knowledge is divine essay

Poems & Poets

An Essay on Criticism

BY Alexander Pope

Introduction

Alexander Pope, a translator, poet, wit, amateur landscape gardener, and satirist, was born in London in 1688. He contracted tuberculosis of the bone when he was young, which disfigured his spine and purportedly only allowed him to grow to 4 feet, 6 inches. Pope grew up on his father’s property at Binfield in Windsor Forest, where he read avidly and gained an appreciation for the natural world. Though he remained in ill health throughout his life, he was able to support himself as a translator and writer. As a Catholic at that time in Britain, he was ineligible for patronage, public office, or a position at a university.   A sharp-penned satirist of public figures and their behavior, Pope had his supporters and detractors. He was friends with Jonathan Swift, Dr. John Arbuthnot, and John Gay. Pope’s poems include the “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” and the mock epic “The Rape of the Lock.” To read his work is to be exposed to the order and wit of the 18th century poetry that preceded the Romantic poets. Pope primarily used the heroic couplet, and his lines are immensely quotable; from “An Essay on Criticism” come famous phrases such as “To err is human; to forgive, divine,” “A little learning is a dang’rous thing,” and “For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”   After 1718 Pope lived on his five-acre property at Twickenham by the Thames. He cultivated a much-visited garden that contained a grotto, and featured the formal characteristics of a French garden and the newer more natural “English” landscape style.   Pope wrote “An Essay on Criticism” when he was 23; he was influenced by Quintillian, Aristotle, Horace’s Ars Poetica , and Nicolas Boileau’s L’Art Poëtique . Written in heroic couplets, the tone is straight-forward and conversational. It is a discussion of what good critics should do; however, in reading it one gleans much wisdom on the qualities poets should strive for in their own work. In Part I of “An Essay on Criticism,” Pope notes the lack of “true taste” in critics, stating: “’Tis with our judgments as our watches, none / Go just alike, yet each believes his own.” Pope advocates knowing one’s own artistic limits: “Launch not beyond your depth, but be discreet, / And mark that point where sense and dullness meet.” He stresses the order in nature and the value of the work of the “Ancients” of Greece, but also states that not all good work can be explained by rules: “Some beauties yet, no precepts can declare, / For there’s a happiness as well as care.”   In Part II, Pope lists the mistakes that critics make, as well as the defects in poems that some critics short-sightedly praise. He advocates looking at a whole piece of work, instead of being swayed by some of its showier or faulty parts: “As men of breeding, sometimes men of wit, / T’ avoid great errors, must the less commit.” He advises against too much ornamentation in writing, and against fancy style that communicates little of merit. In his description of versification, his lines enact the effects of clumsy writing: “And ten low words oft creep in one dull line,” and “A needless Alexandrine ends the song, / That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.” In Part III, Pope discusses what critics should do, holding up the “Ancients” as models, including Aristotle (the “Stagirite”) who was respected by the lawless poets: “Poets, a race long unconfin’d and free, / Still fond and proud of savage liberty, / Receiv’d his laws; and stood convinc’d ‘twas fit, / Who conquer’d nature, should preside o’er wit.”

'Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill Appear in writing or in judging ill; But, of the two, less dang'rous is th' offence To tire our patience, than mislead our sense. Some few in that, but numbers err in this, Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss; A fool might once himself alone expose, Now one in verse makes many more in prose.        'Tis with our judgments as our watches, none Go just alike, yet each believes his own. In poets as true genius is but rare, True taste as seldom is the critic's share; Both must alike from Heav'n derive their light, These born to judge, as well as those to write. Let such teach others who themselves excel, And censure freely who have written well. Authors are partial to their wit, 'tis true, But are not critics to their judgment too?        Yet if we look more closely we shall find Most have the seeds of judgment in their mind; Nature affords at least a glimm'ring light; The lines, tho' touch'd but faintly, are drawn right. But as the slightest sketch, if justly trac'd, Is by ill colouring but the more disgrac'd, So by false learning is good sense defac'd; Some are bewilder'd in the maze of schools, And some made coxcombs Nature meant but fools. In search of wit these lose their common sense, And then turn critics in their own defence: Each burns alike, who can, or cannot write, Or with a rival's, or an eunuch's spite. All fools have still an itching to deride, And fain would be upon the laughing side. If Mævius scribble in Apollo's spite, There are, who judge still worse than he can write.        Some have at first for wits, then poets pass'd, Turn'd critics next, and prov'd plain fools at last; Some neither can for wits nor critics pass, As heavy mules are neither horse nor ass. Those half-learn'd witlings, num'rous in our isle As half-form'd insects on the banks of Nile; Unfinish'd things, one knows not what to call, Their generation's so equivocal: To tell 'em, would a hundred tongues require, Or one vain wit's, that might a hundred tire.        But you who seek to give and merit fame, And justly bear a critic's noble name, Be sure your self and your own reach to know, How far your genius, taste, and learning go; Launch not beyond your depth, but be discreet, And mark that point where sense and dulness meet.        Nature to all things fix'd the limits fit, And wisely curb'd proud man's pretending wit: As on the land while here the ocean gains, In other parts it leaves wide sandy plains; Thus in the soul while memory prevails, The solid pow'r of understanding fails; Where beams of warm imagination play, The memory's soft figures melt away. One science only will one genius fit; So vast is art, so narrow human wit: Not only bounded to peculiar arts, But oft in those, confin'd to single parts. Like kings we lose the conquests gain'd before, By vain ambition still to make them more; Each might his sev'ral province well command, Would all but stoop to what they understand.        First follow NATURE, and your judgment frame By her just standard, which is still the same: Unerring Nature, still divinely bright, One clear, unchang'd, and universal light, Life, force, and beauty, must to all impart, At once the source, and end, and test of art. Art from that fund each just supply provides, Works without show, and without pomp presides: In some fair body thus th' informing soul With spirits feeds, with vigour fills the whole, Each motion guides, and ev'ry nerve sustains; Itself unseen, but in th' effects, remains. Some, to whom Heav'n in wit has been profuse, Want as much more, to turn it to its use; For wit and judgment often are at strife, Though meant each other's aid, like man and wife. 'Tis more to guide, than spur the Muse's steed; Restrain his fury, than provoke his speed; The winged courser, like a gen'rous horse, Shows most true mettle when you check his course.        Those RULES of old discover'd, not devis'd, Are Nature still, but Nature methodis'd; Nature, like liberty, is but restrain'd By the same laws which first herself ordain'd.        Hear how learn'd Greece her useful rules indites, When to repress, and when indulge our flights: High on Parnassus' top her sons she show'd, And pointed out those arduous paths they trod; Held from afar, aloft, th' immortal prize, And urg'd the rest by equal steps to rise. Just precepts thus from great examples giv'n, She drew from them what they deriv'd from Heav'n. The gen'rous critic fann'd the poet's fire, And taught the world with reason to admire. Then criticism the Muse's handmaid prov'd, To dress her charms, and make her more belov'd; But following wits from that intention stray'd; Who could not win the mistress, woo'd the maid; Against the poets their own arms they turn'd, Sure to hate most the men from whom they learn'd. So modern 'pothecaries, taught the art By doctor's bills to play the doctor's part, Bold in the practice of mistaken rules, Prescribe, apply, and call their masters fools. Some on the leaves of ancient authors prey, Nor time nor moths e'er spoil'd so much as they: Some drily plain, without invention's aid, Write dull receipts how poems may be made: These leave the sense, their learning to display, And those explain the meaning quite away.        You then whose judgment the right course would steer, Know well each ANCIENT'S proper character; His fable, subject, scope in ev'ry page; Religion, country, genius of his age: Without all these at once before your eyes, Cavil you may, but never criticise. Be Homer's works your study and delight, Read them by day, and meditate by night; Thence form your judgment, thence your maxims bring, And trace the Muses upward to their spring; Still with itself compar'd, his text peruse; And let your comment be the Mantuan Muse.        When first young Maro in his boundless mind A work t' outlast immortal Rome design'd, Perhaps he seem'd above the critic's law, And but from Nature's fountains scorn'd to draw: But when t' examine ev'ry part he came, Nature and Homer were, he found, the same. Convinc'd, amaz'd, he checks the bold design, And rules as strict his labour'd work confine, As if the Stagirite o'erlook'd each line. Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem; To copy nature is to copy them.        Some beauties yet, no precepts can declare, For there's a happiness as well as care. Music resembles poetry, in each Are nameless graces which no methods teach, And which a master-hand alone can reach. If, where the rules not far enough extend, (Since rules were made but to promote their end) Some lucky LICENCE answers to the full Th' intent propos'd, that licence is a rule. Thus Pegasus, a nearer way to take, May boldly deviate from the common track. Great wits sometimes may gloriously offend, And rise to faults true critics dare not mend; From vulgar bounds with brave disorder part, And snatch a grace beyond the reach of art, Which, without passing through the judgment, gains The heart, and all its end at once attains. In prospects, thus, some objects please our eyes, Which out of nature's common order rise, The shapeless rock, or hanging precipice. But tho' the ancients thus their rules invade, (As kings dispense with laws themselves have made) Moderns, beware! or if you must offend Against the precept, ne'er transgress its end; Let it be seldom, and compell'd by need, And have, at least, their precedent to plead. The critic else proceeds without remorse, Seizes your fame, and puts his laws in force.        I know there are, to whose presumptuous thoughts Those freer beauties, ev'n in them, seem faults. Some figures monstrous and misshap'd appear, Consider'd singly, or beheld too near, Which, but proportion'd to their light, or place, Due distance reconciles to form and grace. A prudent chief not always must display His pow'rs in equal ranks, and fair array, But with th' occasion and the place comply, Conceal his force, nay seem sometimes to fly. Those oft are stratagems which errors seem, Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream.        Still green with bays each ancient altar stands, Above the reach of sacrilegious hands, Secure from flames, from envy's fiercer rage, Destructive war, and all-involving age. See, from each clime the learn'd their incense bring! Hear, in all tongues consenting pæans ring! In praise so just let ev'ry voice be join'd, And fill the gen'ral chorus of mankind! Hail, bards triumphant! born in happier days; Immortal heirs of universal praise! Whose honours with increase of ages grow, As streams roll down, enlarging as they flow! Nations unborn your mighty names shall sound, And worlds applaud that must not yet be found! Oh may some spark of your celestial fire The last, the meanest of your sons inspire, (That on weak wings, from far, pursues your flights; Glows while he reads, but trembles as he writes) To teach vain wits a science little known, T' admire superior sense, and doubt their own!

Of all the causes which conspire to blind Man's erring judgment, and misguide the mind, What the weak head with strongest bias rules, Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools. Whatever Nature has in worth denied, She gives in large recruits of needful pride; For as in bodies, thus in souls, we find What wants in blood and spirits, swell'd with wind; Pride, where wit fails, steps in to our defence, And fills up all the mighty void of sense! If once right reason drives that cloud away, Truth breaks upon us with resistless day; Trust not yourself; but your defects to know, Make use of ev'ry friend—and ev'ry foe.        A little learning is a dang'rous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again. Fir'd at first sight with what the Muse imparts, In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts, While from the bounded level of our mind, Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind, But more advanc'd, behold with strange surprise New, distant scenes of endless science rise! So pleas'd at first, the tow'ring Alps we try, Mount o'er the vales, and seem to tread the sky; Th' eternal snows appear already past, And the first clouds and mountains seem the last; But those attain'd, we tremble to survey The growing labours of the lengthen'd way, Th' increasing prospect tires our wand'ring eyes, Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!        A perfect judge will read each work of wit With the same spirit that its author writ, Survey the whole, nor seek slight faults to find, Where nature moves, and rapture warms the mind; Nor lose, for that malignant dull delight, The gen'rous pleasure to be charm'd with wit. But in such lays as neither ebb, nor flow, Correctly cold, and regularly low, That shunning faults, one quiet tenour keep; We cannot blame indeed—but we may sleep. In wit, as nature, what affects our hearts Is not th' exactness of peculiar parts; 'Tis not a lip, or eye, we beauty call, But the joint force and full result of all. Thus when we view some well-proportion'd dome, (The world's just wonder, and ev'n thine, O Rome!' No single parts unequally surprise; All comes united to th' admiring eyes; No monstrous height, or breadth, or length appear; The whole at once is bold, and regular.        Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see, Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be. In ev'ry work regard the writer's end, Since none can compass more than they intend; And if the means be just, the conduct true, Applause, in spite of trivial faults, is due. As men of breeding, sometimes men of wit, T' avoid great errors, must the less commit: Neglect the rules each verbal critic lays, For not to know such trifles, is a praise. Most critics, fond of some subservient art, Still make the whole depend upon a part: They talk of principles, but notions prize, And all to one lov'd folly sacrifice.        Once on a time, La Mancha's knight, they say, A certain bard encount'ring on the way, Discours'd in terms as just, with looks as sage, As e'er could Dennis of the Grecian stage; Concluding all were desp'rate sots and fools, Who durst depart from Aristotle's rules. Our author, happy in a judge so nice, Produc'd his play, and begg'd the knight's advice, Made him observe the subject and the plot, The manners, passions, unities, what not? All which, exact to rule, were brought about, Were but a combat in the lists left out. "What! leave the combat out?" exclaims the knight; "Yes, or we must renounce the Stagirite." "Not so by Heav'n" (he answers in a rage) "Knights, squires, and steeds, must enter on the stage." So vast a throng the stage can ne'er contain. "Then build a new, or act it in a plain."        Thus critics, of less judgment than caprice, Curious not knowing, not exact but nice, Form short ideas; and offend in arts (As most in manners) by a love to parts.        Some to conceit alone their taste confine, And glitt'ring thoughts struck out at ev'ry line; Pleas'd with a work where nothing's just or fit; One glaring chaos and wild heap of wit. Poets, like painters, thus, unskill'd to trace The naked nature and the living grace, With gold and jewels cover ev'ry part, And hide with ornaments their want of art. True wit is nature to advantage dress'd, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd, Something, whose truth convinc'd at sight we find, That gives us back the image of our mind. As shades more sweetly recommend the light, So modest plainness sets off sprightly wit. For works may have more wit than does 'em good, As bodies perish through excess of blood.        Others for language all their care express, And value books, as women men, for dress: Their praise is still—"the style is excellent": The sense, they humbly take upon content. Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found. False eloquence, like the prismatic glass, Its gaudy colours spreads on ev'ry place; The face of Nature we no more survey, All glares alike, without distinction gay: But true expression, like th' unchanging sun, Clears, and improves whate'er it shines upon, It gilds all objects, but it alters none. Expression is the dress of thought, and still Appears more decent, as more suitable; A vile conceit in pompous words express'd, Is like a clown in regal purple dress'd: For diff'rent styles with diff'rent subjects sort, As several garbs with country, town, and court. Some by old words to fame have made pretence, Ancients in phrase, mere moderns in their sense; Such labour'd nothings, in so strange a style, Amaze th' unlearn'd, and make the learned smile. Unlucky, as Fungoso in the play, These sparks with awkward vanity display What the fine gentleman wore yesterday! And but so mimic ancient wits at best, As apes our grandsires, in their doublets dress'd. In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold; Alike fantastic, if too new, or old; Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Not yet the last to lay the old aside.        But most by numbers judge a poet's song; And smooth or rough, with them is right or wrong: In the bright Muse though thousand charms conspire, Her voice is all these tuneful fools admire, Who haunt Parnassus but to please their ear, Not mend their minds; as some to church repair, Not for the doctrine, but the music there. These equal syllables alone require, Tho' oft the ear the open vowels tire, While expletives their feeble aid do join, And ten low words oft creep in one dull line, While they ring round the same unvaried chimes, With sure returns of still expected rhymes. Where'er you find "the cooling western breeze", In the next line, it "whispers through the trees": If "crystal streams with pleasing murmurs creep", The reader's threaten'd (not in vain) with "sleep". Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along. Leave such to tune their own dull rhymes, and know What's roundly smooth, or languishingly slow; And praise the easy vigour of a line, Where Denham's strength, and Waller's sweetness join. True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence, The sound must seem an echo to the sense. Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows, And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows; But when loud surges lash the sounding shore, The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar. When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw, The line too labours, and the words move slow; Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain, Flies o'er th' unbending corn, and skims along the main. Hear how Timotheus' varied lays surprise, And bid alternate passions fall and rise! While, at each change, the son of Libyan Jove Now burns with glory, and then melts with love; Now his fierce eyes with sparkling fury glow, Now sighs steal out, and tears begin to flow: Persians and Greeks like turns of nature found, And the world's victor stood subdu'd by sound! The pow'r of music all our hearts allow, And what Timotheus was, is Dryden now.        Avoid extremes; and shun the fault of such, Who still are pleas'd too little or too much. At ev'ry trifle scorn to take offence, That always shows great pride, or little sense; Those heads, as stomachs, are not sure the best, Which nauseate all, and nothing can digest. Yet let not each gay turn thy rapture move, For fools admire, but men of sense approve; As things seem large which we through mists descry, Dulness is ever apt to magnify.        Some foreign writers, some our own despise; The ancients only, or the moderns prize. Thus wit, like faith, by each man is applied To one small sect, and all are damn'd beside. Meanly they seek the blessing to confine, And force that sun but on a part to shine; Which not alone the southern wit sublimes, But ripens spirits in cold northern climes; Which from the first has shone on ages past, Enlights the present, and shall warm the last; (Though each may feel increases and decays, And see now clearer and now darker days.) Regard not then if wit be old or new, But blame the false, and value still the true. Some ne'er advance a judgment of their own, But catch the spreading notion of the town; They reason and conclude by precedent, And own stale nonsense which they ne'er invent. Some judge of authors' names, not works, and then Nor praise nor blame the writings, but the men. Of all this servile herd, the worst is he That in proud dulness joins with quality, A constant critic at the great man's board, To fetch and carry nonsense for my Lord. What woeful stuff this madrigal would be, In some starv'd hackney sonneteer, or me? But let a Lord once own the happy lines, How the wit brightens! how the style refines! Before his sacred name flies every fault, And each exalted stanza teems with thought!        The vulgar thus through imitation err; As oft the learn'd by being singular; So much they scorn the crowd, that if the throng By chance go right, they purposely go wrong: So Schismatics the plain believers quit, And are but damn'd for having too much wit.        Some praise at morning what they blame at night; But always think the last opinion right. A Muse by these is like a mistress us'd, This hour she's idoliz'd, the next abus'd; While their weak heads, like towns unfortified, Twixt sense and nonsense daily change their side. Ask them the cause; they're wiser still, they say; And still tomorrow's wiser than today. We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow; Our wiser sons, no doubt, will think us so. Once school divines this zealous isle o'erspread; Who knew most Sentences, was deepest read; Faith, Gospel, all, seem'd made to be disputed, And none had sense enough to be confuted: Scotists and Thomists, now, in peace remain, Amidst their kindred cobwebs in Duck Lane. If Faith itself has different dresses worn, What wonder modes in wit should take their turn? Oft, leaving what is natural and fit, The current folly proves the ready wit; And authors think their reputation safe Which lives as long as fools are pleased to laugh.        Some valuing those of their own side or mind, Still make themselves the measure of mankind; Fondly we think we honour merit then, When we but praise ourselves in other men. Parties in wit attend on those of state, And public faction doubles private hate. Pride, Malice, Folly, against Dryden rose, In various shapes of Parsons, Critics, Beaus; But sense surviv'd, when merry jests were past; For rising merit will buoy up at last. Might he return, and bless once more our eyes, New Blackmores and new Milbourns must arise; Nay should great Homer lift his awful head, Zoilus again would start up from the dead. Envy will merit, as its shade, pursue, But like a shadow, proves the substance true; For envied wit, like Sol eclips'd, makes known Th' opposing body's grossness, not its own. When first that sun too powerful beams displays, It draws up vapours which obscure its rays; But ev'n those clouds at last adorn its way, Reflect new glories, and augment the day.        Be thou the first true merit to befriend; His praise is lost, who stays till all commend. Short is the date, alas, of modern rhymes, And 'tis but just to let 'em live betimes. No longer now that golden age appears, When patriarch wits surviv'd a thousand years: Now length of Fame (our second life) is lost, And bare threescore is all ev'n that can boast; Our sons their fathers' failing language see, And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be. So when the faithful pencil has design'd Some bright idea of the master's mind, Where a new world leaps out at his command, And ready Nature waits upon his hand; When the ripe colours soften and unite, And sweetly melt into just shade and light; When mellowing years their full perfection give, And each bold figure just begins to live, The treacherous colours the fair art betray, And all the bright creation fades away!        Unhappy wit, like most mistaken things, Atones not for that envy which it brings. In youth alone its empty praise we boast, But soon the short-liv'd vanity is lost: Like some fair flow'r the early spring supplies, That gaily blooms, but ev'n in blooming dies. What is this wit, which must our cares employ? The owner's wife, that other men enjoy; Then most our trouble still when most admir'd, And still the more we give, the more requir'd; Whose fame with pains we guard, but lose with ease, Sure some to vex, but never all to please; 'Tis what the vicious fear, the virtuous shun; By fools 'tis hated, and by knaves undone!        If wit so much from ign'rance undergo, Ah let not learning too commence its foe! Of old, those met rewards who could excel, And such were prais'd who but endeavour'd well: Though triumphs were to gen'rals only due, Crowns were reserv'd to grace the soldiers too. Now, they who reach Parnassus' lofty crown, Employ their pains to spurn some others down;        And while self-love each jealous writer rules, Contending wits become the sport of fools: But still the worst with most regret commend, For each ill author is as bad a friend. To what base ends, and by what abject ways, Are mortals urg'd through sacred lust of praise! Ah ne'er so dire a thirst of glory boast, Nor in the critic let the man be lost! Good nature and good sense must ever join; To err is human; to forgive, divine.        But if in noble minds some dregs remain, Not yet purg'd off, of spleen and sour disdain, Discharge that rage on more provoking crimes, Nor fear a dearth in these flagitious times. No pardon vile obscenity should find, Though wit and art conspire to move your mind; But dulness with obscenity must prove As shameful sure as impotence in love. In the fat age of pleasure, wealth, and ease, Sprung the rank weed, and thriv'd with large increase: When love was all an easy monarch's care; Seldom at council, never in a war: Jilts ruled the state, and statesmen farces writ; Nay wits had pensions, and young Lords had wit: The fair sat panting at a courtier's play, And not a mask went unimprov'd away: The modest fan was lifted up no more, And virgins smil'd at what they blush'd before. The following licence of a foreign reign Did all the dregs of bold Socinus drain; Then unbelieving priests reform'd the nation, And taught more pleasant methods of salvation; Where Heav'n's free subjects might their rights dispute, Lest God himself should seem too absolute: Pulpits their sacred satire learned to spare, And Vice admired to find a flatt'rer there! Encourag'd thus, wit's Titans brav'd the skies, And the press groan'd with licenc'd blasphemies. These monsters, critics! with your darts engage, Here point your thunder, and exhaust your rage! Yet shun their fault, who, scandalously nice, Will needs mistake an author into vice; All seems infected that th' infected spy, As all looks yellow to the jaundic'd eye.

