Time Travel, Prenatal Ethics and other Miscellania

Random thoughts, mostly things I have posted online elsewhere:

Wow, this is simply HORRIBLE journalism. There are so many things wrong with this article - it's simply sensationalism. A text from hundreds of years after Jesus' death, written in the area from which we get all Gnostic writings which mixed up Jesus and Christianity with the mystery religions, has Jesus mention a "wife", a fact that even the person working on the text admits has nothing to do with whether Jesus was ever married, and what does the journalist say? "A small fragment of faded papyrus contains a suggestion that Jesus may have been married...The discovery, if it is validated, could have major implications for the Christian faith. The belief that Jesus was not married is one reason priests in the Catholic Church must remain celibate and are not allowed to marry. It could also have implications for women's roles in the church, as it would mean Jesus had a female disciple." Ugh. Then the journalist proceeds to undermine everything they just said. Way to go.

The real title of this article should be "I Like Incoherent, Logically Inconsistent Stories because I cannot Understand the Concept of Time Travel", but I think that would've been too long. It's because of writers like this that we have all the incoherent time travel stories that we do (and which I therefore despise, though I tend to give Doctor Who and Back to the Future a pass since criticizing them for lack of logic is like criticizing the Hitchhiker's Guide for letting Arthur turn into an infinite number of penguins). Seriously, this is horrible. Not all of the 4 options are even KINDS of time travel at all, nor even necessarily incompatible options. Number 3 is simply incoherent, 4 isn't really time travel but universe-hopping. Number 2, which is how non-contradictory time travel would work, has nothing to do with predestination, pre-ordination of events, or lack of any agency.

(1) New-born infants have a right to live;
(2) If there is no relevant intrinsic difference between the members of two sets, then the members of one set will have the same rights as the other;
(3) There is no relevant intrinsic difference between new-born infants and late-term, un-born fetuses;
(4) Therefore, late-term, un-born fetuses have a right to live.
This is a deductively valid argument, which means the only way to avoid the conclusion would be to reject at least one of the premises 1-3. But 2 seems to be a basic principle about rights and 3 is a scientific fact. 1 is therefore the most vulnerable, but few, I think, would be able to stomach the idea that infants have no right to live - to accept that would be pretty implausible. Since 1-3 are fairly certain and the argument is valid, then, we have to accept 4 as well.

Obama seems to deny 4, though, which makes me wonder which of 1-3 he would reject. But I'm sure he hasn't really thought about it (remember the "above my paygrade" remark?). This is just one of the reasons why I cannot understand people's enthusiasm for Obama (his unprecedented rolling back of various freedoms including religion and conscience are some of the other reasons). I understand people really liking some things about him or liking him more than Romney or liking him in general, but the unqualified enthusiasm some people have I cannot relate to. (Almost no one has any kind of enthusiasm for Romney (I certainly don't), so that's not an issue on his side!)

Since I did a potshot at Obama, here's one aimed at Romney: I think the rich should be taxed a lot more than the poor sheerly as a matter of fairness. Suppose we tax everyone 10% - then the person making 20,000 a year will be forced to pay 2000 - a chunk of their income they would be much better off holding onto. For them, missing that money is going to make a noticeable difference in their life. But suppose then we have someone making 100 million - 10 million is just a drop in the bucket and won't affect the quality of their lives in any noticeable way. Money has a diminishing marginal value as income goes up - 10% for a rich person, say, is an entirely different beast from 10% for a poor person. Suppose we actually scaled taxes according to the actual value money has for the individuals concerned (our tax brackets go some way towards this), then the rich person would be paying a much higher percentage of their income then the poor person and the two would be equally affected (or not affected) by the tax. And that's not even taking into account arguments you might make concerning the increased debt the rich have towards society for creating the possibility and infrastructure for such wealth in the first place. Those are just my own opinions, though.

 I don't always agree with him or think he's always fair to conservatives, but Jon Stewart is reliably hilarious. Apropos the above on taxation, this is pretty entertaining (be sure to click to watch on part two too).


I don't agree with all of this, but some interesting thoughts from a Christian philosopher on reforming higher education.

Fatalism, Indeterminacy, and No-Future Views

A paper I gave at the 2008 Eastern APA (at the Philosophy of Time Society group meeting):

FATALISM, INDETERMINACY, AND NO-FUTURE VIEWS

Presentists and growing block theorists reject the idea of a concrete, determinate future. Such ‘No-Futurism’ is often in part motivated by an incompatibilist or libertarian view of free will and the desire to avoid the fatalism which is thought to accompany the denial of No-Futurism. However, this avenue to No-Futurism can be successfully blocked – we can show that the very assumptions which are meant to entail the incompatibility of a determinate future with libertarian freedom actually also entail, in conjunction with the common assumption that bivalence fails for future contingents, the incompatibility of an indeterminate future with such freedom. And in fact, what we are in the end forced to say is that this freedom, when conjoined with a denial of bivalence, is straightforwardly incompatible with No-Futurism in general, whether or not all of the No-Futurists’ assumptions are accepted in the first place. Far from providing a successful route to the nonexistent future, considerations from human freedom and incompatibilism actually point, if anywhere, in the opposite direction or, at least, to some other No-Future views which have their own share of problems.

I. The Open Road
Many people reject the existence of a real, concrete and determinate future because they think it leads to fatalism and hence a lack of freedom on our part. These people tend to fall neatly into one of two camps: presentists, who believe that neither the future nor the past exist (or at least that they do not do so except as parts of the present), or growing block theorists, who believe that only the future fails to exist. More carefully, presentists take it that everything which exists is present and exists at the present, whereas growing block theorists take it that everything which exists is either present or past and exists at the present or in the past. Though these two groups disagree about the ontological status of the past, they agree for the most part about the future. From now on, I will call such views ‘No-Future’ views.

Many No-Futurists hold the beliefs they do at least in part because of a widespread belief in Libertarianism about free will and the looming threat of fatalism which a determinate future is thought to provide. According to Libertarians about free will, free will both exists and is incompatible with determinism (that is, Incompatibilism is true). Libertarians will also take it that free will automatically rules out fatalism about our actions – that is, it rules out the possibility that we might have no power (at every given time) to affect what we will do in the future. So if fatalism turned out to be true, that would automatically rule out the existence of free will as understood by Incompatibilists. According to many of those who hold such views, though, the only way to avoid the fatalism supposedly provided by a determinate, real future is to get rid of it. Indeed, one often sees reasoning such as the following: “If it really is determinately the case that I will eat a burger even before I do it, then I had to do it. So there can be no determinate future featuring my eating of a burger – otherwise my eating would not have been a free action. So there is no future.”

Diekemper (2007, 429) expresses this attitude of the No-Future theorist as follows:

…if the event of the Third World War exists eternally, then in what sense is that event—prior to its occurrence—not inexorable? The [No-Future theorist’s] intuition is that there is no sense in which it is not inexorable; and so, in order to preserve the potentiality of the future, many philosophers of time have rejected the B-Theoretic doctrine of an existent future.

