Category: Determinism And Free Will

DO WE HAVE FREE WILL? PART 4: NEITHER CAUSED NOR RANDOM

2/12/2018

So far, we have looked at three arguments against the existence of free will, each one based on a different type of determinism. But there is another reason for denying freedom of the will: the concept itself appears to make no sense. In this fourth and final part, I explain why.

Free will (in the standard libertarian sense of the term) means the ability to choose from among different possible courses of action: when you have the ability to act freely, you can either perform or not perform some given action. That’s why free will is incompatible with determinism. This does not mean that free will is the same thing as random behavior, however. Free actions are ones for which you can be held responsible. But if your actions were the result of chance events – similar to the decay of a radioactive atom – then they would not be up to you, and you would be no more responsible for them than you are for the weather. They would be events that happened to you rather than events you brought about.

Free actions, then, are neither completely caused nor random. And herein lies the problem. For to lack complete causation is to be random. The decay of a radioactive atom is a chance event, not because it lacks any cause, but because it is not entirely determined by the prior state of things.

Suppose you are asked to pick one of two cards. You pick the right one. If you are free, you could have picked the left one instead. We can imagine the universe being rewound to the moment before you chose – so that everything is exactly the same, both within you and without you – only this time around you pick the left one. But in that case what explains the difference? Well, there could be something (S1) that led you to pick the right card one time and something else (S2) that led you to pick the left the other time. Nevertheless, everything is exactly the same both times, so what could explain S1 influencing you the first time and S2 the second?

Unless there is some difference to explain it, the choice must be random. And there is no difference! Therefore, the choice is random.

Some proponents of free will think they can escape this dilemma by claiming that we have reasons – which are neither caused nor random – for our choices. But again, if one time you accept reason R1 and the other time reason R2, what explains the difference? What makes you adopt one reason rather than the other? If under the exact same circumstances you can accept either R1 or R2, then which reason you end up with is itself ultimately random.

If there is only one possible course of action to you in any given situation, then your decisions are determined. If, on the other hand, you might either perform or not perform some action in any given situation, then your decisions are random. Either way, there is no free will. But of course, there are those who continue to believe in it while claiming that how it works is just a mystery. Anyone familiar with theological arguments has heard that before.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

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DO WE HAVE FREE WILL? PART 3: DIVINE FOREKNOWLEDGE

1/30/2018

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So far, I’ve written about two arguments for determinism which, though not completely conclusive, present serious challenges to belief in free will. The same cannot be said of this next type of determinism. There actually is no reason for accepting it, since there is no reason for believing its premises. Nevertheless, it is a serious internal problem for Christianity. It shows that the beliefs of most Christians aren’t – as shocking as this may seem – entirely consistent.

The basic idea is simple enough: If God already knows the future, he already knows everything you are going to do. The only thing you can do, then, is what God knows you will do. And that means you aren’t free.

There are, however, certain complications here which most people are unaware of. In particular, there is the fact that knowledge does not normally imply infallibility. If one knows something (genuinely knows it, that is), then it follows that it’s true; one cannot know a falsehood. But it doesn’t follow that it had to be true.

How this relates to the foreknowledge argument can best be seen by means of an example:

Suppose that I know you well enough to be sure that you will not vote for Trump in the next election. Does that mean your not voting for Trump isn’t free? That you can’t choose otherwise? That doesn’t seem right. The believer in free will can admit that there are things one would never do, for one can freely choose to never do them. And if I know you well enough, I can know what you will do even if you are free, or have the power, to do otherwise.

If you disagree with the above, it’s probably because you are interpreting the concept of knowledge in a stronger sense than normal. You may be thinking that if there is even the slightest possibility that someone does otherwise, then you can’t know what they will do. But if so, then you can’t claim to know almost anything, for there is a possibility of being wrong for most of the things we claim to know. If, on the other hand, you mean roughly what most of us mean by “knowledge,” then you must admit that one person can know the way another will act even if the other is acting freely and could, if they wanted to, act differently.