Learn then what morals critics ought to show, For 'tis but half a judge's task, to know. 'Tis not enough, taste, judgment, learning, join; In all you speak, let truth and candour shine: That not alone what to your sense is due, All may allow; but seek your friendship too.        Be silent always when you doubt your sense; And speak, though sure, with seeming diffidence: Some positive, persisting fops we know, Who, if once wrong, will needs be always so; But you, with pleasure own your errors past, And make each day a critic on the last.        'Tis not enough, your counsel still be true; Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do; Men must be taught as if you taught them not; And things unknown proposed as things forgot. Without good breeding, truth is disapprov'd; That only makes superior sense belov'd.        Be niggards of advice on no pretence; For the worst avarice is that of sense. With mean complacence ne'er betray your trust, Nor be so civil as to prove unjust. Fear not the anger of the wise to raise; Those best can bear reproof, who merit praise.        'Twere well might critics still this freedom take, But Appius reddens at each word you speak, And stares, Tremendous ! with a threatening eye, Like some fierce tyrant in old tapestry! Fear most to tax an honourable fool, Whose right it is, uncensur'd, to be dull; Such, without wit, are poets when they please, As without learning they can take degrees. Leave dangerous truths to unsuccessful satires, And flattery to fulsome dedicators, Whom, when they praise, the world believes no more, Than when they promise to give scribbling o'er. 'Tis best sometimes your censure to restrain, And charitably let the dull be vain: Your silence there is better than your spite, For who can rail so long as they can write? Still humming on, their drowsy course they keep, And lash'd so long, like tops, are lash'd asleep. False steps but help them to renew the race, As after stumbling, jades will mend their pace. What crowds of these, impenitently bold, In sounds and jingling syllables grown old, Still run on poets, in a raging vein, Even to the dregs and squeezings of the brain, Strain out the last, dull droppings of their sense, And rhyme with all the rage of impotence!        Such shameless bards we have; and yet 'tis true, There are as mad, abandon'd critics too. The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head, With his own tongue still edifies his ears, And always list'ning to himself appears. All books he reads, and all he reads assails, From Dryden's Fables down to Durfey's Tales. With him, most authors steal their works, or buy; Garth did not write his own Dispensary . Name a new play, and he's the poet's friend, Nay show'd his faults—but when would poets mend? No place so sacred from such fops is barr'd, Nor is Paul's church more safe than Paul's churchyard: Nay, fly to altars; there they'll talk you dead: For fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Distrustful sense with modest caution speaks; It still looks home, and short excursions makes; But rattling nonsense in full volleys breaks; And never shock'd, and never turn'd aside, Bursts out, resistless, with a thund'ring tide.        But where's the man, who counsel can bestow, Still pleas'd to teach, and yet not proud to know? Unbias'd, or by favour or by spite; Not dully prepossess'd, nor blindly right; Though learn'd, well-bred; and though well-bred, sincere; Modestly bold, and humanly severe? Who to a friend his faults can freely show, And gladly praise the merit of a foe? Blest with a taste exact, yet unconfin'd; A knowledge both of books and human kind; Gen'rous converse; a soul exempt from pride; And love to praise, with reason on his side?        Such once were critics; such the happy few, Athens and Rome in better ages knew. The mighty Stagirite first left the shore, Spread all his sails, and durst the deeps explore: He steer'd securely, and discover'd far, Led by the light of the Mæonian Star. Poets, a race long unconfin'd and free, Still fond and proud of savage liberty, Receiv'd his laws; and stood convinc'd 'twas fit, Who conquer'd nature, should preside o'er wit.        Horace still charms with graceful negligence, And without methods talks us into sense, Will, like a friend, familiarly convey The truest notions in the easiest way. He, who supreme in judgment, as in wit, Might boldly censure, as he boldly writ, Yet judg'd with coolness, though he sung with fire; His precepts teach but what his works inspire. Our critics take a contrary extreme, They judge with fury, but they write with fle'me: Nor suffers Horace more in wrong translations By wits, than critics in as wrong quotations.        See Dionysius Homer's thoughts refine, And call new beauties forth from ev'ry line!        Fancy and art in gay Petronius please, The scholar's learning, with the courtier's ease.        In grave Quintilian's copious work we find The justest rules, and clearest method join'd; Thus useful arms in magazines we place, All rang'd in order, and dispos'd with grace, But less to please the eye, than arm the hand, Still fit for use, and ready at command.        Thee, bold Longinus! all the Nine inspire, And bless their critic with a poet's fire. An ardent judge, who zealous in his trust, With warmth gives sentence, yet is always just; Whose own example strengthens all his laws; And is himself that great sublime he draws.        Thus long succeeding critics justly reign'd, Licence repress'd, and useful laws ordain'd; Learning and Rome alike in empire grew, And arts still follow'd where her eagles flew; From the same foes, at last, both felt their doom, And the same age saw learning fall, and Rome. With tyranny, then superstition join'd, As that the body, this enslav'd the mind; Much was believ'd, but little understood, And to be dull was constru'd to be good; A second deluge learning thus o'er-run, And the monks finish'd what the Goths begun.        At length Erasmus, that great, injur'd name, (The glory of the priesthood, and the shame!) Stemm'd the wild torrent of a barb'rous age, And drove those holy Vandals off the stage.        But see! each Muse, in Leo's golden days, Starts from her trance, and trims her wither'd bays! Rome's ancient genius, o'er its ruins spread, Shakes off the dust, and rears his rev'rend head! Then sculpture and her sister-arts revive; Stones leap'd to form, and rocks began to live; With sweeter notes each rising temple rung; A Raphael painted, and a Vida sung. Immortal Vida! on whose honour'd brow The poet's bays and critic's ivy grow: Cremona now shall ever boast thy name, As next in place to Mantua, next in fame!        But soon by impious arms from Latium chas'd, Their ancient bounds the banished Muses pass'd; Thence arts o'er all the northern world advance; But critic-learning flourish'd most in France. The rules a nation born to serve, obeys, And Boileau still in right of Horace sways. But we, brave Britons, foreign laws despis'd, And kept unconquer'd, and uncivilis'd, Fierce for the liberties of wit, and bold, We still defied the Romans, as of old. Yet some there were, among the sounder few Of those who less presum'd, and better knew, Who durst assert the juster ancient cause, And here restor'd wit's fundamental laws. Such was the Muse, whose rules and practice tell "Nature's chief master-piece is writing well." Such was Roscommon—not more learn'd than good, With manners gen'rous as his noble blood; To him the wit of Greece and Rome was known, And ev'ry author's merit, but his own. Such late was Walsh—the Muse's judge and friend, Who justly knew to blame or to commend; To failings mild, but zealous for desert; The clearest head, and the sincerest heart. This humble praise, lamented shade! receive, This praise at least a grateful Muse may give: The Muse, whose early voice you taught to sing, Prescrib'd her heights, and prun'd her tender wing, (Her guide now lost) no more attempts to rise, But in low numbers short excursions tries: Content, if hence th' unlearn'd their wants may view, The learn'd reflect on what before they knew: Careless of censure, nor too fond of fame, Still pleas'd to praise, yet not afraid to blame, Averse alike to flatter, or offend, Not free from faults, nor yet too vain to mend.

The acknowledged master of the heroic couplet and one of the primary tastemakers of the Augustan age, British writer Alexander Pope was a central figure in the Neoclassical movement of the early 18th century. He is known for having perfected the rhymed couplet form of his idol, John Dryden , and turned it to satiric and philosophical purposes. His mock epic The Rape of the Lock (1714) derides elite...

“Boethius proved that God’s omniscience is compatible with human free will.” Discuss (40)

Boethius’ discussion of Divine omniscience can be found in his Consolations of Philosophy , Book 5.  Facing his own death, Boethius reflects on the human condition and imagines a dialogue with Lady Philosophy, who points out the vast web of Aristotelian causation in which our lives are caught. In Part I Boethius asks…

“in this series of linked causes is there any freedom left to our will, or does the chain of fate bind also the very motions of our souls?’

pointing to a problem that has always dogged Classical Theism.  If God is Omnipotent, and if Omnipotence entails omniscience, then it is difficult to maintain any meaningful degree of human freedom.  Without freedom there seems to be no convincing way of defending God against charges of creating or at least allowing gratuitous suffering.  A God who is omniscient cannot also be benevolent.  Boethius proceeds to explore this problem and then attempts to resolve it by clarifying the very nature of God and therefore the nature of His foreknowledge, yet his resolution fails to show how Omniscience and human freedom are compatible in the end.

In Book 5 part III, Boethius sets out the paradox of omnipotence in some detail.  Drawing on Platonic philosophy, and the eternal model of God suggested to Christian Neoplatonists by the Timaeus , Boethius saw God’s eternal existence and nature as a necessary conclusion of rational reflection on a contingent world.  However, accepting God’s eternity comes with problems.  Boethius pointed out…

“if from eternity He foreknows not only what men will do, but also their designs and purposes, there can be no freedom of the will”

and explained how neither the suggestion that God’s knowledge of them makes future events necessary nor the suggestion that God’s knowledge is contingent on events in time are satisfactory.  J.M.E. McTaggart (1866–1925) differentiated between a God whose knowledge of events is from a perspective in time (A series eternity) and a God whose knowledge of events is from a perspective outside time whereby all events are simultaneous in the mind of God (B series eternity).  Boethius argued that putting God’s perspective in time, giving him A series eternity, makes God’s knowledge depend on time and the things that happen within it.  If I watch a bus arriving at its stop, my knowledge of it happening depends on the bus doing what it is doing and on time passing to facilitate what it is doing.  Clearly, in this scenario my knowledge of the bus does not determine the bus in doing what it does – I could not reasonably be held responsible for the bus being early, late or punctual – and yet it is also true that my knowledge of the future is limited because I cannot know what has not yet happened.  This sort of A series eternity fails to support the supreme knowledge and power that Classical Theists impute to God.  However there are also problems with B series eternity, as Boethius pointed out.  If God has a timeless perspective and knows all things and events simply and singly, then it seems to follow that future events happen necessarily because they are known by God before they happen and because they cannot not happen.  Consequently,

“what an upset of human affairs manifestly ensues! Vainly are rewards and punishments proposed for the good and bad, since no free and voluntary motion of the will has deserved either one or the other… And therefore neither virtue nor vice is anything, but rather good and ill desert are confounded together… Again, no ground is left for hope or prayer, since how can we hope for blessings, or pray for mercy, when every object of desire depends upon the links of an unalterable chain of causation?”

Boethius sets out how if God knows things that might not come to pass, then His knowledge is limited and if God’s knowledge depends on how things are in time, His power is limited.  He accepts that on the issue of omniscience rests the plausibility of Religion – for without genuine human freedom there can be no morality, no hope for meaningful salvation and no real communication with the Divine. In Part IV Boethius addresses this fundamental problem by attempting to show that God’s foreknowledge of events is not necessary by pointing out that God’s knowledge is not like human knowledge, and suggesting that freedom and foreknowledge could be compatible for God in a way that they do not seem to be to us. God’s knowledge, argues Boethius, is not due to physical senses, nor to imagination, nor to thought, but is instead the knowledge of pure intelligence which understands the very underpinnings of reality

“by surveying all things, so to speak, under the aspect of pure form by a single flash of intuition.” 

For Boethius,

“eternity is the possession of endless life whole and perfect at a single moment… since God abides for ever in an eternal present, His knowledge, also transcending all movement of time, dwells in the simplicity of its own changeless present, and, embracing the whole infinite sweep of the past and of the future, contemplates all that falls within its simple cognition as if it were now taking place. “ (Book 5, Part VI)

This is persuasive; St Augustine discussed something similar in The Confessions (354–430) and St. Thomas Aquinas extended and developed a very similar position in the Summa Theologica (1264) .   However, the price of resolving the conflict between foreknowledge and free-will seems to push God far into timeless abstraction and seeming unknowability.  Arguably, this approach preserves the technical plausibility of Religion by sacrificing the practical plausibility of Religion and so achieves, at most, a pyrrhic victory.  Surely, it is no more meaningful to pray to “pure intelligence” – whose knowledge of individual circumstances is limited to part of a single flash of intuition unsullied by sight, imagination or thought – than it is to pray to a being who has determined the prayer, its cause and its outcome by His very existence?  Further, the meaning of the divine attributes would be severely restricted by pushing God outside the spatio-temporal framework that describes ordinary human language.  What can the words “benevolence” or “power” really mean in a timeless sense?  A timeless God cannot have choice – because choice implies a time before and after a choice is made and the possibility of things being other than they are.  A timeless God cannot act – because action implies a time before and after at the very least.  As Sir Anthony Kenny pointed out that the concept of a timeless God seems “radically incoherent.”  He wrote…

“my typing of this paper is simultaneous with the whole of eternity. Again, on this view, the great fire of Rome is simultaneous with the whole of eternity. Therefore, while I type these very words, Nero fiddles heartlessly on.” (Kenny, The God of the Philosophers (Oxford, Clarendon Press) 1979, 38–9)

The idea that a timeless God can do or be anything that is comprehensible through normal concepts and words is ridiculous.  There is no shared analogical meaning between words applied to God and the world, whatever Aquinas tried to argue.

Boethius was aware of this problem in positing a completely timeless God and tried to reconcile his claim that God exists in a timeless eternity with God having the ability to know events as they happen and a degree of freedom or openness in the future.  In Part VI he argued that while God sees events an eternal present, God’s knowledge cannot be understood to cause them to happen.  God can know an event or action that is genuinely free because his knowledge is of an eternal present rather than a future as we would understand it…  Taking the bus analogy again, God witnesses its journey like a single stack of still photographs.  Every step of the journey is known as if in the present – God’s knowledge is not constrained by time because he sees everything now, but God’s knowledge still depends on the way things are rather than making them the way that they are and removing all freedom. God’s knowledge is neither conditional (as ours usually is) nor simply necessary (as would be the case with a completely timeless God who would be unaware of any present).  God’s knowledge is unlike any form of human knowledge in that it is  conditionally necessary .  The very categories “contingent” and “simply necessary” suggest temporal and logical frameworks that do not apply to God who creates these frameworks and exists outside them.  While this is persuasive, God’s conditionally necessary knowledge of events seems little more religiously satisfying than God’s timeless knowledge of events.  God’s experience of an eternal present is almost as different from human experience as a genuinely timeless experience would be.  The preservation of free will, moral responsibility and divine benevolence is by no means clear either.  If God knows future events now and they cannot be other than how they are, then whether God knows them as if in an eternal present or otherwise, it is difficult to see how anything can really change by human agency.

EL Mascall tried to suggest that quantum science could provide a model for understanding how God’s actions could both be timeless and have an appearance of being in time if each action could be conceived to have a timeless and a temporal pole which are interrelated, this does not advance the discussion by much.  Mascall is just restating the assertion that things would look different from God’s point of view in different language.  He doesn’t seem to do more explain how God can both know the future in a way that God ensures that nothing but what God knows can happen and not be responsible for what happens.  Other contemporary writers, such as Eleonore Stump, Norman Kretzmann, and Brian Leftow, have also tried to modify the timeless model of God by insisting that God’s timeless eternity has some of the features of temporal duration.  The project that Boethius started retains its interest because arguably, the plausibility of religion depends on its success.  However, the project has yet to yield conclusive results.

In addition, Protestant scholars Nelson Pike and Richard Swinburne have developed related arguments.  For Nelson Pike the idea that God’s knowledge can be that of pure intelligence taking in the whole of reality in a single flash of intuition is incompatible with the God revealed through the Bible.  The God of the Bible – of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to borrow Pascal’s phrase – is active and responsive and seemingly possessed of the ability to see, hear, imagine, think and even feel.  In his essay “ Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action ” (1965) Pike points out that whatever metaphorical interpretations are put on Biblical accounts of God wrestling Jacob or speaking with Moses or acknowledging Jesus at His Baptism, God’s knowledge is inescapably tensed.  If this is true, then it is difficult to see how Boethius model of a God experiencing an eternal present could be acceptable to people of mainstream Christian faith. A timeless model of God – even the modified timeless model proposed by Boethius – conflicts with the Biblical account of His creative action and nature.  Swinburne agreed, pointing out that…

“The God of the Hebrew Bible… is pictured as being in continual interaction with humans – humans sin, then God is angry, then humans repent, then God forgives them…” (The Coherence of Theism 2nd ed. 2016 p233)

Without the idea of God responding to human sin and human repentance, there is no obvious way to preserve what is meaningful about Christianity.  Swinburne adds that…

“The Hebrew Bible shows no knowledge of the doctrine of divine timelessness… God is represented as saying “I am the Alpha and the Omega…”  … but it seems to me to be reading far too much into such phrases to interpret them as implying the doctrine of divine timelessness.”  (Ibid. p230)

Although the ideas of God’s timelessness or eternity are philosophically useful in that they provide possible means of defending God against responsibility for suffering – including inflicting endless fiery punishment arbitrarily – the ideas find no support in Scripture and conflict with essential Christian beliefs and teachings.

There seems to be a contradiction between the Philosophical model of God suggested by Boethius, developed by Aquinas and enshrined in Catholic doctrine and the everlasting God described by the Bible and proposed by Theistic Personalists, many of whom are Protestant.  Further, neither model of God really avoids the problem of Omniscience outlined by Boethius in Book 5 of The Consolations of Philosophy .  The God of Theistic Personalists must either be limited in knowledge or power (and so is Philosophically unsatisfying) and the Timeless God is limited in terms of not being able to witness, experience, respond or act in any recognizable sense (and so is religiously unsatisfying.)  Boethius failed to prove that God’s omniscience is compatible with human free will, but he succeeded in outlining the inescapability of the problem and the importance of addressing and ultimately resolving it.  While Nelson Pike was careful to open his 1965 essay Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action by disassociating himself from the implications of his contribution to the project Boethius started, it is difficult to ignore these implications for long.  Either God is limited (i.e. not Omnipotent, Omniscient or Benevolent) or human beings are determined… but in any case Classical Theism is incoherent.

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Knowledge, Belief, and God: New Insights in Religious Epistemology

Matthew A. Benton, John Hawthorne, and Dani Rabinowitz (eds.), Knowledge, Belief, and God: New Insights in Religious Epistemology , Oxford University Press, 2018, 345pp., $74.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780198798705.

Reviewed by T. Ryan Byerly, University of Sheffield

This collection of sixteen new essays in religious epistemology is among the central outputs of the three-year research project New Insights and Directions in Religious Epistemology . In this review, I begin with some comments about the collection as a whole, then briefly identify some of the key insights contained within thirteen of the chapters, before focusing in more detail on the remaining three chapters which, in my judgment, are among the best candidates for identifying fruitful new directions for research in religious epistemology.

