HRG, thanks for your comments.
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God does not know "the future", if he is atemporal, simply because he does not think of it as the future. God's knowledge includes knowledge of all events, where these are represented as the contents of the 4-space "block" universe.
We should be careful to distinguish between our description of the universe (as a space-time block) and the universe itself, which may be a random process
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I don't see the relevance. Of course we should always distinguish between things and their descriptions. But here the point is that the universe could be random, in that it could contain causal indeterminacies at various temporal points (perhaps at all of them), and yet form a determinate structure in 4-space. Think of that structure as just a list of everything that ever happens in the universe. The things listed can include events like "Q indeterministically occurs at t", without it being indeterminate what's written on the list.
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It can be a fact about the block universe that S does x at t -- hey, lucky x; I've seen S! -- as a matter of free will, and thus that it was not "predetermined", ie, *determined* prior to t, that S would do so.
S can be predetermined to do x at t. But S cannot be predetermined to do x at t as a matter of free will, no more that he can be predetermined to draw a square circle. Predetermination eo ipso excludes free will.
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Well, I showed that S's action is *not* predetermined. So I'm not sure who you're responding to with this.
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God's knowing every truth does not determine every truth "in advance", simply because God doesn't know them "in advance". He just knows them, tenselessly, period.
The contradiction with free will occurs as soon as there is a fact about the future to be known, no matter by whom. X has free will means that some statements about future actions of X can never be facts today.
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Your last claim seems a bit confused. But in any event, you don't seem to be engaging what I actually wrote. God does not know a fact about the future. It is not that God knows at t what will happen at t', hence what will happen at t' is determined at t and cannot then turn out otherwise. Rather, the whole point is that God's knowledge (working within the myth) is atemporal. So his knowing all truths does not determine the truths "in advance" -- he doesn't know them "in advance", because he is atemporal. His knowledge is complete and tenseless. So if the spatio-temporal universe contains the event of S's freely doing x at t, God knows this, since he knows the entire contents of the universe. What does he know? That S *freely* does x at t. There's no problem... once you allow the notion of an atemporal agent.
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Notice: even if his knowing them entails their necessity, this is consistent with whatever notion of free will the Christian might spell out. If it's a necessary truth that S *freely* does x at t, then it's true that S freely does x at t.
Similarly to above: that S freely does X at t can never be a necessary truth. Free will entails that both "S does X at t" and "S does Y at t" (Y <> X) are possible; thus none of them can be a necessary truth.
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In fact,
necessarily possibly P reduces to
possibly P in modal logic S5. But whatever. This is a tricky point about the identity conditions of the complete spatio-temporal universe, and is not entirely clear in my mind. Something like: it can be a necessary condition on the identity of the actual totality of events, that one of those events is, say, S's freely doing x.
The essential point, though, is that an atemporal God's knowledge of every event does not amount to a predetermination of those events -- because by definition an atemporal God does not "pre-know" the events.
[ May 20, 2002: Message edited by: Clutch ]</p>
05-20-2002, 07:24 AM
