Some Notes on Greg Boyd's Crucifixion of the Warrior God Volume 2

Pretty much the same thing as my last post, just on Volume 2. Maybe I should note that these are just stream-of-consciousness initial reactions and hence won't be very polished and might seem too negative to some. But that should have been obvious from the previous installment! In any case, I actually really liked this volume as well, despite the numerous concerns listed below. Notes (again, mostly not very understandable without consulting the book at the same time):

General notes:
-Both volumes have been riddled with innumerable typos - spelling errors, incorrect words, missing words or letters, etc. The endorsements in the first volume contained a number of errors and it just went on from there. I don't know if anyone actually proofread the book or they just didn't care, but it makes it look very unprofessional and this book certainly deserves better than the distinct lack of care it received in this area.
-It's funny that Boyd doesn't seem to often like others using philosophical considerations to determine certain things unless they are his own and for his own conclusions.
-Still demands other interpretations "bear witness" to the cross, whatever that might mean.
-A real question: Non-violence. What is meant by "violence"? What is the scope of this non-violence supposed to be? Is the principle only supposed to apply between humans or are humans supposed to treat other livings non-violently as well? But which other living things? What about plants, fungi, or microbes? Some animals or all? If violence is simply doing harm to or killing a living organism, then we and Jesus would all be violent by necessity since this happens just be living.
-I'm still not entirely sure what "deep literalism" or the "Conservative Hermeneutic" from last volume are supposed to be. Especially when applied to stories when they are thought of as fictional/fables/etc.
-Boyd doesn't seem to see that non-order comes in two varieties - simply not-yet ordered and positively anti-order. So he tends to interpret all OT imagery of non-order as anti-order and associates it with Satan.