The editors describe mainstream epistemology as a field that "has enjoyed a fertile period of intense theorizing" in which topics of perennial interest to epistemologists "have given way to lively new epistemological interests" while "many central questions in epistemology proper have been given some revolutionary answers" (1). Among the major developments in epistemology, the editors specifically identify Timothy Williamson's knowledge-first epistemology, epistemological theorizing focused on the semantics and pragmatics of knowledge ascriptions and denials, the flourishing of social epistemology and formal epistemology, and theorizing about epistemic defeat. Regrettably, they claim, "there has been surprisingly little infiltration of these new approaches or ideas into philosophy of religion" (3). Indeed, by contrast with mainstream epistemology, religious epistemology has been preoccupied with examining a single "dominant perspective" -- reformed epistemology. The aim of this volume's contributors is accordingly to "draw on" the more diverse recent developments in mainstream epistemology "in order to generate new directions for religious epistemology, and to reinvigorate interest in questions that have historically enjoyed much attention from philosophers of religion" (3-4).

So understood, the volume is both ambitious and should have broad appeal among philosophers of religion. With respect to its ambitions, it would be no mean feat if essays were able to generate new directions for the field of religious epistemology in the sense of establishing novel agendas for research in the area. With respect to breadth of appeal, it may be that the volume is of special interest to those with interests in the fine-tuning argument or the epistemology of religious diversity, religious testimony, or religious experience, as eleven of the sixteen essays are concerned primarily with these topics. Yet, the full menu of topics includes much more, as we will shortly see.

I would however raise two concerns with the editors' description of the collection which pose some challenge either to the achievability of the book's ambitions or to its breadth of appeal. First, their one-paragraph description of the landscape of contemporary religious epistemology as dominated by adherence to the perspective of reformed epistemology and largely ignorant of the developments in mainstream epistemology upon which the collection focuses comes across as at best a misleading overgeneralization and at worst plainly false. For example, it is somewhat striking -- all the more because he is a contributor -- that Richard Swinburne's longstanding program of applying the formal apparatus of Bayesian epistemology to the epistemology of theism and Christian doctrines is given no mention in the editors' depiction of the landscape of contemporary religious epistemology. We might similarly note that, while there is certainly room for continuing development in the epistemology of religious disagreement and religious testimony, it is just as certainly not the case that these areas have been entirely ignored by religious epistemologists. The more observations of this sort are accurate, the less we might expect the essays to achieve the more lofty ambitions of establishing genuinely new directions for research in religious epistemology, as opposed to achieving the more modest aims of providing insights into ongoing debates in the area.

Second, while the appeal of the essays is undeniably broad, there is a particular, well-represented crowd of mainstream epistemologists whose perspective is notably side-lined. No mention of virtue epistemology can be found in the editors' introduction; virtue epistemology is not one of the four categories into which the essays are organised; and no essay sets out with the express intention to engage primarily with virtue epistemology. I will suggest somewhat paradoxically below that several of the key new directions identified by the essays include directions in which virtue epistemology has a quite significant role to play. But the point here is that it is a noteworthy lacuna that no essay is primarily concerned with addressing an epistemological perspective that has been called "the dominant viewpoint in contemporary epistemology" (Pritchard 2013: 236).

Despite these concerns, the volume is replete with new insights into ongoing debates in religious epistemology broadly construed. Charity Anderson opens the section on the history of religious epistemology by arguing that a key overlooked ingredient in Hume's argument against the rationality of believing miracle reports is the claim that the bad track-record of testimony to the miraculous provides an undercutting defeater for any instance of testimony to the miraculous, in the absence of special reasons for trusting the testifier. Richard Cross's contribution compares the views of Aquinas and Duns Scotus on the rationality of Christian belief, arguing that Aquinas's greater scepticism regarding the reliability of human belief-forming processes led him to adopt an externalist view of reasonable (Christian) belief, whereas Scotus's greater optimism regarding human ability to detect unreliable belief-forming processes led him to adopt an internalist conception. Billy Dunaway, in something of a reversal of the pattern exemplified in most of the essays, argues that an examination of Scotus's argument against divine illumination as a solution to sceptical worries should inform mainstream contemporary epistemology, leading to refinements of principles employed in anti-risk epistemology.

The next four chapters prominently feature the application of formal methods to topics of interest in contemporary religious epistemology. Isaac Choi, in the first of three essays on the fine-tuning argument, aims to defuse the normalizability and coarse-tuning objections to the argument by appealing to the view that the proper approach to measuring knowledge of infinitely many claims is via a subset principle rather than a one-to-one correspondence principle. Hans Halvorson develops a theological critique of the fine-tuning argument, maintaining that if God can be expected to create a life-permitting universe, then God can also be expected to establish favorable chances that a life-permitting universe develops by selecting laws of nature yielding this result. John Hawthorne and Yoaav Isaacs employ a Bayesian formulation of the fine-tuning argument to show that it is a "straightforwardly legitimate argument," emphasizing repeatedly how assigning (rough) numbers to key probabilities, such as the prior probability of theism and the conditional probabilities of finely-tuned laws and life given atheism versus theism, proves illuminating. In the final essay, Roger White argues that it would make little difference to the problem of religious disagreement if the universe contained infinitely many people representing each of infinitely many different religious and non-religious perspectives. What matters, rather, is the limiting ratio of agreement to disagreement within this population, as compared with the ratio one would expect to find given one's views -- a lesson that appears relevant for the non-infinite problem of religious disagreement.

Max Baker-Hytch begins the Social Epistemology section by arguing that the fact that there are widely diverse religious beliefs held on the basis of testimony does not show that religious beliefs held on the basis of testimony are unreliably formed, nor that they are subject to a defeater, but instead that those who hold religious beliefs in this way will not know that they know the contents of these beliefs. Paulina Sliwa concludes this section with an essay focusing on the desiderative and practical (know-how) dimensions of religious and mundane faith, which she maintains may be acquired via social practices of showing rather than telling.

Matthew Benton begins the Rational Epistemology section by developing a novel Pascalian argument, arguing that if the thesis of pragmatic encroachment is known by a subject to be true, then this puts her in a knowledge asymmetry with respect to believing versus disbelieving theism, generating rational pressure for her to believe. In the first of two essays on religious experience, Keith DeRose explains why he doubts that anyone knows whether God exists, by arguing that those who are in the best position to know whether God exists -- those with very high-quality religious experiences -- do not know that God exists, since there are too many others who have had similarly high-quality religious experiences but who lost the faith and came to view their earlier confident selves as suffering from a delusion of knowledge. In the second essay, Swinburne explains what sense the key terms "belief," "seems," "justification," and "defeater" must have for Phenomenal Conservativism to be true, and then goes on to apply Phenomenal Conservativism to religious experience, arguing that, in the absence of defeaters, an experiential inclination to believe there is a God provides greater justification for believing there is a God than an experiential inclination to believe there is anything else provides for believing there is such a thing. Sandwiched between these two essays is a contribution by Margot Strohminger and Juhani Yli-Vakkuri which seeks to provide a Williamsonian defence of a moderate kind of modal scepticism similar to that championed by Peter van Inwagen, but based on the idea that knowing the possibility of a proposition increases in difficulty the more distant that possibility is from actuality.

We're left with three essays I've selected for more in-depth discussion. The first is Dani Rabinowitz's on the epistemology of repentance. The main question on which it focuses is whether one can know via introspection that one has repented of each of one's sins. Rabinowitz motivates interest in the question primarily in the context of Judaism, informed by Maimonides's conceptualization of repentance. In this context, it would be important for each person to be able to know via introspection that she had repented of each of her sins, because this would be the only way she could legitimately experience spiritual catharsis, feeling forgiven by God. Yet, Rabinowitz raises a number of problems for how a person could know whether she had repented of each of her sins. The most interesting of these is motivated by Williamson's defence of the anti-luminosity of mental states. Rabinowitz proposes, for example, that repentance of a sin requires sincere regret of that sin and sincere resolve not to commit that sin anymore, and notes that many sins involve emotions, such as one's enjoyment of the freedom to act independently of God's wishes or commands. Insofar as emotions such as these are subject to borderline cases and so are not luminous, there will be cases in which people will not be able to know whether they have repented of each of their sins.

The essay's focus on this puzzle about repentance motivated primarily within Judaism may make it seem of narrow interest. This may be even more so to the extent that the force of the puzzle depends on a striking view of Maimonides regarding the mysteriousness of the metric whereby God weighs sins (88). Yet, I would suggest that in fact the essay points toward a fruitful area for future research in religious epistemology that is of much broader interest -- namely, the religious significance of the anti-luminosity of the mental. Many religious traditions take seriously the idea that we can have "hidden faults" (Psalm 19:12) which may include mental faults; and religious practices, such as mindfulness meditation in Buddhism, sometimes appear designed to enable practitioners to hone their skills in developing self-knowledge and in gaining control of the relevant mental features that would constitute such faults. There are interesting philosophical questions to investigate concerning the religious importance of exposing and eradicating such faults, and about the (perhaps eschatological) potential of human beings to overcome them. Insofar as there are skills or strengths of character associated with the project of overcoming hidden faults, there is an important role for virtue epistemology to play within such research.

Rachel Elizabeth Fraser's essay focuses on explaining how a kind of testimonial pessimism exemplified by medieval mystics could be accounted for in terms of tacit commitments to positions in the philosophy of language -- specifically, an emotionist semantics or a strong reading of the de re . To remain brief, I'll confine my comments to the former. Medieval mystic authors were keen to restrict the readership of their treatises, writing for example "I do not desire that this book should be seen by worldly chatterers, public self-praisers or fault finders, newsmongers" (207). To at least some extent these restrictions were motivated by epistemological concerns -- roughly, that the wrong kinds of recipients just wouldn't get the message, so that the testimony of the mystic would fail to transmit. In order for the testimony to transmit, the recipients needed to have been transformed by divine grace, which would include changes in their affective dispositions. One way to make sense of such pessimism would be to attribute to the medieval authors a tacit commitment to an emotionist semantics, according to which adequate grasp of at least some pertinent concepts requires an appropriate profile of affective dispositions. As an illustration, Fraser points to Jesse Prinz's (2007) emotionist semantics for "wrong" according to which a person has the concept of wrong only if, given the supposition that x is wrong, they are disposed to feel disapprobation toward x. A parallel approach could be taken to make sense of the testimonial pessimism of the medieval mystics, since they supposed that those they wished to exclude from their readership did not possess the requisite affective dispositions when it came to key religious terminology.

Fraser's piece points toward (at least) two fruitful avenues for research in religious epistemology. One is simply the project of further developing and evaluating emotionist semantics for religious terminology of the kind toward which she gestures. As she writes, her project is "exploratory and suggestive" (207), and she does not aim either to defend or to object to such a semantics. The second avenue concerns the broader project of identifying and evaluating the range of possible ways in which moral or affective features of a person can make a difference for her epistemic standing with respect to religious claims. The idea that such features are epistemically relevant for religious belief is not isolated to the mystics Fraser references, and while some research has been done on the topic of how such features may be epistemically relevant for religious belief (e.g., Wainwright 1995), there may be additional novel proposals which, like Fraser's, are worthy of further attention. Here again it is plausible that virtue epistemology or virtue theory more broadly has a role to play, as many of the relevant features will be characterological.

Finally, Jennifer Lackey's piece is primarily a defence of her novel expert-as-advisor model of expertise over against the currently "standard" (228) expert-as-authority model of expertise. The expert-as-authority model is one according to which expert testimony that p is appropriately treated as providing the recipient with pre-emptive reason for believing p, such that the recipient should forego considering any further evidence she might have concerning p and believe p simply on the basis of the expert's testimony. The expert-as-advisor model, by contrast, maintains that expert testimony that p simply provides (possibly quite strong) evidence that p that the recipient should weigh alongside any other evidence she has concerning p. Lackey brings forward a host of interesting objections against the expert-as-authority model, leading her to the striking conclusion that "there are no rational beliefs grounded in authority" (236) and "experts should always be regarded as advisors" (239). The shift to an expert-as-advisor model has the consequence that "certain features of the proffered testimony become far more important than when the testimony is authoritative" (239). For example, given the shift, it matters for a person's expertise how good they are "at effectively clarifying the terrain, or at being a sensitive listener, or at being open-minded to the issues that are of concern" (240) to their audience. As such -- and this is the key point Lackey wishes to stress -- there are a host of features via which experts can be identified, even in the face of disagreement between experts.

Some readers may find that they are, like myself, neither convinced by Lackey's objections to the expert-as-authority model nor by her expert-as-advisor model. I worry, for instance, that it is close to an obvious empirical falsehood that all experts are, by virtue of their expertise, excellent advisors in the sense Lackey extols (being good listeners, etc.). Nonetheless, I would propose that the ideal of the excellent advisor or something in its near neighborhood provides a compelling locus for future scholarship to focus upon in both mainstream and religious epistemology. As Lackey explicitly notes, theorizing such an ideal "is a place where the intellectual and moral virtues are relevant" (239-40). And indeed, given the relative neglect of so-called other-regarding intellectual virtues within contemporary virtue epistemology (Kawall 2002), there remains significant scope for examining the nature of those traits that help to make one an excellent advisor. Moreover, there may also be interesting questions to ask specifically about traits of excellent advisors in the religious domain. For example, it may be that theistic religious seekers are especially interested in gaining distinctively personal knowledge of God, and that certain character traits in spiritual advisors are especially suited for enabling seekers to gain this kind of knowledge (cf. here Sliwa's contribution).

This collection is brimming with insights for religious epistemology and more sparingly contains signposts toward new directions for the field. It is a striking feature of the book that while it appears to have been conceived so as largely to largely overlook developments in virtue epistemology, some of the most fecund new directions toward which its contributors gesture are ones in which virtue epistemology will be distinctively relevant.

Pritchard, Duncan. 2013. "Epistemic Virtue and the Epistemology of Education." Journal of Philosophy of Education 47, 2: 236-47.

Prinz, Jesse. 2007. The Emotional Construction of Morals . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kawall, Jason. 2002. "Other-regarding Epistemic Virtues." Ratio 25, 3: 257-275.

Wainwright, William. 1995. Reason and the Heart . Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

William Hasker on Divine Simplicity

Dec 10, 2017 • Thomas M. Cothran

In “Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake”, 1 William Hasker argues that “the strong doctrine of divine simplicity is a mistake, one from which theology needs to be liberated.” 2 With this sweeping charter, Hasker proceeds to critique the “traditional strong doctrine of divine simplicity, attributed to Aquinas and before him to Augustine.” 3 The strong notion of divine simplicity is, in Hasker’s view, riddled throughout with category errors, logical failures, the “dehumanization” of God, and departures from the broader traditional understanding of God’s character.

Through a Secondary Source Darkly

Hasker begins with certain qualifications. His purpose lies not in settling a historical question in the history of thought, but in engaging with that history of thought on the substance of the matter at hand.

I recognize, of course, that it is often important to establish as accurately as possible the exact views of some historical figure, even though this will not be the purpose of the present essay. But once that has been done, this accomplishment is merely preliminary to raising the question: Do we have good reason either to agree or to disagree with the thinker in question? 4

That Hasker is not engaged in historical research is clear from selection of interlocutors. Neither St. Augustine nor historian of his through merits examination. 5 St. Thomas Aquinas receives more attention, but primarily through contemporaries who draw on St. Thomas in the context of current debates. 6 Hasker does not examine either Augustine’s or Aquinas’ accounts of what he means by the terms “will”, “knowledge”, “love”, “action”. And although Hasker does quote Aquinas’ account of what he terms “simple simplicity”, 7 he does not set forth a clear statement Aquinas’ (or Augustine’s) formulations of the strong version from which he seeks to liberate theology.

Nor does Hasker address the key components of the metaphysical framework necessary to explain the traditional notion of divine simplicity, at least in the work of St. Augustine or St. Thomas. He raises the St. Thomas’ postulate of the identity of God’s existence and essence only to say suggest it may involve a confusion of categories and quickly move on, saying “we won’t pursue this example.” 8 As any reader of St. Thomas knows, St. Thomas’ formulation of divine simplicity turns on the identity of existence and essence in God, 9 and any treatment of divine simplicity that does not address the existence-essence distinction does not address Aquinas’ notion of simplicity. And Hasker raises a number of questions that Aquinas himself raises as objections and then answers; yet Hasker does so without indication of those discussions. For instance, Hasker asks, if God is actus purus , “how can he be free?” 10 without giving any sign that Aquinas raises the question and offers an answer in a number of places. 11

Had Hasker not held himself out as correcting the traditional views of Augustine and Aquinas, the neglect of what Augustine and Aquinas actually said would not be objectionable. Were Hasker’s purpose simply to limit his criticism to the recent and narrow confines of analytic philosophy of religion where St. Augustine and St. Thomas have colored the debate, little treatment of their views would be necessary on Hasker’s part.

Hasker, however, does not withhold judgment on Augustine or Aquinas, and verdicts on their conclusions come thick and fast. His goal, after all, is extravagant: to “liberate theology”. He does not hesitate to pronounce a verdict on Aquinas’ motivation for the doctrine of simplicity 12 , or to declare that truthmaker theory represents a genuine advance in the traditional argument for simplicity, 13 or to identify logical deficiencies in the traditional formulations of simplicity, 14 to announce “we need to grasp the problem [of divine cognition] as it is conceived by Aquinas and his followers” 15 , and to lay out “Aquinas’ perspective” on the individuation of actions. 16 That Hasker is targeting the view of St. Thomas is clear both from the judgments he makes in the course of his article and in the light of his overall purpose. Unfortunately this lets the paucity and inaccuracy of Hasker’s treatment of St. Thomas’ views undermine his entire argument. And I, like Hasker, in employing the shorthand of the “traditional view of divine simplicity” be referring primarily to the tradition stemming from St. Thomas.

Methodological Objects: Nescience and Deferral

Hasker’s constructive argument prominently features two methods: declarations of personal nescience and raising objections only to defer discussion of their merits. The former methodological deficiency is worth noting, because is hardly unique to Hasker, but are widely deployed in analytic philosophy of religion. The latter is worth noting because Hasker defers the very questions most vital to evaluating the truth of the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity.

Personal Nescience

Personal nescience serves Hasker’s argument both as an offensive and defensive tactic. On defense, Hasker puts forward a syllogisms with premises such as “God is a conscious mental subject”, and is largely content to support this premise by claiming he cannot understand how anyone could disagree. “I find it difficult to see how anyone could regard any of the premises in this argument as seriously open to question.” 17 But of course a central matter in dispute concerns whether God is a conscious mental subject. 18 That Hasker cannot even conceive how one could disagree with him is connected, is not merely Hasker reporting on his psychological state. Hasker’s inability to visualize that the opposition disagrees seems to result from his deferrals of essential components of the opposing view, as we shall see shortly.

Confessions of intellectual myopia crop up frequently in his critique of others. Citing Stump’s exposition of St. Thomas’ notions of identity, which in her view resolve some apparent problems in the objections to divine simplicity, Hasker confesses “far as I can see her proposals fail to resolve the problems with simplicity that are discussed in this essay.” 19 His reply to W. Matthew Grant’s essay, which is directly on point for most of the criticisms Hasker advances? “I do not see, however, that Grant provides any resources for answer the argument given in the text.” 20 And, in place of a critique that sets forth the rudiments of knowledge as traditionally predicated of God, Hasker replies “‘knowledge’ that involves no distinctive intrinsic state of the knower is, it seems to me, simply unintelligible.” 21 Where personal nescience served on defense as an attempt to assert the indubitability of Hasker’s premises, here it serves an offensive function. Hasker attempts to motivate the opinion that the traditional arguments for divine simplicity are unintelligible because he has not made sense of them.

The argument from personal nescience lacks philosophical significance, but it does have several rhetorically advantageous properties. As a general principle, the less one understands, the more one can apply one’s personal nescience. The work of an author is simplified. A systematic presentation of the opposing view decreases the scope of one’s nescience, which defeats the purpose of the tactic. And the argument from personal nescience has this useful advantage: if the author makes a mistake in his presentation of the alternatives, how can he be blamed? He can immediately claim the opposing view too complex, too esoteric, too unintelligible–and cite his own error in proof of that point. Careful philosophical consideration is inimical to such a strategy.

Hasker’s other tactic is to allege problems with traditional view only to indefinitely defer a defense of that allegation. Simply flagging points of disagreement for discussion at some future date is not in itself objectionable. However, Hasker defers points critical to understanding the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity. The two most crucial points for getting a handle on the traditional notion of simplicity concern the identity of being and essence in God, and the notion of accident and extrinsic denomination. We consider each in turn, showing how Hasker evades consideration of these points and why they are critical.

