Taffy Lewis

If omniscience is defined as "all knowing", then it seems that it does not entail foreknowledge. The reason is simply because the future may be indeterminate.

An indeterminate future means that the future consists of possibilities. If this is so there is nothing to know with regard to the future apart from what is possible. If there are no other facts about the future apart from possibilities then one is not ignorant of any fact if one does not know what will happen. In fact, the expression "what will happen" presupposes that the future is not indeterminate.

If the future is indeterminate, sentences such as "I don't know what will happen." do not entail that there are facts that I am ignorant of. The fact that such sentences seem to suggest this may explain why so many theists and atheists are misled into believing omniscience entails foreknowledge.

Zadok001

This is certainly a reasonable assertion.

However, any such entity would not have the ability to give prophecies. So you can't consider the VAST majority of deities using this idea.

Taffy Lewis

Zadok001,

Thanks for your response.

This isn't true. There are at least two reasons to believe that prophecy would still be possible.

(1) The theist is not committed to saying that every future event is indeterminate. It may be that many of our actions are compelled and we are simply not free in an incompatibilist sense. Some such cases are considered to be pathological such as when someone is compelled to gamble or use drugs. But the fact remains that many of our actions are not free in an incompatibilist sense. In addition, it could be true that many future events are determined by physical law. The theist need only believe that quite a bit of the future is indeterminate in order to preserve creaturely freedom.

(2) The theist could claim that God can give reliable information about what will happen because he may decide to cause certain events to happen. For example, I might claim that tomorrow I will go to work. If I am all powerful and all knowing then nothing can prevent this from happening. So it would be correct to say that this event will happen. God can "know" the future in the trivial sense that you can I can know it, by simply fulfilling our intentions.

Clutch

Nope, omniscience only means knowing every truth. If there's no truths about the future, an omniscient agent need not know them! But to be omniscient without knowing the future (in human terms) requires not just that the future be indeterminate. It requires that the agent be temporally embedded. If the agent is outside of time, indeterminacy doesn't matter.

In a similar vein: People like Calvinists seem to miss that an atemporal god can know the future without the future's being determinate. For such a god, it's just not "future knowledge", "foreknowledge", or any other tensed notion. His knowledge is tenseless, and boils down to knowing the structure of all of spacetime. Because by definition he doesn't know it "in advance", this does not require anything like predestination.

Of course, the notion of an atemporal agent is loony.

bd-from-kg

Taffy Lewis:

That doesn't follow. Perhaps the future is not "contained in the present" in the sense that there are deterministic laws. But it is determinate in the simple logical sense that what's going to happen tomorrow is going to happen tomorrow.

Omniscience isn't defined as "knowing whatever can be deduced from the current state of affairs". It's defined as follows: B is omniscient if, for any proposition P, B knows that P if and only if P. Thus if it's going to rain here on December 19, 2055, an omniscient being knows that it's going to rain here on December 19, 2055, for the simple reason that this is a true proposition.

Besides, God created this Universe and therefore cannot be bound by it. In other words, He cannot exist in what we call time, although it's logically possible that He experiences a succession of states and in that sense lives in some sort of "time" of His own.

The notion that God lives in this world's time is in any case made completely untenable by general relativity. Time is relative. If we ask which of a number of events in a distant galaxy are in the "past" and which in the "future", there is no objectively correct answer. In other words, there is no universal "now". Two beings at different places cannot "synchronize their watches" until they agree on a coordinate frame to use, and there is no "preferred" or "objectively correct" coordinate frame. In fact, time doesn't even "flow" at the same rate in different coordinate frames. Thus it doesn't make sense to say that God is "omnipresent" in the sense of being in all places "at the same time" unless you are also prepared to say that God is present (at the very least) at a wide variety of times; ultimately you're forced to say that He is present a all times. Or in other words, to say that He can't "see" the future in one coordinate frame is to say that in another coordinate frame He can't see the past. What kind of a God is that? Not being able to make predictions is bad enough, but not being able even to make postdictions is ridiculous.

Kenny

Hello Bd,

First, let me say that I agree with a block theory of time and I do think that relativity is most favorable to such a view. However, some recent reading has indicated to me that not all philosophers share this interpretation of relativity. I wonder if relativity itself is genuinely inconsistent with the metaphysical notion that time passes in some sense so that the past and future are not real, but that only the present is real.