It’s helpful to know all this because there are theists who will appeal to it in order to reject the argument from divine foreknowledge. They will maintain that, just as you can know how someone will freely act, God always knows how we will freely act. This, however, ignores a crucial difference. God is supposedly infallible. Unlike human knowledge, God’s knowledge does not admit the possibility of error. And it is that which creates a problem for the theist who believes in free will.

This difference can best be understood if we think of it in terms of “possible worlds” (that is, in terms of ways things could have been). So, for example, suppose Mario believed yesterday that Luigi would do x today, that he had very strong reasons for believing it (the kind that we normally associate with knowing), and that Luigi in fact did x today. Then we would say that Mario knew Luigi would do x. However, if Luigi was nevertheless free to do something else – if he could have refrained from doing x – then that means there is a possible world in which Mario believed Luigi would do x and yet he did not do it. In other words, that’s the way things could have turned out, and this shows Luigi was in fact acting freely.

But now suppose instead that it is God who infallibly knew yesterday that Luigi would do x. To say that Luigi was nevertheless free to choose to do something else, then, is to say that there is a possible world in which God believed he would do x, yet he did not do it. But of course, that can’t be! If God is infallible, then it is not even logically possible for him to be mistaken – and thus there is no possible world in which he is mistaken. It follows that if God already knows what you are going to do in the future, you don’t have the power to do anything else. To actually be free in that case is to have the power of making God wrong.

It is God’s supposed infallibility that creates a problem for free will. And the only way to avoid it, it seems, is to deny either that there is an infallible being with foreknowledge (or more precisely, that there could even be such a being), or to deny that we have freedom of choice. Most true believers refuse to accept either of these ways out. They therefore continue to have an internally inconsistent worldview.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

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DO WE HAVE FREE WILL? PART 2: RELATIVITY

1/22/2018

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As I mentioned last time, there are both causal and non-causal varieties of determinism. Most people think of determinism only in terms of the former: events are determined, they might say, if they are the result of prior states along with strict laws of cause and effect (so that given those prior states and laws, the events could not have failed to occur). But historically there have also been arguments for determinism that have nothing to do with causation, such as logical determinism and the type of theological determinism based on God’s foreknowledge (as opposed to God’s foreordination).

I’ll return to theological determinism next time. Today, I want to talk about a much less well-known kind of non-causal determinism.

According to the theory of relativity, there is no absolute “now,” or present moment. What for you are two simultaneous events won’t necessarily be simultaneous for someone else. So, for instance, take what is going on in a galaxy far, far away at the moment you are reading this. There are events occurring there that, from your perspective, are occurring right now. You can’t know about them yet, of course. If the galaxy is, say, 2.5 million light years away, then you have to wait 2.5 million years for its light to reach us. But if you look at it then, you will see what was happening there at the time you were reading this (approximately). However, you can’t say that those events that for you are occurring right now are occurring right now in any absolute sense – because for someone else right now who is travelling relative to you, what is going on in that galaxy will be some other set of events. But that means the universe as a whole cannot be absolutely divided at each moment into past, present and future.

What does this have to do with determinism? Well, in order for indeterminism to be true, the future must be open to more than one possible “path.” Maybe event E will occur tomorrow, or maybe it won’t. This means the future is unlike the present and the past, which are already settled. But if there isn’t any absolute sense in which something is still future, then it seems one cannot distinguish between the settled past and the open future in this way. What is still future for you at a given moment may already be past for someone else at that same moment. And if it is already settled for them, how can it be anything other than settled for you as well?