Tooley (1997, 45-46) describes (but does not endorse) such an argument as denying the existence of future facts because such facts would thereby be unpreventable, even by an omnipotent person. Lucas (1973) seems to endorse this sort of reasoning as, in several places, does Prior and those many who would equate eternalism with a deterministic block universe. Indeed, many people seem to take a real, determinate and concrete future to be a very grave threat to our freedom.

These sorts of lines of thought generally proceed from a largely Incompatibilist or Libertarian view of free will, according to which the predetermination of what I shall do by facts beyond my control render my actions thereby unfree. Let us state a formal, stripped down version of the Incompatibilist view as follows:

Incompatibilism: If either □N F(p) or □N F(~p), then ~Free (F(p)).

Here, ‘p’ stands in for some claim ascribing an action to me and ‘F’ is an operator making the claim future-tensed. ‘Free(F(p))’ claims that I am free with respect to whether I will perform the action described in ‘p’. Assuming a standard logic for tense, we can take ~F(p) to either entail or be equivalent to F(~p). It is important to note that the modality expressed in the modal operators here is not one of absolute metaphysical modality or logical modality. Rather, such a modality is meant to be understood in terms of the temporally-relative modality of ‘accidental’ or ‘temporal’ necessity – the modality of inevitability at a given time and future contingency. The basic idea of this sort of modality is that something is possible with respect to a given time if and only if it is compatible with the facts about that very time (plus the laws of nature and perhaps facts about earlier times). The Incompatibilist might add here that something can only be something I really have a choice about or say in if it is possible in this sense. So we should take ‘□t ’to mean roughly the same as ‘It is inevitable at t that…’ and ‘t’ to mean roughly the same as ‘It is not inevitable that it is not the case at t that…’. All modal operators in this paper should be understood to express this sort of modality and, unless stated otherwise, all verbs should be taken as present-tensed. In our statement of Incompatibilism, then, the subscript ‘N’ should be taken as referring to the current time, so that the whole claim can be read, ‘If it is either now inevitable that p or now inevitable that not-p, then I am not free with respect to whether it will be the case that p.’

On this sort of incompatibilist view we are looking at, then, causal determinism of the ordinary sort is straightforwardly incompatible with free will since if my performing a certain action at a later time is now causally determined, it will not be possible now for me to do otherwise and hence I will not have the power to do so and hence will not be free with respect to that action.

So far, however, none of this gives us any lack of free action when conjoined merely to a determinate, real future. On its own, Incompatibilism may appear prima facie compatible with a determinate future unless we add some further assumption or set of assumptions. As one might expect, though, some No-Future folks will also accept the following controversial principle (though not always stated in this precise form) :

Fatalistic Principle (FP): If Det(F(p)) then □N F(p).

Here, ‘Det’ should be read as ‘It is determinate that…’. I suppose the basic intuition behind FP (which seems on many interpretations to play the key role in Aristotle’s “sea-battle” discussion in De Interpretatione) is that if it is already true that I will perform a certain action, then this settled and hence, in order for it to be possible for me to do otherwise, I would have to be able to causally effect what is already settled (that is, the truth that I will perform that action) – an activity which to many seems impossible or at least beyond the powers of mortal ken. In other words, given that it is already true that I will A in 2010, for it to be possible for me to do otherwise than A, I would need to continue to have the ability to causally influence whether I will do A in 2010. But that would require an ability to causally influence whether it is now or was in the past true that I will do A in 2010. But since those things are already settled, it is supposed, I can have no such ability since those sorts of things cannot be causally influenced. So, on this intuition, if it is indeed true that I will perform an action it must also be necessary now that I do it – it is inevitable and completely unavoidable. And it is precisely this principle, FP, which in conjunction with Incompatibilism, entails the controversial position held by many that freedom with respect to some future action requires that it be indeterminate whether I will take such an action. From Incompatibilism and FP, then, we get:

Openness Principle (OP): If either Det(F(p)) or Det(F(~p)), then ~Free(F(p)).

And so these No-Future theorists will take it that, since there are instances where I am free to do something, there are therefore instances where my doing it in the future is indeterminate. So the Incompatibilist who accepts the Fatalist Principle will thereby be committed to OP and hence, if they believe in free will, will be forced to reject the idea that there is a real and determinate future. No-Futurism follows.

II. The Fatalistic Principle Strikes Back
That OP follows from the assumptions of the previous section is, I think obvious. But that these same assumptions are compatible with the existence of free will is, I think, taken for granted. As I hope to show now, one need not make any further substantive assumptions beyond what many No-Futurists already accept to reach the conclusion that Incompatibilism and FP, together with a common No-Futurist assumption, jointly entail that we have no determinate freedom, so that rejecting a determinate future will not help us to save free will after all.

A key assumption that we need here is one that is widely adopted by many No-Futurists, and this is just the denial of bivalence for future contingents – that is, that for any statement which neither is inevitable nor whose negation is inevitable, such a statement is neither true nor false (not that it is indeterminate whether it is true or false, but rather genuinely neither). We could take this to mean either that future contingents possess a third truth-value separate from truth and falsity, or simply that they are truth-valueless. I do not believe which one we choose will make much of a difference in what follows, so long as we deny bivalence in either case. On this sort of view, for some truth to be determinate is simply for it to be true (and vice versa) and for it to be indeterminate is simply for it to fail to be true and also fail to be false. That is, indeterminacy is a third option – a claim may be true, false, or neither. This view, then, is committed to the following principle:

Alethic Determinacy (AD): If p then Det(p).

Now what should someone who rejects bivalence think about the law of the excluded middle for future contingent propositions? That is, should we take the following as true or not:

Future Excluded Middle (FEM): Either F(p) or ~F(p).

One option here is to adopt a supervaluationist branching future view, accept the truth of FEM, and save the law of the excluded middle. On this strategy, there are many possible futures branching out from the present (and hence many possible complete histories) and if a given claim is true on all branches (that is, on all histories) then it will count as true, if false on all branches then it will be false, and indeterminate otherwise. And since on every history the action described in p occurs or it does not, FEM is also true on every history and hence is true simpliciter. Supervaluation, however, will not be much help here. Consider that we can here distinguish between two notions or modes of truth – there is super-truth (truth at all possible histories) and there is local truth (truth at a given possible history). Super-truth, then, is merely local truth relative to every possible history. A statement like p, then, can be locally true relative to some possible history while failing to be super-true. Local truth, that is, does not entail super-truth. Since Det(p) is generally taken to be true just in case p is super-true, p can be locally true without being determinately true. That is, for a given possible history, it could be true that p while false that Det(p). But this means that, given the existence of some future contingent, AD fails to be locally true relative to every possible future. If we take AD to be super-true just in case it is true at every possible history, then it follows that AD is in fact not super-true.

