the past, then there is a difference between the logical and theological case. If libertarian freedom is unaffected by logical constraints, then there is no difference (and we don't need to worry about whether God's beliefs are strictly about the past).So, I think your response is exactly the right one toward logical fatalism. But theological fatalism is different, because it uses a claim which at least appears to be strictly about the past.
That sounds right to me, as far as it goes. My first thought was to bring in atemporality so God's not in the past to have beliefs about it. Here's his comment about why atemporality doesn't solve the problem:
Jeremy--I agree with David Hunt on this point: adopting an atemporal view of God doesn't solve the freedom/foreknowledge problem. Whether or not God is temporal, the direction of explanation should be from facts or truths to knowledge (and hence foreknowledge), not the other way around. So there shouldn't be a good argument from foreknowledge to a loss of freedom, whether or not there is a being that has complete foreknowledge. Even if God is atemporal, the philosophical problem remains.
I assume what this is getting at is that God's belief isn't in the past but is about the past. The first thing to notice is that God's belief isn't about the past, not for God. If God isn't temporal, then it's not past to God. Ah, but it might be past to us in time, and our statements about God's beliefs should still have truth value if God's beliefs are true. If it was true yesterday that God timelessly holds beliefs about what was then future to me as I might have thought about them, then isn't there still a problem? In other words, I should be saying something true or false in the past if I say that God knows that I'll mow my lawn the next day. Doesn't that bring it back into time?
The answer is yes. It brings the issue of the truth of propositions about future contingents back into time. It doesn't make God's beliefs about what's past to us be strictly about the past, however, because God's beliefs aren't at any time. What I was saying a year ago when we had this discussion still seems true to me, and I don't think I'd put it very clearly in that discussion. The problem of foreknowledge doesn't reduce to logical fatalism if God is in time because of some new feature when you bring God's beliefs at a time into the picture. You now have not just truth about future contingents at an earlier time. You have God's infallible knowledge of future contingents at an earlier time. But if God is atemporal, you don't have that. God's beliefs are infallible but not at any time. So what I'm not sure of is how Jon's point remains if you question both logical fatalism and God's temporality. If God is atemporal, it does seem to me that the issue reduces to logical fatalism. Am I missing some crucial element?
Jeremy, let me try again to say why atemporality doesn't solve the problem. Suppose there is a being Joe who knows in advance everything that is going to happen (as well as knowing everything else). Furthermore, suppose Joe is infallible as well. If theological fatalists are right, then Joe's existence would imply determinism. And that would be true even if God were outside of time.
In short, there are two ways to look at the freedom/foreknowledge problem. One way is to ask whether truths about God's nature imply that humans are not free. Atemporality is relevant to that problem. But there is another problem, the problem of the connection between the concepts of foreknowledge (conceived of in terms of infallibility) and freedom. Here the problem is whether the first concept implies the absence of the second (it is counterintuitive to be told that it does, because that reverses the usual order of explanation for cognitive states). Even if God is atemporal, that problem remains.
I don't understand your first paragraph. If God is outside of time, how does Joe's foreknowledge have any bearing on whether God's knowledge of what is future to me threatens my freedom?
Am I still missing something, or are you just saying that atemporality doesn't solve the foreknowledge problem, because it's no longer foreknowledge if God is outside time, and if anyone is we would still have to deal with the argument?
Yes, my point is that the freedom/foreknowledge problem is about freedom and foreknowledge. It doesn't matter whose foreknowledge we're talking about, as long as it is the right kind of foreknowledge. (though strictly speaking, it is not foreknowledge but infallible forebelief that creates the problem.) When someone says X follows from Y, and it looks like X doesn't follow from Y, you don't get out of the problem their argument raises by denying the truth of Y.
That seems to be almost a trivial point, then. I say almost because there's still the problem of human prophets, if their knowledge is infallible. Most people who raise worries are worrying about whether God's foreknowledge threatens human freedom. Once someone says God is atemporal, the only thing left to do is to say that no human being has infallible beliefs about future contingents.
I don't think it's all that strange to claim that about prophets. It seems consistent to say that the prophecy itself is infallible because it's from an infallible source, yet the prophet who utters it could make errors if straying from the infallible source. Even Christians who want to insist that Jesus was fully God in human form, with knowledge bound to time, might not have to say that Jesus' knowledge during that time was infallible. It wasn't omniscient, after all, according to the gospels.
