Hypatia wrote:

The one time I tried to use S5 on an atheist, mostly to try to force him to acknowledge that his disbelief was an actual metaphysical stance and not just the lack of one, it went pretty badly. Atheists can smell an ontological argument a mile away.

Went badly in the sense that you lost the argument, or went badly in the sense that he stopped engaging with you? Having the latter happen is frustrating, but depending on how gracious you and he are about it, you may have the better of it in the audience's eyes. And changing the mind of those in the audience is usually easier than changing the mind of the person you're arguing with.

That said, I don't know how to motivate acceptance of S5 either.

One resource I've really liked so far is Peter Adamson's History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast. A new episode every week for most of the year, with the intent to cover the whole history of philosophy! He's at the thirteenth century now, which hopefully means a whole host of content soon relevant to the topics discussed on this forum. (Caveat lector, I've only listened to about 100 episodes.)

Scott wrote:

Nick wrote:

But would not your feelings about mushrooms otherwise preclude the mushroom steak from coming about?

Sure. But since, by your own admission, it doesn't seem to make the coming into existence of that mushroom steak (metaphysically or absolutely) impossible, then (the impossibility of something being the necessity of its contrary) the nonexistence of the steak also isn't necessary.

You're right, it doesn't make it metaphysically or absolutely impossible. I think I was being unclear by saying it's impossible. But it seems we're still disagreeing about our modals here. It seems to me that, if something under certain circumstances will never deviate from a behavior, it is (contingently?) necessary that it will never deviate from that behavior. Is stacking modals like that inappropriate? I'm pretty sure physical laws could be described the same way, and we describe those in terms of powers and passive potencies and so on too, therefore, etc.

Scott wrote:

TomD wrote:

Well then here is my question: How does GOd know our free-choices? 

First of all, a choice's being "free" (even in a libertarian sense) doesn't mean it's unpredictable. To repeat an example I used in another thread, if I'm asked in a restaurant whether I want mushrooms with my steak, I'm guaranteed to say "no" no matter how often the scenario is rewound and rerun in imagination (or in reality, if that were possible), because I hate mushrooms. That doesn't seem to make my choice any less "free"; there's a sense in which I could choose mushrooms, and I just didn't (and never will). My choice is a genuine choice, contingent rather than "necessitated" by antecedent factors, and yet easily predicted by anyone who knows me well.

This is a tough argument to accept. My intuitions say you're right about your example, that it seems you are both predictable and free, that you both could and won't ever go for the mushrooms. But it seems bizarre to say that a mushroom steak both could be and will never be. Why does your hatred of mushrooms not compel this conclusion? By contrast, it seems that e.g. a cat would always scoop up a fish, if not frustrated by something else. I'd like to put the question more clearly in terms of dispositions or something, but I don't have my copy of Scholastic Metaphysics on hand.

TomD wrote:

Well then here is my question: How does GOd know our free-choices? 

I think you probably mean God foreknowing, but there is surely a weak sense in which God knows our choices as we make them the same way that he knows anything else about the world.