Along similar lines, we could show that on this understanding of the branching time framework that for any statement F(p) which reports a future contingent, it ends up the case that Det(F(~Det(p))), from which it would follow via the No-Futurist’s principles that I am not free as to whether or not it will be determinately the case that p. This may be better than it not being the case that I am free as to whether or not it will be the case that p, but for someone who wants a robust Libertarian free will it does not seem all that much better. There are various moves that could be tried at this point to avoid all these apparently bad consequences, but in every case I think the rejection of AD will be more plausible than any view which happens to retain it. The truth that AD is trying to capture, it seems, is simply the triviality that if it is determinate that p then it is determinate that p. This is admittedly a rather short dismissal of other supervaluationist alternatives, but for now I will leave the discussion at that and simply assume from now on that such gambits will not ultimately deserve our acceptance.

Supposing, however, we simply stipulate that AD is true at every possible history really is necessarily true in the strongest sense and really does hold even in each of these possibilities. In that case, it is important to remember that FEM is supposed to be true at each history. But that is simply because, for each history, either one disjunct is true or the other is. Given a possible history where F(p), it is also true that either F(p) or ~F(p), and the same for any history where ~F(p). But then, by AD, in histories where F(p), it will also be true that Det(F(p)) and hence that either Det(F(p)) or Det(~F(p)). Similarly for histories where ~F(p). But then, by OP, it follows that in each of these possible histories there is no freedom. But since this holds for every possible history, it holds simpliciter and hence there is no freedom, period.

Since the supervaluationist option was a bust, the anti-bivalentist might instead suppose that FEM, like its atomic constituents, is neither true nor false. This would be a desperate move indeed but perhaps not hopeless. Let us introduce a new operator, ‘Ind’, which obeys the following rule: For any claim c, ‘Ind(c)’ is true just in case c is neither true nor false; it is false otherwise. ‘Ind’ should, then probably be interpreted as saying something like ‘It is indeterminate that…’. Since FEM, we are supposing, is neither true nor false, the following proposition will be true:

Indeterminate Excluded Middle (IEM): Ind(Either F(p) or ~F(p)).

But since ‘Either F(p) or ~F(p)’ entails that I am not free with respect to F(p), it follows that either I am not free with respect to F(p) or it is indeterminate whether I am not free with respect to F(p). That is, ‘~Free(F(p))’ will be the case or ‘Ind(~Free(F(p)))’ will be the case. The former is straightforwardly inconsistent with a Libertarian position, but what of the latter? Since ‘Ind(F(p))’ will only be true just in case ‘Ind(~F(p))’ is also, it follows that ‘Ind(Free(F(p)))’ is also true and hence it is not determinate that I am free with respect to F(p). That is, it is indeterminate whether I have free will. This might be slightly better than having no free will at all but, again, if it is better, it is not much so. After all, a genuine Libertarian is surely going to be committed to its actually being the case – to its being determinately true, in fact – that I am free, not just that it is neither true nor false that I am free. So even if this gambit does not exclude free will, we can surely describe it as excluding determinate free will and that is about as bad. From now on, I will drop the ‘determinate’ adjective and simply assume that the free will we are interested in here is supposed to be determinate. Whether FEM or IEM is accepted, then, freedom is excluded. Instead of securing freedom, it looks like our No-Futurist must reject it.

III. Why No-Futurists Must Accept the Fatalistic Principle
To get out of this mess, it seems we must reject one of the following: free will, Incompatibilism, FP, AD, or FEM. Since I cannot see how anyone would plausibly accept all the other assumptions and yet reject FEM as false, I will leave that option aside. The live options, then, are these: either give up free will, reject Incompatibilism, give up the Fatalist Principle, or accept bivalence and reject AD. Although I would opt for both of the latter two options, it is perfectly open to the Libertarian No-Futurist to take only one. That option, however, cannot be the rejection of the Fatalist Principle – the No-Futurist is committed to this principle by their very views about the future and, hence, the only way for a No-Futurist to adopt a Libertarian position is for them to accept bivalence and reject AD. What I claim, then, is that the following is true:

No-Future and Fatalism (NFF): If No-Future then FP.
NFF, of course should probably be restricted in such a way that it is true only of future truths – that is, as far as facts about the future are concerned, if No-Future, then if these future things are determinate they are necessary. Take this as understood. But how does FP follow from a No-Future view? Here is one way to go – we can say that it follows largely due to the principle that Truth Supervenes on Being (TSB) – a difference in truth value for a given proposition across two worlds requires a difference in the objects or instantiations of properties between those two worlds (that is, a difference in what there is and how things are between them). I take this to be an intuitively obvious principle (even though some may want to deny it) – after all, if the truth of a statement floats freely of the way the world is, we lose any grip on its really being about anything in the world in the first place.

But now, given TSB, if we believe No-Future we are going to be hard pressed not to accept FP as well. After all, if there is no future then all facts about the future must be grounded in the present (or the present together with the past) plus any relevant nomological laws. So if it is determinately true that p, then that fact is grounded in (let’s say) present facts. But for p to be temporally contingent, it must be temporally possible at this time both that p and that ~p. And that is only so if the intrinsic facts about the present (along with, perhaps, the past) do not determine that p. But if that were so, then given No-Future the present facts could not ground the truth that p. But, again, given No-Future and TSB, if that were so then it cannot be determinately true that p. So if it is determinate at this time, it is not possible at this time for it to be otherwise. Hence for the No-Futurist, NFF follows straightforwardly from TSB.

None of the various versions of the kinds of truthmakers No-Futurists give to ground truths about the future will work here. Take, for instance, the view that what grounds truths about the future are simply the current states of things plus the laws of nature. This is straightforwardly ruled out by Incompatibilism as a way of grounding truths about future free actions. Consider also the view that there are primitive, irreducible future-tensed properties such as being such that one will do A possessed by individuals or the world which ground truths about the future (see Bigelow 1996). The having of some such properties rather than some others clearly will be temporally necessary. Appeals to temporally distributional properties will seem to fare similarly, as will verificationists or dispositionalist accounts of the grounding of future truths. If any of those posited truthmakers now ground in the present what will happen in the future, such future occurrences are inevitable – that is, they are temporally necessary.

An ersatzist about times such as Bourne (2006) or Crisp (2007) – who treats times as abstract objects arranged in order via primitive ersatz earlier-than relations – will not do any better here. Such a view treats future truths as being grounded in what is represented as being the case by an ersatz time which is ersatz-later than the ersatz time which correctly represents the present. So if some such time represents p then it is true that p at the corresponding distance from the present time. But this is just as inevitable as any of the other options. These states of abstract objects are, after all, present states – as in all the other options, they render my future actions temporally necessary. Similar sorts of views which make future truths depend on God’s memories or will or some such divine mental state will obviously not do any better.

