Philosophical Essays Against Open Theism

Benjamin H. Arbour, Benjamin H. Arbour

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317627968
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

This new collection of philosophically rigorous essays critiques the interpretation of divine omniscience known as open theism, focusing primarily on philosophically motivated open theism and positing arguments that reject divine knowledge of future contingents in the face of the dilemma of freedom and foreknowledge. The sixteen new essays in this collection, written by some of the most renowned philosophers on the topic of divine providence, represent a philosophical attempt to seriously consider open theism. They cover a wide variety of issues, including: the ontology of time, systematic metaphysics, perfect being theology, the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, the problem of evil, and the nature of divine knowledge in general. Philosophical Essays Against Open Theism advances the discussion by wrestling against the assertions of open theism, and will be of interest to both proponents and opponents of this controversial issue.

Part I
Open Theism and the Metaphysics of Time

1
The Openness of God

Eternity and Free Will

Eleonore Stump

In various publications, William Hasker has argued for what he calls “the openness of God.” It is part of the openness of God, in Hasker’s view, that God does not have comprehensive knowledge of the future; in particular, the God of open theism lacks knowledge of the future free choices of human beings. The proponents of open theism, Hasker says,

portray God ‘as majestic yet intimate, as powerful yet gentle and responsive, as holy and loving and caring, as desiring for humans to decide freely for or against his will for them, yet endlessly resourceful in achieving his ultimate purposes.’¹

For Hasker, the openness of God means that although

God knows an immense amount about each one of us … he does not, because he cannot, plan his actions toward us on the basis of a prior knowledge of how we will respond. … And this means that God is a risk-taker; in expressing his love toward us, he opens himself up to the real possibility of failure.²

Hasker sees his position as an alternative to classical theism, as represented, for example, by standard Thomism, which Hasker rejects. There are two main reasons for his rejection. First, as he sees it, the Thomistic God cannot be intimate with human beings or responsive to them.³ Second, Hasker thinks that the Thomistic account of God as timeless solves the problem of foreknowledge and free will only at the cost of making God’s timeless knowledge useless to God in interaction with the temporal world.⁴ Hasker says,

I … regard the doctrine of timelessness as coherent and intelligible. … But divine timelessness … does not help … in enabling us to understand God’s actions in providence and prophecy.⁵

In this paper, I want to examine the second of Hasker’s reasons for rejecting classical theism.⁶ I will examine Hasker’s argument for thinking free will and timeless knowledge are compatible, and I will give reasons for thinking that this argument is itself incompatible with the doctrine of eternity. Then I will try to show that considerations derived from the doctrine of eternity yield a more effective way to argue for the same conclusion. Finally, I will use those same considerations to try to undercut Hasker’s conclusion that timeless knowledge could be of no use to God in guiding his actions in time.

Eternity

For Aquinas, God is not so much timeless as eternal; and because the doctrine of God’s eternity makes a significant difference to these issues, it is important to try to be clear about it at the outset.

Boethius, who gives the classical definition of eternity, says that eternity is “the complete possession all at once of illimitable life.”⁷ This is a timeless mode of existence. Nonetheless, nothing in this concept denies the reality of time or implies that temporal experiences or events are illusory.

If there were such a thing as Flatland, then there would be more than one mode of spatial existence. There would be both the Flatland mode of spatial existence and the three-dimensional mode of spatial existence. That sentient creatures such as human beings are three-dimensional would not mean that sentient creatures in Flatland were really somehow three-dimensional or that their mode of spatial existence somehow really had any of the three-dimensional characteristic of the three-dimensional mode of existence. The two spatial modes of existence, that of Flatland and that of three-dimensional human beings, would both be real; and neither would be reducible to the other or to any third thing. Nonetheless, the two worlds might interact. (In Erwin Abbott’s original Flatland, a sentient square in Flatland comes into conversation with an inhabitant of a three-dimensional world, who has a terrible time explaining his three-dimensional world to his new friend, the square.)

