If we suppose that future contingents have truth value (which is very hard to deny), it's embarrassing to preserve God's omniscience by insisting that he doesn't form any such beliefs. We do, and it risks global skepticism to insist that we don't know such parts of the future on occasion (our evidence is often as good for such claims as it is that there is a tree in our backyard). But then we've got an account where God is omniscient, but doesn't know some things that I know. Very embarrassing...

So I take it that Jon thinks a move to the Aristotelian solution would be very embarrassing. I am not so prideful that I would be embarrassed at being wrong, and if moving to the Aristotelian solution is wrong I would be happy to see the error of my ways. Perhaps I am simply attracted to it because I am a sucker for underdog causes. (Rooting for underdog causes is a particularly American trait.)

Perhaps I could prevail upon Jon to be more explicit as to why future contingents have truth values? It seems to me, and bear in mind I am a real junior here, that future contingents only become true when the future event occurs. I might have high probabilities about the truth value of future contingents, but if we know the truth value of future contingents then they cease to be contingent.

If we suppose that propositions about future contingent states-of-affairs don't have truth-values before they obtain, it doesn't follow that God doesn't consider the propositions about the future. We don't get global skepticism either. I also don't see how it would follow that God wouldn't know what I know from this.

God has better inductive evidence than I do about my behavior. He can consider the propositions about the future and assign the best evidenced probabilities to their truth. About everybody's. He still knows more than anybody, as much as anything can possibly know. We can still justifiably believe that the future will turn out as we think, this too based on induction.

I guess I just don't see the problem yet. But, I see a potential benefit. We have a way to reconcile theological fatalism.

Matt, maybe this might help see Jon's concern. Suppose for a moment that I have some friend, say, Rachael. She has always been reliable in the past with me, never failing to show up to any of our scheduled activities. She and I chatted yesterday and we planned on meeting at some particular place, x, for lunch tomorrow. So, given my experience with her in the past, do I know that she will meet me as planned for tomorrow?

Of course, Rachael could get into a car accident and fail to show up. But the probability of this, or any other reason to not show, is much lower than the probability that she will freely keep her word (or nonintentionally be kept from showing up). These type of cases, I think (and maybe Jon does too) present the strong intuition that we can know future contingents. And if we can, it *would* be embarrassing to say God does not. Perhaps this was what Christian was getting at with the paragraph about God knowing our behavior, even better than ourselves.

So, the reason or argument is something like this: (1) we know propositions in which their content includes future contingent states of affairs; (2) truth is a necessary condition for knowledge; thus, (3) propositions whose content includes future contingent states of affairs can have truth value.

But then you noted that if we know such things, the state of affairs cease to be contingent. Well, I happen to like Pike's argument and so to a degree, I can't argue that! On the other hand, does knowing some state of affairs will occur entail that the state of affairs is not contingent? Perhaps not if one's knowledge doesn't amount to certainty. Maybe you're not convinced yet? Anyway, I gave it a shot! :)

James's account of my concerns is excellent! I'll only add one small point on the loss of contingency. The fundamental problem for theological fatalism is explaining how it is true while still denying that logical fatalism is true. After all, if the theo part of fatalism isn't really central to the position, then let's drop it and just think about logical fatalism--that's what the Greeks did!

Here it's crucial to understand logical fatalism, the position that there is only one possible world. The argument for it proceeds by noticing that sentences about the future are true. But if they are true, there's another truth: they've always been true. This latter claim starts with a past tense operator, so appears to be a truth about the past. Since you can't change the past, the future is unavoidable.

Now, if my knowing the future relieves it of its contingency, we have nothing more than a variant of this argument for logical fatalism. And then theological fatalism is just a trivial extension of the view.

The really interesting question is whether there is something about God's knowledge that relieves the future of its contingency. And notice that Pike's argument simply doesn't work unless you're talking about God rather than one of us.

It's not clear Aristotle held the view you're talking about. Aristotle scholars, apparently, aren't in agreement on this.

I think it's important to distinguish two things. Contingency here, presumably, is about whether alternative futures are possible. Contingency, therefore, is consistent with one of them being true. It seems to me that you're confusing truth with necessity if you think truth prevents something from being contingent. It's necessity that prevents contingency. Truth doesn't. Otherwise, we couldn't say that there are any contingent truths now. There couldn't be contingent truths at all, since it would be a contradiction. That's why I've never been moved by this view attributed to Aristotle.

I've looked over the Zagzebski entry more carefully now, and I was reminded of one element of her previous work on this that struck me as insightful and absolutely right, and that's what she says toward the end in the section entitled "Beyond Fatalism". Her paper Omniscience and the Arrow of Time is excellent on this, but much of the structure of that paper is here without the detailed arguments for each of her points. I tend to think she's right about the causal directionality being misleading and thus leading to the false conclusions that there is a kind of necessity about the past. Dummett has an excellent paper arguing that we can cause things to have happened in the past through prayer about things that have happened but about which we don't know the result, and everything Dummett says is consistent with libertarian freedom, divine foreknowledge, and the impossibility of backward time travel. If Dummett is right, then someone is wrong with the necessity of the past, or at least with the work it's being put to in this argument.

