Daniel Whitmer

Gregory Spendlove
Philosophy 1000
11/25/2015
Term Paper: The incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and free will

In this paper, I will argue that divine foreknowledge and free will are not compatible. I
will do this by first explaining divine foreknowledge. Then I will show why it isnt compatible
with free will using the ideas of Boethius, Aristotle, and Ockham. I will then address it from the
view point of theological determinism, logical determinism, possible world theory and open
theism.
The idea of divine foreknowledge is that God knew yesterday that you would do
something, let us say, dance in the rain, the day after tomorrow. Since God is said to be
omniscient, this would imply that God has no false knowledge. Due to this, no matter what you
might try to do to change it, you will dance in the rain, the day after tomorrow. This implies lack
of free will. Many philosophers have tried to circumvent this problem. Boethius, for instance,
did so by trying to bring into question the validity of the statement by targeting the term
yesterday. Boethius believed that God was eternal, that is, outside of time. Since God is
outside of time, he couldnt possibly have known yesterday that you would be dancing in the
rain the day after tomorrow. However, this doesnt work because of something called Obscurum
per Obscurius, or explaining a mystery with another mystery. Since both divine foreknowledge
and God being situated in eternality are mysterious, his argument doesnt hold water.

Another famous philosopher that wrestled with this problem was Aristotle. He tried to
take another approach, questioning the validity of God knowing the future. He believed that the
future doesnt exist, only potentialities. If this is the case, then any future tensed statements
cannot be true or false. So, since God cant or didnt know yesterday that you would dance in the
rain the day after tomorrow, you are able to decide to do differently. The problem with this, is it
brings into question Gods knowledge. In the article titled Foreknowledge and Free will, the
author states This solution collapses truth into necessity and falsehood into impossibility, at
least for propositions about the future. They go on to say that 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.(Zagzebski) So if God believes it, an argument for theological fatalism
arises, which follows along the same lines as our basic argument.
Yet another philosopher to try to crack this problem was a man named William of
Ockham. He tried to get around the problem by challenging the precept that Gods knowledge
yesterday was accidently necessary. He tries to do this by showing the differences between hard
and soft facts. Marilyn Adams, a contemporary philosopher, revived this concept, and said that
it 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 at some point in the future. 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.(Zagzebski) Adams argument, however,

doesnt work out, because it has the consequence of making no fact a hard fact.
There are other reasons to think that divine foreknowledge and free will arent
compatible. In the idea of Theological Determinism, it is said that God is ultimately responsible
for everything that happens. In this line of thinking, Gods willing you to dance in the rain was
necessary and sufficient cause for you to go dancing in the rain. However, if this is the case, then
he is responsible for all actions a person does. This would deny the possibility of free will. This
problem becomes especially troublesome when looking at the traditional doctrines concerning
hell and eternal punishment. In the article Free will by Kevin Timpe, he writes The traditional
Christian doctrine of Hell, for example, is that Hell is a place of eternal punishment for nonrepentant sinners. But if theological determinism is true, then whether or not agents repent is
ultimately up to God, not to the agents themselves. This worry over free will thus gives rise to a
particular version of the problem of evil: why does God not will that all come to faith, when His
having such a will is sufficient for their salvation?(Timpe)
Then there is also the problem with logical determinism. This is based off of the law of
the excluded middle, which asserts that propositions about what you will do in the future already
have a truth value. In the article Future contingents the authors give some examples and bring
this concept up. My mother shall go to London or There will be a sea-battle tomorrow could
serve as standard examples. What could be called the problem of future contingents concerns
how to ascribe truth-values to such statements. If there are several possible decisions out of
which one is going to be made freely tomorrow, can there be a truth now about which one will be
made?(hrstrm,Hasle) For instance, Daniel will go dancing in the rain the day after
tomorrow is already true or false. Assuming that is true, and that token propositions cannot

change in truth value over time, it was always true that Daniel would go dancing in the rain the
day after tomorrow. This leads one to question if Daniel had any choice in dancing in the rain at
all, because it was already a true statement.
Some philosophers have tried to disprove the idea that divine foreknowledge and human
freedom are incompatible by targeting the distinction of Gods omniscience. David Hume did
this, by arguing that 1. God is an all knowing, all powerful, perfect being, and that 2. Evil exists.
This brings about problems because it is an argument that purports to show that 1 and 2 are true
logical contraries, and thus, since 2 clearly is true(and is acknowledged by theists to be true),1
therefore cannot be true.(Kroon) Plantinga tries to get around this by the idea of possible world
theory. He asserts that 3. God could not have created a world containing moral good and no
moral evil and that 4. All persons suffer from Transworld depravity. He goes on to argue that
Let W be a world in which all creatures in W always freely do what is morally right, and let P
be any such creature. Since P is Transworld depraved, there is an action A with respect to which
P is free in W and which is morally significant for P in W, and there is a maximal world segment
S included in W, but containing nothing about the outcome of Ps free choice regarding
A(Kroon,pp 75-96). What follows this, is that God can create W only by creating S and letting
P have freedom with respect to A. But in that case, P will go wrong in regards to A, so the end
result wont be W after all. Hence, God cannot create such morally perfect worlds.
The problem with this, however, is that 7. Its logically possible for P to do A, 8. There is
a possible world in which P exists and does A, and 7. It is logically impossible for P to do A,
which means 8. There is no possible world in which P exists, and does A. This creates an
objection to Plantinga. As he admits, there is a possible world W containing God whose free

inhabitants never do what is morally wrong. And it is surely clear that in W God does actualize
W, so it seems as if God could have actualized possible worlds like W after all, given the
analysis of 7 and 7 in terms of 8 and 8.(Kroon, pp 79)
Open theists argue that there is no incompatibility with divine foreknowledge and free
will. They assert that either God has no knowledge of the future, or has only limited knowledge
of it. One reason is the idea that there is no future for him to know about. Only the present exists,
or only the present and the past. The problem with this, is that it forces one to deny the widely
held Principle of Bivalence, which says that for any proposition, it must be either true or false.
An open theist of the kind being described can accept that there are propositions about the future,
but must deny that any are true due to there being nothing there to make them true. However, this
doesnt make it false either, because there are no conflicting future state of affairs to render the
statement false. In the article Omniscience and Divine foreknowledge, the author addresses this
by saying, To fully meet this argument from the Open Theist, one must either defend the view
that the future does exist in some sense or that there can be abstract future facts which make
propositions about the future true, even if the future does not exist.(Borland)

In conclusion, I believe the idea of divine foreknowledge and free will to be

incompatible. This is due to the apparent deterministic situation of our universe and the failure of
sufficient arguments to explain how divine foreknowledge could allow for this.

Borland, Tully, Omniscience and divine foreknowledge, Internet encyclopedia of philosophy,

URL= http://www.iep.utm.edu/omnisci/#SSH4e.i . n. pag. Web. 10 October 2015.
Kroon, Frederick W.. Plantinga on God, Freedom, and Evil. International Journal for
Philosophy of Religion 12.2 (1981): 7596. URL=
http://www.jstor.org.libprox1.slcc.edu/stable/40018250 n. pag. Web. 22 October 2015
hrstrm, Peter and Hasle, Per, "Future Contingents", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Summer 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/future-contingents/>. N. pag. Web. 15
November 2015.
Timpe, Kevin, Free will, Internet encyclopedia of philosophy, URL =
http://www.iep.utm.edu/freewill/ n. pag. Web. October 8 2015
Zagzebski, Linda, "Foreknowledge and Free Will", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Fall 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/free-will-foreknowledge/>. N. pag. Web. 20
November 2015.