It is true that relativity of simultaneity means that in some reference frames the temporal orderings of space-like separated events are reversed with respect to their temporal orderings in other reference frames. However, the temporal orderings of time-like separated events are the same in all reference frames – hence, relativity preserves the temporal ordering of causally related events and no information can be transmitted from a future point in time to a past point in time (provided the speed of light barrier is not broken, of course). Could it be consistently held that this irreversibility of causal orderings results from the deeper metaphysical reality that the future does not actually exist with respect to the present and that the apparent reversal of temporal orderings of space-like separated events is nothing more than an artifact of how we are forced to measure things. In other words, on this interpretation, relativity would simply be describing how our measurements of time (including our measurements of temporal ordering) will turn out, but it is telling us precious little about the metaphysics time itself.

Now, I want to reiterate that I do not share the above view, and I think it ought to be rejected, if for no other reason, on the grounds of parsimony (the standard interpretation of relativity is simpler in my view). Furthermore, since I am very much opposed to theological moves that attempt to deny God’s foreknowledge (such as those of process theology or open theism), I would very much like to have a definitive refutation of the notion. But, still, the view I describe above seems consistent. I’m curious as to what your thoughts (or anyone else’s) are on the matter.

God Bless,
Kenny

Kenny

This is debatable also. Aristotle (as I understand it – I’m not an expert here, so I could be wrong) held that some propositions about the future were neither true nor false because they did not correspond or fail to correspond to anything in reality. On such an interpretation, the proposition “it's going to rain here on December 19, 2055,” if the event of it raining here on December 19, 2055 is indeterminate, is neither true nor false because it does not describe any existing state of affairs. If we could predict with certainty that it is going to rain here on December 19, 2055 based on some set of determinate laws and an adequate knowledge of present conditions, then the above statement, on this view, would be true if it were taken to mean something like, “Given the current state of affairs, it is certain that this state of affairs is inevitably evolving into another state of affairs which could be accurately described by the proposition ‘it is raining here on December 19, 2055.’ In other words, on this view, the proposition “it's going to rain here on December 19, 2055” if true (or false), is really just a description of the present state of affairs and not a future state of affairs.

Again, I don’t agree with the above view. Since I think that the past, present, and future are all equally “real,” I think that propositions about the future are either true or false. But, again, I’m curious as to what your thoughts are on the matter.

God Bless,
Kenny

bd-from-kg

Taffy Lewis:

Actually the theist isn’t committed saying that any events are indeterminate. But anyone who is committed to the concept of libertarian free will is. In fact, if you want to say that the average person actually exercises his (libertarian) free will, say, once a day, that’s around 75,000 indeterminate events every second on this planet alone. Given that everything interacts with everything else, and taking into account the “butterfly” effect from chaos theory, the future two weeks from today, or tomorrow for that matter, will be thoroughly indeterminate for everyone.

In order to overcome the “cloud of indeterminism” that would otherwise envelop all human affairs, God would have to intervene massively and more or less continuously. Aside from the fact that such massive intervention would almost certainly be detectable, it would negate free will. Free will doesn’t just mean being able to do one thing rather than another; its essence is being able to choose the consequences of doing one thing rather than the consequences of doing something else. If God were to regularly intervene so as to get the consequences he “expects” or “wants” or has “planned”, He would effectively negate our free will just as much as if He forced us to do what He wanted.

Let’s take this a step further. In many cases at least, which action is “right” depends on the consequences of the available alternatives. But God is said to be perfectly good, which means that He always does what’s right. How can this be if what’s right depends on consequences that He cannot foresee? To put this another way, perfect goodness entails foreknowledge.

In fact, lack of foreknowledge would be incompatible with God’s omnipotence as well. To see this, let’s take a simple example. God chooses to do A because He expects this to nudge John in the direction of accepting Christ. But contrary to His expectations, it actually has the effect of driving John away from Christ. But doing B instead would have had the desired effect.

Now if God is omnipotent, He not only can but always does accomplish what He wills. Yet in this case He fails to accomplish what He wills because of His lack of foreknowledge. So God’s lack of foreknowledge of what someone will freely will to do in response to His actions is inconsistent not only with His perfect goodness, but with His omnipotence.

bd-from-kg

Kenny:

One reason I like discussing things with you is that you have the intellectual integrity to reject arguments that you think are unsound even when they would tend to support your position. Of course everyone likes to think that they do this, but IMHO most people simply do not examine arguments supporting their own position very critically.

In this case the issue is purely academic for me, since I don’t believe in God. As I result I haven’t really thought about these matters very deeply. But I find them interesting as a logician since they raises some fascinating logical questions.