Identity of Being and Essence

St. Thomas understands metaphysical composition in terms of act-potency correlates. A being is composite if it is a composed of potentiality and a corresponding actuality; otherwise it is simple. While St. Thomas thinks that bodily existents are composed of form and matter, the ultimate composition that distinguishes created things from God is the distinction between being and thing, existence and essence. For St. Thomas and his progeny, metaphysical simplicity just is the denial of a real distinction between a thing and its being. Composite beings have being, but they are not identical with being. Created things exist, but are not their existence; they have existence, but do not exhaust its content; they have a nature, they have being, but their nature is not being. 22

Given that St. Thomas’ account of simplicity is in his view–and in the view of several of the writers Hasker is engaging–articulating the existence-essence distinction, one would think that Hasker would counter with an argument. Instead, Hasker simply brushes the existence-essence distinction aside as a “possible example” of a category mistake; asserting that, in any event, it “certainly looks like a category mistake, but there are complications here and we won’t pursue this example.” 23

Accident and Extrinsic Denomination

The second point necessary to understand the traditional articulation of divine simplicity concerns St. Thomas’ approach to accidents and predicates. Not every predicate is a real accident. An accident is some formal act to which a subject stands in potency. I have the capacity to learn French; a labrador does not. If I become fluent in French, I have both a formal perfection and a potentiality to further act: conversing in French. The developed ability to speak French does not belong to me by nature, and it is something that changes me. Thus, it is an accident.

“French-speaking” is also a predicate. That is, one can assert “Jane speaks French.” And in this case, there is a real accident that does correspond to the predicate, if the statement is true. Yet predicates do not necessarily entail accidents. Some entail natures: “Alice is a cat.” Some predicates are grounded in relations that are in turn grounded in intrinsic accidents. In the statement “Ann is taller than Beth”, “taller than Beth” is predicated of Ann by virtue of a relation grounded in an accident: in this case, her height. Ann’s height is a real accident. Yet if Ann is an older sister, and Beth grows to be taller, the predicate “taller than Beth” can no longer be predicated of Ann, despite no imminent change in Ann herself.

Some predicates are grounded in causal relationships. Take “the spider startled Jeffrey”. The predicate “startled Jeffrey” can be predicated of the spider, without the spider being undergoing any intrinsic change. If Jeffrey does not overreact, the spider may continue on his way, unobstructed and oblivious of Jeffrey. So the predicate “startled Jeffrey” may be true of the spider, without implying any change or accident in the spider itself. “The sun killed the plant” is a similar example: nothing inherent to the sun changes in killing the plant.

This turns out to be critical to understanding how things are predicated of God. If we say “God created the world”, an elementary understanding of predication its relation to accidents shows us that this need not imply no more change in God than it does a spider or the sun. Moreover, St. Thomas has been at pains to set out the sense in which terms like “knowledge”, “action”, “love”, “will” etc. are predicated of God.

Unfortunately, Hasker pays little attention to this notion of accidents and their relation to predication. The subject comes up briefly:

“Stump’s way of addressing this is by a discussion of the medieval notion of an ‘accident,’ which she argues is not the same as our modern notion of an accidental property …. So for God to create individuals instead of others he might equally well have created is not an ‘accident’ in God and is not inconsistent with God’s simplicity. (I omit here a discussion of the sense of ‘accident’ Stump attributes to Aquinas, as this is complex and not altogether clear.)”

Hasker’s Presentation of the Arguments for Divine Simplicity

What of Hasker’s presentation of the arguments for divine simplicity? At a minimum, a philosophical presentation should present those arguments for an opposing position which the opposition regards as the strongest, and, needless to say, it should do so accurately. Does Hasker meet this minimum? Hasker presents two arguments: an argument from the multiplicity of the forms, and an argument from the dependence of a whole on its parts. The first argument is simply not one advanced by any of Hasker’s primary interlocuters; though Augustine makes brief appearances and a citation to an essay by Brian Leftow mentioning Augustine’s motivations is mentioned, neither Augustine nor a similarly Platonist stand-in features prominently in those writers with whom Hasker is engaged. So we can happily grant that the multiplicity of subsistent forms is not a useful one for establishing divine simplicity, unless one is arguing with a certain type of Platonist.

The second argument for divine simplicity is relevant to the remainder of Hasker’s discussion, but he both misstates and misunderstands it. The argument is taken from the following passage in St. Thomas’ Summa Contra Gentiles I.18:

Every composite … is subsequent to its components. The first being, therefore, which is God, has no components. Every composite, furthermore, is potentially dissoluble. This arises from the nature of composition…. Now, what is dissoluble can not be. This does not befit God, since he is through himself the necessary being. 24

Hasker immediately glosses this passage: “Aquinas lucidly explains the basis for an important claim made by the doctrine of simplicity: namely, God is not assembled out of parts and cannot be decomposed into parts.” 25 Yet this is not what St. Thomas says. He does not refer to parts, but to components ( componentibus ), and the difference is clear in the immediate context that Hasker omits. SCG 18 is about whether God is composite, and Aquinas quickly says: “In every composite there must be act and potency.” 26 St. Thomas is explicitly speaking here of components in the sense of act-potency correlates. 27

Here we see the relevance of the essence-existence distinction that Hasker defers. For if in things there is a real distinction between what a thing is and its act of existing, then we have components in sense that Aquinas is using the word componentibus . Aquinas’ motivation here is unabashedly metaphysical, and articulated in view of the existence-essence distinction that runs through the entirety of his metaphysics. It arises not from the vagaries of common sense and the concomitant ambiguous notion of parts to which Hasker appeals, but from a strict demonstration. 28 Because Hasker does not have this in view, he misstates what St. Thomas’ argument actually is, and as a result neither of the two main arguments of divine simplicity Hasker sets forth are relevant.

Specific Critiques of Divine Simplicity

Hasker divides his critiques of “strong” divine simplicity into a) category mistakes, b) logical failures, and c) the dehumanization of God. We begin by attempting to determine what Hasker takes “strong simplicity” to be. He believes that the problematic transition from “simple simplicity” to “strong simplicity” is that the latter rejects “any sort of internal distinction whatsoever in God, including distinctions which cannot at all reasonably be considered as indicating ‘components’ of which God is assembled or into which God can be decomposed.” 29 Hasker provides no citation here of who makes this extension, perhaps because this is not the traditional notion of divine simplicity. But it is evident that he regards this view as the one held by St. Thomas, and even elsewhere makes the wildly incorrect claim that St. Thomas rejected a real distinction in God with respect to the Trinitarian persons. 30 (In fact, St. Thomas clearly affirms a real relation between the persons in God, and regards any denial of this point as heresy. 31 ) The traditional notion of divine simplicity, which St. Thomas explicitly states in the part of the SCG passage cited by Hasker, consists precisely in the denial that God is composed of act and potency.

Category mistakes

Hasker’s primary example of a category mistake is the identify of God with his actions. Says Hasker, “we are told, God is identical with his action of parting the Red Sea.” 32 The culprit who misinformed Hasker goes unnamed; traditional adherents to the doctrine clearly assert otherwise. God is identical with his own act of being, yet the actus essendi of finite things are different acts distinct from God. These acts are caused by God, and St. Thomas deploys a sophisticated notion of instrumentality to explain them as God’s actions; but they are nevertheless extrinsic to God. 33 The difference between God willing some event or not is not in God, it is in the world, and if one cannot see that, one has missed the whole point and God is conceived as no more than one more wistful soul (albeit gifted with super-powers) struggling to have his way.

Hasker believes that the sort of truthmaker theory advanced by Brower and widely accepted in contemporary philosophy vitiates some of the conceptual confusions that plague traditional theists. And he pronounces the verdict: “this truthmaker interpretation represents a genuine advance in formulating the doctrine of divine simplicity, one that advocates of that doctrine would be well advised to embraced.” 34 To which those advocates may well respond that the salient point was grasped long ago, and articulated perfectly well by, say, St. Thomas’ instructions to beginners.

The various names applied to God are not synonymous, even though they signify what is in reality the same thing in God. In order to be synonymous, names must signify the same thing, and besides must stand for the same intellectual. conception. But when the same object is signified according to diverse aspects, that is, notions which the mind forms of that object, the names are not synonymous. For then the meaning is not quite the same, since names directly signify intellectual conceptions, which are likenesses of things. Therefore, since the various names predicated of God signify the various conceptions our mind forms of Him, they are not synonymous, even though they signify absolutely the same thing. 35

Truthmaker theory does not, as Hasker sees it, clear away all the category confusions. He things that “ relational predications, such as ‘God created the universe’ or ‘God loves King David’” still pose a problem, but he defers that to his discussion of logical failures. 36

Logical failures

Hasker claims to identify “the logical inability of the doctrine [of divine simplicity], in its traditional form, to accommodate assertions about God that are nearly universally accepted among theistic philosophers and theologians, including the adherents of divine simplicity .” 37 More specifically, Hasker thinks he has discovered in the cases of God’s knowledge of contingent facts and God’s willing particular events a fundamental incoherence.

If God is pure act, God cannot have multiple intrinsic acts of thought. On this point Hasker is correct. Divine simplicity entails that God does not have a multiplicity of intrinsic acts, whether of will, or knowledge, or anything else. Because Hasker has not examined the relevant arguments for divine simplicity, he has only one option: to show a logical inconsistency between God’s knowledge and his simplicity. If there is a logical error lurking within the doctrine of divine simplicity, the doctrine cannot be true; if, on the other hand, there is not a logical error, then determining the truth of the doctrine turns on the exact arguments Hasker has evaded.

God’s knowledge

Hasker raises two primary objections to way divine simplicity has been reconciled to divine knowledge. First, if God knows things by knowing his essence, he can only know possibilities, not actualities. Second, the claim that God’s knowledge of contingent facts entails nothing about his inner state is both unintelligible and contrary to the nature of a conscious mental subject (a category which for Hasker includes God). The latter question Hasker raises again in the context of divine action, and we, like he, will address the issue there.

Hasker relies on James Dolezal to relay the traditional view that in knowing his own essence, God knows all contingent things. Hasker counters by declaring that

What a knowledge of divine essence gives us–and gives God–is a knowledge of the realm of creaturely possibility ; what it does not and cannot give us is knowledge concerning which of these possibilities are actual.^20^ What is actual but contingent does not follow from what is possible; that is the nature of possibility and actuality. Only if the divine nature contained within itself, not only the myriad realm of possibilities, but the specification of which possibilities are to be actualized, could that nature be by itself an adequate vehicle for knowledge of the created world. But this would mean that all actual creaturely objects and state of affairs are as necessary as the divine essence itself, a conclusion that would be welcome to Spinoza, but not, one would think, to an orthodox theist. 38

At footnote 20, Hasker claims that “On this point Aquinas agrees”, citing SCG I.81.4. Yet St. Thomas clearly does not believe that God’s self-knowledge renders only knowledge of creaturely possibilities. Nor does he agree, as Hasker assumes that we can comprehend the divine essence. Hasker’s implicit argument seems motivated by the assumption that while we may know what God is, that knowledge does not give us knowledge of which creaturely possibilities in fact are, and therefore God’s knowledge his essence yields no more. Yet St. Thomas rejects the premise, holding that “we cannot know what God is, but rather what He is not.” 39 Because God is infinite, and our acts of understanding are finite, we cannot comprehend of God’s essence. So our knowledge of God, which proceeds indirectly, cannot yield knowledge of actuality of creatures. The notion that our knowledge of God fails to entail anything about the concrete goings on in the world has no bearing on whether God’s self-knowledge in fact does.

Hasker’s claim that St. Thomas counts God’s knowledge of himself insufficient for knowledge of the concrete actualities in the world is contrary to every one of St. Thomas’ statements on the subject. St. Thomas treats this exact question so many times and at such great length 40 that one is at a loss to see how his meaning could be mistaken.

We need not even grasp all the details where St. Thomas rejects what Hasker says he affirms. A general understanding of St. Thomas’ thought sufficiently explains his doctrine. Existence makes the difference between a thing and nothing. God is existence subsisting, and things exist by participation in him. God’s knowledge of himself is inclusive of knowledge of what participates in him. Given that what makes a singular thing be is its participation in being, and it is that participation which renders a thing known by God, it follows straightforwardly from St. Thomas’ framework that God knows singular things, not merely general possibility. The only way to mistake St. Thomas on this point is the misinterpretation of being as possibility rather than act, and one could not get St. Thomas more backward than that.

Hasker says that “only if the divine nature contained within itself, not only the myriad realm of possibilities, but the specification of which possibilities are to be actualized, could that nature be by itself an adequate vehicle for understanding the world.” 41 The “specification” that makes the difference between possibility and actuality is, for St. Thomas, existence; and St. Thomas’ central metaphysical claim about God is that he is by nature existence. Hasker’s claim that the presence of this specification in God renders the being of things necessary is given without supporting argument, or any consideration of the many places where St. Thomas considers this exact point.

The point here is not merely that Hasker mistakes the traditional view, but that his allegation of a logical contradiction is premised upon that very mistake. If God is subsisting existence–pure act–and he knows how he is participated, then he knows not only what could be, but what actually is. What does not take part in existence does not exist, and so if that participation entails divine knowledge, then God’s knowledge of singulars is exhaustive.

The primary difficulty Hasker has lies in imagining what it is like for God to know. He tries to imagine what it would be like to grasp everything in a single act of cognition and comes up blank. This is not, on St. Thomas’ account, because of Hasker’s limitations, but rather the limitations of human cognition. Human beings, according to St. Thomas, do not comprehend God, God is identical with his act of knowledge, and so human beings do not comprehend God’s act of knowledge. This does not, however, imply a retreat into mystery, for we do not need to imagine what it is like for God to know to affirm that he does, any more than it is necessary to understand what it feels like for a bat to navigate to affirm that it in fact does. Knowledge is, on St. Thomas account, the immaterial comprehension of form; and if God is subsistent being, he comprehends everything that is.

Although we cannot know what it is like for God to know, we nevertheless find strong indications that higher modes of knowledge tend to be more unified. The child learns that 1 + 1 = 2 , and that 2 + 1 = 3 . The two are discrete facts, relatively unconnected. But as the child advances to understand the principles of arithmetic, the notion of integers and of addition is grasped in principle, and the child performs an act of understanding that includes within its sweep the addition of any integers whatsoever. Likewise, even adults use the base-10 decimal system and the base-60 decimal system without grasping just what a base decimal system is. We know that after _9 the decimal second from the left becomes 1 , and that the 1 in 10 is in the tens place. And we know that 30 minutes past the hour is half past. But what we often do not grasp is the essential feature of the base decimal system is that every place is the digit multiplied by a number that is the base number to the power of the index. So, in the base-10 system, the first place is 10^0, the second 10^1, the third 10^2, and so on. In understanding the pattern b^i, where b is the base and i is the index, one grasps at once not only base-10, but base-60, base-2, and so on.

Our higher acts of understanding grasp a multiplicity in a single act. The higher the act, the larger the multiplicity. This does not demonstrate that God knows in a single act of cognition – for that we need the arguments for simplicity – but it does strongly indicate that the higher the form of knowledge, the more unitary it is and the broader its sweep.

God’s actions

Brower, on Hasker’s view, proposes a “radical and surprising” solution to the problem of how the diversity of what God does (and knows) can be reconciled with God’s simplicity: “these propositions not only are not solely about God’s intrinsic state, but they entail nothing whatever concerning that state.” 42 How can we say that God performing an action involves no internal difference than God not performing an action? Or for that matter, how can we say that God knowing some fact about the world makes no difference to God?

The key to answering this question–or at least to understanding the traditional answer to this question–rests generally on an account of extrinsic predication and specifically–in St. Thomas’ case–on a theory of actio and operatio . Brower’s solution is neither a radical revision of the tradition, nor surprising to one familiar with that tradition. For St. Thomas, predicating any action or act of knowledge of God save his proper act is by extrinsic denomination. 43 The question of the logical coherence of attributing action to God turns on the logical coherence of extrinsic denomination as it pertains to action.

Consider this example: “God creates the world.” What makes the predicate “creates the world” true? It is the real relation of dependence of the world upon God. St. Thomas believes that he has shown that insofar as anything exists, it is due to God’s granting that thing existence. The difference between God granting the thing existence or not is simply whether the thing is or not. Has a thing existence or not? If the former, it is from God. “Creates the world” entails no difference in God from “did not create the world”.

St. Thomas is not engaged in special pleading on this point. Causal predication even in the case of creaturely causality often is a clear cut case of extrinsic predication. The sun kills the plant. Does the plant’s dying or surviving make some intrinsic difference in the sun? Clearly not: no intrinsic difference in the sun occurs by a plant’s dying or surviving. 44 Thus, “kills the plant” is predicated of the sun by extrinsic denomination: the real difference, the ground in reality that makes the predication true or false, is in the plant.

The example of the sun need not be taken to imply an emanationist theory of God’s creating the world. We can substitute examples of human affairs. “The lecturer taught the student” is true if the student actually learned; it is the intrinsic state of the student, not of the teacher, that makes that proposition true.

The apparent difficulty that remains, perhaps, is that the teacher performs a particular action (diagramming on a board or reading a passage out loud) that is distinctly directed teaching the student. Here we find both analogous and disanalogous features. The act by which the lecturer attempts to teach the student (drawing on the blackboard) is not the actuality that makes it true to predicate “taught the student” of the lecturer. Likewise, God’s proper action is not the act that makes it true to say that God created the world, though the latter act has a real dependence on the former. On the other hand, a teacher makes an attempt–one that may succeed or fail–to teach the student. That act is directed toward the student’s learning, and may or may not achieve its aim. God’s action, on the other hand, cannot fail, and his proper act has as its end the ultimate good, with which it is identical.

Now Hasker may find incredible the view that God does not have particular, imminent actions the way we do, but he cannot very well argue that the tradition has committed a logical contradiction. Discrete imminent actions are simply not a component of “knowledge”, “will”, or “action” as the tradition predicates these terms of God. Knowledge is the immaterial, intentional presence of a thing; 45 “will” is either the enjoyment of the Good 46 or the ordering of things toward the Good 47 , and action is the production of an effect. Hasker may find these notions of knowledge, will, and action unsatisfying, but that is a different matter than identifying a logical contradiction.

De-Mammalizing God

The substance of Hasker’s argument does not rest in his allegation that the traditional articulation of divine simplicity involves category errors and logical inconsistencies. Hasker has not examined the traditional formulation of divine simplicity, nor distinguished it from its corollaries and consequents. Nor did Hasker examine the traditional formulations of divine will, divine knowledge, and divine action to put it into relation with divine simplicity (a rather critical step in showing a logical inconsistency, one would think).

Where Hasker’s argument has any purchase it is not at the level of conceptual or logical rigor, but by appealing to a commonsense notion of God’s personality. Hasker puts the case this way: in its strong form, the doctrine of divine simplicity “has the effect of dehumanizing God .” 48 Hasker’s terminology here is as striking as it is unapologetic, and it helps a great deal in explaining why he finds the traditional notions of knowledge, will, and action unintelligible. The explanation is not merely that Hasker has not dealt with those traditional notions, though this likely plays a large part. It is that the tradition Hasker belongs to ties its notion of God to the specifically mammalian aspects of our rational and volitional faculties.

Human beings are intelligent mammals. Our intelligence is bound up with our animality, and our animality with our rationality. Our knowledge is gained from our experience, even if it may not be reducible to it. And the world of our experience is, beyond any doubt, the world of an upright, social mammal. Quarks and black holes, however real they are, are not the fare of our ordinary experience. Useful objects that fit in our hands, homes suited to our size and fit for our biological needs, the magnitude of the earth beneath us and the sky overhead constitute our everyday frame of reference, the opinions of those in our social circles are the norm of our common sense.

It is easy enough to see how our mammalian nature means that our knowledge is had in the transition from potential to actual knowledge. Is there food to be had? The infant cranes his neck to the feeling of another’s skin, the hunter-gatherer heads out to his favorite spots, the employee goes to the store armed with a credit card. We look nearby, and if we cannot see what we are looking for, we move to a better position, employ the tools we have available to us, and being social animals we ask someone else. If that does not work we have more indirect strategies for deciding whether something is there. We start out not knowing, not seeing, and we set about finding out. Our instinctive, pre-philosophical notion of knowledge is that of animal extroversion, which is based primarily on ocular vision.

It is clear enough why animals like ourselves move from potential to actual knowledge. We are here, and most of the objects of our daily concern are located out there. We lack knowledge of things, and our conduit to knowledge is perception. What is unclear is why the same should be said of immaterial entities who are not here rather than there, who, being immaterial, do not have the need for a conduit from one spatio-temporal point to another, and whose object of concern is not limited to everyday medium sized objects. The problem is not unique to God; it encompasses angels as well. We do not know, so we take a look. But we look with our eyes. Our eyes are receptive (though we can turn them in this direction or that), and are informed by what stands opposed to them at some distance. What could it mean for angels to take a look, or for God? Perhaps an angel turns its attention now to this, now to that; but that can only be on the basis of something it already knows. We know things as “out there” because we are here and have senses that convey what is spatially outside ourselves. Imagining a similar conduit in the case of an immaterial being only attributes the features and limitations attendant on materiality.

