Abstract
Eleonore Stump and Katherin Rogers have recently defended the doctrine of divine timelessness in separate essays, arguing that the doctrine is consistent with libertarian free will and that timeless divine knowledge is providentially useful. I show that their defenses do not succeed; a doctrine of eternity having these features cannot be saved.
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Notes
R. T. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Eleonore Stump, “The Openness of God: Eternity and Free Will,” and Katherin Rogers, “Foreknowledge, Freedom, and Vicious Circles: Anselm versus Open Theism,” both in Benjamin H. Arbour, ed., Philosophical Essays Against Open Theism (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 21–36 and 93–109 respectively. Page numbers in the text refer to these articles.
Stump claims to be presenting Aquinas’ views on these topics, and Rogers claims to be presenting Anselm’s. Such claims are of course subject to dispute by other scholars, but I will not enter into such controversies here.
p. 23; quoted from Alvin Plantinga, “On Ockham’s Way Out,” Faith and Philosophy 3 (1986), p. 239; dates have been altered by Stump.
See William Hasker, God, Time, and Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 175, 176.
William Hasker, “The Absence of a Timeless God,” in Gregory E. Ganssle and David M. Woodruff, eds., God and Time: Essays on the Divine Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 197, 198.
At this point Stump mislabels proposition (b) as (a); this has been corrected here.
I am assuming Stump would not want to say that God, though eternally omniscient, is temporally non-omniscient.
There is a possible ambiguity in this formula that needs to be taken account of. Stump understands “God now knows that p” as “God is now (in the temporal present) knowing that p.” So understood, she rejects it, on the grounds that God’s eternal knowing does not take place at any point in time. It can, however, be understood as “It is now true that God knows that p,” and so understood Stump appears to be committed to accepting it, inasmuch as she does accept (a’) “In 1932 (g) God in the eternal present knows that in 2095 Paul mows is true.”.
God, Time, and Knowledge, 176.
Clearly there is much more than this to be said both for and against four-dimensionalism, but we cannot pursue those issues here.
Here Rogers/Anselm differs from Aquinas, who clearly thought that God could have done other than He does. Rogers attributes this view of Aquinas to his desire to avoid Averroism; since Averroism is not a threat at the present time, she thinks there is no need to follow Aquinas at this point. (109, n 29).
This is not to say that the action is causally necessitated; this may or may not be the case. The action is necessary, unavoidable, because it eternally exists as part of the four-dimensional continuum.
See God, Time, and Knowledge 112; numbered there as (PEP5).
In the debate referenced by Rogers in her essay (108, n. 18).
See William Hasker, “The (Non-)Existence of Molinist Counterfactuals,” in Kenneth Perszyk, ed., Molinism: The Contemporary Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 31n; also, “Molinism’s Freedom Problem: A Reply to Cunningham,” Faith and Philosophy 34:1 (January 2017), 93–106.
See my "Zagzebski on Power Entailment," Faith and Philosophy 10 (April 1993), pp. 250–255.
The embedded quotation is from God, Time, and Knowledge, 63.
God, Time, and Knowledge, 176 (emphasis added).
“In one and the same eternal present, God can be aware of the prayer for healing at t1 and will that there be healing at t2. In this case, although God’s willing of healing is not later than the prayer, It is nevertheless because of the prayer” (33). For more context, see Stump’s entire discussion on pp. 32–34.
A referee thinks that Stump’s conception of the providential usefulness of divine eternal knowledge actually is the one sketched in this paragraph. I tend to doubt this, because (a) I find no indication in her writings that God’s timeless knowledge is acquired in a way that is logically (though not temporally) sequential, as required for this conception, and, (b) I do not find any acknowledgement that the providential usefulness of divine timeless knowledge is the same as the usefulness of the knowledge available to God according to open theism. If however she does concede point (b), then the purpose of my argument here is satisfied and I have no further complaint on this score.
In introducing this example, Rogers states: “The only way to express the example is as a sequence of divine desires and beliefs. This, of course, fails to capture the reality. I take the reality of God’s eternal act to be beyond human imagining” (100). No doubt there is wisdom in this. However, I can only address Rogers’ example in the form in which she presents it to us.
This follows from what Rogers calls the “grounding principle,” which asserts that “the truth about an a se choice, and hence knowledge about an a se choice, can be grounded in (or dependent upon) only the actual choice itself” (93). This of course is yet another reason to reject Molinism.
One very well-informed philosopher who does pay the price is Paul Helm (see his The Providence of God (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1994); also “The ‘Openness’ in Compatibilism,” in Barbour, ed., Philosophical Essays Against Open Theism. Helm is unusually frank in facing all of the implications of this view; one might say, he does not so much bite the bullet as he chews it up, swallows, and asks for more!.
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Hasker, W. Can eternity be saved? A comment on Stump and Rogers. Int J Philos Relig 87, 137–148 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-019-09719-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-019-09719-w