The argument for NFF I have been giving is similar to ones that have been given in the literature attempting to show that Libertarians and their ilk must reject bivalence or at least determinacy for at least some future-tensed statements. Rhoda, Boyd, and Belt (2007), for instance, argue that the guarantee by present conditions of the truth of future-tensed statements about my actions is straightforwardly inconsistent with Incompatibilism (though they do not use this exact terminology). And Michael Rea (2006) has skillfully argued that, if Presentism is true and all statements about the future are determinate then, since future truths about someone’s actions have not in the past been even partly grounded in the person such truths are about (since they were true before that person even existed), such a person never has and never will have a choice about such actions. And hence such a person will not be free with respect to such actions.

Rea considers ways someone might try to resist fatalism, but most of the ways out of principles like FP end up being available only to one who actually believes in a real, concrete and determinate future. At this point, though, one might think that if TSB is rejected for statements about my future contingents (as might be done by certain Molinists) then we would have a way out of NFF. But, as Rea (2006, 521-522) has in effect argued, even if TSB is false (as claimed by Merricks 2007), if No-Future is true and all statements of future contingents are now either true or false, then such ‘future contingents’ will indeed be temporally necessary. After all, these ungrounded truths are still present (or past) truths and, being ungrounded, they are not made true by anything outside of the present (or past). So the fact that F(p) is a wholly present fact, not dependent on anything future, and this fact guarantees or fixes what will occur in the future. Hence, any future contingents will be inevitable. So whether or not TSB is true, NFF follows once we accept a No-Future view.

IV. The No-Futurist’s Options
Given the truth of NFF, the No-Futurist is thereby stuck with FP. Hence, per the discussion of the previous sections, for the No-Futurist, the only options left are to abandon No-Futurism (so they can reject FP), abandon free will, accept compatibilism, or take bivalence on board. So for someone committed to both No-Futurism and Incompatibilist freedom, the only option is to accept bivalence and reject AD. Presumably, this would have to involve invoking some kind of perhaps entirely non-semantic metaphysical indeterminacy where F(p)’s indeterminacy is compatible both with its truth and its falsity – that is, where it really is either true or false, and hence bivalence holds for it, yet it is simply indeterminate which. On this view, indeterminacy would not be some third option over and above truth and falsity, but rather a kind of primitive state where the world is simply indeterminate between the two options. The problem here, of course, would be to make sense of this sort of metaphysical indeterminacy and the idea that something could be true but not determinately so.

Another bivalence-accepting strategy would be to take ‘~F(p)’ as true, and differentiate this from ‘F(~p)’. So far I have been taking these two claims to be either equivalent or for the former to entail the latter. However, were one to differentiate them, denying that one entails the other, and take all ‘will’ claims such as ‘F(~p)’, where they express future contingents, to be false, one could still affirm the truth of ‘~F(p)’. In this case, the inference from IEM to the denial of free will is rendered invalid. The basic idea of this view, then, is to accept bivalence and still get out of my argument by, in effect, denying that ‘will’ and ‘will not’ sentences are genuine contradictories. Contraries, yes, but not contradictories. This strategy, of course, has its own problems dealing with the way we ordinarily treat ‘will’ and ‘will not’ as contradictories and dealing with truth-value links between previous predictions about what were once future contingents and the truth of propositions about these same events occurring in the present..

So, from what we have seen, far from requiring a No-Future view of time, Libertarianism is straightforwardly incompatible with it (or at least with many common forms of it). To escape from this incompatibility, I have suggested two strategies the No-Futurists might make use of, both of which will involve a lot of work, if not substantial difficulties. Whatever the case may be, the denial of bivalence for propositions about future contingents in order to uphold our free will is a self-defeating gesture and No-Futurists who deny bivalence in the name of saving free will are instead attacking the very thing they set out to defend.

WORKS CITED

Aristotle, De Interpretatione
Asher, N., J. Dever, and C. Pappas (draft) “Supervaluations Debugged”
Bigelow, John (1996) “Presentism and Properties” in Tomberlin, James (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives 10: Metaphysics. Oxford: Blackwell, 35–52.
Bourne, Craig (2006) A Future for Presentism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cameron, Ross (draft) “Truthmaking for Presentists”
Crisp, Thomas (2007) “Presentism and the Grounding Objection”, Noûs 41.1: 90-109.
Diekemper, Joseph (2007) “B-Theory, Fixity, and Fatalism”, Noûs 41.3: 429-452.
Ludlow, Peter (1999) Semantics, Tense, and Time. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
McGee, V. and B. McLaughlin (1995) “Distinctions without a Difference”, Southern Journal of Philosophy 33 Supplement: 203–251.
Merricks, Trenton (2007) Truth and Ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Naylor, Margery Bedford (1980) “Fatalism and Timeless Truth” in Inwagen, Peter (ed.), Time and Cause: Essays Presented to Richard Taylor, 49-65. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Parsons, Josh (2000) “Must a Four-Dimensionalist Believe in Temporal Parts?”, Monist 83.3: 399-418.
__________ (2004) “Distributional Properties” in Jackson, F. and G. Priest (eds.), Lewisian Themes, 173-180. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rea, Michael (2006) “Presentism and Fatalism”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 84.4: 511-524.
Rhoda, A., G. Boyd, and T. Belt (2006) “Open Theism, Omniscience, and the Nature of the Future”, Faith and Philosophy 23: 432–59.
Tooley, Michael (1997) Time, Tense, and Causation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Varzi, Achille (2007) “Supervaluationism and its Logics”, Mind 116: 633-676.
Williamson, Timothy (1994) Vagueness. London: Routledge.

Can a Presentist Believe in Incompatibilist Freedom?

In my last post, I argued that the following was true:

Fatalist Contradiction (FC): ~((Incompatibilism & DF) & FP)

Since then, I noticed that this has certain other consequences for presentism (and growing block views too). Notice first that the following seems true (straightforwardly, via the principle that Truth Supervenes on Being):

Presentism and Indeterminacy (PI): If Presentism and Incompatibilism then FP.

A Molinist may deny this, but in doing so they run afoul of TSB or either DF or Incompatibilism (depending on how its spelled out). So it follows from FC and PI that

Incompatibility (I): If DF, then ~Presentism or ~Incompatibilism.

So if libertarianism is true, presentism is not. And if presentism is true, either we have no free will or we do but it is of a compatibilist nature.

EDIT (4/18/08): PI should probably be restricted in such a way that it is true only of future truths - that is, as far as facts about the future are concerned, if Presentism and Incompatibilism, then if these future things are determinate they are necessary.