On specific pages:
647-648 - Moves way too fast. Generally could be clearer. It seems like the crucifixion itself is being identified as identical with various other aspects of salvation or things normally thought of as consequences of it. So I'm not sure what's going on here or why. It's really hard to follow the line of thought.
650 - 'we must understand every divine accommodation to be a reflection of the self-emptying agape-love of the eternal triune God.' It's not clear what "self-emptying" means here, but is this principle so because every divine action is to be understood in this way? Or is this some special principle here? If the latter, why? If the former, it's not clear what use is going to necessarily follow without smuggling in one's own assumptions here. We'll see.
652-682 - Almost all of this is useless and irrelevant - just a chance to grind an axe against non-open theists.
652-663 - Why is this here? It doesn't deal with defenses of classical theism or responses to his "this is not enough" objection, etc. Also doesn't deal with views that only take parts of classical theism on board. For instance, transcending time and immutable yet also immanent in time, relational, and passible (since immutability and impassibility are definitely not the same thing nor is temporal change required for God to have a real relationship with us or be passible - x affecting y and x changing y are distinct in that changing is one way of being affected but not the only one). On another point, knowledge or experience of God is filtered not simply through Israel's moral beliefs but also its religious or metaphysical ones as well. Hence God's frequent modelling by Israel as a pagan god (that is, using pictures of models of God as used by ANE for gods in general). So accommodation in that sense pretty much guaranteed.
666 - A bit question-begging here it looks like...
667 - Boyd says we must "ground all our thinking about God from start to finish in the revelation of God in the crucified Christ as witnessed to in Scripture." Ground in what sense? Why? What about natural revelation? Similarly for "anchored". If we did this, he asks, would we ever think God was immutable? Sure - why not? Humans suffer and change. Christ was/is human - so he can too. In that sense, so can God. But God can still be immutable in his divinity. A lot of rhetorical, perhaps question-begging, questions here with not too much argument. Seems to confuse ordinary language with metaphysical interpretations thereof (specifically, Boyd's metaphysical interpretations, based on his own prior philosophical convictions - not coming directly from Scripture, despite his own insistence).
668 - Doesn't taking on a human nature mean a change? No, except in the creation.
671 - Not clear what "simple" means here. Looks like it should be more than "lack of parts" but this isn't explained. Also, not clear why an unchanging God "bridging the 'ground of being' with the contingent and ever-changing world" is supposed to be unintelligible. What's supposed to be so especially nonsensical about it? What does this "bridging" even mean anyway?
672 - 1st sentence. The "then" doesn't follow from the "if"!
673 - You can get about everything Boyd wants without jettisoning immutability.
674 - According to Boyd, the Bible is more interested in God's moral qualities than metaphysical, which makes the previous discussions even stranger.
680 - Again, confusing various issues with the issue of power.
686-687 - Some question-begging here, it looks like.
693-696 - Girard. I would like to sometime see some real evidence in favor of his stuff. Is it true?
722-725 - Parts of this seem a bit off. Partly because of a reliance on a bad translation of Galatians 3:24.
731-734 - I don't really see what the biblical evidence is that all these laws of passages were meant to be mere object lessons. Boyd quotes from a bunch of people who agree with him, but there isn't really any biblical evidence of convincing depth on display here. So why accept this as opposed to just saying "I don't know why this is here"? I guess relying on that mistranslation again? Other explanations seem to fit actual biblical evidence better. It seems right for some stories, though...
739 - "It follows that" - no, it really doesn't.
772 - The argument vs. immutability in terms of Jesus' feeling divine abandonment isn't very good. It wrongly associates it with Nestorianism (though, since Boyd seems to be leaning into monophysitism, I guess a more central orthodox view would seem more Nestorian). More unnecessary swipes at non-open theists, in other words.
894 - Confused - if the future exists and God knows it from eternity there is no fact of what they will choose eternally preceding it. That fact, if facts exist and have any location at all, is going to be located in my actually performing that action, not as some prior thing constraining or forcing it. Boyd treats such facts as if they were mere programs that somehow the universe is being made to run, which is completely baseless. What he's doing is, in a sense, smuggling his own views of the future into opponents' views and getting the obvious results from that. Why is this here?
908 - Says God restrains, takes options away, but this is supposed to be somehow non-coercive and not violating free will. That sounds good, but doesn't really elaborate enough to see whether what he says is in fact true. How God does this matters, but Boyd doesn't really say how. But we need to know how in order to be able to assess whether it is really noncoercive,etc. or not. He says his view is clear but it isn't - at least not here. Doesn't really address the objection, I think.
923 - Whether we can imagine something and whether it is true or false are two different things.
936-938 - Not really relevant. Guilt-by-association/appeal to supposed consequences not really pertinent. Issue is whether it's true.
965-968 - Argues based on different sources, ignoring his earlier dictum that he was going to deal with the final form of the text. The question is not what sources were like or meant but what does it mean as it is in fact now? What is the meaning with these put together as they are now? Literal hornet  argument not very plausible. No evidence that there was going to be a hornet annoying them so much they would leave of their own accord.
976 - Something's been bugging me and at this point it became clear. Despite his protestations that he is bracketing out historical-critical stuff and focusing on the story itself, he seems to me at least to be confusing the two. He wants to say the conquest was not God's idea. But that's a statement about what really happened - that there was a conquest and that God wanted something and that the Israelites misunderstood. But Boyd is saying he isn't talking about real life, just the story. In the story itself, however, Boyd wants to say it really was God's idea. But he's supposed to be talking about the story. But he's not. That's a bit disorienting.
979-980 - What God said vs. what was heard. Better, I think, and more in tune with inspiration is to distinguish what God said (which is something filtered through culture, etc.) vs. what God meant. Maybe he said "kill" (because that is the word the human author chose in rendering God's will) and meant something other than kill. So it's not that God didn't say that but his less violent meaning was communicated through a more violent human filter.
1001 - "I trust my treatment ...has demonstrated how..." No, not really.
1013-1014 - The identification of Job's accuser and the chaotic force of Sea is not completely convincing - he doesn't seem to appear as the foe here that Boyd thinks of him as.
1061 - Boyd says the "Aikido-like manner" God won on the cross "clarifies both how and why Jesus was punished for the sins of humanity." Maybe it does that with the causal "how", but otherwise I don't really see where Boyd's explained this.
1062 - Says Jesus submitted to being killed by powers/humans and this defeats the "kingdom of darkness" because it "manifested" God's love. How does that work? This isn't really explained - the connection is unclear. Further on, concerning subverting "the myth of redemptive violence", it isn't clear how this is relevant. Again, the issue is whether it is true that is relevant, subversion or no.
1063 - "I trust it is now clear" - no, not really. Nor is the line of thought in the next sentence. At the bottom, the "then" doesn't follow from the "If so", at all.
1067 - Seems to be saying that people who disagree with him about divine violence haven't "yielded to the Spirit." Ouch.
1069 - I'm not sure all these expressions really refer to Satan.
1072 - Not again...
1087 - Again, it's truth that's relevant here, not this stuff.
1157 - Agreed that Carson is "biased in a deterministic direction" in his interpretations, but it's also just as true that Boyd himself is also but in a non-deterministic direction. Actually, though Carson is clearly biased, of course, I think it's not as strong as Boyd thinks it is.
1158 - "I cannot help but see this 'tension' as a blatant contradiction" - well, of course. That's because of your philosophical views. It's not a formal contradiction. There are a lot of statements here about what Boyd cannot do. Surely the question is about the truth of what Carson is saying, not Boyd's personal inability to agree with, understand, or imagine something. It isn't clear how any of Boyd's inabilities here actually support his historical theories.
1211 - I see no reason to think we can't "be genuinely tempted" by something we believe we cannot do. It depends on what it is and why we think we cannot do it (whether it is prevented by our character but we are physically able vs. we are physically unable to do it, for instance). I might genuinely believe it is impossible for me to kill someone but then really want to kill in a certain situation and be sorely tempted by it, even while still thinking that I ultimately won't succumb. This is different from, say, being tempted to fly when I know I don't have the wings for it. One inability is present within my "action-producing system", the other without.