St. Thomas’ answer is clear: we might not know what it is like for angels or God to know, and we should not attribute to them that are bound to animality. But while we might not know what it is like for immaterial beings to know, we can know that they know. It is a sufficient condition for knowledge that a thing be comprehended immaterially. Nothing remains uncomprehended by God; God is being subsisting, and nothing is simply other than being. It follows that God knows, even if we have no qualitative feel for that knowledge. We should not expect to.

It may be suggested that Hasker’s essay could be charitably and creatively re-interpreted as a critique not of the traditional notion of divine simplicity as held by Augustine and Aquinas, but merely as a critique of how that notion has been interpreted or even misinterpreted by the contemporary philosophers of religion for whom Hasker devotes the most space. Yet we can divide these philosophers into two camps: those who hold to the traditional doctrine, and those who diverge from it. 49 To the extent that Hasker aims at those who in fact hold to the traditional doctrine, the charitable interpretation does nothing to shield Hasker from the critique I have advanced (namely, that Hasker does not address or misinterprets key elements of that doctrine). And to the extent Hasker aims at those who diverge from the traditional notion of divine simplicity his efforts are irrelevant to his overall thesis: that the traditional notion of divine simplicity is mistaken. In neither case does the charitable revision salvage Hasker’s arguments.

I have argued in this essay that Hasker’s case against the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity fails. Yet this conclusion is not entirely negative; the argument also serves as a template for how an evaluation of divine simplicity would need to proceed. If Hasker’s omission of the notions of essence-existence distinction and the relation between predication and intrinsic accidents renders an evaluation of divine simplicity impossible, then, inversely, a pre-condition for understanding the traditional notion of divine simplicity would be articulating those notions. If Hasker has operated from a mammalian notion of knowledge, action, and will, then a successful approach to divine simplicity would require the examination of knowledge, action, and will as traditionally attributed to God.

Understanding is a prerequisite for judgment. Grasping the traditional case for divine simplicity and formulating it accurately a necessary condition to reaching a judgment on its merits. My argument has been that Hasker has rushed to judgment on that traditional doctrine. And my criticisms have operated at the level of understanding: what is the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity, its corollaries and consequents, and the broader framework in which it has been situated? And my concern, like Hasker’s, has not remained within the narrow confines of recent analytic philosophy of religion, but with the broader tradition, and especially as that tradition stems from St. Thomas. Unlike Hasker, I have devoted attention to what that tradition actually says. That tradition not only remains standing after Hasker’s critique; it remains untouched.

Bibliography

Hasker, William. “Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 90, no. 4 (2016): 669-725.

William Hasker, “Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 90 (No. 4) 2016 669-725, p. 725.  ↩

Hasker 2016, p. 725.  ↩

“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?” p. 699.  ↩

Ibid 699-700.  ↩

Hasker does briefly cite an article by Brian Leftow for a short account of Augustine’s position, but the mention is brief and plays little role in Hasker’s overall argument.  ↩

Aquinas is cited in footnotes 4, 20, 57, 58; John Wippel’s Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas II is quoted on p. 709. Stump, Brower, and Dolezal all use St. Thomas as a resource in contemporary debates.  ↩

Ibid. 701 - 702.  ↩

Ibid. 703.  ↩

See De Ente 4.6.  ↩

Ibid. 713.  ↩

Treatment of this question abound in St. Thomas’ corpus. See, for instance, DV Q. 24, art 3, Q. 23 art 1, and SCG I.82.  ↩

“Is Divine Simplicity a mistake?”, p. 702.  ↩

“Is Divine Simplicity a mistake?”, p. 705.  ↩

“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake”, p. 706.  ↩

“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake”, p. 707.  ↩

“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, p. 708.  ↩

“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, pp. 712 - 713.  ↩

If this remark seems puzzling, recall that a subject is one actualized by accidents; and that in the case of knowing, our possible intellects are actualized by the forms of things. Our knowledge is passive. But for the traditional view, God’s knowledge is not passive but active, not receptive but creative. God is not a subject that receives forms, and hence not a conscious subject.  ↩

“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, p. 703.  ↩

“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, p. 713.  ↩

“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, p. 712. Hasker acknowledges that not everyone finds this notion unintelligible, and so offers an argument. But the argument is explicitly premised upon God being a “conscious mental subject”, in defense of which Hasker notes that he cannot imagine how anyone would disagree.  ↩

The best short overview on the subject is St. Thomas’ De Ente .  ↩

“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, p. 701; cf SCG I.18 3-5.  ↩

“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, p. 701.  ↩

/SCG/ I.18 2.  ↩

And when Aquinas does use the term partes in this chapter, he clearly does so in the broad sense, one not restricted to material parts. See e.g., SCG I.18 2.  ↩

See, e.g., DE 5, ST I qs. 2-3, SCG I ch. 13-18.  ↩

“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, p. 702.  ↩

See Hasker’s interview with Dale Tuggy, at the 22 minute mark.  ↩

/ST/ I.28 1, 3.  ↩

“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, p. 704.  ↩

The best scholarly treatment of which I am aware on this subject may be found in Bernard Lonergan’s Grace and Freedom I-4 (2000 ed.).  ↩

“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, p. 705.  ↩

See, for instance, St. Thomas Aquinas, Compendium of Theology sections 23 - 27.  ↩

“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, 706.  ↩

“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, 709.  ↩

/ST/ I, q. 3 prol.  ↩

/ST/ I, q. 14, art 11, SCG I.65, DV 2.7, all take as their subject this exact question.  ↩

“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, p. 709.  ↩

“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, p 710.  ↩

See, for instance, St. Thomas distinction at ST I q. 25, art. 1 ad 3.  ↩

It may be objected that this is an empirical question for astro-physicists, but this only makes the point. If the sun’s killing the plant does involve some slight effect on the sun itself, this is an empirical question, and its affirmative answer runs contrary to expectation.  ↩

See ST I q. 14, art. 1.  ↩

See ST I, q. 19, art. 1.  ↩

See ST I, q. 19, art. 2.  ↩

“Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?”, p. 719.  ↩

Of course, a writer may hold to certain elements and diverge from other elements. In that case, we can divide positions, rather than writers, into the categories of those that hold to the classical doctrine, and those that do not.  ↩

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God's Omniscience: A Summary of the Middle Knowledge View on Divine Foreknowledge and Human Free Will

It is not the intent of this paper to investigate or dissect this ages-old debate, but rather to present a summary of an alternative to the (often polarized) positions of Calvinism or Arminianism. The hypothesis reviewed here is called Middle Knowledge or Molinism. This construct might be best called a compatibilist model, as it seeks to make the clear scriptural teachings of divine foreknowledge and human freedom of will compatible under God’s omniscience.

Related Papers

Agana-Nsiire Agana

Debate on the relationship between God’s omniscience and human free will has raged in Christianity since the early church era. Countless theologians and philosophers have written so much on the subject that probably enough ink has been expended as can sink a respectable navy fleet. Resolution, however, still evades scholarship. A part of the reason is that the question has philosophical dimensions that underpin and therefore influence any theological approach. But is it possible using any of the established approaches to resolve it so conclusively that divine omniscience and human free will can be said to coexist harmoniously, without logical, epistemological or theological conflict? This study sought to answer that question by critically assessing the long list of attempts. It finds that in the end, the compatibilist view espoused by traditional theology survives against the challenges of modern theologians, though it does not constitute a full solution. This is because Scripture affirms the truth of both. However, compatibilists only offer a leaning towards the truth, not its explanation, for the mysterious mechanism by which the coexistence they affirm is held remains obscure. The study finds, importantly, that the biblical conception of omniscience is different from the classical conception. The former is presented in the context of God’s relational dealings with human beings and the latter is absolutist and abstract, depending on a timeless, wholly transcendent Deity conceived in neo-platonic and Aristotelian terms. When God’s omniscience is understood in the relational context, the traditional difficulty is diminished, though not removed. The study concludes that it is more worthwhile to explore the question biblically than philosophically, and recommends an exegetical approach that is not as dependent on neo-platonic philosophy as orthodox theology has been for a long time. In light of this, the study recommends a didactic approach that emphasizes the biblical relation of omniscience in the context of God’s sovereign provision for salvation and humankind’s free acceptance of it.

Oxford Handbooks Online

William Hasker

This article focuses on the problem of divine foreknowledge and human freedom, which has been the most discussed problem in this area in recent philosophy. It begins with a formal statement of the standard historical argument for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and human free will, an argument based on the idea that if God has foreknowledge of all future events and God's foreknowledge is infallible, then agents cannot act other than they actually do. It examines the most prominent proposed solutions to this problem, including the Eternalist solution, which appeals to the notion that God's knowledge is timeless; the Ockhamist solution, which holds that God's past beliefs are not accidentally necessary; and the Molinist solution, which relies on God's “middle knowledge” that every creature would freely choose to do in any situation of libertarian free choice.

Senior Honors Theses

Nathan Justice

I examined evidence concerning the coherence of divine foreknowledge as defined by Arminianism and Molinism. Arminianism argues that God has complete and infallible knowledge of the future, and attempts to simultaneously maintain a strong view of libertarian freedom. Molinism agrees with the Arminian stance on foreknowledge and human freedom, but argues God must have middle knowledge to maintain strong providential control over creation. I argued that Molinism better accounts for the biblical data and provides a more coherent theological and philosophical position, because Arminianism cannot provide a strong theory of providential control. I also briefly presented my concept of Reformed Molinism, which combines Molinism with Robert Kane’s event-causal version of libertarian freedom.

Aldo Frigerio

Michael DeVito

This essay marks the first steps towards a viable glut-theoretic (contradictory) solution to the longstanding foreknowledge and free will dilemma. Specifically, I offer a solution to the dilemma that accommodates omniscience (foreknowledge) and human freedom (as the ability to do otherwise) in a simple, flat-footed way. This goal is accomplished via viewing the theological fatalist argument not as a problem, but as a sound argument: omniscience and human free will are contradictory and by dropping to a weaker underlying account of logical consequence, we can embrace them in their full-throated, robust (though contradictory) interpretations. That said, the primary aim of this paper is one of exploration: how does a subclassical solution to the foreknowledge and free will dilemma stack up in comparison to the traditional solutions on offer in the literature. This essay represents the beginning of such an exploration.

Free Will and God's Foreknowledge - a new compatibilist solution

Flavio Correa

This article reviews the apparent incompatibility between human freedom and God's knowledge about future events. Although reviewed by many philosophers and theologians throughout history, this problem still lingers as something that challenges all to provide a comprehensive answer. The proposed solution will expand the concept of God's knowledge, encompassing all potential future scenarios that can happen, based on past circumstances, knowledge of the rules that govern all actions in the universe, and all contingent variables. With this, it can be stated that the Expansion of God's knowledge solution categorically resolves the incompatibility as it is presented.

Forum Philosophicum

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion

David Basinger

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A Level Philosophy & Religious Studies

Knowledge of God’s existence summary notes

OCR Christianity

This page contains summary revision notes for the Death & the Afterlife topic. There are two versions of these notes. Click on the A*-A grade tab, or the B-C grade tab, depending on the grade you are trying to get.

Find the full revision page here.

This topic is about what is the right basis for Christian belief in God? Most Theologians agree that faith is a vital pillar of Christian belief. Some theologians (tends to be Catholic natural theologians) claim that reason can also support faith in God. Protestants tend to disagree.

Natural theology – knowledge about God can be gained through the power of the human mind.

Revealed theology – knowledge about God can be gained through faith. 

Pretty much all theologians agree with revealed theology. 

The debate is between those who also subscribe to natural theology, and the Fideists – theologians who argue that only revealed theology is valid – knowledge about God can only be gained through faith.

Aquinas’ natural theology (+Brunner)

• Reason is a gift from God, resulting from being made in his image.
• God designed our reason with the power to know of his existence (teleological & cosmological arguments) and his morality (natural law ethics).
• Aquinas’ argument for natural theology:
• Aquinas thought that original sin couldn’t have completely destroyed our ability to reason. 
• We have reason due to being made in the image of God, and that’s what distinguished us from the animals according to Genesis. If original sin had completely corrupted us and totally destroyed our ability to reason, then we would just be like animals. But we aren’t – we are still morally responsible and have some reasoning ability left, and that is capable of knowing God’s existence and morality.
• Karl Barth – rejected natural theology as placing a dangerous overreliance on human reason.
• Reason is corrupted by original sin. Original sin might not have totally destroyed reason, but it does make it unreliable. 
• “The finite has no capacity for the infinite”.
• Our finite minds have no – zero – capacity to understand God’s infinite nature.
• So, we should not use reason to know God.
• If we make a mistake when trying to use reason to know God, then we will gain a false view of God and could end up worshipping the wrong thing – perhaps even worshipping something earthly – which is idolatry. This is dangerous as it can lead to the worship of human things like nations, fatherlands, and that he argued contributed to Nazism.
• Barth concluded we should solely rely on faith in the Bible.
• Barth’s argument is unsuccessful because Aquinas isn’t saying reason can grasp God’s infinite being, however – he’s just arguing that it can support faith through giving us inductive evidence in support of God’s existence.
• Aquinas just says there must be some unmoved mover and whatever that is ‘that thing we call God’.
• Similarly, with natural law, reason isn’t grasping God’s infinite eternal law – just the lesser natural law within our nature.
• Through reason we can also know that God has a quality of love/power/knowledge which is analogous to ours yet proportionally greater than our own.
• Aquinas’ approach is successful because he takes care not to claim too much about God based on reason.
• Reason may sometimes indeed be corrupted, but that doesn’t mean it will always be corrupted. Sometimes, with God’s grace, human reason is capable of knowing something about God.

Calvin’s revealed theology & Calvin’s sensus divinitatis

• Humans are all born with an innate ability to sense God’s existence.
• He points out that even tribes remote from civilisation have some idea of a higher power.
• This is a variety of natural theology – because it is knowing God through the power of the human mind. 
• It’s very different to Aquinas’ style, however – since it does not involve or require reason.
• As a protestant, Calvin, like Luther and Barth, was sceptical about the ability of reason to know God.
• We can still sense God, nonetheless. This is knowing God through the power of the human mind, but not the specific power of reason.
• Calvin thought that this sense of God was required, so that people would be without excuse if they didn’t believe in God. It’s necessary that everyone know God exists, to justify sending people who don’t believe in God to hell.
• Calvin thought that natural theology through sensuing God was the only way the human mind could know God by itself.
• Calvin thought natural knowledge was insufficient, however. For full knowledge of God, such as that Christ was God incarnate (trinity), that Christ rose from the dead etc, we need faith in the Bible.
• The spread of atheism suggests this sense does not exist. Some countries like China have over 90% non-religious people. In the UK it is 37%.
• In Calvin’s time being an atheist was dangerous – people were forced to believe in God. It’s easy to see why he would get the impression that we are born with a sense of God, but it could just be because of how dominant the social pressure to believe in God was.
• Plantinga supports Calvin, suggesting that some might lack the sense of God because of sin.
• However, this is a weak argument because it assumes that atheists sin more than religious people. In fact, the northern european countries are very atheistic and yet have very low crime rates.

Romans 1:20

• The Bible seems to support Aquinas’ style of natural theology.
• “Since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his external power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse”.
• Paul here seems to suggest that God’s qualities & nature can be understood from what he has made, i.e. the natural world. 
• This is what inductive a posteriori arguments such as Aquinas’ cosmological and teleological (design) arguments do.
• Calvin attempts to argue that this verse is really justifying his style of natural theology – not Aquinas’.
• Calvin argues this verse is not supporting knowing God through reasoning about the natural world, but through sensing God.
• However, what about the word ‘understood’ – doesn’t that imply reasoning rather than merely sensing? 
• Furthermore, the verse seems to suggest that the understanding is gained from creation itself, which sounds like reasoned inference from the natural world rather than a sense of God which isn’t derived from ‘what has been made’; creation. 
• Finally, the verse suggests that God’s qualities and nature can be understood – not just his existence, so it seems to go further than the sensus divinitatis in that regard also.
• It looks like Romans 1:20 is saying we can know God’s nature through reasoning about the natural world, not just that we can sense the existence of a higher power.

Barth’s interpretation of romans 1:20

• Barth also attempts a reinterpretation of this verse away from natural theology.
• Barth points out that just because this verse says God can be known through creation – it doesn’t follow that we are able to do that. 
• He claims humanity has become too sinful due to original sin to know God through our own mind.

Evaluation:

• However, Barth’s argument is unsatisfying because the quote clearly claims that this knowledge of God is meant to leave people ‘without excuse’. It’s hard to argue that doesn’t apply to us. 
• Adam and Eve, before original sin, metaphorically ‘walked’ and talked with God in Eden, so they had no excuse for that reason. 
• We are those born with original sin, we must be those the passage refers to as having no excuse due to this knowledge of God through reasoning about the world. 
• So, Aquinas’ style of natural theology is validated by the Bible.

Bibliography

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Foreknowledge and Free Will

Fatalism is the thesis that human acts occur by necessity and hence are unfree. Theological fatalism is the thesis that infallible foreknowledge of a human act makes the act necessary and hence unfree. If there is a being who knows the entire future infallibly, then no human act is free.

Fatalism seems to be entailed by infallible foreknowledge by the following informal line of reasoning:

For any future act you will perform, if some being infallibly believed in the past that the act would occur, there is nothing you can do now about the fact that he believed what he believed since nobody has any control over past events; nor can you make him mistaken in his belief, given that he is infallible. Therefore, there is nothing you can do now about the fact that he believed in a way that cannot be mistaken that you would do what you will do. But if so, you cannot do otherwise than what he believed you would do. And if you cannot do otherwise, you will not perform the act freely.

The same argument can be applied to any infallibly foreknown act of any human being. If there is a being who infallibly knows everything that will happen in the future, no human being has any control over the future.

This theological fatalist argument creates a dilemma for anyone who thinks it important to maintain both (1) there is a deity who infallibly knows the entire future, and (2) human beings have free will in the strong sense usually called libertarian. But it has also fascinated many who have not shared either of these commitments, because taking the argument’s full measure requires rethinking some of the most fundamental questions in philosophy, especially ones concerning time, truth, and modality. Those philosophers who think there is a way to consistently maintain both (1) and (2) are called compatibilists about infallible foreknowledge and human free will. Compatibilists must either identify a false premise in the argument for theological fatalism or show that the conclusion does not follow from the premises. Incompatibilists accept the incompatibility of infallible foreknowledge and human free will and deny either infallible foreknowledge or free will in the sense targeted by the argument.

1. The argument for theological fatalism

2.1 the denial of future contingent truth, 2.2 god’s knowledge of future contingent truths, 2.3 the eternity solution, 2.4 god’s forebeliefs as “soft facts” about the past, 2.5 the dependence solution, 2.6 the transfer of necessity, 2.7 the necessity and the causal closure of the past.

• 2.8 The rejection of Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP)

3. Incompatibilist responses to the argument for theological fatalism

4. logical fatalism.

• 5. Beyond fatalism

Other Internet Resources

Related entries.

There is a long history of debate over the soundness of the argument for theological fatalism, so its soundness must not be obvious. Nelson Pike (1965) gets the credit for clearly and forcefully presenting the dilemma in a way that produced an enormous body of work by both compatibilists and incompatibilists, leading to more careful formulations of the argument.

A precise version of the argument can be formulated as follows: Choose some proposition about a future act that you think you will do freely, if any act is free. Suppose, for example, that the telephone will ring at 9 am tomorrow and you will either answer it or you will not. So it is either true that you will answer the phone at 9 am tomorrow or it is true that you will not answer the phone at 9 am tomorrow. The Law of Excluded Middle rules out any other alternative. Let T abbreviate the proposition that you will answer the phone tomorrow morning at 9, and let us suppose that T is true. (If not- T is true instead, simply substitute not- T in the argument below).

Let “now-necessary” designate temporal necessity, the type of necessity that the past is supposed to have just because it is past. This type of necessity plays a central role in the argument and we’ll have more to say about it in sections 2.4, 2.5, 2.7 , and 5 , but we can begin with the intuitive idea that there is a kind of necessity that a proposition has now when the content of the proposition is about something that occurred in the past. To say that it is now-necessary that milk has been spilled is to say nobody can do anything now about the fact that the milk has been spilled.

Let “God” designate a being who has infallible beliefs about the future, where to say that God believes p infallibly is to say that God believes p and it is not possible that God believes p and p is false. It is not important for the logic of the argument that God is the being worshiped by any particular religion, but the motive to maintain that there is a being with infallible beliefs is usually a religious one.