Fatalism, Indeterminacy, and Power

Here's an interesting argument I came up with:

Many people (i.e., many (but not all) growing block theorists and presentists) don't believe in a real, concrete and determinate future because they think it leads to fatalism and hence a lack of freedom on our part. Here are some assumed (incompatibilist) assumptions:

Freedom Implies Power (FIP): If I am free to make it the case that p then I have the power to make it the case that p and I have the power not to make it the case that p.

and

Power Implies Possibility (PIP): If I have the power to make it the case that p then possibly (I make it the case that p).

These seem to be fairly straightforward incompatibilist beliefs - incompatibilists will accept them, even if others do not. Here's another principle:

Power Produces Determinacy (PPD): I have the power to make it the case that p iff I have the power to make it the case that determinately p.

This is pretty straightforward - it makes no sense to say that someone has the power to bring something about if they do not also have the power to make it determinately the case (and vice versa). So far none of this gives us fatalism when conjoined to a determinate, real future. But then, some no-future folks will also hold to the following controversial principle:

Fatalistic Principle (FP): If it is the case that determinately p then necessarily p.

FP in conjunction with FIP and PIP entails the relevant belief in no determinate future:

Openness Principle (OP): If I am free to make it the case that p then it is not the case that determinately p.

And so these folks will take it that there are instances where I am free to do something and hence where my doing it in the future is indeterminate. And, of course, I am not only free to do certain things, but I am determinately so (since really robust freedom requires us to be determinately free, not merely for it to be indeterminate whether we are so):

Determinate Freedom (DF): I am determinately free to make it the case that p.

From OP and DF, we can reasonably infer,

Determinate Indeterminacy (DI): It is determinate that it is not the case that determinately p.

Now here's where my real argument starts to get going: From DI and FP, we get:

Necessary Indeterminacy (NI): It is not possible that determinately p.

From NI and PIP, we get:

Power Failure for Determinacy (PFD): It is not the case that I have the power to make it the case that determinately p.

And now we finally get to use PPD which I mentioned earlier. From PFD and PPD we get:

General Power Failure (GPF): It is not the case that I have the power to make it the case that p.

So from GPF and FIP we get:

Unfree (U): I am not free to make it the case that p.

And so we have a contradiction, which means at least one major assumption must be false. The only real substantive premises that might be candidates for rejection, I would contend, are FIP, PIP, FP, or DF. Since FIP and PIP just follow from incompatibilism and DF is just a way of saying that we are free, we can put things this way: What this argument shows is that either incompatibilism is false, the Fatalistic Principle is false, or we have no free will. Contra the no-future folks who hold to all three of these, we must choose one of these options. In my opinion, a rejection of the Fatalistic Principle is the obvious choice.

Notes on Boyd's Satan and the Problem of Evil Chapter 4A

Last time, I finished up with chapter three of Boyd's book, so now we go to chapter four. Here, at the beginning of this chapter, Boyd attempts to address passages that look like they ascribe to God some amount of EDF (exhaustive definite foreknowledge) - passages where God predicts details about future free actions or events which depend on such, passages that cannot plausibly be interpreted as expressing mere conditional intentions on God's part. Part of his answer involves the same sort of idea I've been discussing elsewhere - that real freedom involves deciding who one will be and once that is fixed, that will also fix the range of actions one may do. And if one has made oneself fixedly wicked, for instance, God will know how to arrange it so that you will certainly do, say, action A because he knows your fixed character - a character you cannot any longer act against. The rest of his answer in this section is rather vague and hand-wavy - the real argument comes later. What he's said so far isn't nearly sufficient, but since his main arguments come later, I'll deal with them then and show why he still can't have both open theism and God's certain knowledge of these prophesied events.

Boyd then goes on to criticize Molinism which, in the context of the sort of no-future view Boyd holds, I can agree won't work. His idea, though, of God making plans for every contingency so that lack of EDF does not limit his sovereignty or providence over the future could equally well be put into effect by a non-Molinist believer in EDF - prior (not temporally prior, though) to creating everything and giving out free will, God could have lots of different plans for how things might turn out with his free creations. Posterior to this set of plans, however, is the creation of the space-time universe and God's knowledge of all of history, including EDF. Boyd, however, makes the rather lame claim that God knows more on his view than on, say, the Molinist view since God on his view not only knows what will happen but also what may. This, of course, is rather unfair since the Molinist may claim that they are the ones that allow God to know more since God knows much more of what will happen on their view than on Boyd's. That point aside, I think both Molinists and other EDFers could perfectly well have both EDF and exhaustive knowledge of all those mays and mights that Boyd includes. So, contra Boyd, EDFers may include all the same knowledge Boyd does. So Boyd's just plain wrong when he claims that in his view "God does not know less than the classical view: he knows more." The facts are quite the opposite.

Boyd uses all he's said so far to address the passage of Jesus predicting Peter's denials - God could providentially ensure that things happen such that Peter denies Christ three times. But this requires Peter's character to be fixed in this regard. But it doesn't seem to me that anyone's character can be completely fixed in such a regard without being nearly totally fixed in its entirety. Our character is an organic whole, after all, not some construct made up of behavioral or habitual atoms. And since Peter is by no means a "saint", on Boyd's own view Peter would perhaps be irredeemably lost (having formed a fixed character leading to or involving a denial of Christ). In any case, Peter wasn't the only one involved in the story - there were other free agents as well. They would also have to be significantly fixed in their characters. But there were other free agents around them as well, who could have killed them or done other things to prevent them from talking to Peter. So they would have to fixed as well. But then those people were around free agents as well, and so on. So whatever happened to the people with unfixed character here? It doesn't seem that God, without interfering in ways Boyd wouldn't like or having EDF, could guarantee that Peter would deny Christ three times even if Peter had a fixed character that would otherwise make it certain.

Now to Boyd's philosophical arguments. Consider the argument enshrined in the following passage:

Let four things be granted: (1) God possesses EDF; (2) God's knowledge is infallible, hence unalterable; (3) the past by logical necessity cannot be changed; and (4) we are not free or morally responsible in relation to what we cannot change. These four premises seem to entail that agents are no more free and morally responsible with regard to future events (including their own future chosen actions) than they are with regard to past events. Among the totality of facts in any given moment in the past which we cannot change is the fact of what we shall do in the future - a facticity found in God's EDF and included in the totality of factual truths at any given moment in the past.

This is a completely awful argument. Note that Boyd's argument entails that I am not morally responsible for what I did in the past. But if I'm not morally responsible for, say, my past sins, God cannot justly hold me accountable for them or punish me for them. The only atonement necessary is that provided by the passage of time! But then even present actions are not things I can be responsible for either - in the same sense I cannot change the past since I cannot make something other than what it is, I cannot change the present either. After all, if I am sinning in the present I cannot very well also be not sinning. So on Boyd's lights, I cannot be responsible for past or present actions. What about future actions? Well, on Boyd's view, these do not literally exist, so I cannot be held responsible for actions that are not even there. And in any case, I can hardly at one time be held responsible for something I haven't done yet. So if Boyd's argument works, it shows that there is no free will or moral responsibility! And I think that in turn shows that Boyd's argument has gone seriously wrong.

