Majesty of Reason Philosophy Podcast Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom | (MoR No. 14)
Is God’s comprehensive foreknowledge of the future incompatible with free will? Let’s see where reason takes us.
Here’s another argument that I didn’t cover in the video but which will be of interest to y’all:
(1) It is not under your control that God believed 1000 years ago that each of your actions would occur.
(2) Necessarily, if God believed 1000 years ago that each of your actions would occur, then each of your actions occur.
(3) If P necessarily entails Q, and P is not under your control, then Q is not under your control.
(4) So, the occurrence of each of your actions is not under your control.
(5) If (4), then you are not free.
(6) So, you are not free.
This argument is interesting. I would probably challenge premise (1). It is precisely because you are free in each of your actions that you are in control of past facts specifying what your free actions will be. In other words, while you don’t cause the past to be how it is, there’s a kind of counterfactual dependence of the past on your choices: had you chosen A instead of B, God would have foreknown that you chose A.
Here’s another example. Presumably, it was true before you were born that you would read this sentence today. And — by the same kind of reasoning that would presumably motivate (1) — this truth is not under your control (since you didn’t even exist to causally influence the past). And, moreover, this truth necessarily entails that you do in fact read this sentence today. So, it would follow from all of this that you are not free in reading this sentence! And we didn’t even need to invoke God’s foreknowledge here. All we needed was a truth prior to your birth.
Surely, then, the argument has gone wrong somewhere. I suggest — as I did in the case of the foreknowledge argument — that it’s simply false that you have no control over truths prior to your birth. Rather, it is precisely because you are free and in control of your present actions that you thereby have control over truths prior to your birth. The explanation of your actions doesn’t flow from the past truth to your actions; rather, it’s the opposite. Your actions explain the past truth. Don’t put the cart before the horse.