Some Notes on Greg Boyd's Crucifixion of the Warrior God Volume 1

I like reading Greg Boyd but it's a bit of a love-hate relationship with his books that I have - they are generally good reads, very interesting, full of insight and creativity, clarity and faithfulness, but at the same time bad arguments, questionable assumptions, irrelevancies, and similar flaws. I'm now reading his massive two-volume Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Interpreting the Old Testament's Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross. I've just finished Volume 1: The Cruciform Hermeneutic. Through my reading, I've been taking notes of some (not all) of my questions or concerns as I go along. (So, to be clear, a question or concern at one point in the text doesn't mean it isn't answered later in the work - I mostly haven't seen this yet, but am hoping more get addressed in volume two). It's pretty much what I would have expected given my first sentence above and includes many (not so successful, in my opinion) seemingly needless attempts at connecting his open theism with the discussion. I should also note that there was a lot I did agree with, even sometimes when the arguments for what I agreed with were not good (a lack of good arguments doesn't always mean the conclusion isn't right). So without further ado, here are the notes I made on Volume 1 (unfortunately, this won't be very understandable without consulting the book yourself!):

General notes:
-There are way too many irrelevant accusations that various pieces of incorrect (or supposedly incorrect) theology are due in origin to classical theism.
-Much of the "proof" for some of Boyd's assertions in this book amounts to quoting other theologians. More biblical support would be nice.
-It's still not fully clear how the cruciform hermeneutic really is supposed to work. It looks suspiciously like it involves inventing meanings for texts you don't like rather than discovering the meanings they already have. But then the relevant passages would look like they are being retained in the canon in name only, contrary to what Boyd seems to want.
-It seems like in treating the cross as the center of his hermeneutic he is in fact choosing one aspect interpreted in exactly that way that can get the pacifist conclusion he wants, making it absolute, completely exhaustive without any room for further information or truths or contexts, etc. and can only be applied directly in the exact way he wants it to be. There are many weak links here.
-Claims often that opponents' views or methods "can't disclose how the Old Testament's violent divine portraits bear witness to the crucified Christ." But it's not clear what Boyd is demanding here, why we should think his particular demand (as opposed to other potential interpretations of such a principle) is the absolutely correct one, or what meeting it is even supposed to look like.