Boyd's final sentence in the above paragraph represents a huge confusion. For one thing, it's not clear that there are distinct entities called "facts". And if there are, it's not clear that they exist in or at any times at all - they may very well be atemporal. But if some of them do exist at times, they exist wholly at the time they are about. So facts about the future therefore do not exist, exist outside time, or exist in the future, not in the present or in the past. So Boyd's argument doesn't work (see Nathan Oaklander's work on this stuff for more, similar details). Appealing to the pastness or presentness of God's beliefs won't work either since God's beliefs, if he is atemporal, cannot be past or present in the temporal sense anyway. And even if God is temporal, if the beliefs get the content or truth that they do from the actual future events then the fact that God believes such and such is not solely a fact about this current time in any case. So either way Boyd's argument doesn't work. For more criticisms of the sorts of arguments Boyd employs throughout this chapter and book (including criticism of his thought that EDF makes the future unalterable and hence we are not free with regards to it), see my earlier post here and also this one.

Boyd mentions "soft facts" - current or past facts which are dependent on future facts - as a way out of his argument. On this move, God's current belief (supposing he is in time) that E will occur is dependent on E's occurrence in the future. That seems about right to me. But Boyd doesn't like this. He thinks that because God is omniscient we can't affect the content of his past beliefs. But why not? Boyd doesn't really give any kind of argument other than to say that if God in the past wrote down his beliefs about the future then the fact the written document had the content it did or said what it did would be a hard fact. But it wouldn't - Boyd is simply wrong. If God's beliefs are dependent on future fact then so is the document. I think Boyd here is assuming an illegitimate notion of soft facts according to which the only way something can be dependent on the future is if we already have a growing block or presentist view of time and certain facts about the past do not even exist in reality at all since there is no future to determine them. But if we are eternalists and believe that all times and their contents exist and are on a par, we can have dependency relations crisscrossing over time with no problem. So Boyd is simply assuming from the get-go without any kind of real argument that the most plausible opposing views are false. But of course, if you do that, it's not to difficult to argue for your own view.

Next time...science and experience as "evidence" for open theism...

Notes on Boyd's Satan and the Problem of Evil Chapter 3B

Okay, part 2 of my notes on chapter 3 from Boyd (see here for part 1). After going through some philosophical arguments to try to show that EDF (exhaustive definite foreknowledge) is incompatible with risk, Boyd then goes on to try to argue that Scripture supports the idea that God lacks EDF and takes risk with his creation. His main argument is that a lot of Scripture looks like it describes God as (a) being temporal, (b) lacking EDF, and (c) taking risks - and that if things were different God would have made them clearer. That is, the way Scripture is written is just what we would expect if all three of those things (a, b, and c) were true. However, it seems - taking at least just a and b for the moment - that if these things were not true, the way Scripture is written is also just what we would expect. That is, we would expect Scripture to be written the way it is regardless of whether a or b are true. Why is that? Well, assume an atemporal God with EDF. How would God's actions in history and revelations of himself look to a normal person? Exactly the way things get described in Scripture. And how would God express what he was like in human terms that would be understandable for almost everyone, terms that would allow people to get the main point of what God's character is like, even those who are unable to understand what it is to be atemporal or what that entails (a lack that Boyd apparently also shares, given a lot of his misconceptions about an atemporal God that show up in this book)? Exactly the way things get described in Scripture. So either way, things would get described this way and hence I see no reason to think that the Scriptures Boyd mentions automatically favors one view over another - it is open to more than one plausible interpretation. But we should get into the nitty gritty of Boyd's interpretations - let's go.

One thing Boyd says to get out of the problem of God needing EDF to give prophecies is that some prophecies are conditional - for instance, God may say "I'm going to destroy X" but this was really a mere threat to get them to do something, not a promise or forecast of what was definitely to come. So some prophecies reveal not God's foreknowledge but rather his conditional intentions about something. But Boyd thinks these sorts of things also support his view. But of course, they do not - or at least no or little more than the opposing view. After all, if God had an unconditional intention, say, to destroy Nineveh (see the book of Jonah), then not destroying it would have been a case of God changing his mind and would have been good evidence of a lack of EDF. But if Boyd is right and lots of these cases were really cases of conditional intentions - of something like a threat - then its perfectly compatible with this that God knew exactly what would come of his threat. After all, a parent may say threateningly, "I'm going to spank you!", and the child may as a result stop what they are doing and avoid the spanking - and all this is perfectly compatible with the parent knowing that the child would avoid the spanking by avoiding the bad behavior (in fact, that was probably precisely why the threat was given in the first place). So Boyd's own strategy to save and support his view seems to also save and support his opposition as well.

To give another example of this phenomenon, consider what Boyd says about II Kings 20:5-6/Isaiah 38:5-6, where as a result of his repentance God is said to heal Hezekiah of his terminal illness (God said he would die) and "add fifteen years to his life". To this, Boyd asks, "If the Lord didn't really change his mind, isn't Scripture misleading when it says the Lord added fifteen years to his life? Conversely, if God was truthful in declaring his intentions to end Hezekiah's life, and if God's later statement was also truthful, then must we not accept that God truly changed his mind?" Well, no and no. No to the first question because the Lord added 15 years to his life in the sense that he made sure Hezekiah would live 15 years longer than he would have had God not healed him of his disease. But that's perfectly compatible with God always from eternity intending to heal him and thus add those years. No to the second question because, as Boyd's already said, God's original statement was not an unconditional one. So this passage doesn't seem to necessarily teach what Boyd thinks it does. Most of the texts from Jeremiah that Boyd looks at are much in the same boat as this one from Kings.

In some passages, though, it does say that God "changed his mind" or "repented of what he had done". Does that mean that God did really change his mind? Or does it merely mean that the condition for the conditional intention was not fulfilled and hence God did otherwise? If the latter, which seems very plausible, then this is perfectly compatible with God having EDF. In the parent-child case above, a parent may have a conditional intention to spank their child, know that they won't because the condition won't be fulfilled, and then this all may come to pass and it will perfectly true in a very real sense that the parent "changed their mind" about the spanking in so far as they didn't carry out their threat and would have done so had the child acted otherwise than the parent knew they would. And we can say all of this and accept these texts at fairly close to their face value without hiding out in the "that's just an anthropomorphism" reply that some EDFers give to such texts. It just so happens that, as I said earlier, the Scriptures in these cases admit of more than one plausible interpretation (something which is actually fairly common with Hebrew styles of writing in general).

