Omniscience and freedom

1. Omniscience and freedom Michael Lacewing enquiries@alevelphilosophy.co.uk

2. Omniscience • Omni-: ‘all’; scient: ‘knowing’ • Is it possible to know everything? • God is the most perfect possible being. So omniscience is ‘knowing all the truths that it is possible to know’. • What form does ‘perfect’ knowledge take? • Does God know via language or propositions or inference? Or only ‘directly’? • Is it possible for God to know the future?

3. God outside time • If God is outside, then yes: God knows all events in time in the same way • Past, present and future are the same to God • Is this compatible with free will? • If God is within time, and the answer is ‘no’, then is God omniscient?

4. On omniscience and free will • For me to do an action freely, I must be able to do it or refrain from doing it. • If God knows what I will do before I do it, then it must be true that I do that action. • Therefore, it cannot be true that God knows what I will do before I do it and be true that I don’t do that action. • If it is true that I do that action, then nothing I can do can prevent it coming true that I am doing that action.

5. On omniscience and free will • Therefore, if God knows what I will do before I do it, then I cannot refrain from doing that action. • Therefore, if God knows what I will do before I do it, then that action is not free. • (Therefore, conversely, if my actions are free, God does not know what I will do before I do it.) • This argument claims that omniscience and free will are incompatible. • We could just abandon free will and defend omniscience – but…

6. Goodness and free will • Free will is a great good that allows us to do good or evil and to willingly enter into a relationship with God or not. • If God is supremely good, he wants our lives to be morally significant and meaningful, so he has given us free will. • One response: God does not know what we will choose. But it is impossible to know what a free agent will choose, so there is nothing that it is possible to know that God doesn’t know. • Is this a satisfactory conception of omniscience?

7. Kenny’s solution • God can know what I will do before I do it and yet I can act freely. • The confusion • Whatever God knows is true – this claim is necessarily true • Whatever God knows is necessarily true – this claim is false. • So God can know what I will do, but the fact that I will do it is contingent – it is not necessary that I do it • It is not true that I must do it, only that I will do.

8. Objection • To do something different from what God knows I will do would mean changing God’s knowledge – either changing what God knows (I will do) or making it that God doesn’t know what I will do, because I do something else. • If God already knows what I will do, then changing what God knows would mean changing the past. • I can’t change the past, so I can’t change what God knows. • So I can’t change what I will do. • So there is nothing I can do except what God already knows that I will do.

9. Kenny’s reply • We don’t change the future – the future is what is (what is true) after all the changes are in. • Instead, our actions make a truth about the future become a truth about the past • ‘I will eat’ becomes ‘I have eaten’ • Notice we can change the past: ‘I have not eaten’ becomes ‘I have eaten’. • When I act, my action is what makes God’s belief about what I will do true. But this doesn’t show that I can’t decide what to do.

10. Confused? • Kenny doesn’t explain how God could know the future while I remain free. • I can know that my friend will help this old lady across the street • He is kind, in a good mood, and he just said he would • But his action is still free. • But God’s knowledge is complete and infallible • How, if our choices are not determined?

11. Knowledge and determinism • If God knows my future choices because he has infallible knowledge of my character, this won’t be enough to predict my future in detail, e.g. whether I’m alive! • If God knows this, this suggests that the future is fixed in some way. • If the future is not fixed, then how does God know the future? • Reply: we can’t answer this – we don’t know. • However, we have shown that omniscience is not logically incompatible with free will.