1 - TomD
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Time
It seems that presentism is incompatible with Catholic Teaching. I will briefly sketch why then open for discussion. But eternalism seems unpopular in philosophy of religion circles. Thoughts?
Reasoning:
1 If presentism is true, future free choices do not exist.
2 If future free choices do not exist, God cannot know them.
3 Therefore, if presentism is true, God cannot know future free choices.
4 But God does know future free choices.
5 Therefore, presentism is false.
(1) follows from the definition of presentism. 3 follows from 1 and 2 and 5 follows from 4. 4 is Catholic teaching. Therefore, all that needs defense is 2.
My reason for holding 2 is as follows: Either God's knowledge of a future free choices (FFC) is caused by that choice or is the cause of that choice. If that choice causes God's knowledge, it must exist and consequently (2) follows. On the other hand, suppose God's knowledge is the cause of an FFC. Now, there are a number of reasons to suppose that God's knowledge of an FFC cannot exist without the FFC. One such reason is that God has no real relations. This means that there is nothing intrinsic to God which is contingent, or related to contingent reality. This would include knowledge of an FFC. But if knowledge of an FFC isn't some internal mental state in God but rather a relation of the FFC as dependent upon God, then it would follow that said FFC would have to exist. Because God cannot know a contingent truth without that contingent truth existing.
Another reason to hold that if God causes FFCs they exist is that it doesn't make sense to say that God has future intentions. So if God knows FFCs by causing them, it seems to be the case that God knows them because He is currently causing them. Not by thinking "I will cause them." If He knew them in this way, it would seem to be the case that God's causality differed from His intentions which is odd and moreover, it would seem to be the case that God's intentions could exist without their effects which too is strange (and I would argue impossible due to the real relations business).
Thoughts?
- John West
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Re: Time
TomD wrote:
One such reason is that God has no real relations.
Well, causation requires that a cause, x, brings about a change in some y, not that x undergoes a change itself. So, it may not actually be that big a deal if causal relations are real (which is plausible) and God has some to creation. So, it may not be that big a deal if God has some real relations to creation.
I'm not, however, sure this helps presentists much. I'll have to let them speak for themselves.
- Greg
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Re: Time
I'm inclined to think this is a good argument. I accept it, anyway, and I don't mind that some philosophers of religion don't like eternalism.
Perhaps a Molinist could reject (2). A Molinist might hold that God knows about future free choices like Laplace's demon knows what happens at every time from any starting point. God can see what the future will be like even though it doesn't exist, and (the Molinist-presentist might hold) that's good enough for a sort of omniscience.
- Greg
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Re: Time
This sort of Molinist projection, though, arguably requires composition. God must see the present (all that really exists) and then, in another move involving his knowledge of laws of nature and of how free creatures would choose to behave, project into the future to see what things will be like. This seems to require two steps, and arguably a simple God couldn't do it.
So if one thinks Catholicism requires simplicity (or prefers it), then perhaps that solution isn't available.
- John West
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Re: Time
Well, if all you want to do is break premise two, you can just adopt some form of determinism and argue for compatibilism. The question is whether you're willing to pay the costs associated with compatibilism.
This seems a better route to take than Molinism, yet retains the intuition that the future does not exist.
The eternalist would say the intuition is that “The future doesn't exist yet”, which they don't deny.
Does Geach's response permit free will?
- Scott
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Re: Time
It seems that presentism is incompatible with Catholic Teaching.
I agree. Catholic teaching is that God creates/sustains all of spacetime "at once," from eternity. Now, that certainly means that time is real, but I actually think that presentism logically ends in a denial of the reality of time (or at least of temporal relations, since -- if presentism is true -- the two relata of a before-and-after relation never exist together and the "relation" therefore never really obtains). In my admittedly idiosyncratic view, it's only under eternalism that the reality of time is even possible.
I suspect the religious allergy to eternalism is due in part to the (mistaken, I think) tendency to think it implies some form of determinism. As I've said (or, to put it generously, "argued") in this forum before, I think it makes perfect sense to hold that the outcome of my free-will decision will always be exactly the same no matter how many times it's "rewound and replayed," so to speak, and yet that it isn't necessitated; there's a tolerably clear, albeit hard to articulate, sense in which I could have chosen otherwise even if in fact I never do/would.
- John West
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Re: Time
[M]y problem with eternalism is how to make sense of the distinctions between past/present/future, to avoid saying that time or change doesn't really exist.
It's worth making the distinction between A-theoretic eternalism and B-theoretic eternalism explicit. If some form of A-theoretic eternalism is correct (ie. someone stuns us with a defense and proof of the Moving Spotlight Theory), then the present is unique and there's no problem.