Sadly, I too am not an expert on Aristotle. But the following passage from Swartz’s Lecture Notes on Free Will and Determinism might shed some light on this:

Swartz goes on to point out that this argument is clearly fallacious. My best guess is therefore that Aristotle rejected the “law of the excluded middle” with regard to statements about the future – that is, he held that some such statements are neither true nor false. But that he did so because he didn’t realize that the argument above is fallacious. Had he recognized this, it’s very doubtful that he would have taken this position. (Aristotle scholars, feel free to correct me!)

Swartz goes on to discuss this possible resolution of the “problem” posed by Aristotle:

[Note: The 2000 election provides an even better illustration of Swartz’s first point than the 1988 one, but this was written in 1997.]

These objections seem pretty convincing to me. But since this argument turns ultimately on how one defines various terms, there seems to be little point in pursuing it indefinitely. I think that defining “omniscience” in terms of knowing only the present is grossly inconsistent with what this term is generally taken to mean, and that defining it in this way entails a radical diminution of one’s conception of God’s “greatness”. But ultimately this kind of view can’t be refuted – at least not in this way. When one realizes that it also involves a radical revision (to put it mildly) of the meaning of “perfect goodness” and “omnipotence” [see my latest post to Taffy], it seems to me that these considerations are cumulatively pretty decisive. A God who is omniscient, omnipotent, and “perfectly good” only in senses consistent with a lack of foreknowledge seems to me to be a pretty paltry kind of God.

It’s true that relativity “preserves the temporal ordering of causally related events”. But that’s because events where the temporal ordering is ambiguous are on that account excluded from being considered “causally related”. For example, say that two particles are created simultaneously (at the same point, of course) such that their spins along a given axis have a perfect reverse correlation – i.e., particle A has spin +1 if and only if particle B has spin –1. Later, after they’ve separated somewhat, their spins along this axis are measured “simultaneously” and A’s measured spin is +1 while B’s is –1. So far, so good. But since they are no longer in the same place, there are reference frames in which the measurement of A’s spin occurs first. Once this measurement is complete, B’s spin must be –1, even though it was originally indeterminate. This is just the sort of thing that would ordinarily be called a causal relationship: the measurement of A’s spin caused B’s spin to assume the determinate value of –1. But in other reference frames the measurement of B’s spin occurs first, and in this reference frame we would naturally say that this measurement cause A’s spin to assume the determinate value of +1. But these two interpretations taken together don’t seem to make sense (to our human minds anyway), so we say instead that there is no causal relationship, just a perfect correlation between the two measurements. How this is supposed to be interpreted “physically” is deliberately left murky because no one has the slightest idea how to interpret it physically – at least in the standard (Copenhagen) interpretation. (As I’m sure you know, the kind of experiment described here has been replicated thousands of times, and there are very strong reasons for rejecting “hidden variables” or other “locally realistic” interpretations of what’s going on.)

Anyway, the basic problem with the concept of a God who cannot foresee the future except insofar as it is embedded in the present is that the term “the present” is indeterminate; it has no objective meaning. If there is no “now” in the cosmic sense (which is what GR says) it follows that God cannot exist “now” in the way that we (seemingly) do. Fundamentally the problem is that God is not “space-bound” – that is, He is omnipresent – but space and time are ultimately the same thing, just as matter and energy are the same thing. These are ideas that our human minds aren’t really able to “wrap themselves around”, but (if GM and QM “correspond to reality” in any meaningful sense) they are true nonetheless. Thus a being who is omnipresent spatially is necessarily omnipresent temporally.

Here you lose me. If our measurements have any sort of meaningful relationship to an underlying reality, they must necessarily be telling us something about that underlying reality. To deny this is to deny that science can tell us anything at all about the “real world”.

I agree. I think the concept of “now” is ultimately meaningless. Or to put it another way, it merely refers to my “parochial” point of view. Perhaps this is why I find it difficult to take the kinds of ideas Taffy is advocating very seriously. At the same time, I’m not entirely sure that the first two sentences in this paragraph actually mean anything!

I would like to add that I’m far from confident about my position on these matters. In fact, I’m not at all sure that human reason is competent to arrive at meaningful judgments about things so abstract and far removed from human experience.

Silent Acorns

:notworthy beautifully said :notworthy

One way around this is to say "God knows the present perfectly and all it's 'laws'", but then we're talking about a deterministic universe in which God has the Ultimate Universe Simulator 1.0 in his head. This would suggest that God can know what will happen at any given place and time in the future. I suppose one could argue that God might choose not to run the simultor most of the time, but I don't find this very convincing. I can't help but think that such a God would have had to have thought about what he was doing when he created the Universe, and thus efectively "ran" the simulator.