Abstract
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.
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Notes
I say this is the rough idea because there are some who would endorse (2) but who would reject understanding infallibility as implying that for any proposition p, if God believes p at t then p. Those who would do so would be those who think that non-time-indexed claims can change their truth-values, but time-indexed claims cannot.
See (Zagzebski 1996).
In my own view, some of the most interesting responses to foreknowledge arguments are ones which might be charitably interpreted as rejecting the assumption here that God’s belief occurs in the past, not because they hold to timelessness but because they hold that divine beliefs (or other mental states) occur only cross-temporally. See, e.g., (Zemach and Widerker 1987).
For an overview of the principle of alternate possibilities, see (Widerker and McKenna 2006).
For a recent defense, see (Rota 2010).
E.g., (Van Inwagen 2008).
See (Alston 1986).
(Zagzebski 2011) presses this line.
E.g., see (Adams 1967).
In this section, I follow closely Zagzebski’s presentation in her (2011), which has no page numbers.
For a review of such principles, see (O’Connor 2000).
For a reflection on two-way power and causation in this vein, see (Lowe 2013).
For simplicity’s sake here, I overlook a slightly different argument Merricks offers for the same conclusion on p.54 which makes a similar mistake as that made by the argument discussed in the main text. The alternative argument depends on the claim that God’s belief at \(\hbox {t}_{0}\) that Jones will sit at t depends on the truth at \(\hbox {t}_{0}\) of the proposition \(<\)Jones will sit at t\(>\). This claim is no more adequately defended than is the claim discussed in the main text that God’s belief at \(\hbox {t}_{0}\) that Jones will sit at t depends on Jones’s sitting at t.
See especially (Byerly 2012b).
For my part, I think Fischer and Tognazzini overlook another charitable reinterpretation of Merricks’s argument according to which it is not rhetorically infelicitous. Rather than thinking of Merricks as responding to an argument for fatalism, see Merricks as responding to an argument for the incompatibility of foreknowledge and freedom. If we think of Merricks’s work in this context, then his helping himself to the claim that Jones has a choice about his sitting is not ipso facto rhetorically problematic.
See, e.g., (Plantinga 1986).
As, e.g., in (Flint 1998).
Again, see (Widerker and McKenna 2006).
For helpful discussion of roughly this point which does not apply it to the foreknowledge debate, see (Timpe 2006).
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Byerly, T.R. Foreknowledge, accidental necessity, and uncausability. Int J Philos Relig 75, 137–154 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-013-9436-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-013-9436-z