Recently in Free Will Category

[Cross-posted at Parableman] Open theists distinguish between two different varieties of their view. There are actually a number of ways to divide up open theism into varieties, but one particular division that open theists make among themselves is between the following two positions:

1. There is no such thing as a future to be known, and that's why God doesn't know the future exhaustively. It's not a limitation on God that he doesn't know everything that will happen. There's nothing to be known, so God can't know it. So God is omniscient in knowing all the facts about the future. There just aren't very much such facts yet.

2. God could know the future, but it would prevent our freedom, so God chooses to limit his knowledge, knowing that knowledge about what we would choose to do would make us unfree. God doesn't know all he could know metaphysically, but he does know all he could know given his choice not to know future free choices.

I'm not really sure these are distinct views.

[cross-posted at Parableman]

I'm working on a chapter for the forthcoming Blackwell Philosophy and Harry Potter on the topic of destiny, and one of the things I'm trying to do in the chapter is distinguish between different metaphysical analyses of prophecy. I've come up with three, and I'm inclined to think that it might be exhaustive enough for the purposes of a popular-level work like this, but I'm curious if anyone here can think of any others.

Here's what I've got (and how I'm presenting it in the draft I'm writing):

1. They involve mere likelihoods. No one has access to the actual future, but someone might have magical access to information that's derived from what's likely. Given what's true about the various people involved, it's very likely that a certain outcome will happen. That means prophecies, even the ones Dumbledore is inclined to call genuine, are not infallible. They can turn out get it wrong.

2. They do not derive their content from the actual future. Rather, they make the future happen. When a genuine prophecy occurs, it influences those who hear it in such a way that they end up doing things that will fulfill the prophecy. This kind of prophecy is self-fulfilling in a very literal sense.

3. The seer has some intuitive connection with the way things will really happen, such that the words of the prophecy are true about a future that really will be that way. If it's a genuine prophecy, it can't be wrong, because its origin lies in the very future events that it tells about. In the same way that a report about the past can bring knowledge about the past only if there's some reliable connection with the actual events in the past, a genuine prophecy in this sense must derive its truth from a reliable method of getting facts about the future.

My understanding of J.K. Rowling's view of prophecy, judging by this interview and my sense that the Albus Dumbledore character represents her views when he discusses this issue with Harry Potter, is that she wants to treat Professor Trelawney's two genuine prophecies as the first kind, a kind of prophecy an open theist could accept.

There are hints in at least two of Dumbledore's conversations with Harry that he thinks something like the second kind is going on, but it's clearly not a reduction of prophecy to what happens in #2, because the characters in question (mostly Lord Voldemort) still make free choices and aren't simply caused by the prophecy to do anything the way some ancients thought Laius was caused by Apollo's prophecy to do what he did that led to Oedipus eventually killing him.

My argument at this point is that there isn't really a way for Dumbledore to distinguish between Trelawney's two genuine prophecies and all her vague predictions that can often be interpreted as coming true unless the genuine ones are of the third kind (because the pseudo-prophecies are of the first kind, and the genuine ones can't be completely explained by the second kind). Rowling doesn't seem to want to accept that, and Dumbledore is clearly with her, so there's a consistency issue here both for the character and the author. But my argument depends on the options I've listed being exhaustive. Is that true?

Here is a simple proposal:

A being x is omnipotent provided that in every possible world, x's free choices are collectively the ultimate explainers of the rest of contingent reality.

In particular, only a necessary being can be omnipotent. Whether omnipotence is compatible with created free will depends on how exactly we spell out "ultimate explainers". We might think that if y in situation S freely chooses to A, and God creates y in S, and y freely chooses to A, then God's creation is an ultimate explainer (it may or may not be the case that an ultimate explainer of a proposition is an explainer of the proposition).

This definition is incompatible with Molinisms on which God is not an ultimate explainer of conditionals of free will.

If the above account is right, we have a sound ontological argument along the lines of the standard S5 ontological argument:

1. Possibly, there is an omnipotent being.
2. Therefore, there is an omnipotent being.

Careful readers will have noted that I posted an argument against Molinism earlier this morning, and it committed a modal fallacy. I took down the argument as soon as I realized the fallacy. Here's an argument that doesn't seem to commit the same modal fallacy, but the cost of it is that it has some much more controversial premises. Let C a complete description of the circumstances at the time of Jones' choice. The main point of Molinism is to make possible situations like this:

1. Were Jones in C, he would freely choose to mow the lawn.
2. Because of (1), God brings it about that Jones is in C.

Now add some statements that are, plausibly, conceptual truths, for a reductio:

3. If p is explanatorily prior to Jones' choosing what to do in C, and p entails that Jones will choose to mow the lawn, then Jones does not freely choose to mow the lawn. (This is a version of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities.)
4. Explanatory priority is transitive.
5. If, because of q, God brings it about that p, then q is explanatorily prior to p.
6. If C is a complete description of the circumstances at the time of Jones' choice, then that Jones is in C is explanatorily prior to Jones' choosing what he chooses.
7. If p and q are explanatorily prior to r, then p&q is explanatorily prior to r.

The argument now is easy. By (1) and (2), Jones is in C and freely mows the lawn. By (2) and (5), conditional (1) is explanatorily prior to Jones' being in C. By (6), Jones' being in C is prior to Jones' choosing to mow the lawn. By (4), it follows that conditional (1) is explanatorily prior to Jones' being in C. Let p be the conjunction of (1) with the claim that Jones is in C. By (7) and what we have already shown, p is explanatorily prior to Jones' choosing to mow the lawn. But p entails that Jones chooses to mow the lawn. By (3), Jones does not freely choose to mow the lawn. But by (1) and (2) he does. Hence, a contradiction ensues.