On specific pages:
70-74+ - Seems to treat the lex talionis as an interpersonal principle - that is, how as a private individual to treat someone who harms you. So he thinks Jesus repudiates the lex talionis in the Sermon on the Mount. But the lex talionis in the OT is actually a principle of legal/judicial action, not of how to respond when someone hurts you. That's part of Jesus' point - whatever might be commanded here, don't take vengeance! But that's not a repudiation of the law itself at all! Boyd doesn't really say anything to argue that the lex talionis really was intended be a principle of personal vengeance, so this section seems to fail. A lot of what follows tends to rest on the success of this, so that's not great for his argument in the larger section. (What's really weird and cuts against what he says here is his agreement that Jesus is not interested in talking about political/legal/judicial stuff)
74-75 - Weirdly, Boyd rests his case against capital punishment or killing of any kind on a story about Jesus that he doesn't think is even canonical. (Later he keeps relying on this as if it was!) I'm not sure how that's supposed to actually support him argument-wise...
150-151 - A bad anti-predestination argument (where by "predestination" I mean the Augustinian-Calvinist variety). There are better arguments than this one on offer, so I'm not sure why he feels the need to offer this seemingly rather poor one. 1) relies on a certain criteria of meaningfulness for a concept such that in order for a concept to be meaningful, those using it have to have something to contrast it with (in some sense of "contrast" not fully explained); 2) assumes that the only possible contrast with the concept of divine love must be some kind of action; 3) assumes without argument that predestination to damnation must of necessity be included in any such contrast or there is no contrast at all; 4) so he concludes that if predestination happened, then the love of God is a meaningless concept. Each of his assumptions in 1-3 are open to serious question!
161-167 - The unity of Christ's life stressed here makes it harder, not easier (contrary to Boyd) to single out the cross as the single defining event. If they're all so interrelated and mutually dependent, etc. this becomes a much more difficult task.
167-170 - Says that the resurrection is not the center since it must be understood in light of the cross. But we could just as easily argue in the opposite direction - that the cross must be understood in light of the resurrection. The atonement must be understood in light of the new creation - means in terms of ends! The resurrection is what justifies the crucifixion. So again, not a great argument here.
chapter 5 - Claims that there are no exceptions to Jesus' commands of nonviolence. But does not give proof that Jesus was speaking about things like official administration of justice within a proper legal/judicial system, etc. After all, Boyd explicitly says elsewhere that Jesus wasn't generally concerned to speak of or to such systems!
226 - Claims that if God ever acted violently that would be hypocritical. But why? Government officials can say not to confine people but are not hypocritical when they put criminals in jail nor are parents hypocritical when they tell their kids that the kids are not allowed to drive the car. Differences in context, authority, position, attributes, etc. do make relevant moral differences!
269-273 - Assumes without any argument at all that issues of divine control and of divine power are pretty much the same. But why?
274 - Not clear what is meant by "wisdom" - weird, unconvincing argument.
384-385 - Odd reasoning in favor of applying the label "Might Makes Right" to the view that divine violence is correct even if we can't see it. The argument is really nonsensical, smuggling in divine power for no apparent relevant reason and making huge, unargued and unwarranted assumptions just to be able to stick a silly label on opponents. What on earth is this even in the book for?
386-387 - Another poor argument against the same view - this time that it would make "good" unintelligible. As if "good" was a purely descriptive word, where the description is what we happen to apply it to in our own human cases (de dicto, not de re) such that any deviation would upend it. But this is pretty implausible (and this sort of argument has been ably refuted elsewhere, so there isn't really much more to add here).
387-388 - Makes claims about competing views that are both unargued and unfair (and inaccurate for many opponents). Also doesn't distinguish between instrumental and non-instrumental value. For instance, sticking a needle in someone is bad in itself but can in some cases be instrumentally good (giving medicine, for instance). Additionally, here and throughout Boyd doesn't really seem to get that there is a distinction between good and right and also between evil and wrong. An intrinsically bad action (sticking needles) can be right in some contexts, for instance. In the same pages, doesn't distinguish between God intentionally hard-wiring our brains a certain way and them being that way through some other explanation (which is odd given that his own theological views actually require such a distinction).
389 - Confuses intuitions in favor of moral rules with intuitions for the exceptionlessness of them. My points just above likely apply here as well - intuition in favor of something always being bad is easily confused with intuition in favor of something always being wrong, for instance. Is it arrogant to think we can perfectly grasp every possible reason or kind of reason such that we can rule out all of them as even possibly justifying an action contrary to a certain moral rule (and carried out by a being very different in position, authority, context, etc. from us)? There is also here an irrelevant objection relating to the supposed "consequences" of opponents' views (as if views have consequences of any kind in and of themselves!).
389-390 - Confuses analogy with qualitative identity. Seems to think we can and do know all the relevant circumstances.
390-392 - More questionable historical diagnoses of unclear relevance. Again, confuses opponents' positions as having something to do with power or the use of it.
404-406 - Thinks that the progressive revelation view which features accommodation to engaging in violence is committed to the cross not being the ultimate revelation. But isn't that rather the point of the view - that the cross is the ultimate revelation and hence the progress and accommodation for earlier violence? That is, that the earlier is merely an accommodation, not ultimately revealing? Further on, Boyd thinks character itself is only how we will or act, which seems to me wrong (character produces will and action - it isn't reducible to it). That's fine if you're a behaviorist, but otherwise it doesn't work well.
406-408 - Assumes progressive revelation can only proceed from falsehood to truth. Why not some truth, then more? Or some ambiguity or unclarity to less? None of these require falsehood and it's weird that he mentions these and then seems to ignore those options.
497ish - Seems to sometimes be saying that it is only via the cross that we can uncover revelation in many OT passages. If so, how then were these passages revelation for its original audience before the cross? If not, what is being said here? What was the nature of OT believers' access to the revelation in the OT in these places?
498-502 - The "Indirect" vs. "Direct" revelation analogy between the cross and the Bible seems a bit strained - they don't seem very analogous here at all. To me, anyway, this seems to confuse rather than clarify.
504-509 - Wants an analogy between proposed exegesis and "prosopological" exegesis which is supposedly in the NT. But it's not clear whether such a thing is even present in the NT as opposed to something similar which uses Scripture in a related way but without it being an exegesis of it.

Notes on Boyd's Satan and the Problem of Evil Chapter 5A

After a brief discussion of some "dynamic theories" of time, I thought I'd return to Boyd and talk about chapter 5 of his book (see here for the previous installment). In this chapter, Boyd really now does confront the issue of how, if there is so much indeterminism and free will going on in the world and God doesn't have EDF (Exhaustive Definite Foreknowledge), God can ensure that certain things happen according to his plan. After all, it sure seems like his creation could just so happen not to cooperate and thus render God's plan ruined. Things could work out, for instance, so that God would not have a people for himself after all since no one ever freely turns to him. Boyd's answer is, roughly, that unpredictability or indeterminism at an individual level is consistent with very good predictability at a larger level. Complex systems with chaotic, indeterministic parts can emerge extremely stable and very predictable. So at a societal level we can almost certainly guarantee that a certain percentage of people will smoke, etc., but we can't do this kind of thing with anything near certainty with a given individual. On the basis of his exhaustive knowledge of his own character and unwillingness to give up and the predictability of human nature in general, God can be certain that a certain percentage of people (or at the very least, some people) will turn to him or would turn to him if there was ever a Fall.

