A central argument for the view that God's necessary omniscience [( Bgf p )] precludes freewill is unsound, because the necessity of the consequence is not the necessity of the consequent, and nor is Bgf true. God's belief in some particular proposition f about what I will do is not necessary, as I might do something that makes ~ f true. Fischer and Tognazzini claim that this counterargument argument assumes that I must freely do the something that makes f true. (...) But plainly it doesn't. All that it assumes is that I will do the something that makes f true. It makes no difference whether I do that thing unfreely, or "deterministicall". The argument does not assume the existence of a case of freewill in the face of divine foreknowledge, but instead considers the necessity of God's belief in some particular designated proposition f. The argument does not depend, as Fischer and Tognazzini suppose, on whether God's knowledge is a function of the facts (omniscience) or vice versa (infallibility). (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 1, Page 66-77, January 2022.

The idea that some of God's past beliefs depend on our future actions has a long history, going back to Origen in the third century CE. However, it is not always clear what this idea amounts to, since it is not always clear what kind of dependence is at issue. This paper surveys five different interpretations of dependence and, in each case, considers the implications for the debate over theological fatalism. Along the way, we discuss a number of related issues, (...) including the nature of explanation, the scope of metaphysical grounding, and the possibility of backward causation. (shrink)

In this paper, a cognate of the problem of divine foreknowledge is introduced: the problem of the prophet’s foreknowledge. The latter cannot be solved referring to Ockhamism—the doctrine that divine foreknowledge could, at least in principle, be compatible with human freedom because God’s beliefs about future actions are merely soft facts, rather than hard facts about the past. Under the assumption that if Ockhamism can solve the problem of divine foreknowledge then it should also yield a solution to the problem (...) of the prophet’s foreknowledge, it is concluded that Ockhamism fails. (shrink)

Recently, a time-honored assumption has resurfaced in some parts of the free will debate: if past divine beliefs or past truths about what we do depend on what we do, then these beliefs and truths are, in a sense, up to us; hence, we are able to act otherwise, despite the existence of past truths or past divine beliefs about our future actions. In this paper, I introduce and discuss a novel incompatibilist argument that rests on. This argument is interesting (...) in itself, for it is independent of a number of assumptions about the nature of God that have played an essential role in the classical defense of incompatibilism about divine foreknowledge and human free will. Moreover, the argument enables us to identify a difficulty compatibilists encounter when employing to block incompatibilism. (shrink)

The most promising way of responding to arguments for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom (in one way or another) invokes a claim about the order of explanation: God knew (or believed) that you would perform a given action because you would, in fact, perform it, and not the other way around. Once we see this result, many suppose, we'll see that divine foreknowledge ultimately poses no threat to human freedom. This essay argues that matters are not so (...) simple, for such reasoning threatens also to reconcile divine prepunishment with human freedom. The question here is this: if you have already been ( justly) punished by God for doing something, how then could you avoid doing that thing? As we'll see, there is a strong argument that seems to show that you couldn't. However, this essay argues that if divine prepunishment rules out human freedom, then so does divine foreknowledge. The arguments are exactly parallel in certain crucial respects. At any rate, investigating the issues surrounding prepunishment can help to throw into relief the various different strategies of response to the foreknowledge argument and can bring out what their costs and commitments really are. In particular, investigating prepunishment can help to bring out the inadequacy of the “Ockhamist” reply to the argument, as well as the sense in which God's past beliefs need to depend on what we do, if we are plausibly to have a choice about those beliefs. (shrink)

There is an old but powerful argument for the claim that exhaustive divine foreknowledge is incompatible with the freedom to do otherwise. A crucial ingredient in this argument is the principle of the “Fixity of the Past”. A seemingly new response to this argument has emerged, the so-called “dependence response,” which involves, among other things, abandoning FP for an alternative principle, the principle of the “Fixity of the Independent”. This paper presents three arguments for the claim that FI ought to (...) be preferred to FP. (shrink)

In our paper, "Omniscience, Freedom, and Dependence" (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 88: 346-367), we argued that recent attempts (by Merricks, McCall, and Westphal) to resolve the dilemma of freedom and foreknowledge fail because they are question-begging. Westphal replied to our paper in an earlier issue of Analysis, and this article is our rejoinder to his reply.

Several theorists (Merricks, Westphal, and McCall) have recently claimed to offer a novel way to respond to the dilemma of freedom and foreknowledge, rooted in Molina's insight that God's beliefs depend on what we do, rather than the other way around. In this paper we argue that these responses either beg the question, or else are dressed-up versions of Ockhamism.