Boethius and others who accept the concept of eternity suppose that an analogous point holds as regards modes of duration. From their point of view, reality includes both time and eternity as two distinct modes of duration, neither of which is reducible to the other or to any third thing. Nonetheless, it is possible for inhabitants of the differing modes to interact.

To understand the nature of the interactions, it is important to see that, as Boethius and many others in the traditions of the major monotheisms understand it, eternity is not just timelessness. Rather it is a mode of existence characterized by both the absence of succession and also limitless duration.

Temporal events are ordered in terms of the A-series—past, present, and future—and the B-series—earlier than, simultaneous with, later than. Because an eternal God cannot be characterized by succession, nothing in God’s life can be ordered in either of those series. Moreover, no temporal entity or event can be past or future with respect to, or earlier or later than, the whole life of an eternal God, because otherwise God would himself be part of a temporal series.

On the other hand, eternity is also characterized by limitless duration, that is, the duration of a present that is not limited by either future or past. Because the mode of existence of an eternal God is characterized by this kind of presentness, the relation between an eternal God and anything in time has to be one of simultaneity.

Of course, the presentness and simultaneity associated with an eternal God cannot be temporal presentness or temporal simultaneity. Taking the concept of eternity seriously involves recognizing that it introduces technical senses for several familiar words, including ‘now,’ ‘present,’ and ‘simultaneous with,’ as well as for the present-tense forms of many verbs. The relations between eternity and time therefore require a special sense of ‘simultaneity.’

In earlier work, Norman Kretzmann and I called this special sort of simultaneity ‘ET-simultaneity,’ for ‘simultaneity between what is eternal and what is temporal.’ A relationship that can be recognized as a kind of simultaneity will of course be symmetric. But, since its relata have relevantly distinct modes of existence, ET-simultaneity will be neither reflexive nor transitive. In particular, each of two temporal events can be ET-simultaneous with one and the same eternal event without being ET-simultaneous with each other.

Given the doctrine of eternity, God does not have foreknowledge. He knows any given future contingent only as it is temporally present, and not as it is future. For the same reasons, God cannot change the past or act on the future. Such actions require a temporal location, without which there can be neither past nor future. Nonetheless, the proponents of the doctrine of eternity thought that, in the eternal present, God can directly affect events that are past or future with respect to us. God can will in the eternal present that something occur or come into existence at any particular point in time, including those points that are past or future with respect to us.

If Flatland were linearly ordered with an absolute middle, there might be an absolute Flatland here, which in the Flatland world could be occupied by only one Flatlander at a time. Nonetheless, if Flatland were small enough, then from the point of view of a human observer in the three-dimensional world, all of Flatland could be here at once. And yet it would not follow and it would not be true that all of Flatland would be here with respect to any occupant of Flatland. So it could be the case both that only one thing in Flatland could be here at once (with respect to the occupants of Flat-land) and also that all of Flatland could be here at once (with respect to the inhabitants of the three-dimensional world). The reason for this apparently paradoxical claim is that all of Flatland can be encompassed within the metaphysically bigger here of the three-dimensional world.

An analogous point holds with regard to the present, on the doctrine of eternity. With respect to God in the eternal present, all of time is encompassed within the eternal present, insofar as all of time is ET-simultaneous with the eternal present. But it does not follow and is not true that all of time is present with respect to anything temporal at any particular temporal location.

It may help to make this point clear if we briefly consider the question: “Does an eternal God know what time it is now?” For the sake of discussion, suppose that the indexical ‘now’ is ineliminable and that there is an absolute temporal present, as distinct from a present that is merely relative to some particular temporal entity. Could an eternal God know what time the absolute now is?

On the supposition that there is an absolute present, then in time there is a fact of the matter about how far history has unrolled. With regard to the inhabitants in time, at any given moment in time as that moment in time becomes present, history has unrolled that far. And this is something an eternal God can know. Furthermore, because the whole of eternity is ET-simultaneous with each temporal event as it is actually happening, an eternal God can know all the events actually occurring at any particular time as well as the temporal location of that time and its being experienced as absolutely present by temporal entities at that time.