I don't think this response works. Notice that for all the apparent predictability in complex systems, they are still not completely predictable with absolute certainty if they consist of indeterministic pieces and chance at the larger level is not entirely eliminated. But it's not clear how one could have a system for which, at this larger level, there is no chance whatsoever given that it has chancy parts. It would have to be incredibly complex and have extraordinary, perfectly-functioning, indestructible mechanisms existing for the purpose of instantly and completely correcting at the system level sudden aberrant fluctuations of any kind in the behavior of its parts (and of course this would be a problem if the mechanism itself contains indeterministic parts).

Human societies, though, are not like that at all. They are not so insulated and jerry-rigged that they can't deviate from a large scale pattern of change. History depends in large part on the decisions of individuals - individuals which affect other individuals, and so on throughout history. Often, things which weren't inevitable happen, things which change the entire course of history. The actions of Martin Luther are one example - sure, maybe some other person would probably eventually spark a similar kind of religious revolt against Rome but the very specific writings and character of Luther himself had a very specific and very huge impact on Germany and thus on the rest of the world that would have been different if he himself had not been the one to act as he did in all those important moments when he did. Often in history, specific individuals and sometimes even specific actions of particular individuals hold enormous sway over the course of history in a way that simply cannot be predicted if one does not have prior EDF of the way things will turn out.

So in a complex system like human society, there is indeed quite a bit of predictability. The sheer complexity of society does a lot to dampen the effects of chance due to its individual members (this cancelling-out effect is the benefit reaped for larger complex systems - they are much more stable and predictable than smaller, less organized systems). But it does not fully eliminate it. Sure, we can predict fairly well the percentage of people that will smoke. But that's just what most likely will happen. The more complex and organized things are, the less of a chance things will deviate from their predictable path, the more stable a system is, and the less likely a single chance action or event will be able to upset the course of the system. But the system can still be broken out of its path if there is a sufficiently large, widespread breakdown and a huge, coincidental mass of chance fluctuations all around the same time.

It's incredibly improbable - practically impossible even - for my entire body, for instance, to undergo quantum tunneling and suddenly pop out of my current position and appear in, say, China. It's not so improbable with a single one of my particles but for just one of them to do it wouldn't be for me as a whole to do it - that would require a massive coincidental and simultaneous tunneling by most of my particles in the exact right combination, etc. And that's just probably not going to happen. But it's still possible. In the same way, the prediction of the percentage of smokers is what is most likely going to happen but it is still possible for reality to widely deviate from what is most probable - even if it is almost entirely certain. So even though it is massively improbable that no one would ever respond to God's continuous pursuit of us, it is still possible even if the chance of it is vanishingly small. So, contra Boyd, Boyd's view does in fact commit us to the view that God's plans - which are supposed to happen and be assured to happen - may in fact never happen. But since that goes against Scripture, so much the worse for Boyd's view!

Next time...the rest of chapter 5...

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

At the end of chapter four (see here for some criticisms of the first part), Boyd, in Satan and the Problem of Evil, gives what he takes to be scientific and experiential support for his open theism - that is, evidence that is supposed to show that the future does not exist (and hence is not known in an exhaustive definite manner by God). Boyd suggests that science supports this view by appealing to the fact that most plausible interpretations of quantum theory in physics require indeterminism. But of course indeterminism - causal "openness" - is perfectly compatible with the future not being open in Boyd's sense. Indeterminism and eternalism (the view that all times past or present or future exist) are perfectly compatible. It is a common confusion not to notice this, but of course Boyd is pretty much entirely confused throughout this science section. He takes indeterminism to show that the irreversibility of time is real, however, I'm not really sure what he even means by "the irreversibility of time". I take it that he has in mind something like the arrow of time - that is, the directedness of time or the things within it. But of course, indeterminism has no direct bearing on this issue, contra Boyd. A system can be indeterministic in a past-to-future direction, a future-to-past direction, or even both. So indeterminism on its own, even quantum mechanical indeterminism, really says little if anything about Boyd's "irreversibility of time" (despite the people he cites in support of what he says - these are issues that scientists unfortunately often get as confused about as lay people). Thus, contra Boyd, quantum mechanics does not in the slightest support his views and is perfectly compatible with all manner of eternalist or anti-open theist views.

