Abstract
The cause of an event must continue over a period at which the effect is not occurring and the whole period at which it is occurring. It follows that simultaneous causation and backward causation are metaphysically impossible. I distinguish among events said to occur at a time, ‘hard’ events which really occur solely at that time and ‘soft’ events which occur partly at another time. God’s beliefs at a time are hard events at that time. It follows that if God is a temporal being, he cannot know infallibly what either we or he will do freely at a future time; and if God is timeless, he cannot know what happens in time. Hence we must define God’s ‘omniscience’ in such a way as to exclude any knowledge of future free actions. I discuss in an Appendix how far this view is compatible with Scripture and Church tradition.
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Notes
For a clear summary of the argument and reaction to subsequent writing on the topic, see Pike (1993).
In his first definition of a cause as ‘an object, followed by another, and where all the objects similar to the first are followed by objects similar to the second’—David Hume. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section 7. Part II.
For a fuller exposition of this account, see Swinburne (2013, ch. 5).
For argument in support of the thesis that every intentional action involves trying, see for example Hornsby (1980, ch. 3).
Most philosophers seem to allow the possibility of simultaneous causation. Immanuel Kant (The Critique of Pure Reason, B248) claimed that 'the great majority of efficient causes are simultaneous with their effects'. He purported to justify this claim by giving what he claimed were examples of simultaneous causation, without giving any argument to show that they were not merely examples of very fast forward causation; his least plausible example is 'the stove, as cause, is simultaneous with its effect, the heat of the room.'
The definition which I proceed to give is based on the account of a ‘hard fact’ about a time t given by William Hasker (Hasker 1989, 81–90), as (in effect) one which has truth conditions independent of whether there is any future time subsequent to t. This definition and all the other earlier definitions are unsatisfactory for the purpose of discussing the possibility of backward causation, because they constitute an event as ‘hard’ in terms of its relation to events in only one direction of time, and so beg the question about whether hard events can be caused by what happens later. For detailed discussion of all other definitions see Swinburne (2014). My definition in that paper defines an event as ‘hard’ in terms of its relation both to its past and to its future. I realized subsequently that my own definition in that paper needed further refinement, and I have tried to provide that here. My definition will of course, for any T, capture far fewer events as ‘hard’ at a given time than all the earlier definitions, since it rules out events reported by propositions which depend for their truth-value on the existence (or non-existence) of any times before T.
I am assuming that an expression denoting a period (or instant) of time, such as a particular year, picks out the time it does on our current usage, independently of what happens before or after that time. This aspect of our usage is shown by the fact that the names of years (e.g. as ‘1988’ or ‘1990’), originally given to them on the basis of their supposed distance in years from the year of the birth of Jesus (‘1’ CE) have been retained, despite the current general belief of scholars that Jesus was born a few years earlier than previously believed.
A belief is the belief it is in virtue of who has it and what is its content, that is what is believed by the believer, but that content may be described in different ways. Thus my belief that ‘there was a Greek called ‘Alexander’ who was a great general’ may be described by those who believe that there was such a person as Alexander, as my belief that ‘the Greek called “Alexander” was a great general’. But while I could have the belief described in the former way, even if there was not such a Greek, I couldn’t have the belief described in the latter way if there was no such person—that description of the content of the belief presupposes that there was such a person. This difference is sometimes described as a difference between beliefs of two kinds which we may have—‘narrow content’ beliefs (e.g. the belief that ‘there was a Greek called “Alexander” who was a great general’) and ‘wide content’ beliefs (e.g. the belief that ‘the Greek called “Alexander” was a great general’). But there are not two such kinds of belief; there are merely two different ways of describing a particular belief. A narrow content belief is one in which the content is described in a way which does not presuppose anything outside the mental state of the believer. A wide-content belief is always a re-description of a narrow content belief in a way which does presuppose something outside the mental state of the believer. In this context we are concerned with whether the contents of God’s beliefs to which he has immediate mental access are all true; and so my claim in the text is that a belief at a time, individuated by its narrow content, is a hard event at that time. Although to avoid too complicated an exposition, I have often in the text given wide content descriptions of beliefs. I ask the reader to assume that when it is relevant to the hardness of a belief, the belief is the belief it is in virtue of its narrow content.
They claim that the ‘timeless’ tradition is most naturally read as holding that the divine ‘moment’ has duration and thus is a period and not an instant’ (pp. 432–433). Paul Fitzgerald (Fitzgerald 1985) denies that their view can be held consistently with the rest of what Stump and Kretzmann wish to claim.
Stump and Kretzmann (1981) have tried to make sense of a special kind of simultaneity, which could hold between God’s beliefs and actions on the one hand, and mundane events on the other hand, without incurring the problems which I have been describing. They point out that, according to the normal interpretation of the equations of the Special Theory of Relativity, simultaneity is relative to a frame of reference; and so strictly we can speak only of ‘simultaneity in frame F1’ or ‘simultaneity in frame F2’ and not of ‘simultaneity’ simplicitier. With this analogy in mind, Stump and Kretzmann define a notion which they call ‘ET-simultaneity’, which has the consequence that all events in time are ET-simultaneous with the one timeless event, without being simultaneous (in the normal sense) with each other. I do not believe that the analogy from Special Relativity will serve Stump and Kretzmann’s purpose of beginning to make ‘ET-simultaneity’ intelligible. For my reasons for this, see Swinburne (2016, chapter 12).
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Swinburne, R. Causation, Time, and God’s Omniscience. Topoi 36, 675–684 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9396-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9396-x