Roger Penrose put this idea very clearly in what has come to be known as the Andromeda Paradox:

“Two people pass each other on the street; and according to one of the two people, an Andromedean space fleet has already set off on its journey, while to the other, the decision as to whether or not the journey will actually take place has not yet been made. How can there still be some uncertainty as to the outcome of that decision? If to either person the decision has already been made, then surely there cannot be any uncertainty. The launching of the space fleet is an inevitability. In fact neither of the people can yet know of the launching of the space fleet. They can know only later, when telescopic observations from earth reveal that the fleet is indeed on its way. Then they can hark back to that chance encounter, and come to the conclusion that at that time, according to one of them, the decision lay in the uncertain future, while to the other, it lay in the certain past. Was there then any uncertainty about that future? Or was the future of both people already ‘fixed’?” (The Emperor’s New Mind, 392-393)

In order for free will (in the sense being discussed here) to exist, one must be able to choose from among different possible courses of action. You can either go out tonight or stay home. But if the future is as settled as the past, there is only the one possibility: what will in fact occur. If you stay home, that’s the only thing that you could have done. This view of time is therefore inconsistent with the existence of free will.

The only way to avoid this conclusion, it seems to me, is to reject the relativity of simultaneity.

For more on this kind of determinism, see my brief paper Relativistic Determinism.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

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DO WE HAVE FREE WILL? PART 1: PHYSICAL DETERMINISM

1/16/2018

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The most common Christian view holds that human beings are free in the usual libertarian sense of the term – meaning that we can choose from among different courses of action (this is what I’ll mean here by “free will”). Eve and Adam chose to eat the fruit, but they could have chosen to obey Yahweh instead; you chose to read at least this far, but could have stopped after the first sentence; and so on. There are serious problems with such a view, however, and I thought it might be interesting to cover the main ones in a brief series of posts. (Plus, I don’t think I could have chosen otherwise anyway!)

To begin with, there are reasons for believing that our decisions are determined. There are in fact several different arguments for determinism, and as a result several types of it. What they all have in common, however, is the idea that in some sense events are unavoidable. Basically, something is determined if it must occur. (The necessity here isn’t logical necessity; it refers to what is necessary in fact, given the way things are.) Thus, for example, if physical determinism is true, the current state of the universe combined with the laws of nature make it the case that only one future is possible for the universe as a whole. (Physical determinism is causal in nature, but in the next couple of posts I’ll mention non-causal types as well.)

Physical determinism, then, states that all of nature is causally deterministic. This is basically the view one finds in classical physics, and was made famous by Laplace’s thought experiment: if a demon knew every detail about the universe at a particular moment (the position, velocity, etc., of every particle, as well as all the laws of physics), he would be able to predict everything that will ever happen. If the laws of nature are such that everything that happens is a result of prior states, then there is only one possible course that history can take. It follows that Adam and Eve had no choice but to eat the fruit, and therefore that the standard Christian view is wrong.

Nowadays, physical determinism isn’t all that widely accepted because of quantum mechanics. But actually, quantum mechanics does not rule determinism out; it merely implies that determinism might not be true. It all depends on what the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics is. Whether physical determinism is true therefore remains an open question.

But even if natural laws are ultimately indeterministic, some problems remain for the proponent of free will. The world may contain a certain amount of randomness, but at the level of everyday objects, the randomness in the behavior of individual particles is almost entirely cancelled out, and things behave pretty much the way classical physics says they should. This is why Newtonian mechanics was thought of as the final word in physics for such a long time. We just don’t see billiard balls, for instance, move randomly (even if, like me, you’re really bad at pool). And human beings operate on this level. We and our brains are medium-sized objects, made up of trillions of subatomic particles, and therefore any quantum effects on our behavior should be completely negligible.

Even worse, if there were some noticeable randomness to our behavior, that wouldn’t mean we have free will. Free behavior isn’t random behavior. Eve wouldn’t be morally responsible for eating the fruit if her decision were the result of a chance event that she did not in any sense choose.

The only way that quantum indeterminacy might make free will possible is if it provides an “opening” for a non-physical mind to act on our brains. That is, if the firing of neurons isn’t completely determined, then a soul might, by taking advantage of the indeterminacy, be able to fire them one way rather than another. However, there are very good reasons for thinking that our minds are dependent on our brains, rather than residing in some non-physical substance (see my previous post).