It is hard to think much less write when the heat index in peaking at 110 degrees, but such good responses deserve a reply. I suppose that if I am going to entertain the Aristotelian solution I should at least be prepared to offer some defense of the position. As an aside I should mention that I ran this problem by my non-philosopher wife. She intuitively espoused the Frankfurtian/Augustinian solution and told me I was being ridiculous thinking otherwise.

Jeremy-

I know that it is not clear whether or not Aristotle held the view we are talking about. However, most of the literature I have seen calls it the Aristotelian solution so I am just sticking with the herd.

James, Jon & Jeremy-

To answer Jon’s concern, the only answers the logical fatalism that I am aware of turn out to be Aristotelian in nature. So my concern about theological fatalism is in part a concern about the nature of God’s knowledge, and secondarily about how if theological fatalism is true that logical fatalism is false.

In the case that James provides it seems clear that the extent to which we can know future contingents is weak. Actually I do am not sure that we can say that we know a future contingent at all on a TJB account of knowledge. We may have a justified belief that Rachael will show for our meeting, but it does not turn out to be true until she actually arrives. The James would say ''I knew you would come!''� However, it is dubious to me that he ever knew such a thing.

I said knowledge of future contingents is weak, which I mean in the sense that it is only probabilistic knowledge. There are a great number of cases in which we will lack a great deal of certainty about such knowledge. Yet in the case of God his cannot be probabilistic knowledge with questionable certainty. God’s knowledge is certain and necessary. This seems to be the rub. If God knows a certain state of affairs will achieve then it is not contingent. It seems that God’s knowledge must rob the world of its contingency because there is no state of affairs wherein we could have chosen otherwise.

Hi Matt. I'm a little confused on what your claim is then. Above, you stated that "future contingents only become true when the future event occurs." I replied that this seems worrisome because of cases like my knowing Rachael would meet me for lunch seems to suggest that propositions whose content includes some future contingent state of affairs *do* have a truth value. At least, following Jon and being a particularist (in the Chisholmian sense) by starting with what seem to be instances of knowledge, my knowing such a proposition, though without certainty, seems to be a reasonable supposition on our part, and a counterexample to your claim here.

Now, however, we do in fact know such things, but only weakly (i.e. probabilistically). So, it seems like a rejection of the earlier claim just commented on. But this seems problematic too, if I am following your strategy, because admitting truth-values to propositions that are about future contingent SOA requires an account of God's knowledge of such propositions. I suppose you could adopt the view that God knows such things only weakly, but I take it this isn't a live option for you. As far as I can tell, this leaves you with the following options: (a) if God knows such things with certainty and there is a truth value to such propositions, then you lose your freedom insofar as freedom requires the ability to do otherwise; or (b) there is no truth value to such propositions and so God doesn't know them, we keep our freedom, but we lose even our weak knowledge of future contingents (the weak "knowledge" turns out to be justified or unjustified guesses). If this is correct, the landscape is not very attractive!

It seems to me absurd to think that God could lack knowledge of our future. For one thing,

this would imply that God is limited in some way by time, and for another, this would

discredit prophecy (and thus much of scripture).

If there is a truth about the future (eg., that I will go to work tomorrow, or that I won't,

whichever is the case), then God knows it. Furthermore, he knows it immediately, not

inductively, or as Aquinas might say, discursively.

Does this eliminate our freedom? I suppose that depends on what we take our freedom to

consist in.

1. Augustine, among others, seems to think that freedom, as something good, consists in a

good moral choice, namely, to conform our will and actions to what God wants, which is what

is best for us anyway. We could choose to do evil, but as St. Paul points out, this is

hardly an example of freedom, since it really means that we are enslaving ourselves to sin

(or error) and bodily desires which make us less like God, rather than more.

2. On the other hand, we could consider freedom to be power, or ability to carry out our

will. In this case, freedom is not unambiguously a good thing. In this case, it seems to

be irrelevant whether God knows what we will do.

3. The freedom that God's knowledge seems to limit is our freedom of thought. If we know

that something in the future will happen regardless of our behavior, it is pointless for us

to think it might be otherwise, and so we will not consider any alternatives. Our thought will be limited to one possibility only. We limit our own thought when we consider that only one alternative is possible or good. However, we don't know very much of what God knows about the future, so this limit on our freedom is negligible. Besides, I don't think we would actually consider it a loss of freedom if we came to know the truth about the future, rather than speculating all the possibilities, just as we don't consider it a loss to know the truth about the past, rather than being able to generate our own memories.

Perhaps I have not really addressed your concerns about God's foreknowledge. If so, let me know!

James-

I am sure your confusion is in some way my fault. When one goes from 110-degree heat to a 68-degree air-conditioned office a fine patina of frost forms over the brain. I suppose at this point I should admit that I have given up my apostasy and returned to the fold, but I am capable of backsliding at any moment. However, I am still interested in pushing the unknowability question a little further if only for my own better understanding.