If Boyd's discussion of quantum mechanics was somewhat confused, his discussion of relativity theory is a complete mess. First of all, though, he suggests that Scripture treats God as temporal but I've dealt with these sorts of contentions in this previous post. Boyd then notes that relativity theory doesn't show that time is unreal as if that helped him. But of course those who object to theories like Boyd's based on relativity theory would mostly agree with this, so I'm not sure how this is supposed to be helpful. Boyd claims that the theory does not address the ontological status of the future but this is contentious and, I would suggest, false. For instance, say event E1 is in the absolute future of my current space-time coordinate (pretend for the moment that I'm a point-particle). Now, given relativity, any event E2 which is neither in my absolute past nor present nor "light-like" related to me will be simultaneous with me in some reference frames and not in others (these are called "space-like" related to me). So let us take an event E2 which is very close to the space-time cone carved out by my absolute future. There are parts of my absolute future which, in some reference frames are simultaneous with E2 since they are space-like related to it. Assume E1 is space-like related to E2. Now we have two events - E1 and E2 - which lie on a simultaneity line but one of them - E2 - lies on such a line with me and the other lies in my absolute future. So there's no room to say that E1 doesn't exist since it lies on a simultaneity line with E2, which also exists, and everything which lies on a single simultaneity line is equally real. So Boyd (or Capek, who he cites) really can't get out of eternalism without reinterpreting relativity theory or treating it merely instrumentally (which sometimes Boyd confusingly sounds like he's doing, other times not - I'm not sure even he knows exactly what he's trying to do here). The rest of Boyd's discussion is basically the same as the mass of confusions he's posted on his blog and which I've addressed previously in this post.

In response to the argument that time was created with creation and since God is above creation he is above time, Boyd confusingly tries to respond to this by saying that God's experience or measurement of time is different than ours. But that doesn't even address the argument at all since it wasn't about experience or measurement in the first place - this is a metaphysical or physical argument based on the nature of God and the apparent fact that our time dimension is essentially a component of our space-time universe and hence cannot have existed outside of it. I'm really not sure what Boyd was after when he started talking about measurements here.

Boyd's argument from experience is essentially this - our experience of ourselves as free and morally responsible presupposes or is the same as an experience of ourselves as being undetermined. But of course this, again, does not support his views in the slightest. As I've said previously, indeterminism is perfectly compatible with eternalism or anti-open theism. So again, nothing Boyd says here provides even the slightest shred of evidence for his views.

Next time, more on Boyd's book...

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...

Replies ad infinitum

Here is a reply to my reply to a reply to my reply to a paper. And my reply to that reply to...wait, where was I?

A Couple of Comments on Gregory Boyd on Relativity Theory

In a recent post on his blog, Gregory Boyd says the following (in comments about the recent Quincy Science and Theology Conference):

We all know thawt Relativity Theory stipulates that the NOW of every finite perspective cannot be absolutely correlated with the NOW of any other finite perspective, since WHEN an event happens depends on WHERE you are, and HOW FAST you're traveling, relative to the event in question. Yet, each finite perspective has ITSELF as a NOW, and this NOW has a real "before" and a real "after." So the universe is comprised of all finite perspectives with their own NOW and their own "BEFORE" and "AFTER." (In relativity language, each perspective has its own "time cone").Now, if we believe in an omnipresent God, God would be internally present to, and thus contemporaneous with, each finite perspective, and thus each NOW. God could therefore have -- indeed, MUST have -- a "NOW" that synchronizes and integrates ALL finite perspectives. Thus, for God, there is an absolute NOW that encompasses all NOWS. So even with Relativity Theory, I argued, God and the universe are moving forward from a real past to a real future...

But none of this actually works given Relativity as it stands (you could, of course, decide to reject Relativity as being literally true but that would be a different move, though more common). When Boyd talks about "perspectives" the only thing I can think of that he might mean is a space-time point or a space-time point considered in a particular frame of reference (given what he says about perspectives having an absolute earlier and later there really isn't much else he could mean in the context of Relativity Theory). But then, if God's NOW is just the

combination of all NOWs and each perspective is its own NOW then God's NOW would just be the whole space-time universe. How do you get a real past and future just from that or any movement from one to the other? This isn't to say that there is no past or future or anything that might be called "flow" (I think there is, though I think the tensed version of this is incorrect). It's just that Boyd's idea doesn't seem to get him anything like what he might want.

He also reports on this:

But the main topic for the day was what science has to say about the nature of time. Among the many things Robert said was that there are 7 indicators in science (as we presently understand it) that suggest that the flow of time from the past to the future is real. (This is very important since the flow of time has for the most part been considered superfluous for the physical sciences, since most equations work forward or backward. Prediction and retrodiction are essentially the same).I don't have time to explain these, but for those who are curious, these 7 arguments are:

1) Cosmological: Evidence of the big bang suggests the universe is moving from a start in the past to a finish in the future.

2) Radioactive: Light and sound diverge outward but don't converge inward.

3) Thermodynamics: Disorder increases over time. (This is the famous "Second Law of Thermodynamics").

4) Gravitational: Black holes absorb all matter in a one way motion. There are no "white holes" that reverse the process.