One way that philosophers have attempted to defend free will against the threat of fatalism and against the threat from divine beliefs has been to endorse timelessness views. In this paper, I argue that, in order to respond to general worries about fatalism and divine beliefs, timelessness views must appeal to the notion of dependence. Once they do this, however, their distinctive position as timelessness views becomes otiose, for the appeal to dependence, if it helps at all, would itself be (...) sufficient to block worries about fatalism and divine beliefs. I conclude by discussing some implications for dialectical progress. (shrink)

Recently, several authors have utilized the notion of dependence to respond to the traditional argument for the incompatibility of freedom and divine foreknowledge. However, proponents of this response have not always been so clear in specifying where the incompatibility argument goes wrong, which has led to some unfounded objections to the response. We remedy this dialectical confusion by clarifying both the dependence response itself and its interaction with the standard incompatibility argument. Once these clarifications are made, it becomes clear both (...) (1.) that the dependence response does not beg the question against the proponent of the incompatibility argument and (2.) that the dependence response advances the dialectic whether it is developed as a version of Ockhamism or as a version of multiple-pasts compatibilism. (shrink)

It is widely thought that Atemporalism—the view that, because God is “outside” of time, he does not foreknow anything —constitutes a unique solution to the problem of freedom and foreknowledge. However, as I argue here, in order for Atemporalism to escape certain worries, the view must appeal to the dependence of God’s timeless knowledge on our actions. I then argue that, because it must appeal to such dependence, Atemporalism is crucially similar to the recent sempiternalist accounts proposed by Trenton Merricks, (...) Philip Swenson, and Jonathan Westphal, and I conclude by briefly sketching some implications of this result. (shrink)

Trenton Merricks, among others, has recently championed in a series of papers what he takes to be a novel and simple solution to an age-old problem concerning the compatibility of divine omniscience and human freedom. The solution crucially involves the thesis that God’s beliefs about the future actions of human persons asymmetrically depend on the future actions of those persons. I show that Merricks’s defense of this thesis is inadequate and that the prospects for improving his defense of it would (...) require him to enter the fray of articulating and defending a view about the mechanics whereby divine foreknowledge is achieved—something he and other advocates of the strategy he advances had hoped to avoid. (shrink)

Foreknowledge arguments attempt to show that infallible and exhaustive foreknowledge is incompatible with creaturely freedom. One particularly powerful foreknowledge argument employs the concept of accidental necessity. But an opponent of this argument might challenge it precisely because it employs the concept of accidental necessity. Indeed, Merricks (Philos Rev 118:29–57, 2009, Philos Rev 120:567–586, 2011a) and Zagzebski (Faith Philos 19(4):503–519, 2002, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011) have each written favorably of such a response. In this paper, I aim to show that (...) responding to the accidental necessity version of the foreknowledge argument by disputing the concept of accidental necessity, including doing so in the ways these authors do, does not constitute a successful response to the foreknowledge argument. This is because there is an only slightly modified but still well-motivated version of the foreknowledge argument which employs the notion of uncausability rather than accidental necessity; and this argument is not threatened by objections to the concept of accidental necessity, including those objections offered by Zagzebski and Merricks. As recent literature on the foreknowledge argument has emphasized, when a response to a foreknowledge argument fails to threaten an only slightly modified but still well-motivated version of that argument, the response in question is not successful. So the responses to the accidental necessity version of the foreknowledge argument I have mentioned are not successful. Moreover, those working on foreknowledge arguments more generally should take seriously the uncausability version of the foreknowledge argument articulated here, as it may well be that still more responses to the foreknowledge argument will not threaten it, either. (shrink)

An increasingly popular approach to reconciling divine foreknowledge with human freedom is to say that, because God’s beliefs depend on what we do, we are free to do otherwise than what we actually do despite God’s infallible foreknowledge. This paper develops a new challenge for this dependence response. The challenge stems from a case of backward time travel in which an agent intuitively lacks the freedom to do otherwise because of the time-traveler’s knowledge of what the agent will do, and (...) this is so despite the fact that the time-traveler’s knowledge depends on what the agent will do. (shrink)

We contend that since what is true cannot be false, foreknowledge is transparently incompatible with free will. We argue that what is crucial to the conflict is the role of truth in foreknowledge and that the identity of the one who foreknows is irrelevant.