When I said that I am concerned with the nature of God’s knowledge it is not that I think that God’s foreknowledge in and of itself rules out that we would not have freedom, but that the way God comes knows might rule out human freedom. So I think you would need to modify your (a) since it is not simply God's knowledge but how he comes to have that knowledge that would seem to limit our ability to chose otherwise. I probably should have been more explicit to begin with. This is what happens when one makes off the cuff comments.

To attempt to clear up any confusion over my claim about truth-values, what I was endeavoring to argue for is along the lines of Steven Cahn's solution to the problem of logical fatalism. Cahn proposes a three-valued logic in which propositions can be true, false, or indeterminate. Propositions about future contingents then have an indeterminate truth-value. So when you claim that Rachael is coming tomorrow your statement has an indeterminate truth-value, but the truth-value changes on the following day based on whether or not Rachael actually arrives. One consequence of this is that we have to reject the view that truth-values are unchanging. The other more pressing problem for me is that it would seem to limit God's knowledge to a greater degree than I desire.

I will admit that I am a limited skeptic about future knowledge. In the case of Rachael it does seem to me that you simply have a justified belief. I take it that we can know things about the present and about the past, but in the case of future contingents it doesn’t seem to me that we can say that we know until the SOA achieves. You think that having justified guesses makes for an unattractive landscape but I am not sure why. It appears to me that when you say I know Rachael will show up that you are simply saying Rachael will probably show up. It is knowledge of a sort but I don’t think it is knowledge of the TJB sort.

Matthew K. S.

I’m sorry you find it an absurd proposition, but to be clear I was not saying that God would lack all knowledge of our future only knowledge of future contingents. In the view I was pushing God doesn’t lack knowledge because he still knows all that is knowable. I suppose it is a difference in how we view omniscience. I like the way Jon frames this in his paper Unknowable Truths and the Doctrine of Omniscience

“The doctrine of omniscience has been understood in two ways. Roughly, it has been taken either as the claim that God knows all that is true or as the claim that God knows all that can be known. The first construal I shall call the traditional construal, and the second I shall call a limited construal. Though the traditional construal would seem to be the natural one to hold, considerations of the analogy between the best construals of the doctrine of omnipotence have suggested to some that a limited construal is prefera). In particular, some have claimed that one should be careful to construe the doctrine of omnipotence, not as the claim that God can do everything, but as the claim that God can do everything that can he done; thus, it might seem that we should clarify the doctrine of omniscience, not as the claim that God knows everything true, but everything that can be known.”

Two further points in reply. 1) There might be good reason to think that God is in some way limited by time. While it would take a whole post of its own there is some good literature on God’s eternalness and whether it should be viewed as timeless or as everlasting. There are some good arguments on both sides but I think there are some good reasons to think of God’s eternalness as being God everlasting. 2) It isn’t God’s knowledge that is the limiting factor, but how God comes to know that is troubling. I take it that you think god knows immediately because he is outside of time. However this timelessness thesis seems to be fraught with problems of its own (see 1).

Thank you for your reply, Mr. Mullins. Unfortunately, your position is still unclear to me in two respects. First of all, you seem to be saying that there is a difference between what is knowable and the truth. I agree that we can only expect God to know the knowable, but do you mean that some of the truth is not knowable? I don’t think a proposition can be true and unknowable at the same time.

Perhaps you are making a distinction between how propositions are a) unknowable at the time (in this way future contingents are unknowable to us), or unknowable by some other accident of location, sensory ability, etc., and b) a proposition which cannot be known by anyone at any time, in principle, as it were. Here we have the ancient distinction between relative (unknowability) and absolute.

Something which is in principle (or “absolutely”) unknowable would be in principle untrue (eg. a self-contradictory statement such as “I am sitting down and I am in no way sitting down.”). On the other hand, a proposition which is true is always knowable in principle, although our physical or temporal limitations may prevent us from knowing it. We may not know whether there were “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, and may never know, but that does not mean that the truth about their presence there at the time of the invasion is simply unknowable. We are limited by time, and especially the need to devote so much of our time to making a living. But clearly God must know the truth about the alleged WMDs.

I take it that you would agree that God is not bound by the same physical constraints we are. Here are some reasons for thinking that God is not bound by temporal restraints either.

1. It cannot be true that God is unchanging, but that his lifetime, knowledge, sensations, and hopes are constantly being added to, as ours is.
2. It cannot be true that God is infinite but that he then adds time to his existence.
3. It cannot be true that God is absolutely wise, but at the same time is not sure what the result of his actions will be.
4. Finally, time is only measured by a series of physical or mental changes, but God is not in a body and does not change his opinion on anything.

It may be argued from scripture that God is portrayed as changing his mind or reacting to things, but he is just as often portrayed (especially in the Psalms and the New Testament) as unchanging. I suppose one might say that He is not eternal, but simply everlasting. This is the second point which is unclear to me. Once again, there doesn’t seem to be any real distinction here.

For God to be everlasting, he must be incorruptible (as Augustine says), that is, not capable of being diminished in any way. But then God must also be incapable of becoming any better than He is, since that would mean that He could also become worse again. Thus, to be incorruptible, God must be unchanging. To be unchanging, God must not have a beginning or end. Thus, God must be eternal.

If I’ve missed your point, let me know.