5) Subatomic: Anti-kaons (the anti-matter of kaons) disintegrate faster than kaons.

6) Measurement: The collapse of the quantum wave is irreversible.
And....

7) Psychological: People uniformly remember the past and anticipate the future. (This one, of course, is not a strictly scientific piece of evidence, but perhaps Mann included it simply because its a phenomenon that needs explaining.)

...At one point Mann seemed to suggest that Special and General Relativity Theory entailed a "block view" of the universe (this is the view that the past, present, and future are timelessly present as a sort of settled block. The flow of time, in other words, is not real ).

Of course, all of those things do indicate that there is flow to time - they simply do not, however, indicate that there is flow in the sense that tensed theorists like Boyd want there to be. What these things indicate is that time has an arrow, but that doesn't have much to do with whether there is a block universe or not (if by "block universe" all we mean is the view that all times are equally real, existent, and determinate - this may not be exactly what Boyd has in mind, though I'm not sure what else he might mean since a block universe in this sense does not have all times being "timelessly present"). Again, nothing here to write home about from the perspective of a tensed theorist or open theist.

Discussions About A Recent Post

Philosopher Alan Rhoda has responded on his blog to my earlier post on his (co-authored) pro-open theism paper in Faith and Philosophy. So it's a reply to a reply. And to get the discussion going even further, I've issued my own reply to his reply to my reply to his paper (whew!). Check out the discussion here.

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.

Open Theism, the Future, and Free Will - Comments on Some Recent Articles Pt. 1

In the Fall 2006 issue and Winter 2007 issues of Faith and Philosophy (which I've just recently received), there are a number of interesting articles, two of them from an open theist perspective. While some of their arguments I could agree with, their arguments in favor of one or another open theist position left something to be desired. I'll tackle these in chronological order in two different posts.

First we have a paper, "Open Theism, Omniscience, and the Nature of the Future", by Alan Rhoda, Greg Boyd (the Evangelical Godfather of open theism), and Thomas Belt. One of things they do is to argue that the future's causal openness (that is, the state of affairs where the future is not causally determined to be a certain way) is incompatible with the denial of semantic openness for associated future-tensed sentences (a sentence is semantically open if it is neither determinately true nor determinately false). They argue for this incompatibilism by arguing that 'will' in normal cases has 'causative force' - when we utter such future-tensed sentences we are indicating that there is some (high, perhaps) causal probability that what we are saying is going to occur. And supposedly that shows that if the future is causally open then such sentences cannot be semantically closed. But if 'will' does have causative force, that to me still doesn't seem to decide the issue in favor of their incompatibilism unless they simply already assume that if 'It will be the case that p' has causative force that must be because it means something like what their semantics says it does and includes that causitive factor already in the way the semantics works. But why think that unless one were already antecedently convinced of something like open theism? Why think the causative force must show up in the semantics? After all, there's a very important distinction between saying and indicating - when I say that p, I am also indicating that I believe that p, but 'p' in my mouth doesn't have anything about me in its semantics. So 'It will be the case that p' may very well indicate something causal without that showing up in the semantics at all. In fact, their whole argument seems to trade on a confusion between evidence or conditions of rational assertibility on the one hand and truth conditions or semantics on the other. Just because the causal probability of p is a condition for its rational assertion doesn't mean its a condition for its truth. All sorts of things show up in the conditions for all sorts of propositions' rational assertibility without them being conditions on truth. Only a verificationist would want to deny this - but this seems to be what the authors need to affirm to get to their conclusion of incompatibilism. So the argument is just awful.

But let's say 'will' does function in the way the authors suggest. This tells us nothing about tenseless sentences that don't use 'will'. So you can still have sentences about the future with determinate truth values so long as you don't use 'will'. Or if that's not kosher, we could decide to use 'will' stripped of its causal significance and so still have sentences about the future with determinate truth values even in the face of causal openness. So who cares, ultimately, about whether 'will' has causative force or not? Maybe it does, but so normally does 'if' and we can perfectly well use that stripped of causal significance as well. So in sum, their argument for incompatibilism doesn't really even begin to get off the ground (unless of course they are already assuming that the future doesn't exist, but that would be a very different argument which they give later - one that I'm quite happy with since I deny the assumption).

Report on the APA

Sorry about the lack of blogging lately - I've been in the Bay Area at the annual Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association. It was kinda cool seeing all these famous people and not knowing they were famous people until someone called them by name. Anyway, I caught the first two sessions of the second and last day of the Mini-Conference on Models of God and it was semi-interesting. I sat in for the first session on open theism, which was interesting. Alan Rhoda made the good point, which I had not considered before, that an open theist might take the point of view that the future is settled in the sense that every meaningful statement about the future is either determinately true or determinately false. This sort of open theist, by stating that God does not know all future contingents, denies that God knows everything - there are truths about the future that God just doesn't know. I think that's not a very plausible position to take, if not incoherent, but it's a point well-taken that this sort of position would also count as an open theist position.