Jeremy,
I think I'm siding with Jon here in saying this, but as a general rule, one intentionally X's by Y-ing when one knows that by Y-ing one will X.* Surely this isn't problematic. We cannot move from an agent's foreknowledge of the intentional action he will perform to the absence of freedom. If there is something special about divine foreknowledge, the problem might be reinstated, but it can't be mere foreknowledge that entails an absence of freedom. Once we grant that there is nothing problematic per se about foreknowledge, whether 1st or 3rd personal, it is hard to see how the problem could be reinstated and thus hard to see how the temporality/atemporality issue could have any bearing.
*As stated, John Turri and Johnny Way have convinced me there are counterexamples (Turri likes Gettier-style cases and Way likes the Davidson example of trying to press through a large stack of carbon paper but as a general rule, it looks like intentionally doing something involves foreknowledge even if over a very short span of time).
I don't understand the claim that the point is trivial. If the non-fatalists are right, it doesn't matter whether anyone has the requisite foreknowledge since freedom is not threatened; if the fatalists are right, then atemporality would escape the problem of the threat to freedom if none but God could have the requisite foreknowledge. And the non-fatalist viewpoint about direction of explanation is the proper starting point, since in general the difference between a person knowing p and a person intentionally causing p is whether the direction of fit is from mind to world or world to mind. So even if the fatalists are right, there's a puzzle to explain away, and there's nothing trivial about that.
Oops, I hit the post button before thinking... So, to finish the above thought:
If fatalists are right, there's still the intuitive direction of explanation point to explain away. And if non-fatalists are right, there is the power of the fatalist argument, with the disturbing issue of how to explain the idea of a foreknower's beliefs so that they are not strictly about the past. Either way, there's substance to the problem conceived as I claim it ought to be conceived.
Clayton, the thing special about divine foreknowledge is infallibility, which is defined in terms of an inability to be wrong.
if the fatalists are right, then atemporality would escape the problem of the threat to freedom if none but God could have the requisite foreknowledge
Actually, shouldn't it be "if none but God does have the requisite foreknowledge"? That seems to me to be an important difference.
So even if the fatalists are right, there's a puzzle to explain away, and there's nothing trivial about that.
I think maybe I need to probe more on why you think there's still a puzzle. I've formulated some further thoughts that I'll put into a post tomorrow sometime, I hope.
Jeremy,
I'm not seeing the significance of infallibility. There are two sorts of concern I have here. First, if the problem had to do with infallibility rather than knowledge of the future, there is some condition beyond those on knowledge required for generating the problem but I just can't see what it is. Second, in the special case where it is God's knowledge of God's own action, surely we don't want to say that owing to God's infallibility, God is ignorant of what he is doing (I don't know how to express this without conceiving of God as within time, but hopefully that doesn't spoil the point).
Clayton, I'm not sure you're following the dialectic. The logical fatalist says we're not free if there are truths about future contingents. This is based on some principle about the necessity of the past. Jon and I both deny logical fatalism.
The theological fatalist steps in and says that a different necessity means we're not free. That necessity is the necessary connection between the truth of an infallible belief and the impossibility of doing otherwise. This necessity isn't raised by logical fatalism, because simple truth doesn't mean it couldn't be otherwise. Theological fatalism adds this because infallibility is a modal notion. An infallible belief can't be true. Jon and I both deny theological fatalism because we both deny the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP), as Frankfurt calls it. We both deny it because of variations on Frankfurt's counterexamples to PAP. I'm also a compatibilist, so I don't care if libertarian freedom is threatened by the lack of alternative possibilities, but I don't happen to think it is anyway because of Frankfurt.
Your examples seem to me to be further counterexamples to PAP, which both of us already don't believe. I think you're right. I see the import of those cases as an excellent reason to deny PAP. I'm having trouble seeing how they're relevant to the debate we're interested in, though, which is whether theological fatalism involves something further than logical fatalism. It does if God is in time. It doesn't seem to if God is atemporal, though it would if any being in time has infallible knowledge of future contingents due to God's use of prophets. We both agree with you that PAP is false. We both deny PAP. The question we're discussing right now is whether you have to deny PAP to get that or if atemporality is enough.