One more preliminary point is in order. The dilemma of infallible foreknowledge and human free will does not rest on the particular assumption of fore knowledge and does not require an analysis of knowledge. Most contemporary accounts of knowledge are fallibilist, which means they do not require that a person believe in a way that cannot be mistaken in order to have knowledge. She has knowledge just in case what she believes is true and she satisfies the other conditions for knowledge, such as having sufficiently strong evidence. Ordinary knowledge does not require that the belief cannot be false. For example, if I believe on strong evidence that classes begin at my university on a certain date, and when the day arrives, classes do begin, we would normally say I knew in advance that classes would begin on that date. I had foreknowledge about the date classes begin. But there is nothing problematic about that kind of foreknowledge because events could have proven me wrong even though as events actually turned out, they didn’t prove me wrong. Ordinary foreknowledge does not threaten to necessitate the future because it does not require that when I know p it is not possible that my belief is false. The key problem, then, is the infallibility of the belief about the future, and this is a problem whether or not the epistemic agent with an infallible belief satisfies the other conditions required by some account of knowledge, such as sufficient evidence. As long as an agent has an infallible belief about the future, the problem arises.

Using the example of the proposition T , the argument that infallible foreknowledge of T entails that you do not answer the telephone freely can be formulated as follows:

Basic Argument for Theological Fatalism

This argument is formulated in a way that makes its logical form as perspicuous as possible, and there is a consensus that this argument or something close to it is valid. That is, if the premises are all true, the conclusion follows. The compatibilist about infallible foreknowledge and free will must therefore find a false premise. There are four premises that are not straightforward substitutions in definitions: (1), (2), (5), and (9). All four of these premises have come under attack in the history of discussion of theological fatalism. Aristotle’s concern about future contingent truth has motivated an increasing number of compatibilists to challenge premise (1). Boethius and Aquinas also denied premise (1), but on the grounds that God and his beliefs are not in time, a solution that has always had some adherents. William of Ockham rejected premise (2), arguing that the necessity of the past does not apply to the entire past, and God’s past beliefs are in the part of the past to which the necessity of the past does not apply. This approach to the problem was revived early in the debate stirred up by Pike’s article, and has probably attracted more attention, in its various incarnations, than any other solution. There are more radical responses to (2) as well. Premise (5) has rarely been disputed and is an analogue of an axiom of modal logic, but it may have been denied by Duns Scotus and Luis de Molina. Although doubts about premise (9) arose relatively late in the debate, inspired by contemporary discussions of the relation between free will and the ability to do otherwise, the denial of (9) is arguably the key to the solution proposed by Augustine. In addition to the foregoing compatibilist solutions, there are two incompatibilist responses to the problem of theological fatalism. One is to deny that God (or any being) has infallible foreknowledge. The other is to deny that human beings have free will in the libertarian sense of free will. These responses will be discussed in section 3 . The relationship between theological fatalism and logical fatalism will be discussed in section 4 . In section 5 we will consider whether the problem of theological fatalism is just a theological version of a more general problem in metaphysics that isn’t ultimately about God, or even about free will.

2. Compatibilist responses to theological fatalism

One response to the dilemma of infallible foreknowledge and free will is to deny that the proposition T can be true, on the grounds that no proposition about the contingent future is true: such propositions are either false (given Bivalence), or neither true nor false. This response rejects the terms in which the problem is set up. Since God wouldn’t believe a proposition unless it were true, premise (1) is, on this account, a non-starter. The idea behind this response is usually that propositions about the contingent future become true when and only when the event occurs that the proposition is about. If the event does not occur at that time, then the proposition becomes false. This seems to have been the position of Aristotle in the famous Sea Battle argument of De Interpretatione IX, where Aristotle is concerned with the implications of the truth of a proposition about the future, not the problem of infallible knowledge of the future. But some philosophers have used Aristotle’s move to solve the dilemma we are addressing here.

This approach to the problem had already been endorsed, three years before Pike’s seminal article, by A.N. Prior (1962), but it received little initial attention. John Martin Fischer’s first anthology of essays on the problem (1989) does not contain a single paper advocating this solution. It wasn’t until the 1980s, when it was defended by Joseph Runzo (1981), Richard Purtill (1988), and J.R. Lucas (1989), that it began to gain traction in the debate. More recently, Alan Rhoda, Gregory Boyd, and Thomas Belt (2006) have argued for the “Peircean” semantics favored by Prior (1967, 113–36), on which the predictive use of the word ‘will’ carries maximal causal force and all future contingents turn out false, while Dale Tuggy (2007) has defended the position that future contingents are neither true nor false. A critique of both Rhoda et al . and Tuggy may be found in Craig and Hunt (2013). Another supporter of the all-future-contingents-are-false solution to the problem of theological fatalism is Patrick Todd (2016a), whose recent book (2021) offers a vigorous defense of this approach against various objections. Many (but not all) of those who reject future contingent truth base their position, at least in part, on presentism, according to which only the present exists. Statements about the future, especially the contingent future, would then arguably lack the grounding necessary for truth. D.K. Johnson (2009) has taken up this solution to both logical and theological fatalism, as has Dean Zimmerman (2008). A measure of how much the debate has shifted in this direction is that Fischer’s second anthology (Fischer and Todd 2015) contains an entire section on “The Logic of Future Contingents.” The connection between this solution and “open theism” will be discussed in section 3 .

While there is considerable prima facie appeal to the idea that statements about the contingent future aren’t yet true, and that they become true only when the future arrives, both the semantic and the metaphysical justifications for this idea can be challenged. A semantics that collapses truth into necessity and falsehood into impossibility, at least for propositions about the future, may appear insufficiently attentive to people’s actual use of the predictive ‘will’, not to mention logically problematic. The true futurist theory (“the thin red line”), allowing for future contingent truth, is defended by Øhrstrøm (2009) and by Malpass and Wawer (2012). Presentist opponents of future contingent truth, for their part, need to explain how there can be contingent truths about the past but not about the future, given that, on presentism, the past is no more real than the future. (This is not a problem on the growing block theory.) Rhoda (2009) and Zimmerman (2010), for example, have independently suggested that truths about the past could be grounded in God’s present beliefs about the past; but if this move is allowed, it would seem just as legitimate to assume God has present beliefs about the future and use this to ground truths about the contingent future. The semantic and metaphysical issues surrounding future contingent truth are complex and highly contested, so it isn’t possible to do more than note them here.

It is not clear, however, that the denial of future contingent truth is sufficient to avoid the problem of theological fatalism. Hunt (2020) suggests that future contingents that fail to be true for presentist reasons alone might nevertheless qualify as “quasi-true” (Sider 1999, Markosian 2004), and argues that the quasi-truth of God’s beliefs about the future is enough to generate the problem. The following consideration tends in the same direction. According to the definition of infallibility used in the basic argument, if God is infallible in all his beliefs, then it is not possible that God believes T and T is false. But there is a natural extension of the definition of infallibility to allow for the case in which T lacks a truth value but will acquire one in the future: If God is infallible in all his beliefs, then it is not possible that God believes T and T is either false or becomes false. If so, and if God believes T , we get an argument for theological fatalism that parallels our basic argument. Premise (4) would need to be modified as follows:

(6) becomes:

The modifications in the rest of the argument are straightforward.

It is open to the defender of this solution to maintain that God has no beliefs about the contingent future because he does not infallibly know how it will turn out, and this is compatible with God’s being infallible in everything he does believe. It is also compatible with God’s omniscience if omniscience is the property of knowing the truth value of every proposition that has a truth value. But clearly, this move restricts the range of God’s knowledge, so it has religious disadvantages in addition to its disadvantages in logic.

If T is true, there is still the question how God could come to believe T rather than not- T , and believe it without any possibility of error, given that T concerns the contingent future. T is contingent only insofar as it is still possible for you to refrain from answering the phone at 9 tomorrow morning, though we’re supposing for the sake of argument that you will answer the phone at 9. But then it’s still possible for T to turn out false (though it won’t), and still possible for the belief that T to be incorrect (though it isn’t). This is hard to square with the claim in premise (1) that God’s belief that T was infallible.

This problem for infallible belief about a contingent future parallels a problem for God’s knowledge of a contingent future. Though the argument for theological fatalism rests only on divine belief rather than knowledge (since the additional conditions for knowledge, beyond true belief, don’t play any role in the argument), God nevertheless wouldn’t believe without knowing. But it’s unclear what could have been cognitively available to God yesterday, when your answering the phone at 9 am tomorrow was still future and contingent, to raise his belief that T from a correct guess to genuine knowledge. Prior (1962) held this to be a further problem for premise (1), beyond the nonexistence of future contingent truths. For William Hasker (1989, 186–88), Richard Swinburne (2006, 22–26), and Peter van Inwagen (2008), who maintain (contrary to Prior) that there are future contingent truths, the impossibility of foreknowing them is the problem with premise (1). This “limited foreknowledge” view has been critiqued by Arbour (2013) and Todd (2014a), among others.

Defenders of divine foreknowledge need something to say in response to skeptical questions about how such knowledge could be available to God. One possible response is that it’s a conceptual truth that God is omniscient, and his knowledge, including his knowledge of future contingent truths, is simply innate (Craig 1987). Skeptics might regard this response as closer to a non-response. But others have offered detailed if speculative proposals. These include Ryan Byerly (2014), whose book-length treatment of the issue grounds God’s infallible foreknowledge in a divine “ordering of times” that is supposed to leave human free will intact.

It is relatively easy to see how God can know what is (contingently) “going to” happen if this refers to the present tendency of things. All it takes is exhaustive knowledge of the present. But what is “going to” happen can change, as the present tendency of things changes, and what God foreknows on this basis (his knowledge of what is going to happen ) will change along with this change in present tendencies. This “mutable future” position, defended by Peter Geach, has been revived by Patrick Todd (2011, 2016b). On the “Geachian” view, God’s beliefs about the contingent future constitute genuine knowledge, because they track the changing truth about where the future is headed. What this view doesn’t provide is the infallibility required by premise (1).

Fischer (2016, 31–45) tries to fill the gap with his “boot-strapping” account of divine foreknowledge. Even human beings are sometimes in a “knowledge-conferring situation,” or KCS, with respect to the contingent future. Since God would be aware of all the evidence and other knowledge-conferring factors that human beings are aware of in such situations, God is in a position to know (some) future contingents in the same way that human beings can know them: by being in the appropriate KCS. But this presupposes a fallibilist theory of knowledge. What accounts for the infallibility of God’s beliefs? Fischer argues that God can “bootstrap” his way to certainty by combining his beliefs about the contingent future with self-knowledge of his own infallibility. Hunt (2017b) objects that the account is circular, and that it couldn’t support anything close to exhaustive foreknowledge, since most future contingent truths will lack KCS’s at any given time. Fischer (2017, and forthcoming) elaborates and defends the view.

The most straightforward account of the matter, accommodating the infallibility of God’s beliefs, is that he simply “sees” the future. If God is in time, this requires that he be equipped with something like a “time telescope” that allows him to view what is temporally distant. A hurdle faced by time telescopes is that they probably involve retrocausation. If God is not in time, however, he wouldn’t need a time telescope to view the future along with the present and past. This brings us to the next solution.

A third challenge to premise (1), independent of the first two, is that it misrepresents God’s relation to time. What is denied according to this solution is not that God believes infallibly, and not that God believes the content of proposition T , but that God believed T yesterday . This solution probably originated with the 6 th century philosopher Boethius, who maintained that God is not in time and has no temporal properties, so God does not have beliefs at a time. It is therefore a mistake to say God had beliefs yesterday, or has beliefs today, or will have beliefs tomorrow. It is also a mistake to say God had a belief on a certain date, such as June 1, 2004. The way Boethius describes God’s cognitive grasp of temporal reality, all temporal events are before the mind of God at once. To say “at once” or “simultaneously” is to use a temporal metaphor, but Boethius is clear that it does not make sense to think of the whole of temporal reality as being before God’s mind in a single temporal present. It is an atemporal present in which God has a single complete grasp of all events in the entire span of time.

Aquinas adopted the Boethian solution as one of his ways out of theological fatalism, using some of the same metaphors as Boethius. One is the circle analogy, in which the way a timeless God is present to each and every moment of time is compared to the way in which the center of a circle is present to each and every point on its circumference ( SCG I, 66). In contemporary philosophy an important defense of the Boethian idea that God is timeless was given by Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (1981), who applied it explicitly to the foreknowledge dilemma (1991). Recently it has been defended by Katherin Rogers (2007a, 2007b), Kevin Timpe (2007), Michael Rota (2010), Joseph Diekemper (2013), and Ciro De Florio (2015).

Most objections to the timelessness solution to the dilemma of foreknowledge and freedom focus on the idea of timelessness itself, arguing either that it does not make sense or that it is incompatible with other properties of God that are religiously more compelling, such as personhood (e.g., Pike 1970, 121–129; Wolterstorff 1975; Swinburne 1977, 221). Zagzebski has argued (1991, chap. 2 and 2011) that the timelessness move does not avoid the problem of theological fatalism since an argument structurally parallel to the basic argument can be formulated for timeless knowledge. If God is not in time, the key issue would not be the necessity of the past, but the necessity of the timeless realm. So the first three steps of the argument would be reformulated as follows:

Perhaps it is inappropriate to say that timeless events such as God’s timeless knowing are now -necessary, yet we have no more reason to think we can do anything about God’s timeless knowing than about God’s past knowing. The timeless realm is as much out of our reach as the past. So the point of (3t) is that we cannot now do anything about the fact that God timelessly knows T . The rest of the steps in the timeless dilemma argument are parallel to the basic argument. Step (5t) says that if there is nothing we can do about a timeless state, there is nothing we can do about what such a state entails. It follows that we cannot do anything about the future.

The Boethian solution does not solve the problem of theological fatalism by itself, but since the nature of the timeless realm is elusive, the intuition of the necessity of the timeless realm is probably weaker than the intuition of the necessity of the past. The necessity of the past is deeply embedded in our ordinary intuitions about time; there are no ordinary intuitions about the realm of timelessness. One possible way out of this problem is given by K.A. Rogers, who argues (2007a, 2007b) that the eternal realm is like the present rather than the past, and so it does not have the necessity we attribute to the past.

If God’s timeless knowledge doesn’t threaten free will, there’s still the question whether it can be confined to the timeless realm; if not, it might still cause trouble for free will. Van Inwagen (2008) argues against the Boethian solution on the grounds that a timeless deity could still bring about the existence in time of a “Freedom-denying Prophetic Object,” for example, a stone slab on which are inscribed the words, “Peter van Inwagen will answer the phone at 9:00 am on May 27, 2034.” An interesting puzzle for Christian defenders of the Boethian solution is the problem of whether the knowledge of Jesus Christ during his time on earth was infallible. The problem here is that the incarnate Christ was in time even if God is timeless. A particular problem discussed by Timothy Pawl (2014a, 2014b) is whether Christ had infallible foreknowledge of his own future choices, and if so, whether his created will was free. Pawl defends the compatibility of Christ’s infallible foreknowledge and the freedom of his created will.

The next solution is due to the fourteenth century philosopher William of Ockham, and was revived in the contemporary literature by Marilyn Adams (1967). This solution rejects premise (2) of the basic argument in its full generality. Following Ockham, Adams argues that premise (2) applies only to the past strictly speaking, or the “hard” past. A “soft” fact about the past is one that is in part about the future. An example of a soft fact about the past would be the fact that it was true yesterday that a certain event would occur a year later, or the fact that you saw Paris for the last time. Adams argues that God’s existence in the past and God’s past beliefs about the future are not strictly past because they are facts that are in part about the future.

Adams’s argument was unsuccessful since, among other things, her criterion for being a hard fact had the consequence that no fact is a hard fact (Fischer 1989, introduction), but it led to a series of attempts to bolster it by giving more refined definitions of a “hard fact” and the type of necessity such facts are said to have—what Ockham called “accidental necessity” (necessity per accidens ). The resulting formulations became so refined and elaborate, in an effort to avoid possible counterexamples, that they risked becoming detached from the simple intuition they were intended to capture. Recent discussions of the hard fact/soft fact distinction may be found in Todd (2013) and Pendergraft and Coates (2014). Plantinga (1986) argued that a successful Ockhamist response to theological fatalism needn’t await the definitive formulation of necessary and sufficient conditions for soft facthood, because paradigm examples of soft facts--facts that are surely soft, if any facts are soft--are enough for the job. It’s clear that proposition T , for example--that you will answer the phone tomorrow at 9 am--does not express a hard fact about the past. (It doesn’t express a fact about the past at all.) But if God is necessarily existent and essentially omniscient, this fact about what you will do tomorrow both entails, and is entailed by, God’s yesterday believing T . Assuming that hard and soft facthood are closed under logical equivalence, it follows that God’s having believed T is not a hard fact about yesterday, a conclusion that doesn’t rely on any particular answer to the general question how the hard fact/soft fact distinction is to be articulated. Responses to this defense of Ockhamism may be found in Brant (1997) and Hunt (2002).

There was considerable debate over Ockhamism in the eighties and nineties. Some of the defenses in this period appear in Freddoso (1983), Kvanvig (1986), Plantinga (1986), Wierenga (1989), and Craig (1990). Some of the criticisms appear in Fischer (1983, 1985a, 1991), Hasker (1989), Widerker (1990), Zagzebski (1991), and Pike (1993). The Ockhamist strategy, relying as it does on the distinction between facts about the past that are really about the past and facts about the past that are really (at least in part) about the future, is intertwined with work on the reality of the past and future. Finch and Rea (2008) have argued that the Ockhamist solution requires the rejection of presentism.

Perhaps the toughest obstacle confronting the Ockhamist solution is that it is very difficult to give an account of the necessity of the past that preserves the intuition that the past has a special kind of necessity in virtue of being past, but which has the consequence that God’s past beliefs do not have that kind of necessity. The problem is that God’s past beliefs seem to be as good a candidate for something that is strictly past as almost anything we can think of, such as an explosion that occurred last week. If God’s past beliefs about the future are soft facts, but the past explosion is a hard fact, that must be because of something special about God’s past beliefs that is intuitively plausible apart from the attempt to avoid theological fatalism. Perhaps God’s doxastic states are best understood in terms of “wide content” or a functionalist account of the mental (Zemach and Widerker 1987); perhaps divine omniscience is dispositional rather than occurrent (Hunt 1995), or doesn’t involve beliefs at all (Alston 1986). If God’s foreknowledge is special in any of these ways, premise (2) is arguably false. But there are theological costs to these conceptions of divine omniscience. The appeal to Putnam’s point that “meanings ain’t in the head” conflicts with the “incompatibilist constraint” in Fischer (1983); see also Hasker (1988) for a response to Alston, and Hughes (1997) for a response to Hunt. Since these accounts of divine foreknowledge aren’t independently plausible, however interesting they might be theoretically, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Ockhamist solution is ad hoc .

One of the best-known Ockhamist proposals after Adams was made by Alvin Plantinga (1986), who defined the accidentally necessary in terms of lack of counterfactual power. For someone, Jones, to have counterfactual power over God’s past beliefs, the following must be true:

Plantinga argued that counterfactual power over God’s past beliefs about human free choices is coherent and if it occurs, these beliefs are not accidentally necessary; they do not have the kind of necessity the past is alleged to have in premise (2) of the basic argument.

Notice that counterfactual power over the past is not the same thing as changing the past. Under the assumption that there is only one time line, changing the past is incoherent since it amounts to there being one past prior to t 2 in which God has a certain belief at t 1 , and then Jones does something to make a different past. That requires two pasts prior to t 2 , and that presumably makes no sense. What (CPP) affirms instead is that there is only one actual past, but there would have been a different past if Jones acted differently at t 2 . (CPP) also does not require the assumption that what Jones does at t 2 causes God to have the belief he has at t 1 . There is much debate about the way to analyze the causal relation, but it is generally thought that causation does not reduce to a counterfactual dependency of an effect on its cause. The dependency of God’s belief on Jones’ act need not be a causal dependency. (CPP) is therefore weaker than the claim that Jones’ act at t 2 causes God’s belief at t 1 . A discussion of the counterfactual dependence of God’s past belief on human future acts is given in Zagzebski (1991, chap 4).

The idea that God’s past beliefs depend upon our future free acts has been enlivened by Trenton Merricks (2009), who argues that the idea appears in Molina (see section 2.6). There is some question how distinct Merricks’ approach is from classic Ockhamism: Fischer and Todd (2011, 2013) argue that Merricks’ solution is simply a form of Ockhamism and suffers from the same defects, while Merricks (2011) replies that the dependency relation between God’s past beliefs and human acts is different from the one at work in Ockham’s approach. The idea, in any case, is that the dependence of God’s foreknowledge of future contingents on the foreknown events themselves, including future exercises of human free will, along with the in dependence of human actions from God’s foreknowledge of them, is the key to defending the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom. This “Dependence Solution” has gained sufficient currency that it deserves a section of its own, regardless of its relationship to the original Ockhamist strategy.

The Ur -text for this approach is the following passage in Origen of Alexandria’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans:

it will not be because God knows that an event will occur that it happens; but, because something is going to take place it is known by God before it happens.

The because-relationship in question is stronger than counterfactual dependence, because it can be absent even when counterfactual dependence is present, as in the case of divine foreknowledge. (Though you won’t answer the phone tomorrow at 9 am because God foreknew you would do so, your answering it at 9 tomorrow is nevertheless counterfactually dependent on God’s foreknowledge: were God to have believed yesterday that you won’t answer the phone at 9 tomorrow, you wouldn’t answer the phone at 9 tomorrow, and were God to have believed that you will answer at 9, you would answer at 9.) What’s needed is the stronger relationship of explanatory dependence.