Another panelist made the claim that a lot of the debaters in the controversy over open theism are simply evaluating things based on differing values or ordering of values. For instance, non-open theists think that a God who takes risks is somehow less than God - it is not befitting of God or his greatness. Open theists respond that, on the contrary, a God who doesn't is somehow less than God - it is not befitting of God or his greatness to constrain people. This clearly seems to be a disagreement about values at the fundamental level - if you start with grandeur then you're not likely to be an open theist whereas if you start with love and self-sacrifice you are more likely to be one. While much of this debate may be like this, however, I think a lot of it is not. Whether open theism can do justice to biblical prophecy, biblical teaching on God's knowledge and control, whether it can provide a coherent or plausible view of time and God, and so on are not subjects in which values mainly come to the fore - these are primarily exegetical and metaphysical issues.

Another one of the panelists reported and agreed with the writings of some open theist scholar to the effect that the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, far from being influenced by or a product of Greek philosophical thought as is sometimes claimed, was actually a reaction to such influence. According to this viewpoint, Arius and other heterodox thinkers, influenced by Greek ideas of the kinds of gulfs between human and divine and oneness and simplicity, etc., objected to the deity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity was an attempt to resist what was thought to be an effort to squeeze the Divine Persons into the procrustean bed built for it by Greek thought and sensibilities. He also claimed, however, that Trinitarianism was the answer to the anti-open theism of the day and that reflection on the Trinity demands open theism. This move, however, was vastly unclear and I really have no idea how one is supposed to get from Trinity to God not knowing future contingents - this was quite a leap.

I also saw the panel on panentheism but this was pretty unclear and boring (at least to me). The first speaker was not a native speaker and unfortunately I wasn't able to clearly make out a lot of what he said because the accent was so thick. So I wasn't quite sure what his paper was about and he wasn't quite sure what was going on when audience members asked questions, which was too bad. Panentheism (for those who don't know) is, by the way, the view that God includes the world in himself. God is more than the world, but the world is not a separate being from God even though God and the world are different entities. The basic metaphor of many panentheists is that the world is "God's body" in some weird sense. I'm not sure about the whole "God's body" thing - which is pretty weird - but something like panentheism used to be highly attractive to me. I think an adequate theory of God ought to take on the kernel of truth in panentheism but jettison the whole "God's body" business and treating the physical world as if it was a literal proper part of God.

In the remainder of the conference, I went to a lot of talks. A lot were hard for me to follow and I didn't get much out of them - this was most of the time due to lack of sleep, my generally poor attention span even under normal conditions, being too far in the back or unable to see the speaker well, etc. A few of the ones of note from Thursday and Friday: David Papineau argued that identity theorists must not really fully believe mind-brain identity since even to them the association seems contingent. If they really fully believed it, this wouldn't even appear contingent to them. David Chalmers noted that in a substantive dispute, the terminological dispute associated with the dispute is due to the dispute itself whereas in a merely terminological dispute the order of dependency is reversed. Chalmers gave a heuristic for uncovering merely terminological disputes: disallow the offending the word and make each party rephrase their position without it. If the respective rephrasings do not conflict, this is a merely terminological dispute. If they do, then it isn't. Some words, however, cannot be so eliminated. Chalmers dubs these "bedrock" and debates involving these words are probably going to be substantive rather than merely terminological since there are no more basic words in which to frame the disagreement and display the lack of substantive disagreement.

On Saturday morning, I commented on Stephan Torre's paper "In Defense of a Formulation of the Date Theory" (I think I got that title about right). It went pretty well. I'll have to keep in touch with Stephan since we have some similar projects in trying to defend a tenseless view of time. The last time session of Saturday was on a paper attempting to show that our temporal biases in our concern for others is conflicted and irrational. Our very own Cody Gilmore commented on the paper and argued against the thesis. During the discussion period, I offered some objections of my own. At a session on perception later that day, all I remember is that the idea of a Spinozistic system was introduced. In a Spinozistic system (perhaps perception is one of these as is testimony), this system directly gives us a belief which we only afterwards evaluate and decide whether to reject it or keep it. This nicely explains how brainwashing and cult indoctrination works - keep telling people stuff often enough and don't give them the opportunity or ability to evaluate or decide for themselves whether to keep such beliefs and they will keep them by default.

At the Society for the Philosophy of Time group meeting Saturday night, Cody presented the idea of a new theory of persistence - distension theory. According to this theory, objects wholly occupy temporally thick regions of spacetime where the thickness is determined by size, complexity, and kind. This is a pretty interesting view, and congenial to me in various ways. It's definitely better than endurantism, I think, but I'll have to think more about how it compares with perdurantism.

This coming Saturday - another conference in the Bay Area...

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.