Despite quantum mechanics, then, it is far more likely that the activity in our brains – and the behavior that results from it – is essentially deterministic. And that is inconsistent with free will.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

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ANOTHER PROBLEM WITH THE BOETHIAN SOLUTION

11/16/2017

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This may be beating a dead horse, but since some people are convinced the horse is alive and well, here’s something else that's wrong with the Boethian attempt to escape theological determinism.

According to Boethians, God doesn’t have foreknowledge of one’s future actions because God is outside of time. He therefore does not foresee what we are going to do, he timelessly sees what we are going to do. And that, they claim, means that we remain free to choose among different possible courses of action.

I’ve already argued that this doesn’t solve the problem (see my blog post from 10/31/17, A Timeless God and Theological Determinism). But even if you disagree with my criticism in that earlier post, there's another reason for rejecting this Boethian solution. For even supposing God is timeless, it is still the case that as an omnipotent being, he ought to be able to make himself temporal. One must accept this as a possibility unless it is metaphysically impossible for God to exist in time — and that’s something the theist would have to argue for. Moreover, this would be especially difficult for a Christian to maintain, for obvious reasons. And yet, as a temporal being, it seems clear that God would be able to foresee the future if he so chose. After all, it would take nothing more out of the ordinary than remembering what he already knew during his timeless existence.

The problem here isn’t (as Linda Zagzebski implies in her Stanford Encyclopedia article https://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/free-will-foreknowledge/) whether or not Jesus actually had infallible foreknowledge. If it were, then this would be of concern only to Christians — and they could easily escape it by pointing out that there are reasons for denying Jesus had such knowledge. After all, he himself claimed he didn’t know exactly when the world would end. Moreover (though Christians will be less happy to admit this), he was way off when he predicted it would happen during the lifetime of some of his contemporaries.

No, the problem is wider than that. It is that God could be in time and know the future. It is important to realize that the problem of foreknowledge is not essentially a problem with there actually being such knowledge; it is a problem about it being possible for there to be such knowledge. So long as there is the possibility that someone could know the future infallibly, the future cannot be open to different possibilities. And the Boethian, it seems, must admit that God could have such foreknowledge.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

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A TIMELESS GOD AND THEOLOGICAL DETERMINISM

10/31/2017

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Many theists believe both in a god with infallible knowledge about the future and in libertarian free will, and thus face the problem of how to reconcile these two ideas. An attempted solution which has come up in the comments section here more than once is the so-called “Boethian solution.” It maintains that God is outside of time, and so does not actually have foreknowledge. From his extra-temporal vantage point, God sees all of time — past, present, and future — all “at once,” so to speak. Therefore, he does not foresee what you’re going to do tomorrow; rather, he sees it, much as we see the present.

The most common reply to this is to point out — correctly, in my opinion — that a timeless god is a contradiction in terms. But there is another problem with the Boethian solution, which is that, even if we set aside problems with timelessness, it doesn’t work!

To understand why, it’s important to first be clear on what the problem of theological determinism is. God’s foreknowledge implies that there is only one possible future: the only events that can happen are the ones God knows will occur. It is this that is incompatible with the kind of freedom most people believe in. The Boethian solution therefore can only work if it allows there to be more than one possible future. And yet it’s pretty clear that it doesn’t.

To begin with, the Boethian solution is a perfect “have your cake and eat it too” kind of move. It is an attempt to find a way for God to know the future (while it is still the future) without, however, knowing it beforehand. Contrast this with “open theism,” which says that God only knows what happens once it happens (and thus does not know the future). The Boethian claims that God knows everything that happens because he “sees” it happening — just like the open theist does. However, because God sees it, not as it is happening, but rather from outside of time, he supposedly does not have to wait until it happens. Simple, right?