If B-theoretic eternalism is correct, now is whichever time slice you're at when you say “now"; it's indexical. The past and future are relative to that time slice. (I'm not sure we should be banking too much on our intuitions for philosophy of time in the first place—see Scott's Spriggean argument—but I also wonder if admitting a causal arrow and the fact that we remember the past but not the future take care of them here.)
The standard B-theoretic analysis of change is the reductive “at-at” theory. Alexander Pruss has a couple of good blog posts on it here and here.
A third alternative, which may do better with relativity but doesn't help against Tom's argument, is the Growing Salami Theory (which some call the Growing Block). On the Growing Salami Theory (an A-theory), the present is the moving edge of being (though it need not be a flat edge). The past exists but isn't the edge of being, and the future doesn't exist. I like the Growing Salami Theory, but considerations like Tom's argument and Scott's spin on the “Why is it now now?” argument here push me towards eternalism.
- Greg
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Re: Time
As I've said (or, to put it generously, "argued") in this forum before, I think make perfect sense to hold that the outcome of my free-will decision will always be exactly the same no matter how many times it's "rewound and replayed," so to speak, and yet that it isn't necessitated; there's a tolerably clear, albeit hard to articulate, sense in which I could have chosen otherwise even if in fact I never do/would.
I think one certainly wants to say that this is true, or else free will seems to slip into the necessitated or random dilemma.
Though I suppose one might also ask: If this is true, then what's wrong with compatibilism?
- Scott
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Re: Time
I would dispute that, unless by "I could have" you just mean "it is logically possible that I could have", and not "I actually could have". If you replay the same event infinitely many times, and each time get the same result, there is no serious sense in which you "could" get a different result.
From your later post, though, it seems you agree that there's middle ground between necessity and sheer randomness. I think that's the key point, even if you dispute my framing of it in terms of some other modality, so I think we're in fundamental agreement.
Nevertheless I do continue to think that when I make a decision, I could genuinely select any of the available alternatives even if in fact I never do. The modality is easier (for me, anyway) to illustrate than to characterize: I prefer Cheddar cheese to American in omelettes, so if I'm offered a choice between the two (under suitably uniform circumstances, e.g. nobody's offering me a million dollars to try their American cheese omelette) I'll always in fact choose Cheddar, but it seems that if my choice is genuinely a choice, I could choose American. I think this "could" is more than a mere logical possibility although I'm open to argument that it falls short of "actually could."
But in any case I don't think eternalism entails determinism - my problem with eternalism is how to make sense of the distinctions between past/present/future, to avoid saying that time or change doesn't really exist.
Yeah, me too, and in fact I arrive at my own (quasi-)eternalism by acknowledging that temporal relations and change are real. Let me know when you resolve this and we'll both be happy people.
If it turns out to be a divine mystery, I'm okay with that too, but I don't like to give up too soon.
- Greg
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Re: Time
Forgive my ignorance, but why is there a dilemma?
Well, arguably there isn't a dilemma. There is a popular argument for compatibilism which aims at showing that the concept of libertarian free will isn't really coherent. (In An Essay on Free Will, Peter van Inwagen calls it the Mind argument, because it has been made so often in the journal Mind.) People are interested in defending libertarian free will because they think moral responsibility requires it, that is, that necessitation is incompatible with moral responsibility. But if it's not necessitated, then it's random. (That's, I think, the contestable premise.) But if necessitated actions cannot be free in a sense that merits moral responsibility, then why should random actions?
Even in physical processes, there seems to be a middle ground between necessitated or random. The decay of nuclei is not necessitated - you cannot predict, even in principle, when a particular nucleus will decay - but it isn't totally random - there is a clear "order" to the whole process, which can be seen more clearly with a larger sample size, and can be laid out mathematically.
Well, I don't think the argument needs it to be "totally random". Suppose there is some materialistic account of mind. And suppose for simplicity that there is some "module" in the brain that necessitates (say) that one always acts in this way when one has these desires, habits, occurrent feelings, beliefs, etc. The incompatibilist says that even if this might preserve the appearance of free will, the person acting cannot really be free. Now suppose you replace that module with one that behaves indeterministically (say it makes use of radioactive decay). Now the agent is not necessitated to act how he does act. But it doesn't seem that by adding this indeterministic element, we have salvaged his freedom.
Again, the contestable premise is that the only options are necessitated or random-in-the-sense-of-radioactive decay. The force also depends somewhat on a reductionist account of mind, I think.