But after these things, there is nothing further for God to know about what time it is now. There is no time in the eternal now; and, from the standpoint of the eternal present, every temporal event, as it is part of the absolute temporal present, is present to God. In the life of an eternal God, no temporal moment has any more claim than any other to be for God the absolute present.

A rough image may help make the point more intuitively available. Imagine two parallel horizontal lines, the upper one representing eternity and the lower one representing time; and let presentness be represented by light. Then, with respect to things in time, we might say, the temporal present is represented by a dot of light that moves along the lower line, which is lighted successively, moment by moment. The eternal present is represented by the upper line’s being entirely lighted at once. For any temporal present, with respect to something in that temporal present, the whole line of eternity is lit up at once; but time is lit up only instant by instant. On the other hand, with respect to an eternal God, the entire timeline is lit up at once.

So a particular moment in time may be both lit and not lit—only not at the same time. Just as in the example of Flatland and the three-dimensional world, once eternity is introduced, there are two different but equally real modes of existence; and presentness becomes relational. In relation to the unrolling of history, a moment of time may be not yet present. But in relation to the enduring and encompassing present of eternity, that same moment in time may be present, insofar as one and the same eternal present is ET-simultaneous with it.

With this much review of the doctrine of eternity, we can now turn to a sketch of Hasker’s position as regards God’s eternal knowledge of future free choices.

Hasker’s Position

Hasker begins the development of his position on God’s timeless knowledge by examining a much discussed argument of Alvin Plantinga’s which attempts to show that taking God’s knowledge to be timeless does not solve the problem of foreknowledge and free will.⁸ In this argument, Plantinga is making use of a common intuition, namely, that divine eternity is somehow now as fixed and determinate as the past is.

Linda Zagzebski puts that intuition this way:

[W]e have no more reason to think we can do anything about God’s timeless knowing than about God’s past knowledge. The timeless realm is as much out of our reach as the past.⁹

And so, she says, “the timelessness move does not avoid the problem of theological fatalism since an argument structurally parallel to the basic argument [for the incompatibility of foreknowledge and free will] can be formulated for timeless knowledge.”¹⁰

Here is Plantinga’s version of such an argument (with dates changed for the sake of the argument):

Suppose in fact Paul will mow his lawn in 2095. Then the proposition God (eternally) knows that Paul mows in 2095 is now true. That proposition, furthermore, was true eighty years ago; the proposition God knows (eternally) that Paul mows in 2095 not only is true now, but was true then. Since what is past is necessary, it is now necessary that this proposition was true eighty years ago. But it is logically necessary that if this proposition was true eighty years ago, then Paul mows in 2095. Hence his mowing then is necessary in just the way the past is. But, then it neither now is nor in future will be within Paul’s power to refrain from mowing.¹¹

Plantinga thinks that since this argument makes use of the notion of God’s eternal knowledge and nevertheless leads to the conclusion that Paul’s “mowing [in 2095] is necessary in just the way the past is …, the claim that God is outside of time is essentially irrelevant”¹² to any solution to the problem of foreknowledge and free will.

Plantinga’s argument depends on taking the past truth of the proposition God eternally knows that Paul mows in 2095 as a hard fact about the past, to which the fixity of the past applies. But Hasker argues that whether or not this is a hard fact about the past depends on whether the proposition God eternally knows that Paul mows in 2095 is itself a hard fact. From Hasker’s point of view, the success of Plantinga’s argument depends on whether or not “propositions about the eternal acts of God [are] ‘necessary’ in the same way in which the past is necessary.”¹³

On the one hand, in the spirit of the intuition expressed by Zagzebski, Hasker claims that it certainly seems as if they are. He says,

as of the present moment, it is in many respects not yet determined how the future shall be. …. God’s timeless eternity … certainly cannot be open in this way; every fact is determined to be as it is, and not in any other way.¹⁴

On the other hand, however, Has...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Open Theism and the Metaphysics of Time
• PART II Open Theism and Other Philosophical Issues
• PART III Open Theism and Other Issues in Philosophical Theology
• List of Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index