I've long suspected that the basic structure of Plantinga's free will defense doesn't require a libertarian view of free will, but I've never gotten around to trying to figure out in detail why that might be so. Well, Andrew Fulford has a proposal. Relying on the notion of creaturely integrity, Andrew offers an account of why God's options might be limited by how God himself may have intended a person's compatibilist freedom to work itself out, and for all we know this may be true for every actual person. In other words, it may well be that transworld depravity of a very particular sort may be true. It's possible for all we know that, for each actual person, there is no possible world in which that person does no wrong. There is the problem of dealing with non-actual people, but that's where God's choice to actualize people with a certain kind of creaturely integrity comes in. Perhaps it's true that anyone with the right sort of creaturely integrity, that God would have good moral reasons for wanting to bestow on people, will be transworld depraved in the way Andrew imagines.

What's interesting about this proposal is that objections to it seem to be the same sort that people might raise against Plantinga's own libertarian version of transworld depravity or his use of it. If that's right, then he's used the basic structure of the free will defense without relying on libertarian freedom.

On the Papers in Philosophy of Religion sister site, I've posted a draft of a paper that Tim and I have written on free will in heaven.  Comments welcome encouraged.

The following claims seem to be true:

(1) God not be in any way caused to act by anything outside of himself.

(2) Providence requires that God in his actions respond to events in the world.

If one adds the plausible claim:

(3) If God responds to events in the world, then these events are partial causes of his action

one concludes that God cannot have both aseity and providence.  This conclusion, however, is theologically problematic: aseity seems to follow from transcendence, and providence is affirmed by all the major monotheistic religions. 

Strong Sovereignty (the doctrine that God determines the truth value of every contingent proposition) and Molinism can be seen as providing ways to deny (2).  One could also take them as ways to reinterpret (2) in a way that denies (3).  I don't think it matters which option one takes.  Anyway, the idea is that given Strong Sovereignty, God simply decides everything ahead of time in such wise that he has no need to "respond" to events, since all the events are always already part of his plan.  Strong Sovereignty has a difficulty, however, with free will and with the deductive problem of evil.  Molinism, on the other hand, holds that God knows prior (I always understand "prior" as "prior in the order of explanation" here) to any decision what to create how any stochastic processes (including free choices) would turn out in any possible circumstances, and using this knowledge, he can make a complete plan of creation without needing to "respond" to events.  Thus, God knows that

(*) were Adam and Eve placed in the garden, they would freely sin. 

Thus he does not need to "respond" to their sin with their expulsion.  He can simply strongly actualize Adam and Eve in the garden, and strongly actualize their expulsion, knowing that they would sin.  Molinism faces two major problems: (a) that the subjunctive conditionals like (*) arguably make no sense, and (b) the problem that Robert Adams raised that it appears to commit one to explanatory loops.

In this post I want to describe a model of creation developed in discussion with Grant Matthews and Sarah Coakley, based on some ideas of theirs, that offers a way to reconcile aseity with providence without making use of Strong Sovereignty or Molinism.  I think the model has theological problems, which may be insuperable, but it should be on the table.  Interestingly, the model does not even require foreknowledge (though, of course, I believe in foreknowledge).

Keith DeRose reflects on Calvinism and philosophers. Why amidst a resurgence of Calvinism in mainstream evangelicalism (both among theologians and at the popular level) has there been virtually no change in the libertarian orthodoxy in Christian philosophy? Keith seems to agree with Dean Zimmerman that this has to do with having to put up a more serious defense of Christianity with secular philosophers, since most Christian philosophers are in secular philosophy departments, and most Christian theologians are in Christian seminaries and colleges. I think that's probably right as a sociological explanation.

I do find it somewhat interesting given that I (as a Calvinist) find the Calvinist response to the problem of evil to be more thoroughgoing in its consequences (even if more difficult to motivate in its foundations), as a number of Christian philosophers throughout history have held. After all, if Calvinism is true, then every bit of evil is fully explained with no remainder. But it's at the foundations of a response to the problem of evil that most Christian philosophers are turning to libertarianism. It's also in the face of considerable social pressure against libertarianism, given that compatibilism is now the default in the philosophical world (a situation interestingly parallel to the dominance of materialism, with many Christian philosophers holding on to dualism).

I've got some more detailed thoughts on this at my personal blog, but I thought it was worth directing Prosblogion readers to this discussion without subjecting all of you to the details of how a Calvinist will view this whole issue. Those who want to see that can read my lengthier reflections there.

Since there's still little going on here, I thought I'd direct readers to another post in my series based on my introductory philosophy course lecture notes. This time it's on foreknowledge and freedom. Again, I don't expect it to include anything newsworthy for many readers of this blog, since we've discussed all these issues here in much more depth in the past, but I've tried to summarize the main moves in the discussion at a level someone in an introductory course could understand, and some may want to take a look at that or offer feedback. Newer readers less familiar with our discussions on this topic or with the literature on the issue may find it informative as well. I did try to include the most current work on the subject.

In a new issue of Religious Studies, Gordon Knight has an interesting article on universalism and open theism that many PBers may be interested in ("Universalism for Open Theists," 42 (2006):213-223).

Here is the central thrust of his argument:

I will argue that belief in the openness of God makes a hard case even worse. Furthermore, while this problem is perhaps most vivid in the case of open theism, it also can be generalized for all theists who accept a non-Molinist account of foreknowledge and who accept a libertarian conception of freedom of the will. On the other hand, this very same commitment to liberatarian freedom also precludes non-Molinists from accepting the sort of necessary universalism recently advocated by Talbott. The solution, I will argue, lies in adopting a version of contingent universalism that is able to avoid the moral problems of the [traditional] doctrine of hell while at the same time not doing violence to the strong conception of libertarian freedom to which open theists (among others) are committed (214).

A few comments below the fold.