Fischer and Tognazzini (2014), in a response to Merricks (2009, 2011), McCall (2011), and Westphal (2011), ask how the dependence point alone shows that the hard past isn’t fixed. That would require that the agent upon whose action the past depends really can act otherwise, and this is just asserted rather than argued. After all, this is the very point at issue, so simply assuming it is to beg the question. Cyr and Law (forthcoming) defend the dialectical appropriateness of the assumption that doing and refraining are both open to the agent.

Todd (2013) challenges the courage of dependence theorists’ convictions with a scenario in which, instead of simply foreknowing that you will perform a certain action tomorrow, God prepunished you for it yesterday. The explanatory relations are the same in the two cases, but your undergoing that punishment yesterday is surely a fixed fact about the past, and your performing that action tomorrow is surely unavoidable. We have no less reason to think that God’s foreknowledge belongs to the fixed past and that foreknown actions are unavoidable. Swenson (2016) and Law (2020) dispute the moral Todd draws from his prepunishment case, appealing to time travel scenarios in which some fact about the past depends on what might yet happen in the future, where our intuitions are supposedly more open to the possibility that the past isn’t entirely fixed.

Swenson (2016) argues that what’s fixed isn’t the past in toto , but so much of the past as isn’t dependent on the future. Rather than modifying the principle of the fixity of the past, Law (2020) advocates junking it altogether and replacing it with the principle of the fixity of the independent. Law (2021) continues the case for replacing the fixity of the past with the fixity of the independent by arguing that the former, insofar as the past is fixed, is derivative from the latter. In two recent papers, Ryan Wasserman stakes out positions that differ from most other defenders of the dependence solution. After reviewing modal, counterfactual, metaphysical, and logical analyses of explanatory dependence, and taking in lessons from time travel cases, Wasserman (2021) concludes that causal dependence is the best model for understanding how God can foreknow what you will do because you will do it, and in Wasserman (forthcoming) he argues that the defense of libertarian freedom against theological fatalism is best served by emphasizing the independence of future actions from God’s foreknowledge rather than the dependence of God’s foreknowledge on the foreknown actions.

The dependence solution redirects attention from the temporal to the explanatory order, in which divine foreknowledge depends on future events while future events do not depend on divine foreknowledge. It then proposes that what’s relevant to assessing libertarian agency is the explanatory order--the temporal order is relevant only insofar as it follows the explanatory order, and (when it does follow it) because it follows it. Thus a fact about the past, such as God’s believing yesterday that T , is irrelevant to the libertarian status of a future action if that fact does not explain, and is instead explained by, that future action. This much is consistent with the past’s being fixed and necessary in just the way that premise (2) requires, and consistent with the solution we’ll look at in 2.8 . What the dependence solution adds is that openness in the explanatory order overrides the necessity of the past: any facts about the past that aren’t yet explanatorily fixed, aren’t yet temporally fixed either. So (2) isn’t true in its full generality, and divine foreknowledge is one of the exceptions, blocking the inference to (3).

Whether this additional move is plausible depends on the strength of one’s intuitions about the necessity of the past. If the police are already on the way, summoned by the tachyonic alarm system the bank teller is about to activate, not everyone will share the intuition that the teller still has the option not to press the alarm button.

The next premise in the argument is (5), the principle that licenses the “transfer” of necessity from (3) to (6) via (4). Ockhamists and Dependence Theorists both allow that the necessity of the past, when applicable to past events, transfers to the future. Whether this transfer principle is valid depends on the modality being transferred and the modality effecting the transfer. Logical necessity, for example, is validly transferred by entailment: □ p , □( p ⊃ q ), ∴ □ q . But some modalities, like non-accidentality (Slote 1982), are not closed under entailment. How about the necessity of the past? A much-discussed transfer principle, playing the same role in Peter van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument that (5) plays in the argument for theological fatalism, is rule β (van Inwagen 1983). The necessity-operator featured in this principle is N , where N p is to be read, “ p , and no one has, or ever had, any choice about whether p .” Rule β states that, given N p and N ( p ⊃ q ), it follows that N q . Counterexamples to rule β were soon discovered, e.g., by McKay and Johnson (1996). But it was easy to amend the Consequence Argument to rest on N p , □( p ⊃ q ), ∴ N q , and this principle appears to have no counterexample. The parallel principle for theological fatalism is □ t p , □( p ⊃ q ), ∴ □ t q , where □ t p is to be read, “p is fixed, accidentally necessary, no longer avoidable, etc., relative to time t .” This principle, too, seems to have no counterexample.

Duns Scotus (Kenny 1979, 56–58) appears to have challenged this principle. Fischer (1985b) responds to the challenge. But the theory of divine omniscience that has been most closely associated with the denial of (5) is the doctrine of Middle Knowledge. This doctrine was vehemently debated in the 16 th century, with the version of Luis de Molina, referred to as “Molinism,” getting the most attention in the contemporary literature. Recently the doctrine has received strong support by Thomas Flint (1998) and Eef Dekker (2000). Unlike the other compatibilist solutions we are considering, which aim only at showing that infallible foreknowledge and human freedom are compatible, Molinism provides an account of how God knows the contingent future, along with a strong doctrine of divine providence. Middle knowledge is called “middle” because it is said to stand between God’s knowledge of necessary truths and his knowledge of his own creative will. The objects of Middle Knowledge are so-called counterfactuals of freedom:

If person S were in circumstances C , S would freely do X .

Middle knowledge requires that there are true counterfactuals of this form corresponding to every possible free creature and every possible circumstance in which that creature can act freely. These propositions are intended to be contingent (a claim that has been disputed by some objectors), but they are prior to God’s creative will. God uses them in deciding what to create. By combining his Middle Knowledge with what he decides to create, God knows the entire history of the world.

There are a number of objections to Middle Knowledge in the contemporary literature. Robert Adams (1991) argues that Molinism is committed to the position that the truth of a counterfactual of freedom is explanatorily prior to God’s decision to create us. But the truth of a counterfactual to the effect that if I were in circumstance C I would do A is strictly inconsistent with my refraining from A in C , and so my refraining from A in C is precluded by something prior in the order of explanation to my act in C . This is inconsistent with my acting freely in C . Climenhaga and Rubio (forthcoming) clarify the nature of explanatory priority and in so doing affirm the essential correctness of Adams’ analysis. There are a number of other objections to Middle Knowledge in the literature, as well as replies by its defenders. William Hasker (1989, 1995, 1997, 2000) has offered a series of objections and replies to William Craig, who defends Middle Knowledge (1994, 1998). Yet other objections have been proposed by Walls (1990) and Gaskin (1993). Recent critical discussions of Molinism appear in Fischer (2008), Guleserian (2008), and Fales (2010). Defenses of Molinism appear in Brüntrup & Schneider (2011) and Kosciuk (2010), and a critique in Shieber (2009). Perszyk (2011) is a collection of essays examining Molinism and its future direction, while Perszyk (2013) provides a survey of the recent literature.

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the doctrine of Middle Knowledge is defensible. How does that avoid the conclusion of the argument for theological fatalism? Middle Knowledge does not entail the falsehood of any premise of the basic argument. Freddoso (1988, 53–60) argues that Molina rejects the closure of accidental necessity under entailment, but for reasons closer to those inspiring the Dependence Solution (though Molina does not dispute the necessity of the past). Flint (1998) rejects some of the steps of the fatalist argument in addition to defending Middle Knowledge, and more recently blends of Ockhamism and Molinism have been defended (Kosciuk 2010), which suggests that even though the theory of Middle Knowledge is a powerful theory of divine knowledge and providence, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to avoid theological fatalism by itself.

Doubts about premises (2) and (5) can be combined into a more radical critique of the argument. We have already discussed the Ockhamist response, which accepts (2) as applied to what is strictly past, but rejects it as applied to that part of the past that is not wholly or strictly past. It is worth asking, however, whether there is any such thing as the necessity of the past at all. What do we mean when we say that the past, the strict past, is necessary? When people say, “There is no use crying over spilled milk,” they presumably mean that there is nothing anybody can do now about the spilled milk; the spilling of the milk is outside the realm of our causal control. But it is not at all clear that pastness per se puts something outside the realm of our causal control. Rather, it is pastness in conjunction with the metaphysical law that causes must precede their effects. If we decided that effects can precede their causes, it’s quite possible that we would no longer speak of the necessity of the past.

So the necessity of the past may simply be the principle that past events are outside the class of causable events. There is a temporal asymmetry in causability because everything causable is in the future. But some of the future is non-causable as well. Whether or not determinism is true, there are some events in the future that are causally necessary. If a future event E is necessary, it is causable, and not E is not causable. But if the necessity of the past is the non-causability of the past, it would be odd to pick out the class of propositions about the past as possessing an allegedly distinct kind of necessity since some of the future has that same kind of necessity.

This leads to a deeper problem in the idea of the necessity of the past. Zagzebski (2014) argues that the interpretation of the necessity of the past as a purely temporal modality is confused. What people generally mean by the necessity of the past is that the past is causally closed, meaning the past is neither causable nor preventable. Understood that way, the necessity of the past is not a purely temporal modality, and it is not a form of necessity. The categories of causability and non-causability do not correspond to the standard modal categories of the necessary, possible, and impossible. The attempt to assimilate the causal categories to modal categories is a mistake.

Let us see what happens to the argument for theological fatalism if the necessity of the past is understood as the causal closure of the past.

Let us begin with a definition of causal closure :

E is causally closed = df There is nothing now that can cause E , and there is nothing now that can cause not E .

To use this principle in an argument for fatalism, the principle of the necessity of the past will need to be replaced with the following principle:

Principle of the Causal Closure of the Past : If E is an event in the past, E is causally closed.

We will then need to replace the transfer of necessity principle by the following:

Transfer of Causal Closure Principle : If E occurs and is causally closed, and necessarily (if E occurs then F occurs), then F is causally closed.

To recast the argument for theological fatalism, let us again consider the proposition that you will answer the telephone tomorrow at 9am and call it T :

But (6) denies that there are causes of the future. Certainly we believe that something now, whether agents or events, can cause future events, and the fatalist does not deny that. What the fatalist denies is that we can cause something other than what we cause. So the relevant half of the principle of the causal closure of the past is as follows:

Principle of the Unpreventability of the Past : If E is an event in the past, nothing now can cause not E .

To use this principle in a fatalist argument, we need the following:

Transfer of Unpreventability Principle : If E occurs and it is not now causable that E does not occur, and necessarily (if E occurs, then F occurs), then it is not now causable that F does not occur.

This principle is virtually identical to the transfer of unpreventability principle proposed by Hugh Rice (2005), and is similar to a strengthened form of the well-known principle Beta first proposed by Peter van Inwagen (1983).

Using this principle, we get the following argument for theological fatalism:

From the Principle of the unpreventability of the past we get:

From the definition of divine infallibility we get:

From 2, 3, and the transfer of unpreventability principle we get:

From a variation of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities, we get:

From (4) and (5), we get:

This argument for theological fatalism is better than the standard argument if a purely temporal necessity is problematic. The second premise of the above argument is only the principle that the past is unpreventable, not a questionable premise that the past has a special kind of necessity distinct from the causal structure of the universe simply in virtue of being past. But since the unpreventability of the past is not a form of necessity in the formal sense, then the transfer principle licensing the crucial inference to (4) is not a transfer of necessity. Unlike the transfer of temporal necessity principle in our original argument, it is not a variation of an axiom of logic, and is far from indisputable. This suggests that the idea of the necessity of the past may be confused. On the one hand, we have inherited from Ockham the idea that the past has a kind of necessity for which we can formulate an analogue of the formal principles of logical necessity. But the intuitions supporting such a form of necessity are largely intuitions about causability, and the modalities of causability/non-causability do not parallel necessity, possibility, and impossibility. If this is correct, then if there is a true transfer of causability or non-causability principle, it is not because it is like logical necessity in its formal structure. The problem, then, is that the fatalist argument needs a kind of necessity that the past has and which is also transferred to the future via a valid transfer of necessity principle. In section 5 we will look at how this is a general problem that extends beyond the issue of fatalism.

2.8 The rejection of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP)

Compatibilists who hold that it’s possible for an agent to do otherwise, in the sense required for free will, even if her action is causally determined, will probably be untroubled by an argument purporting to show that no one can do otherwise, given divine foreknowledge. The relevant interlocutors for the argument for theological fatalism are those who endorse a libertarian conception of free will (Alston 1985).

With that in mind, let us now look at premise (9). This is a form of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP), a principle that has become well-known in the literature on free will ever since it was attacked by Harry Frankfurt (1969) in some interesting thought experiments. The point of Frankfurt’s paper was to drive a wedge between responsibility and alternate possibilities, and to thereby drive a wedge between responsibility and libertarian freedom. In general, those defending libertarian freedom also defend PAP, and those attacking PAP, like Frankfurt, defend determinism, but some philosophers have argued that PAP is false even if we have libertarian free will. The literature that clearly distinguishes the claim that free will requires alternate possibilities from the claim that free will requires the falsehood of determinism is contemporary. The former is a thesis about events in counterfactual circumstances, whereas the latter is a thesis about the locus of causal control in the actual circumstances. Aside from the foreknowledge literature, support for the rejection of PAP from the perspective of an incompatibilist about free will and determinism can be found in Stump (1990, 1996), Hunt (1999b), Zagzebski (1991, 2000), Pereboom (2000), and Shabo (2010). This view was originally called hyper-incompatibilism by John Martin Fischer, but has recently been called source incompatibilism. For a recent critique of this version of incompatibilism for solving the foreknowledge problem, see Werther (2005) and Talsma (2013).

Here is an example of a typical Frankfurt case intended to show that an agent can act freely even when she lacks alternate possibilities:

Black, an evil neurosurgeon , wishes to see Smith dead but is unwilling to do the deed himself. Knowing that Mary Jones also despises Smith and will have a single good opportunity to kill him, Black inserts a mechanism into Jones’s brain that enables Black to monitor and to control Jones’s neurological activity. If the activity in Jones’s brain suggests that she is on the verge of deciding not to kill Smith when the opportunity arises, Black’s mechanism will intervene and cause Jones to decide to commit the murder. On the other hand, if Jones decides to murder Smith on her own, the mechanism will not intervene. It will merely monitor but will not affect her neurological function. Now suppose that when the occasion arises, Jones decides to kill Smith without any “help” from Black’s mechanism. In the judgment of Frankfurt and most others, Jones is morally responsible for her act. Nonetheless, it appears that she is unable to do otherwise since if she had attempted to do so, she would have been thwarted by Black’s device.

Most commentators on examples like this agree that the agent is both morally responsible for her act and acts freely in whatever sense of freedom they endorse. They differ on whether she can do otherwise at the time of her act. Determinists generally interpret the case as one in which she exercises compatibilist free will and has no alternate possibilities. Most libertarians interpret it as one in which she exercises libertarian free will and has alternate possibilities, contrary to appearances. As mentioned above, some philosophers have interpreted it as a case in which she exercises libertarian free will but does not have alternate possibilities. If Frankfurt cases can be successfully interpreted in this third way, then they can be used to show the compatibility of infallible foreknowledge and libertarian freedom. Hunt (1999a) argues that this is essentially the solution put forward by Augustine in On Free Choice of the Will III.1–4, though Augustine’s own considered position on free will was not libertarian.

But there is another way Frankfurt cases can be used to argue for the compatibility of foreknowledge and freedom. There is an important disanalogy between a Frankfurt case and infallible foreknowledge that might lead one to doubt whether an agent really lacks alternate possibilities when her act is infallibly foreknown. A crucial component of the standard Frankfurt case is that the agent is prevented from acting freely in close possible worlds. That aspect of the case is not in dispute. Black’s device is counterfactually manipulative even if it is not actually manipulative. In contrast, infallible foreknowledge is not even counterfactually manipulative. There is no close possible world in which foreknowledge prevents the agent from acting freely. Of course, if theological fatalism is true, nobody ever acts freely, but the point is that there is no manipulation going on in other possible worlds in the foreknowledge scenario. The relation between foreknowledge and human acts is no different in one world than in any other. But it is precisely the fact that the relation between the Frankfurt machine and Mary’s act differs in the actual world from what it is in other close worlds that is supposed to make the Frankfurt example work in showing the falsity of PAP.

To make this point clear, let us look at how the standard Frankfurt case would have to be amended to make it a close analogy to the situation of infallible foreknowledge. As Zagzebski has argued (1991, chap. 6, sec. 2.1), the device implanted in Mary’s brain would have to be set in such a way that no matter what Mary did, it never intervened. It is not even true that it might have intervened. Any world in which Mary decides to commit the murder is a world in which the device is set to make her commit the murder should she not decide to do it, and any world in which she does not decide to commit the murder is a world in which the device is set to prevent her from deciding to do it if she is about to decide to do it. Now of course this might be an impossible device, but it would have to be as described to be a close analogy to the foreknowledge scenario. And our reactions to this amended Frankfurt case are very different from typical reactions to the standard Frankfurt case. In the standard case it at least appears to be true that the agent cannot do otherwise, whereas in the case amended to be parallel to the foreknowledge case there is a very straightforward sense in which the agent can do otherwise because her will is not thwarted by Black in any reasonably close possible world. The machine is ready to manipulate her, but it does not manipulate her, nor might it have manipulated her since it does not even manipulate her in counterfactual circumstances. We might think of the machine as a metaphysical accident—an extraneous addition to the story that plays no part in the sequence of events in any possible world. Possibly it is not clear in the amended story whether or not Mary has alternate possibilities. What the story shows, then, is that alternate possibilities are not always relevant to the possession of libertarian freedom.

Disanalogies between the cases are relevant, however, only if the prospects for exempting divine foreknowledge from PAP depend on how closely it mimics Frankfurt-type counterexamples. That assumption may be unwarranted. Augustine’s counterexample to PAP was divine foreknowledge itself, not a proto-Frankfurtian thought experiment featuring a counterfactual intervener. Since God infallibly believed yesterday that you will answer the phone at 9:00 am tomorrow, there is no alternative possibility on which you fail to answer the phone at 9:00 tomorrow morning; but since “a man does not therefore sin because God foreknew that he would sin” ( CG V.10) and, more generally, “God’s foreknowledge does not force the future to happen” ( FCW III.4), we can still regard your action as free, even in the libertarian sense. So PAP is false, for the same reasons Frankfurt pronounced it false in his story about Black, Smith and Jones: God’s foreknowledge, no less than Black’s mechanism, played no role at all in leading the agent to perform the action, could have been subtracted from the situation without making any difference to what happened or why it happened, and is completely irrelevant to understanding why the agent acted as she did (Frankfurt 1969, 836–7). Divine foreknowledge constitutes its own counterexample to PAP (Hunt 2003).

If this is correct, the following dilemma critique of theological fatalism becomes available (Hunt 2017a). Either the argument fails somewhere along the way to (8), or it succeeds up through (8). If it fails at one of these earlier steps, it fails full stop. That’s the obvious horn of the dilemma. But if it reaches step (8) successfully, and reaches it for those reasons , we have a case in which you cannot do otherwise than answer the phone tomorrow morning, but you are presumptively free in doing so, since you are acting on your own, and the circumstances that deprive you of alternatives do not in any way explain your action. So (9) is false, and it’s falsified by (8). Whether (1)-(8) succeeds or fails, then, the fatalistic inference to (10) is blocked.

Note that this solution shares an intuition with the dependence response surveyed in 2.5, namely, that God’s foreknowledge is explanatorily dependent on future events, and not the other way around. The difference is that the Dependence Solution retains PAP by denying the general necessity of the past, while the Augustinian/Frankfurtian approach is to abandon PAP and stick with the necessity of the past.

Ever since the dilemma of this article was identified, there have been philosophers who thought that something like our basic argument succeeds in demonstrating that infallible foreknowledge is incompatible with human free will. If they are incompatible, one of them must be given up. It’s possible to give up both, of course, but that’s more than the argument requires, and one reason the dilemma has attracted so much attention in the history of philosophy is that both the belief in a being with infallible foreknowledge and belief in the existence of libertarian free will are strongly entrenched in the world view of many philosophers. To give up either of these beliefs is difficult and often has many ramifications for one’s other beliefs.

The denial of libertarian freedom has always had many supporters. The idea of making causal determinism the focal point of discussions of free will is modern in origin, and some philosophers think that the modern framing of the issue is confused. Philosophers who deny libertarian freedom may affirm a type of free will compatible with determinism, or they may instead simply accept the consequence that human beings lack free will. It is worth noting, however, that theists who deny libertarian freedom are typically theological determinists rather than fatalists; it’s primarily considerations of divine omnipotence or sovereignty, rather than foreknowledge, that motivate them. When Augustine, for example, rejected human freedom apart from divine control—“I tried hard to maintain the free decision of the human will, but the grace of God was victorious” ( Retractationes 2.1)—it wasn’t because of the fatalist argument from divine foreknowedge, which (as we’ve seen) he regarded as a complete failure. Jonathan Edwards, on the other hand, based his Calvinist denial of libertarian freedom, in part, on a sophisticated version of the argument for theological fatalism ( FW II.12).