Not so fast. Here’s the problem: if there is more than one possible future, then there is more than one set of future events compatible with what is happening right now. But from God’s timeless vantage point, what is happening now and what happens in the future are combined into one overall set of events. Thus, from his vantage point, there isn’t more than one possible set of events in the future to go along with the present. Our present is combined with one-and-only-one possible tomorrow, since they are together present before God’s eyes. It follows that there can only be one possible future — and therefore, no free will.

By analogy, when we watch a movie, it seems that the characters are making free decisions — but of course we know that they aren’t: there is only one possible set of events that can play out, since the entire movie is already on the reel. If God is outside of time looking at it as a whole, he is seeing it much the same way as we would see a movie reel. The scenes of our lives are all already there, and thus can only turn out one way. The Boethian solution therefore implies that there is only one possible set of events for us to perform. It doesn’t avoid theological determinism.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

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IS GOD'S FOREKNOWLEDGE COMPATIBLE WITH FREE WILL?

7/28/2015

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One of the biggest problems facing the traditional Christian believer is to explain how human beings can have free will given that God has perfect knowledge of the future. If God already knows what you are going to do tomorrow, then how can the decisions you make be free? It seems the only thing you can possibly do is what God already knows you are going to do – and if so, then you cannot have what philosophers call libertarian free will, the kind of freedom that most Christians, and in fact most people, believe human beings possess.

Not all Christians face this dilemma. Calvinists avoid it by rejecting the traditional (libertarian) concept of free will, while so-called “open theists” reject the idea that God knows everything about the future. But for those in between these two extremes – which is the majority of believers – the problem remains.

One of the most common ways apologists have tried to get around the difficulty states that merely knowing what someone is going to do does not prevent them from doing it freely. For example, I may know that if you find a $100 bill on the sidewalk you will pick it up, but it doesn't follow from that that you don't do so freely. You could refrain from picking up the money; it's just that I know you wouldn't want to do so. Likewise, some claim, God's knowledge of what you are going to do tomorrow doesn't mean your decisions aren't free.

It may help to make this point clearer if we compare it with knowledge of what has already occurred. Let's say that yesterday you had pizza for dinner, and that God (of course) knows that. This doesn't mean that you didn't do so freely: you could have had something else. There were other possibilities as to what you might have had. However, the choice you actually made was to have pizza. Now contrast that with God's knowledge of what you are going to have for dinner tomorrow. Again, there are different possibilities as to what you might have. However, there is only one that you will actually choose, and God knows, in spite of there being other possibilities, which one it will in fact be.

This argument may appear perfectly sensible. After all, in many cases we can predict with pretty good accuracy what someone will do (especially if we know the person well) – and yet we don't think that someone isn't acting freely for that reason. So why should it be any different with God's knowledge?

But in fact it is different, and to understand why we merely need to remember one thing about God: namely, that he is supposedly infallible. That is, God cannot possibly make mistakes; by definition, he cannot be wrong. And that changes things.

As we have already seen, in order for you to be free in the sense being discussed here, it must be the case that you are free to choose from among different alternatives. Your choice of pizza yesterday was free only if it is true that you could have chosen something else instead. And this means that if tomorrow's decisions are to be free, there have to be different possibilities as to what you will do. Maybe it is the case that you will, as it turns out, have spaghetti for dinner, but nevertheless other alternatives must exist. You aren't free if having spaghetti is the only thing that it is even possible for you.

But now here's the problem: if God cannot be wrong, then it is impossible for there to be alternatives to what he knows you are going to have. In other words, it's not merely that God knows that you are in fact going to have spaghetti, while other possibilities remain. Rather, since it is impossible for God to be wrong, it is also impossible for you to have anything else. Because for there to be another possibility is for there to be the possibility of God making a mistake.

Another way of putting this is that, if you have free will, then you have the power to make God wrong – and that of course cannot be. God's foreknowledge – his perfect, infallible foreknowledge – is therefore incompatible with the kind of freedom that most Christians believe we have.

Addendum, 15 August 2015:

This post led to a rather lengthy and for the most part fruitless online exchange. As a way to try to prevent the kind of misunderstanding that led to that argument, I decided to further explain the reasons supporting my view.

