Abstract
Michael Tooley’s latest argument against the possibility of divine foreknowledge trades on the idea that, whichever theory of time is true, the ontology of the future—or lack thereof—gives rise to special problems for God’s prescience. I argue that Tooley’s reasoning is predicated on two mischaracterizations and conclude that, on at least some theories of time, the possibility of divine foreknowledge appears secure.
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Notes
The literature on this subject is massive. For a helpful overview of the many issues surrounding this debate, see Patrick Todd and John Martin Fischer’s introductory essay in Freedom, Fatalism, and Foreknowledge, eds. John Martin Fischer and Patrick Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1–38. The arguments against divine foreknowledge that I will be considering in this paper, however, are distinct from those presented in standard works on the topic. Consequently, I will not be engaging with very much of that literature here.
Michael Tooley, “Time, Truth, Actuality, and Causation: On the Impossibility of Divine Foreknowledge,” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 1 (2010): 143–163.
This definition comes from Alan Rhoda’s essay, “The Fivefold Openness of the Future,” in God in an Open Universe: Science, Metaphysics, and Open Theism, eds. William Hasker, Dean Zimmerman, and Thomas Jay Oord (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011), 73.
Technically, Storrs McCall’s so-called “branch attrition” model of time—according to which each one of a great many possible future states exist—also counts as an ontically open future view since, as Rhoda points out, there is no unique series of future world states (Ibid., 74). Details can be found in McCall, A Model of the Universe: Space–Time, Probability, and Decision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). For defenses of presentism and the growing block see, e.g., Craig Bourne, A Future for Presentism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) and Michael Tooley, Time, Tense, and Causation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) respectively.
Barry Dainton provides an excellent treatment of the eternalist position in Time and Space 2nd edition (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 27–41. For a recent explication and defense of the moving spotlight theory, see especially Ross Cameron, The Moving Spotlight: An Essay on Time and Ontology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
Tooley, “Time, Truth, Actuality, and Causation,” 154. (my emphasis)
Ibid.
The argument is part of a larger case Tooley makes for the reality of a growing block model of time in his book Time, Tense, and Causation.
David Lewis, “The Paradoxes of Time Travel,” American Philosophical Quarterly 2 (1976): 149.
Tooley, “Time, Truth, Actuality, and Causation,” 159.
Philip Swenson, “Ability, Foreknowledge, and Explanatory Dependence,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 4 (2016): 660.
Ibid. The examples Swenson cites come from Correia, Existential Dependence and Cognate Notions (Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 2005); idem, “Ontological Dependence,” Philosophy Compass 5 (2008): 1013–1032, and Benjamin Sebastian Schnieder, “A Certain Kind of Trinity: Dependence, Substance, Explanation,” Philosophical Studies 2 (2006): 393–419.
One candidate relation between a true proposition p and the state of affairs that makes p true, of course, is the truthmaker relation. For a clear statement on the non-causal nature of truthmakers, see D. M. Armstrong’s Truth and Truthmakers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 5. Linda Zagzebski has also recognized that counterfactual dependency needn’t be causal. She writes, “Counterfactual dependency of the past on the future may not entail causal dependency of the past on the future or, to be more accurate, a type of dependency of the past on the future truly expressed by a subjunctive conditional may not entail causal dependency.” Zagzebski, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 81.
Tooley, “Time, Truth, Actuality, and Causation,” 161.
Special thanks to Trip Glazer for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
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Hess, E. Contra Tooley: divine foreknowledge is possible. Int J Philos Relig 87, 165–172 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-019-09727-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-019-09727-w