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A way out of fatalism for the Christian
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A way out of fatalism for the Christian
I will respond to Daniel’s post which outlines Nathan Rockwood’s attempt to address the difficulties of divine foreknowledge in his paper “Foreknowledge without Determinism.” Instead of highlighting what Rockwood says himself, I want to entertain a possible way out that doesn’t believe that God can be wrong about what human agents will do in the future.
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If God is omniscient, he cannot be wrong about what human agents will do in the future.
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God is omniscient.
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So, God cannot be wrong about what human agents will do in the future. (MP 2,1)
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If God cannot be wrong about what human agents will do in the future, then human agents cannot do otherwise.
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So, human agents cannot do otherwise. (MP 3,4)
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If free will exists, then human agents can do otherwise.
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Therefore, free will does not exist. (MT 5,6)
I will object to premise three. As humans, we are bound to the laws of nature. We are constricted by time and understand things in relation to time. God conversely is outside of time and is not constrained in the way we are. 2 Peter 3:8 says, “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.” In our human mind, the fact that God knows everything human agents will do may make it so that he is commanding their actions but it is not so. I want to look at one specific biblical example that shows that God’s foreknowledge doesn’t interfere with free will. In Genesis 3:15 it is recorded that “he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” This is describing that Jesus will die on the cross but will defeat death and rise from the dead. When Jesus came to earth to fulfill that prophecy, he prayed to God to take that cup away in Luke 22:42-44. “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done”. After Jesus submits himself and is captured, Peter steps in and cuts off one of the officer’s ears. In response to this Jesus tells Peter in Matthew 26:53-54 “Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?” This is clear evidence that Jesus could have at any time tapped out and have chosen to not suffer on the cross for our sins but he freely chose to do so. The fact that God foretold that Jesus is not what commanded Jesus to die on the cross, it was the fact that Jesus chose to submit himself to God’s will.
This example may not seem sufficient to convince someone that fatalism is false, but I hope to make it seem more probable that God can maintain his omniscience and humanity with their free will.
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1 Reply
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As far as I can tell, fatalism commits a modal scope fallacy. Given that God is omniscient, this gives us “Necessarily, if God knows X then X”. However, the necessity operator extends over the whole conditional statement and isn’t bound exclusively to it’s antecedent. In other words, “Necessarily, if God knows X then X” does not entail that God knows X in all possible worlds and thus, that X occurs in all possible worlds. In a possible world where Bob chooses Y instead of X, God foreknows that Bob does Y in that possible world.
This does entail that God’s current foreknowledge is contingent (if what I do in the future could have been different, then what God currently knows about my future actions could have been different). This raises additional problems. God’s foreknowledge of our future actions is now beginningless (he has possessed it from all eternity) yet it is contingent (it could have been different), for example. It could be argued that our action taking causes God to timelessly know those actions but then temporal events taking place within the universe then stand in causal relation to timeless events taking place sans the universe (the events are having causal efficacy on God under circumstances where those events don’t exist, sans the universe).
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