The foreknowledge argument claims that the future is determined because God already knows everything that is going to happen. So for instance, if God already knows that tomorrow you are going to wear a blue shirt, then it isn't possible for you to do anything else.

Now, there are two rather different versions of this argument. According to the first, the problem here is simply a problem about there being knowledge: God knows what you are going to do, so how can you be free to choose what to do? On this version of the argument, God is the focus, but only because he is said to know everything about the future (which is more than one can say about humans, including even fortune tellers). However, the problem would be just as acute if anyone else knew what you were going to do. And even though human beings don't know everything about the future, we do know some things – including some things about what other people are going to do.

A second version of the argument makes an important distinction between knowing something and having infallible knowledge of something. The importance of this distinction will be explained below. For now, however, note that if one makes this distinction, then God's role becomes far more central, since only he is said to have infallible knowledge of anything. (Of course, if someone else had such infallibility, the same problem would arise.)

I claim (as do many philosophers) that it is the supposed infallibility of God – and not mere knowledge – that creates a problem.

To understand why mere knowledge isn't the problem, consider what that version of the argument is really saying, beginning with what it means to know something. If you know x, then (a) you believe x, and (b) x is true. (In addition, you must have good grounds for believing x, but for our purposes, that can be ignored.) Now, your believing x (or even having good reasons for doing so) isn't the problem; where some see a problem is in the fact that x is true. For if x describes some future event and yet is already true, then how can the event be avoided? Thus, if I know you are going to wear a blue shirt, then how can you still be free to decide whether or not to do so?

This argument from mere knowledge, then, is really the same as the argument from fatalism (a.k.a. logical determinism). Fatalism begins with the observation that for anything that is going to happen, it is true that it is going to happen. For example, if as it turns out you are going to wear a blue shirt tomorrow, then it is true (and one can express that truth right now) that you are going to wear a blue shirt tomorrow. But if it is already true now that tomorrow you are going to wear such a shirt, then how can it be possible for you to do anything else?

Some people try to avoid fatalism by claiming that statements about future contingent things are neither true nor false, but that seems to be a mistake. After all, it is necessarily true that something is the case at each given time and place. It follows that even if the future is not determined – so that there is more than one possibility as to what occurs at each given place and time – some specific thing e will be the case at a given time and place t. And if so, then a statement beforehand that e will be the case at t is, as it turns out, a true statement.

However, to then conclude that, since the statement is true, the event is determined to happen is another mistake – for, as we have just seen, the statement is true even on the supposition that the event is not determined.

If the future is not determined, then that means that all the facts about our world right now are compatible with more than one possible future. But what about the claim – which we can make right now – that it is true that event e is going to happen tomorrow? Isn't that a fact about our world right now – namely, that it is true now that e will happen? And isn't it inconsistent with e not happening?

That it is true that e will happen is indeed inconsistent with e not happening. However, the truth that e will happen is not a fact about the world right now. A complete description of everything in the universe at this moment does not include the fact that e will happen tomorrow. To put it another way, the claim that it is true that you are going to wear a blue shirt tomorrow isn't a claim about today. To say that it is true that you are going to wear a blue shirt tomorrow is to say something about tomorrow, and nothing more. It doesn't in addition describe some fact about today that would be different if tomorrow were also different.

If this is still unclear, think about actual events and things that might have been said about them. So for example, if you had said eight years ago that Obama would be the next president, you would have said something true, since that is in fact what happened. But it doesn't follow that it had to happen. Similarly, if I say now that Trump will not be the next president, my statement may very well be true. That is, if it turns out that someone else will be elected, then Trump won't be the next president, and my statement is true. But that doesn't mean it has already been determined who will be the next president.

