Download Incompatibilism, Foreknowledge, and Responses: An Analysis - Prof. Jeffrey Speaks and more Study notes Philosophy of Science in PDF only on Docsity! An argument for incompatibilism and two responses phil 43503 Jeff Speaks April 14, 2009 1 The core argument for incompatibilism There are different ways to formulate arguments for the incompatibility of free will and divine foreknowledge. We’ll be looking at (a slight simplification of) Warfield’s way of doing it, which pretty closely follows the presentation in Jonathan Edwards’ 1754 book, Freedom of the Will (an excerpt from this book is also on the course web site). As with the consequence argument, we will use ACT as a name for some arbi- trary future action of yours, that happens at some specified time – say, January 1, 2015. Here is the argument: 1. Necessarily, if God believes at some time t that p, then p. Infallibility 2. If p is a truth about the past, then no one is free to make it the case that not-p. Past 3. Necessarily, if no one is free with respect to p, and necessarily, if p, then q, then no one is free with re- spect to q. Transfer 4. God believed in 1900 that ACT will happen. Foreknowledge 5. No one is free with respect to the fact that God be- lieved in 1900 that ACT will happen. (2,4) C. No one is free with respect to the fact that ACT will happen. (1,3,5) A few points to note about this argument: • Like the consequence argument, this is set up as a conditional proof: we assume foreknowledge plus some other principles and derive the conclusion that if God has foreknowledge of our actions, then we have no free will. • As with the consequence argument, Warfield is right to note that we can’t infer from the validity of the argument plus the truth of the premises that free will and foreknowledge are incompatible, since that says that necessarily, if God has foreknowledge, we have no free will. But we can male the same sort of repair here as suggested in that case: take the argument to show the incompatibility of foreknowledge with creatures of a certain sort — those that cannot change the past — having free will. • It is sometimes said that there is no problem about free will and fore- knowledge, because God’s foreknowledge does not cause our actions. In one way, this is right — there is no easy argument from foreknowledge to determinism, for example. But this point does not appear to help with the above argument. 2 Molinism and Ockhamism Today we will be focusing on two responses to this argument for the incompat- ibility of free will and foreknowledge. The Ockhamist claims that the inference from (2) and (4) to (5) is invalid. This is because some claims seem to be genuinely past claims, but really are not; sometimes they are, in part, claims about the future. Some intuitive examples or apparent-but-not-really past claims: it’s being true yesterday that you would come to class; your roommate truly believing yesterday that you would come to class today. Warfield suggests as one possibility this criterion for genuinely past claims: they do not entail the existence of any future time (any time future relative to the events which they are about, that is). By this criterion, facts about God’s past beliefs are not genuinely future facts. Given that God’s believing in 1900 that something will happen in 2015 entails that 2105 will come to pass (since, necessarily, God’s beliefs are true), claims about the past beliefs of God about the future are not genuinely past claims. So, if God believed in 1900 that I would do something in 2015, the following is not the case: I am not now free with respect to what God believed in 1900. The Molinist, by contrast, rejects Transfer: sometimes we can have no free choice with respect to some fact which entails another, but still have free choice with respect to the second. This looks suspiciously like rejecting the No Choice Principle. 2
