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Attacking Boethain Solution to Fatalism.
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Attacking Boethain Solution to Fatalism.
Attack Boethian Solution to Fatalism.
Boethius offered a solution for the Problem of Fatalism. His solution for the problem of Fatalism is to deny the notion of God being inside of time. By stating that God is outside of Time, therefore timelessly, he denies that God existed in the past or believed anything in the past. An example of this is If God had temporal knowledge, He would “see” Jones mowing the lawn on 1/1/2000 because that’s what happens in the future relative to God’s perspective.
I had a problem with this argument, this does not really solve the problem of Fatalims. Fatalism still persists, If God lives timelessly then He would see all events past, present, and future simultaneously. I have a few problems with this. On the surface, this seems that this solves the problem of theological fatalism by separating God’s knowledge from Timely events, however, this doesn’t solve fatalism because God still knows and believes that Jones will be mowing the lawn on 1/1/2000. Say if “A God, who exists timelessly, believes that Jones will now mow the lawn on 1/1/2000 then, Jones has no choice in his action. This does not solve Fatalism but rewords it, changing the Nature of God does not necessarily mean it can cause him to not have foreknowledge.
Another problem with this proposal is that it challenges the notion of timelessness and causality. If we think an action causes a change in something, an example of this is God’s belief which measures our action before that change. An example of this is through prayers. If the prayer “causes a change in God’s belief then this change would follow from the act of prayer. This is a paradox since something influenced a timeless god even though he does not exist within it.
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2 Replies
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Fatalism commits a modal scope fallacy and can be dismissed solely on those grounds. “If God knows X then necessarily, X” does not entail that X couldn’t have been different and any thought that it does results from a mishandling of the necessity operator. We need to rewrite the premise as “Necessarily, if God knows X then X”. The necessity operator applies to the whole conditional statement, and not just the antecedent or consequent. If I do X then God foreknows that I do X but had I done Y, God would have foreknown Y instead.
But that is the real problem. Because given that God’s foreknowledge is without beginning and exists sans the universe, we now have my free actions causally determining beginningless scenarios that exist in the in the absence of those actions!
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