| Theoretical Philosophy » Divine Simplicity and Divine Freedom » 7/09/2015 8:59 pm |
- John West
- Replies: 24
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Hi Tom,
TomD wrote:But just because there aren't possible worlds doesn't mean the concept doesn't have its uses. Divine simplicity entails that God is His act of will. But God wills to create this world. It would seem to follow then if God hadn't willed to create this world, He would have been different. And given God simply is His will, it would follow that if God didn't will to create He wouldn't even exist. But that seems ridiculous. So how do we simultaneously hold God is His act of will AND God could have willed otherwise?
First, I think we ought to introduce the old scholastic distinction between necessity-by-supposition and absolute necessity. For example, on the supposition that I have just eaten soup, it's necessary that I have just eaten soup. It's not, however, absolutely necessary that I have just eaten soup. It would not have been against my nature to choose to not eat soup. Similarly, on the supposition that God created the actual world, it's necessary that He created the actual world and not another world. It's not, however, absolutely necessary that He created the actual world, for it would not have been against His Nature to create a different world.
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My current view is that unactualized possible worlds can be treated as what Gregory Doolan calls pure possibles. Pure possibles are Exemplars that God doesn't actualize, but that would not have been outside of God's Power or against His Nature to actualize. Since this view gets possible worlds without requiring God create a different possible world, it seems to me that this alone deals with much of the problem.
But another useful distinction is Peter Geach's distinction between real properties and mere Cambridge properties. For instance, for Cicero to grow a beard i
| Theoretical Philosophy » Divine Simplicity and Divine Freedom » 7/09/2015 7:06 pm |
- John West
- Replies: 24
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Scott wrote:
Because in any meaningful sense, there aren't various "possible worlds" each with its own God. There's one God, and His knowledge of and will toward the entire range of "possible worlds" (here meaning "worlds He could have made and perhaps did make") are unchanging.
It's exactly as Scott says. Theist modal ontologies ground possible worlds in God, rather than making possible worlds more ontologically basic than God. The two major, relevant contemporary accounts come from Pruss and Leftow.
| Theoretical Philosophy » Seeking Clarification of Feser's Philosophy » 7/08/2015 7:03 pm |
| Theoretical Philosophy » God and Free-Will » 7/08/2015 5:18 pm |
- John West
- Replies: 37
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Scott,
TomD did write:TomD wrote:I take it that this is the common understanding of the Thomistic view. Specifically, God's primary causation causally determines the will however it is free in the sense that there are no secondary causes which determine the will. Therefore, God knows our future free actions by knowing His own causal activity.
He may have meant something a lot like what you're writing, there (though, I didn't, at the time, understand it that way).
| Theoretical Philosophy » God and Free-Will » 7/08/2015 4:45 pm |
- John West
- Replies: 37
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Hi Tom,
I'm not sure I meant to accept Boethius's solution tout court, but either way:TomD wrote:(5) This raises an issue however: If God is the cause of our choices, then can they really be free?
Okay, and the answer that's been presented (and largely ignored) is that they can if God contingently causes our choices.
TomD wrote:The compatibilist solution has the distinct philosohical problems associated with compatibilism and the theological problem of reconciling this with God's universal desire to save and the teaching of the Church that God does not positively reprobate the damned.
For the record, I take it that there are good responses to this type of problem of evil too, such as those from Davies's work.
TomD wrote:I just want to discuss it further. In fact, I think the libertarian solution is correct, but it does face the issue I just mentioned.
Okay. Well, that's cool. But it doesn't seem like the contingent causation response is compatible with the avenue of the issue you're interested in exploring, and I don't really have much else to add that wouldn't be presenting arguments for the same point. So. I think I'm going to step back for now and see what else is said. Thank you for the discussion so far.
| Theoretical Philosophy » God and Free-Will » 7/08/2015 2:46 pm |
- John West
- Replies: 37
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iwpoe wrote:
Fair, but then I wanted to know how God knows what the contingent cause *does* rather than just what it *may* do.
Well, it either brings about its effect or does not bring about its effect, but it doesn't follow that God can't know whether it brings about its effect without it being the case that it had to bring about its effect, because He's atemporal.
The mistake here, I think, is that even though you recognize divine timelessness is a factor, you're still thinking (or at least writing) like God's somehow behind the cause trying to calculate what will or won't happen.iwpoe wrote:Even if you take the Boethian solution, and god simply sees all of time as if at once, the question is if this perspective exists as an object of divine knowledge in what sense is there *in fact* any contingency? It might at least be thought that it has to *be there* at once to be seen. God's knowledge is true knowledge, and ours is in some sense lesser, so one worry might be that any "contingency" is really some kind of illusion of our finitude. But since freedom is not supposed to be an illusion, this is troubling.
As I wrote before, it doesn't follow that if God knows a fact Q, Q must occur (q→Lp) [1], only that necessarily, if God knows a fact Q, Q occurs (L(p→q)). I tried to give the example with the barometer to help illustrate this point. Unfortunately, barometers operate in time and so it wasn't an ideal analogy.