Even if we did go the "anthropomorphism" route, which isn't even necessary, many of Boyd's criticisms of that option still fall short. He speaks as if the anthropomorphic texts would be less accurate than others - but this, of course, is complete baloney. The fact that a text makes use of some kind of symbolism or anthropomorphism or whatever does not make it less accurate than a text that speaks literally - this is to automatically privilege literal philosophical styles of discourse over symbolic ones, a move which is surely illegitimate to say the least. What next, is Boyd going to claim that the Psalms or Prophets or other symbolic literature in the Bible are less accurate than, say, the Gospels? Clearly, this objection proves too much. In any case, Scripture isn't even intended to teach us about the exact, literal metaphysical nature of everything about God - Scripture is more interested in God's character and great acts in history rather than how he relates to time. So Boyd's claim that the anthropomorphic reply would make it the case that, contra Scripture, Moses didn't really know God that well misses the point - one can know someone really well without knowing specifics of their metaphysical nature and vice versa. I, for instance, know my wife better than probably any other human being outside the two of us, but I'm sure a lot of biologists or physicians or psychiatrists or whatever probably know more about her nature as a human than I do. But that's not what's most important in knowing someone. And that's something I think Boyd's missed here. (I won't even mention Boyd's discussion of Calvin here on this subject since his argument is one of the worst howlers I've seen and completely uncharitable to Calvin)

Most of the other passages Boyd considers are in pretty much the same boat as the ones discussed above. And many of them come from prophetic passages telling stories or otherwise symbolically talking about God's dealings with Israel. To just think that one can automatically take them as literally true and, not just that, literally true and this in an open theist sense like Boyd tends to do is a fine example of an implementation of the faulty Hermeneutic of the Literal (yes, it afflicts others - not just dispensationalists and their ilk). Other passages quite simply do not directly support an open theist interpretation (though they are certainly in harmony with it) over any other. In other places, Boyd seems to assume that knowledge of the future is incompatible with the future being open to influence (see, for instance, his discussion of God's use of 'may' or 'perhaps' in speaking of future events) - but, of course, an argument for this is still needed and hence cannot be used to force an open theist interpretation on the relevant passages. After all, for all Boyd's said, it may be the case that an actual future p is perfectly compatible with the possibility of an alternate future not-p. If that's the case, though, then Boyd's argument suffers. And I think it is the case.

So much for Boyd's arguments from Scripture. For more problems with open theism and scripture, see this post on Parableman. Next time in this series, I'll begin my discussion of chapter 4...

Notes on Boyd's Satan and the Problem of Evil Chapter 3A

I've been reading open theist Gregory Boyd's Satan and the Problem of Evil off and on for a while now. His Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy, which he describes in this book, is interesting and there's a lot to be said for it. I won't say much about it in this post but it is many ways fairly plausible. And then there's the open theist stuff which is interwoven with the actual theodicy (though, as he admits, it is not essential to it). The arguments for open theism here are really not very convincing and make all sorts of errors including logical errors, failure to deal with all the alternatives, confusions about the opposition's beliefs, confusions about modality and temporality, and so on. Rather than attack his open theism, let me here just respond to a few things he says in favor of open theism in chapters three and four of the book.

Chapter three of the book is meant to argue for the following thesis:

(TWT2): Freedom implies risk.

However, all he actually does in this chapter is argue that risk and exhaustive definite foreknowledge (EDF) are incompatible and that Scripture seems to support the ideas of both risk and lack of EDF. None of that, of course, proves that TWT2 is true. That's just a (very simple) matter of logic. I'm really not sure how Boyd could seriously do what he actually does in the chapter and claim that he's argued for TWT2. One could accept everything from this chapter and yet reject TWT2.

Let's take some quotes and see some other mistakes:

"It seems that a decision cannot be risky if its outcome is known an eternity before it is made." Well, it may seem that way, but this is false. After all, a decision can be risky for me even if someone else knows what the outcome will be so long as I do not know. But maybe Boyd meant that for a given individual, if that individual knows the outcome of that individual's decision an eternity before it was made then the decision cannot be risky for that individual. That sounds much better. But it still won't give us what Boyd wants - this can still be false given everything he's said so far in the book. The decision can still be risky, after all, if the knowledge is dependent on the outcome of the choice and not vice versa. That is, if the knowledge does not enter into the account of why someone decided as they did or what the outcome is like but rather the outcome or decision instead enters into the account of why they have the knowledge of the outcome or decision then decision can still be risky. And this does not change if we make the knowledge begin temporally prior to the decision or its outcome - what matters is teleological or explanatory priority, not temporal priority here. Even better, if (as I believe) God is outside of time then his knowledge of free decisions or their outcomes cannot correctly be said to be temporally before the decisions or their outcomes in the first place. So either way, it seems that what Boyd says here and in the rest of this part of the chapter to argue that EDF and risk cannot coexist simply does not work.

For instance, speaking of those who will end up in hell, "If their damnation was certain to God, the impossibility of their salvation was also certain, and there was no risk involved in God's decision to create them." Again, for reasons stated above, not true. God can know that someone will be damned without it being impossible that they will be saved and therefore without it being certain that it is impossible. That p is the case does not entail that not-p is impossible. What is impossible is that both p and not-p, but that hardly says anything about risk. God's creation of a person and then their subsequent creation of their own choices may be explanatorily prior to God's knowledge of those choices, which would answer Boyd's "question of why God would create individuals he knows will end up in hell". The simple answer would be that the knowledge depends on the actual way things turn out, not the other way around - someone who believes in EDF need not also be a Molinist, after all (that is, someone thinks that there are definite facts about which free actions a person does or will do or will in fact do metaphysically prior to the occurrence of such actions or even in the absence of such actions). This in fact would perfectly mirror Boyd's own response to the same question, just without the additional questionable move of denying the existence of a definite future.

Boyd does consider a view somewhat like this that he calls "the simple foreknowledge view", according to which "God knows that certain individuals will be damned but cannot on this basis refrain from creating them". However, according to Boyd, this view "holds that God simply knows what will take place but cannot alter it in the light of this knowledge". This sentence contains a number of confusions. For one thing, the sense in which God cannot alter what he knows is a very trivial one - if someone knows that p then p is the case and if p is the case then not-p is not the case. And one cannot make contradictions true, so one cannot make both p and not-p the case. There's nothing more to this supposed inability of God to alter what he knows. But this hardly raises any sort of problem, let alone any kind of problem over whether God can control what goes on in light of his foreknowledge. After all, foreknowledge is not a monolithic thing - it's not as if all God's knowledge or action will be posterior to what goes on. After all, it may be the case that p at time t and God may, as a result, know that p at time t and therefore decide to do A at some other time (temporally before or after) which in turn makes other stuff happen so that God's knowledge of this other stuff may (depending on the nature of the events) both depend on how things turn out and God's own intentions in action. And so on.