Fatalism, then, doesn't make sense. And if fatalism doesn't make sense, then neither does the version of the foreknowledge argument based on mere knowledge – for as we have already seen, it's simply a version of fatalism. Thus, even though I can only have knowledge of some future event if it in fact does happen – just as a statement about some future event can only be true if it in fact does happen – everything about the mental state that we in this case call my knowledge is consistent with the future event not happening. My belief is exactly the same either way. It's just that in the case where it is true, it is correctly described as knowledge, whereas in the case where it isn't true, it is not knowledge. So for instance (to use an example that more clearly involves knowing than the question of what someone is going to wear), consider that I know there is going to be a solar eclipse on 21 August 2017. We call this knowledge because we are very certain that what I believe in this case is indeed true. And if indeed it is true, then it can correctly be said that I know the eclipse is going to happen. But this mental state of mine that we are (almost certainly correctly) describing as knowledge is compatible with the eclipse failing to happen (maybe a very powerful alien civilization will alter the orbit of the moon between now and then) – in which case it wouldn't be knowledge.

We are now ready to tackle the other version of the foreknowledge argument, the one based on God's infallibility.

To say that God knows infallibly that you are going to wear a blue shirt tomorrow is to say, first, that it is true that you are going to wear such a shirt (so far, nothing different here), and second, that God has a belief that cannot be wrong about what you are going to wear. That God has such a belief follows from the meaning of “infallible” – and it is this second part that introduces something different into the mix. If God cannot be wrong, then any event that God believes is going to happen cannot fail to happen. And that's where there is a problem.

Above, we saw that my belief that something is going to happen, even if it is correctly described as knowledge (if the event does happen) is in itself perfectly compatible with the event not happening. That is why my knowledge that you are going to wear a blue shirt tomorrow doesn't take away your freedom to wear a red one instead. Yes, it remains the case that if what I have is indeed knowledge, then you do in fact wear a blue shirt. But that doesn't mean you couldn't wear something else. And again, the easiest way to understand this is to see that the mental state that we describe as knowledge in this case is perfectly compatible with your not wearing a blue shirt. Even if it is knowledge, it could have turned out to be a false belief instead.

Now contrast this with the case in which God infallibly knows that you are going to wear a blue shirt tomorrow. His belief cannot be wrong. The mental state that we describe as his knowledge, then, is not compatible with your failing to wear a blue shirt. If it were, he would have a false belief. Thus, if God infallibly knows that you are going to do x, you have no choice but to do x. It isn't merely that you in fact do x; it's that that is the only thing you can do!

One final thing. It is important to realize that neither the foreknowledge argument nor fatalism have anything to do with causation. Many people think that determinism is the view that everything is causally necessitated to happen as it does, so that past states of the world determine its future states. But strictly speaking, determinism encompasses more than causal determinism. What all varieties of universal determinism (i.e., those that apply to everything rather than to some subset of things) have in common is the idea that the universe has only one possible history: that there is only one way things can turn out. And it's important to keep this in mind because otherwise one might make the mistake of supposing that according to the foreknowledge argument, God's knowledge somehow causes future events to happen as they do – which of course would be nonsense!

I bring this up because one difficulty some have with the argument is in “seeing” how the future is determined just because God has infallible knowledge of it. What makes you wear the blue shirt? The correct reply is that this argument doesn't address that question. It only shows that the future is determined (if its premises are true), not why it's determined. Maybe it's determined by the laws of physics, or because we live in static four-dimensional “block” universe, or for some other unknown reason. But that's irrelevant to this argument, and to demand that one explain what makes the future determined is to miss the entire point.

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DO WE HAVE FREE WILL? PART 4: NEITHER CAUSED NOR RANDOM

DO WE HAVE FREE WILL? PART 3: DIVINE FOREKNOWLEDGE

DO WE HAVE FREE WILL? PART 2: RELATIVITY

DO WE HAVE FREE WILL? PART 1: PHYSICAL DETERMINISM

ANOTHER PROBLEM WITH THE BOETHIAN SOLUTION

A TIMELESS GOD AND THEOLOGICAL DETERMINISM

IS GOD'S FOREKNOWLEDGE COMPATIBLE WITH FREE WILL?

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