But I don't have any other, better examples on tap. There may not even be any better examples. We're temporal beings. What is common and ordinary and easy to understand to us is temporal. But if I think of such an example, I'll put it out there.iwpoe wrote:I don't know if I've lost you again, but isn't the whole idea of a contingent cause that it be *really* contingent? If we only seem free *as far as we know*, that's hardly satisfying.[/quote
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| Theoretical Philosophy » God and Free-Will » 7/08/2015 9:00 am |
- John West
- Replies: 37
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iwpoe wrote:
Sure, but the point of giving an example is to try and cash this notion out in something familiar. We can make all kinds of intellectual constructs and call them A-Causation, B-Causation, C-Causation, & etc. The point is to *see* some not make them for the sake of articulating an argument.
Some people find that by abstracting away the specific details the essence of the issue becomes clearer and easier to see. Though, of course, that only works with propositional logic if the people involved are sufficiently familiar with propositional logic.
But actually, I meant that it might have been better to use a different example.iwpoe wrote:It's hard for me to *see* how contingent causation and knowledge are supposed to interact. In what sense could God foreknow a cause/effect relation that's *ontologically* contingent?
The problem here is still the word foreknow (and, later, "will"). It implicitly presumes a temporal deity (that's why I kept putting “fore” in scare quotes). But since God exists outside of time, He doesn't foreknow, He just knows.
iwpoe wrote:I think you lost me. Would that be an ontological aspect of the cause or an epistimological aspect of our ability to know possible worlds?
Epistemic. In Thomistic terms, it could be that mushroom hatred is an accidental rather than essential property of Scott, and he just isn't able to imagine it (or, even if it were essential, there could be worlds where he's just ignorant of his mushroom hatred for some reason we can't currently imagine and so orders and eats a few anyway).
iwpoe wrote:I'm more concerned about possible worlds notions of necessity, at least in this context, but that's also needlessly far afield.
We might say that it's de re necessary (if it's not de re contingent); or, to use more ordinary terms for here, that it's an essential property of Scott (in any world Scott exists, anyway) if it's not accidental.
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As f
| Theoretical Philosophy » Seeking Clarification of Feser's Philosophy » 7/08/2015 8:21 am |
- John West
- Replies: 99
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“[G]rounded in” and “ontologically dependent on” are synonymous, there.
“Ontologically posterior to”, however, is not synonymous with my use of “grounded in”. The expressions are not synonymous because something can “have of itself its own necessity, [...] not receiving it from another.” (Summa Theologiae I.2.3), in which case something can be its own ontological ground and not posterior to its ontological ground.
But I could have kept it a lot simpler by writing, “if unicorns are possible, unicorns are possible in virtue of being within God's power to and not against His Nature to create, and God is absolutely simple, pure act”. But the possibilities don't add any ontological extra. It's my mistake for (I haven't read all the way back, but probably needlessly) bringing in discussion of the Divine Ideas, though since God is a single, absolutely simple, undivided unity, strictly they don't add any ontological extra either.
| Theoretical Philosophy » God and Free-Will » 7/08/2015 8:07 am |
- John West
- Replies: 37
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iwpoe wrote:
However, it's very hard to see if that account ultimately works. In what sense do I say I know I'll never order the steak with mushrooms other than to say it can't be otherwise for me because my psychology compels it, but if my psychology doesn't compel me, in what sense can I really say that I know I'll never order it? .
I take it contingent causation is when a cause brings about an effect only sometimes, sometimes it does not. The issue with Scott's mushrooms isn't, I think, necessary to the conversation. It was a great example when he gave it to me, but it probably had unecessary features for our purposes in this discussion here.
But we could use a modal system that allows for accessibility relations (say, S4, or something), and say that Scott does not eat the mushrooms in every possible world to which he has epistemic access, but that there might be other worlds to which he lacks such access where he does eat mushrooms.
The problem arises, of course, as to whether Scott here and mushroom-eating Scott here would really be the same Scott (ie. the "problem of transworld identity"). But I don't think we need to get into that for this discussion, unless someone else wants. It would just needlessly complicate the discussion.
| Theoretical Philosophy » God and Free-Will » 7/07/2015 10:50 pm |
- John West
- Replies: 37
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No, it was a fancy way to explain why I wrote: "That just begs the question." You're right, however, that it's also true he has let abductive reasoning into his argument, and thereby lacks deductive certainty in his chain of inference. It's a bit odd, when I'm proposing a third way incompatible with one of the listed, to write, "P or Q" and these are the only two possible ways. I suppose I could have written it as "P or Q or R, but not both Q and R", or just that the second implicit premise "and there are no other possible ways" baldly asserts what I'm arguing is false and needs support like you say, or something else like that. But I take it that what I'm saying is effectively the negative of what he's saying, or at least includes it.
But I don't really care about that. I was just explaining why I wrote he begged the question. As I wrote before, I take it what he's really after here is the view that there is a conflict between omniscience and divine providence, and human freedom. The view that there is a conflict between mere omniscience and human freedom is based on a misplaced necessity operator, or the view that God exists in time (and classical theists hold God does not exist in time). In my initial comment, I just wanted to get the distinction between predictivity and necessitation out of the way before (I thought) getting to issues related to divine providence and contingent causation.