Abstract
Taking divine omniscience as including temporal omniscience, which means God exists at all times and knows everything, I point out the fallacies in an incompatibilist argument. Syntactically, due to misapplication of the principle of substitutivity, this incompatibilist argument isn’t valid. Semantically, due to cancelation of a supposition on which God’s earlier belief depends, an agent’s alternative action won’t result in falsification of divine belief. Finally, by appealing to an eternalist conception of truth of proposition about the future, I argue that what divine belief entails isn’t the necessity of an agent’s action but the action itself, and put forward a notion of conditional fatalism, which allows for human free will.
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Notes
I borrow the terminology “ET-simultaneous(ly)” from Stump and Kretzmann 1991. We can define ET-simultaneity as follows. For every x and every y, x and y are ET-simultaneous if and only if (i) either x is eternal and y is temporal, or vice versa (for convenience, let x be eternal and y temporal); and (ii) with respect to some A in the unique eternal reference frame, x and y are both present-i.e., (a) x is in the eternal present with respect to A, (b) y is in the temporal present, (c) both x and y are situated with respect to A in such a way that A can enter into direct causal relations with each of them and (if capable of awareness) can be directly aware of each of them; and (iii) with respect to some B in one of the infinitely many temporal reference frames, x and y are both present-i.e., (a) x is in the eternal present, (b) y is at the same time as B, and (c) both x and y are situated with respect to B in such a way that B can enter into direct causal relations with each of them and (if capable of awareness) can be directly aware of each of them.
Such a solution is an Ockhamist proposal, which is put forward and defended in Plantinga 1986. According to this proposal, God’s past beliefs depend on human actions counterfactually and there would have been a different past if a different action were performed. More recently, Merricks 2009 asserts that the idea of counterfactual dependence comes from Molina.
For more on metaphysical modality, see Zhang (2014)
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Kevin Timpe, Tony Soong and Siyuan Cao for their helpful comments or suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper.
Funding
This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China [Grant Number 20AZX015].
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Zhang, L. Temporal Omniscience, Free will, and Their Logic. glob. Philosophy 33, 3 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-023-09657-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-023-09657-3