So Boyd unfairly saddles the simple foreknowledge view outlined above (which is actually closer to or perhaps even a version of Boyd's "classical Arminian" picture, contra Boyd) with the additional, inessential commitment to God's foreknowledge being explanatorily useless. So Boyd clearly overlooks other elaborations of this sort of view, ones that do not suffer from any of these problems. In fact, much of his criticisms also saddle the view with belief in a temporal God, something which simple foreknowledge folks may safely and consistently deny. Even if we put my other criticisms aside, were a simple foreknowledge theorist to be an atemporalist about God, most of Boyd's arguments in this section would fall to pieces (for instance, his argument comparing God on this view to the mythological Cassandra).

More on chapter three's arguments from Scripture still to come...

Open Theism, the Future, and Free Will - Comments on Some Recent Articles Pt. 2

Sorry for not blogging too much lately...I've had papers to grade...:(

Anyway, here's part 2 as promised. This entry is on Dale Tuggy (of Trinities fame) and his paper "Three Roads to Open Theism", which is for the most part a fairly good paper though I disagree (obviously) with some of the things he says about those who believe in a real future. According to Tuggy, there is no future since libertarian free will is incompatible with there being such a thing - it requires a genuinely open future because we need to have power over the future/more than one thing to choose to do/be able to do otherwise. But none of that stuff entails that the future is open at all - this is the mistake of all fatalistic arguments (see my earlier post for one version of such arguments and where it goes wrong). In actuality, the unreality of the future not only isn't a requirement for free will but it actually excludes it. Why? Precisely because it removes choice - one cannot choose when there is no later moment (there being no future after all) to choose at! If there is no future then there is no free choice over future states. Free will requires power to influence things but one cannot influence non-existent things. If there is no future then there's nothing to influence and therefore nothing to deliberate about in the first place. So free will actually requires there to be a fully determinate (but not determined) future.

**WARNING: Really Technical Part**

Tuggy thinks we need a branching model but not a linear model of time. But branching and linear models can actually be made compatible. The linear model can be taken to describe the actual world as it is - it models the concrete way things are. Temporal accessibility here is simply a matter of having actual temporal relations with something. The branching model describes possibilities for times - both actualized and non-actualized. Accessibility here is simply capturing possible temporal relations. Failure to see the compatibility of these two models and thinking the linear model rules out all possibilities is a key reason for the mistake Tuggy and many other open theists make in their reasoning.

Tuggy says that the branching structure beyond the present represents facts about the present - outcomes which are possible given the course of history up until now, represented futures not ruled out by past and present happenings. But that's consistent with an actual future. Which path is taken is up to us but that doesn't mean the path doesn't exist.

**End Really Technical Part**

Tuggy says that opponents of open theism haven't argued for or defended the assumption that time is linear (that is, that there is a single, determinate future). That, however, seems plainly wrong. They might not work, but Tuggy actually considers some objections against non-linear conceptions! So it's a bit disingenous to say that there's been no arguments when Tuggy has actually considered some in the very same paper in which he claims this. Additionally, lots of people have defended an actual future. There's a rather large literature here, actually. On this score, it could even be argued that non-linearists have actually been much more dialectically irresponsible than linearists!

Tuggy also claims that if those objections (from bivalence and the Law of the Excluded Middle) he considered are shown wrong, the anti-open theists will then rest their case against open theism on the weight of the claim that the Bible plainly teaches things incompatible with open theism. I, however, do not think that is true, so I'm clearly a counterexample to Tuggy's claim here. I think the main case against open theism of the variety Tuggy and many others like is that it requires an unreal future. And there are lots and lots of reasons against believing such a thing - ones that don't rest on the purely logical considerations that Tuggy addresses in his paper.

Fate

Fatalism is the view that everything that happens is somehow fated or perhaps determined or decided with certainty beforehand - there is no way of avoiding what is fated to happen and one has no control over whether such fated occurrences come to pass. One is powerless in the face of fate. Often, people try to argue that various views about God or the future lead to an objectionable sort of fatalism and, since fatalism is false, we ought to reject such views. One such view that has been attacked is the view that for every proposition p about the future, it is determinately true or determinately false that p. So for the proposition that I will go to school tomorrow or perform a certain action eleven years from this date, it is either determinately true that I will do this or determinately false. But some people want to object that this means that fatalism is true and that we have no control over the future since it's already determined for us.

Here's the sort of argument that seems to be in many peoples' minds:

1. If all propositions about the future are determinately true or determinately false, then no one has any control over their future.
2. But we do have control over our futures.
3. So, by 1 and 2, not all propositions about the future are determinately true or determinately false.

To make this argument go against the further view that such propositions are true or false because future times and events actually exist, we can add the following:

4. If not all propositions about the future are determinately true or determinately false, then not all of the future does exists.
5. So, by 3 and 4, not all of the future exists (the open future view).

To make this relevant to issues over open theism (the view that God doesn't know everything about the future), we could further add:

6. God knows about something if and only if that thing exists.
7. So, by 5 and 6, God does not know all of the future.

Why think any of these statements are true? 7 follows from 6 and 5. 6 seems reasonable - one can't know something if there isn't anything there to be known. 5 follows from 3 and 4. 4 seems reasonable - how could every bit of the future exist if parts of it are still indeterminate? 3 follows from 1 and 2. 2 seems fairly common-sensical and accords well with our general experience of the world. 1, however, seems to be the most interesting premise - the one that I think we need to push on if we are to avoid open theism or "open future" views on the one hand and fatalism on the other. 1 is the crux in arguments for fatalism or an open future.

I think something like the following reasoning seems to be lurking in the background for premise 1:

0. If the future is not as real as the present then 1 is true.
0.1. The future is not as real as the present.
Therefore, 1 is true.

Notice, though, that if we reject 0.1, this argument for 1 won't work - we can insist that the existence and full reality of the future on par with the present grounds the determinate truth of claims about the future without entailing fatalism. The reasoning many open-future people seem to be using is that we seem, metaphorically, to be "moving" from the real present into a not-so real future so that, if the future is determinate it can't be because of our free actions since those free actions do not yet exist and so are not fully real - it is as if there is a cosmic play written out that we must inevitably follow, one that is independent of us and constraining us. Indeed, if God knows our futures and the future is not real then that must be because something is constraining us, perhaps God himself. Otherwise, there is no way he could know what we will do.

But now consider the badly-named static view of time, according to which all times are equally real and on a par with each other. I exist and act just as much in future moments as I do in past or present ones. On this view, there isn't necessarily any cosmic blueprint that my future is forced to follow since it is my future - my future free decisions and actions - that make it determinately true or determinately false that I will perform some specific action in the future. So my future is under my control and exists as a result of decisions under my control. It is only when we deny that it is me who makes it true that I will do something - when we deny that I act and exist as much in the future as in the present or past - that we will be tempted to say that determinate truth or falsity about my future actions means such things are outside my own control. So it seems we need to deny the reality of the future in the first place to get the argument for the unreality of the future (1-5) off the ground. And that's clearly a question-begging move - which puts open-theism, with its reliance such arguments, on very shaky ground.