The other incompatibilist position is to affirm libertarian free will along with the principle of alternate possibilities (premise 9), and to deny the possibility of infallible foreknowledge. This position has recently come into prominence through its association with “open theism” (Pinnock et al . 1994). Open theists reject divine timelessness and immutability, along with infallible foreknowledge, arguing that not only should foreknowledge be rejected because of its fatalist consequences, but the view of a God who takes risks, and can be surprised and even disappointed at how things turn out, is more faithful to Scripture than the classical notion of an essentially omniscient and foreknowing deity (Sanders 1998, Boyd et al 2001, 13–47). See Rhoda et al (2006) for an argument that the key issue in the open theism debate is the nature of the future, and Tuggy (2007) for an overview of the different positions open theists can take on this question. A reply to both Rhoda et al. and Tuggy may be found in Craig and Hunt (2013). Fischer, Todd and Tognazzini (2009) offers a wide-ranging appraisal of responses to Pike's argument, paying special attention to open theism and issues in the philosophy of time. For an argument that open theism necessitates the view that propositions about the future lack truth value, see Arbour (2013). Todd disagrees on behalf of the open theist, defending (but without endorsing) the mutability of the future (2016a), and arguing that future contingents are all false rather than truth-valueless (2016b). Boyd (2015) attempts to turn the tables against critics on the grounds that the openist God’s knowledge of all the ways the future might go represents more knowledge than the classical theistic God’s knowledge of the way the future will go. Arbour (2019) is a recent collection of commisioned essays criticizing open theism on philosophical grounds.

One influential argument that open theists use against defenders of foreknowledge who do not also accept Molinism is that foreknowledge without middle knowledge is useless for divine providence. In a number of papers (1993, 1997, 2009), David Hunt has defended the providential utility of foreknowledge without middle knowledge, describing cases in which foreknowledge enhances God’s providential prospects without generating the “metaphysical problem” of explanatory circles, and arguing that the “doxastic problem” of agential impotence when one already knows what one is going to do rests on a principle that is in fact false. Responses to Hunt include Kapitan (1993), Basinger (1993), Robinson (2004a, 2004b), and Hasker (2009). Zimmerman (2012) is friendlier to Hunt’s position.

A related objection to foreknowledge without middle knowledge is that prophecy requires middle knowledge. See Pruss (2007) for a defense of a foreknowledge-only account of prophecy. Another issue related to divine providence is the efficacy of past-directed prayers. Kevin Timpe (2005) argues that adherents of simple foreknowledge or timeless knowledge and Molinists have the resources to explain the efficacy of prayers about the past, but open theism does not.

A form of fatalism that is even older than theological fatalism is logical fatalism, the thesis that the past truth of a proposition about the future entails fatalism. Aristotle discusses this form of fatalism in his famous Sea Battle Argument, mentioned in section 2.1 above. A clearer and more sophisticated form of the argument was proposed by Diodorus Cronus, whose argument is remarkably similar in form to our basic argument for theological fatalism. The logical fatalist argument parallels our basic argument as follows:

Argument for logical fatalism

Let S = the proposition that there will be a sea battle tomorrow.

Unlike the argument for theological fatalism, the argument for logical fatalism has few defenders. One reason is that (2L) is less plausible than (2). (3L) is a soft fact about the past, if anything is. Nevertheless, some philosophers, like Susan Haack (1974) and William Lane Craig (1987), have maintained that theological fatalism is just a gussied up version of logical fatalism, and that the former is no more impressive than the latter once one looks past the theological window-dressing. This seems to be Merricks’ (2009) position as well, since he holds that theological fatalism fails for essentially the same reason as logical fatalism. Warfield (1997) has argued for the equivalence of the two forms of fatalism if God is necessarily existent and essentially omniscient. Responses have been given by Hasker (1998) and Brueckner (2000), and Warfield (2000) offers a rejoinder to both. Hunt (2002) links Warfield’s argument with Plantinga’s (1986), discussed in 2.4 , inasmuch as both exploit the logical equivalence of propositions about the contingent future with God’s believing those propositions, and argues that they both fall prey to the same reductio: the closure principles they invoke (closure of consistency under logical equivalence for Warfield, closure of hard/soft facthood under logical equivalence for Plantinga) would equally support the compatibility of free will with divine determinism, an unacceptable result for a libertarian. Peter Graham (2008) argues that the consensus about consistency to which Warfield appeals emerged against the backdrop of an assumption that there is no necessarily existent being, and is therefore question-begging.

5. Beyond theological fatalism

There’s more at stake here than the coherence of libertarian theism, as evidenced by the many non-libertarians and non-theists who have contributed to the debate. A comparison might be helpful. There’s more at stake in Zeno’s Achilles paradox than the fleetness of Achilles and the torpidity of tortoises. If that’s all there was to it, the discovery that Achilles was actually a quadraplegic, or that the tortoises of ancient Greece were as fast as jack rabbits, would resolve the puzzle. But that would simply exempt Achilles and/or the tortoise from complicity in the problem; it would do nothing to address the real issues presented by Zeno’s argument. The situation is arguably the same when it comes to the argument for theological fatalism (Hunt 2017a). If the argument gets God wrong by assuming that he’s in time when he isn’t, the problem possibly goes away for God, once the mistake is corrected, but it’s easily reinstated by replacing God with Gud, an infallibly omniscient being who exists in time. If the argument gets human beings wrong by assuming that they have (libertarian) free will when they don’t, the problem can be reformulated in terms of Gud’s infallible beliefs about the future actions of Eleutherians, a race of extraterrestrials stipulated to possess libertarian freedom. This is to understand the argument for theological fatalism as a thought experiment. Whether or not divine foreknowledge and libertarian freedom are real, we’re being asked, what if? Could libertarian freedom really be incompatible with divine foreknowledge for the reasons given in the argument ? The answer to this question may involve rethinking more than God and free will.

Zagzebski has argued that the dilemma of theological fatalism is broader than a problem about free will. The modal or causal asymmetry of time, a transfer of necessity principle, and the supposition of infallible foreknowledge are mutually inconsistent. (1991, appendix). If there is a distinct kind of necessity that the past has qua past, and which is not an implicit reference to the lack of causability of the past, then it is temporally asymmetrical. The past has it and the future does not. The necessity of the past and the contingency of the future are two sides of the same coin. To say that the future is contingent in the sense of temporal modality does not imply that we have causal control over the entire future, of course. We lack control over part of the future because part (or even all) of it is causally necessary. But if the necessity of the past is distinct from the lack of causability, and is a type of necessity the past has just because it is past, the future must lack that particular kind of necessity.

The idea that there is temporally asymmetrical modality is inconsistent with the transfer of necessity principle and the supposition of infallible foreknowledge of an essentially omniscient deity. The inconsistency can be demonstrated as follows:

Dilemma of Foreknowledge and Modal Temporal Asymmetry

Again, let T = the proposition that you will answer the telephone tomorrow at 9 am.

(1f) and the Principle of the Necessity of the Past tells us that

From (1f) and the definition of an EOF it follows that

By the Transfer of Necessity Principle (TNP), (2f) and (3f) entail

(4f) is logically equivalent to

From the Principle of the Contingency of the Future we get

But (6f) contradicts (5f).

The inconsistency shown in this argument has nothing to do with free will or fatalism. In fact, the problem is even more general than this argument illustrates. The reason essential omniscience conflicts with temporal modality and the transfer principle is that the existence of an EOF requires that a proposition about the past entails a proposition about the future. But it straightforwardly follows from TNP that a proposition that is now-necessary cannot entail a proposition that is not now-necessary. So if the past is now-necessary and the future is not, a proposition about the past cannot entail a proposition about the future. The conclusion is that if asymmetrical temporal modality is coherent, it can obey TNP, or it can permit a proposition about the past to entail a proposition about the future, but not both.

The root of the problem, then, is that it is impossible for there to be a type of modality that has the following features:

So the problem of the alleged incompatibility of infallible foreknowledge and free will is a special case of a more general problem about time and necessity. It was suggested in section 2.6 that the problem may be (a) above. There is no temporally asymmetrical necessity. But regardless of what one thinks of fatalist arguments, the general problem in the logic of time and causation needs to be addressed. Both the alleged modal asymmetry of time and the causal asymmetry should be examined in more detail.

The problem of foreknowledge and fatalism has been around for a long time, but the amount of philosophical attention it has attracted since 1965 is truly remarkable. The literature on this problem is enormous, and it continues to grow.

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Aristotle | Augustine of Hippo | Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus | fatalism | freedom: divine | free will | God: and other ultimates | incompatibilism: (nondeterministic) theories of free will | incompatibilism: arguments for | Ockham [Occam], William | voluntarism, theological

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Openness Theology and Divine Omniscience

Other essays.

Openness theology, a modern theological movement that is essentially a resurgence of the Socinian heresy condemned by the church in the 16th century, denies the orthodox doctrine of God’s omniscience, the belief that God knows all things exhaustively before they happen.

Scripture teaches God’s omniscience, that is, that God knows himself and all things in creation exhaustively and from eternity past. This is a function of God’s lordship over all things. God’s knowledge of all things extends to the past, present, and future, encompassing even the actions of free agents. This does not destroy the freedom of humanity, but instead defines it more carefully as a compatibilist freedom rather than a libertarian freedom. Humans are not free to do anything without constraint but are constrained by their desires, circumstances, natures, and, ultimately, God. Openness theology denies all of this; where Arminian theology only denies that we have compatibilist freedom in favor of libertarian freedom, Openness theology denies that God even knows what we will do. Openness theologians argue that it is logically inconsistent to say that God knows in advance what someone would freely do in a libertarian sense. Openness theology is not new but is essentially a relabeled Socianism, a heresy that was condemned in the 16th century.

Scripture affirms that God’s knowledge of himself and of the world is exhaustive:

Great is our Lord, and abundant in power; his understanding is beyond measure. (Ps. 147:5)

(Peter) said to (Jesus), “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep.” (John 21:17)

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account. (Heb. 4:12–13)

For whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything. (1 John 3:20)

God knows all about the starry heavens (Gen. 15:5; Ps. 147:4; Isa. 40:26; Jer. 33:22) and the tiniest details of the natural world (Pss. 50:10–11; 56:8; Matt. 10:30). God’s knowledge is absolute knowledge, and so it elicits religious praise (Ps. 139:17–18; Isa. 40:28; Rom. 11:33–36). Wicked people often think that God will not notice what they do, but they will find that God does know, and that he will certainly condemn their sin (Ps. 10:11; 11:4; 73:11; 94:7; Isa. 29:15, 40:27; 47:10; Jer. 16:17–18; Ezek. 8:12). To the righteous, however, God’s knowledge is a blessing of the covenant (Exod. 2:23–25; 3:7–9; 1 Kgs. 18:27; 2 Chron. 16:9; Pss. 33:18–20; 34:15–16; 38:9; 145:20; Matt. 6:32). He knows what is happening to them, he hears their prayer, and he will certainly answer.

God knows everything because he is the Lord of all. He made the heavens and the earth, and he knows his own plan for its history (Eph. 1:11). He has control over all things (Rom. 11:36), his judgments of truth have ultimate authority (John 17:17), and he is present everywhere to observe what is happening (Ps. 139). The theological term omniscience refers to God’s exhaustive knowledge of himself and of the creation.

God’s Knowledge of the Future

His omniscience includes knowledge of the past, present, and future. His knowledge of the past and present is clear from the texts cited above. Scripture is equally clear in teaching God’s knowledge of the future. Note, for example, this part of the definition of prophecy in Deuteronomy 18:21–22:

And if you say in your heart, ‘How may we know the word that the LORD has not spoken?’ – when a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the LORD has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him.

In this passage, part of the work of the prophet (appointed by God to bring his word to the people) is to foretell the future. If he claims to foretell the future, and that prophecy fails, then the people may conclude that he is a false prophet. The assumption behind this provision is that God knows the future, and therefore any true prophet will predict the future accurately.

Knowledge of the future is not only the test of a true prophet. It is also the test of a true God. In the contest between Yahweh, Israel’s lord, and the false gods of the ancient Near East, a major issue is which God knows the future. This is a frequent theme in Isaiah 40–49, a passage that focuses on the sovereignty of Yahweh over against the absurd pretensions of the false gods:

Set forth your case, says the LORD; bring your proofs, says the King of Jacob. Let them bring them, and tell us what is to happen. Tell us the former things, what they are, that we may consider them, that we may know their outcome; or declare to us the things to come. Tell us what is to come hereafter, that we may know that you are gods; do good, or do harm, that we may be dismayed and terrified. (Isa. 41:– 23)

True prophets announce the future: not only momentous events like the coming of the Messiah (Isa. 9:6–7; 11:1-9), but also very concrete and specific events of the near future (1 Sam. 10:1–11). These passages indicate that God has a knowledge in advance, even of free human decisions. That is also true of prophecies that indicate the broad structure of human history. An example is God’s promise to Abraham:

Then the LORD said to Abram, “Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.” (Gen. 15:13–16)

This general prediction presupposes an indefinite number of more specific future facts: that Abraham will have many descendants, that they will migrate to lands with unfriendly rulers, that the rulers of the nations will afflict them, that these afflictions will end after four hundred years, and so on. These events result from many free human decisions: by the rulers, by Abraham’s offspring, by the Amorites, and so on. This prophecy of great redemptive-historical events is also a prediction of many free actions by many people. The biblical picture here is that God knows the future exhaustively, meticulously, in every detail.

The prophetic prediction of free human actions is found in many other passages (see Gen. 27:27–29, 39–40; 49:11; Num. 23–24; Deut. 32:1–43; 33:1-29; 1 Sam. 23:11; 1 Kings 13:1–4; 2 Kings 8:12). God knows everything we will say or do, before we say or do it (Ps 139:4, 16). He knew the prophet Jeremiah before his conception (Jer. 1:5). That implies that he knew in advance who would marry whom in Israel, and all the various combinations of sperm and egg that would lead to the conception of this one individual. Many free human decisions led to Jeremiah’s conception, and the lord knew them all.

In the New Testament, Jesus teaches that his Father knows the day and hour of his return (Mark 13:32). But that day will not come until after other events have taken place—events that depend on free human decisions (13:1–30). Jesus also predicted that Judas would betray him (John 6:64; 13:18–19), though Judas certainly made his wicked decision freely and responsibly.

Openness Theology

The view of divine omniscience summarized above has been the traditional view of orthodox Christianity—Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant. But some within the church have questioned it. Among these were Lelio (1525-62) and Fausto (1539-1604) Socinus. Robert Strimple describes their view as follows, contrasting it with Arminianism:

Arminianism denies that God has foreordained whatsoever comes to pass but wishes nevertheless to affirm God’s foreknowledge of whatever comes to pass. Against the Arminians, the Socinians insisted that logically the Calvinists were quite correct in insisting that the only real basis for believing that God knows what you are going to do next is to believe that he has foreordained what you are going to do next. How else could God know ahead of time what your decision will be? Like the Arminians, however, the Socinians insisted that it was a contradiction of human freedom to believe in the sovereign foreordination of God. So they went “all the way” (logically) and denied not only that God had foreordained the free decisions of free agents but also that God foreknows what those decisions will be (see “What Does God Know?” in The Coming Evangelical Crisis , 140-41).

In the later part of the twentieth century, a movement sprung up, associated with Clark Pinnock, Richard Rice, Gregory Boyd, John Sanders and others, called by such names as “open theism,” “free will theism,” and “openness theology.” Strimple compares their teaching to that of the Socinians:

(The Socinian doctrine) is precisely the teaching of the “free will theism” of Pinnock, Rice, and other like-minded “new model evangelicals.” They want their doctrine of God to sound very “new,” very modern, by dressing it up with references to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in physics and to the insights of process theology (although they reject process theology as a whole…). But it is just the old Socinian heresy rejected by the church centuries ago.

As Strimple suggests, openness theology sees itself primarily as a defense of human free will. There are various understandings of human freedom in theological discussion. One view, called “compatibilism,” asserts that we are free whenever we can do what we want to do. To be free is to act according to what you desire. On this view, it doesn’t matter whether your decision is caused or necessitated. The term “compatibilism,” in fact, indicates that freedom is compatible with causes and constraints. As long as you can choose to do what you want to do, your choice is free.

The other meaning of freedom commonly discussed in theology is “libertarian” freedom. On a libertarian basis, your decisions are free only insofar as they are not caused or constrained by anything at all. If your choice is made necessary—by your own desire, your nature, your inclinations, someone else’s power over you, or even God—your decision is not free. Libertarian freedom is sometimes called “incompatibilism,” because it is incompatible with any kind of causation.

Now in ordinary life, our usual concept of freedom is compatibilist. As long as we can do what we want to do, we believe that we are free. It would never occur to us to think that being compelled by our own desires removes our freedom (except, perhaps, in cases where our desires are obsessive). That is also the concept of freedom taught in Calvinist theology and, as this author believes, in Scripture. In Scripture, we can be free even when our actions are determined by our own desires, our nature (significantly, our heart: Matt. 15:18­–20; Luke 6:45), our circumstances, or by God. God’s sovereign determinations are, of course, all important. According to the Bible, God controls everything that happens (Rom. 11:36; Eph. 1:11), but that fact does not detract from our freedom and responsibility. God hardened Pharaoh’s heart to oppress the Israelites (Rom. 9:17–18), but that divine judgment did not take away Pharaoh’s freedom and responsibility.

Openness theology, however, denies that compatibilist freedom is “real” freedom. It insists that libertarian freedom, freedom from all causation, is the only freedom worthy of the name, and therefore the only possible basis of moral responsibility. Arminian theology also champions libertarian freedom. But Arminianism tries to combine libertarian freedom with a strong view of God’s omniscience. In particular, Arminians, like Calvinists, believe that God knows the future exhaustively.

But open theists, like the Socinians, point out that if God knows the future in all its details, then the future is certain. And if the future is certain, then there can be no libertarian freedom. All of our actions are constrained, if God knows them in advance. So openness theology takes a step beyond Arminianism. It not only affirms libertarian freedom as Arminianism does, but it denies that God knows in advance all the details of the future. In open theism, the (libertarian) free actions of human beings are inherently unknowable, because nothing makes them happen, not even God. So God cannot be omniscient in the traditional orthodox sense. He is ignorant of what any free agent will do in the future.

This is a startling view in a Christian context. Open theists try to relieve some of the sharpness of it by emphasizing that God, like human pundits, has the ability to project present trends in the future, so as to make a good guess as to what will happen next week, or years from now. But it is hard to imagine how such celestial punditry could explain the detailed predictions of biblical prophets, centuries before their fulfillment. And it is hard to imagine how we can fully trust a God who is ignorant of the course of our lives. A God who is ignorant of the world he has made is certainly less than the Lord of the Bible.

Further Reading

Advocates of Open Theism

• Clark Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders, and William Hasker, The Openness of God
• David Basinger, The Case for Freewill Theism: a Philosophical Assessment
• Gregory Boyd, God of the Possible
• John B. Cobb and Clark Pinnock, eds., Searching for an Adequate God: a Dialogue Between Process and Free Will Theists
• John Sanders, The God Who Risks
• Richard Rice, God’s Foreknowledge and Man’s Free Will

Critiques of Open Theism; Advocates of Traditional Divine Omniscience

• Bruce Ware, God’s Lesser Glory: The Diminished God of Open Theism . See book summary here .
• Bruce Ware, Their God is Too Small: Open Theism and the Undermining of Confidence in God
• Douglas Wilson, ed., Bound Only Once: the Openness of God as a Failure of Imagination, Nerve, and Reason
• John Frame, No Other God: a Response to Open Theism
• John Frame, The Doctrine of God , 21–79, 469–12.
• John Piper and Justin Taylor, eds., Beyond the Bounds: Open Theism and the Undermining of Biblical Christianity
• Paul Helm, The Providence of God
• R. K. McGregor Wright, No Place for Sovereignty: What’s Wrong with Freewill Theism
• Roger Nicole, “ A Review Article: God of the Possible? ”
• Robert Strimple, “What Does God Know?” in Armstrong, J., ed., The Coming Evangelical Crisis

Online Resources

• Matt Slick, “ What is Open Theism? ”
• Theopedia, “ Open Theism ”
• Tim Challies, “ Challenges to the Church: Open Theism ”

This essay is part of the Concise Theology series. All views expressed in this essay are those of the author. This essay is freely available under Creative Commons License with Attribution-ShareAlike, allowing users to share it in other mediums/formats and adapt/translate the content as long as an attribution link, indication of changes, and the same Creative Commons License applies to that material.