TomD wrote:

I don't see how it begs the question and I do not see any other possible disjunct.

Since the infallible barometer was just a placeholder to illustrate how the possibility of divine foreknowledge without necessitation might look, let's put the analogy aside. The reason I called it question begging is that it's an incomplete disjunction. Let "~" be the "not" operator, "v" be the "or" operator, P be your proposition about luck, and Q be your proposition about God's “fore”knowledge necessitating the occurence of the events He knows. Your argument is P v Q. ~P. ∴, Q.

But from the Law of the Excluded Middle and the inference rule of addition, "If P v Q, then P v Q v ~Q". Hence, given ~P, all that follows is Q v ~Q. But we kinda already knew that. ~Q is what I'm arguing in the first place. So, the reason I called it question begging is that the only way for you to get Q is for you to include (and prove) the premise ~~Q, but that just means all your work is still cut out for you.

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.

Last edited by John West (7/08/2015 12:19 am)

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.
 

Last edited by John West (7/08/2015 8:10 am)

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. 

As for the fear about the possible worlds notion of necessity, there is no problem with that in my writing here. The analysis of what is necessary to a Scott is based firmly on an analysis of his essence. If I use possible worlds, I'm just using them as a “tool” to conceptualize issues of essence (or to open up possible discussion about counterfactuals that can't be analyzed purely in terms of essences).

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.

You seem to have lost me. That's okay though. The point about accessibility relations is unimportant for our purposes here. 


[1] The same point could be formalized with an epistemic operator thrown in, but I take it that's unnecessary here.