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‘Nice Soft Facts’: Fischer on Foreknowledge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

William Lane Craig
William Lane Craig
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Westmont College, California
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Extract

During the last several years, philosophers of religion have witnessed a long-drawn debate between Nelson Pike and John Fischer on the problems of theological fatalism, Fischer claiming in his most recent contribution to have proved that even if God's past beliefs are ‘nice soft facts’, still theological fatalism cannot be averted. Unfortunately, this debate has not – at least it seems to this observer – served substantially either to clarify the issues involved or to move toward a resolution of the question, but has instead confused matters by its use of misleading terminology and diverted the discussion into unpromising side roads.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , June 1989 , pp. 235 - 246
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

page 235 note 1 Fischer, John Martin, ‘Hard-Type Soft Facts’, Philosophical Review, XCV (1986), 591–601;CrossRefGoogle ScholarFischer, John Martin, ‘Ockhamism’, Philosophical Review, XCIV (1985), 81–100;CrossRefGoogle ScholarPike, Nelson, ‘Fischer on Freedom and Foreknowledge’, Philosophical Review, XCIII (1984), 599–614;CrossRefGoogle ScholarFischer, John Martin, ‘Freedom and Fore-knowledge’, Philosophical Review, XCII (1983), 69–79;Google Scholar see also Fischer, John Martin, ‘Pike's Ockhamism’, Analysis XLVI (1986), 57–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 235 note 2 With regard to the terminological issue, a historical corrective is definitely in order here. For although Fischer claims to be discussing various versions of ‘Ockhamism’, it is clear that most of the positions he attacks only remotely resemble Ockham's views, thereby promoting misunderstanding of Ockham's important insights on this question. (For a more accurate exposition of Ockham's views, see my The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge and Future Contingents from Aristotle to Suarez, Studies in Intellectual History 7 [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988], chap. 6.) To be specific, the view that we can act in such a way that were we to do so, God would not have existed (or the person who is God would net have been God) – a view Fischer calls one version of Ockhamism – would have been vigorously repudiated by Ockham. It resembles his view only in employing a back-tracking counterfactual; but to call it therefore ‘Ockhamism’ is a distortion of his position.

Similarly, to characterize the defender of divine foreknowledge and human freedom as a ‘compatibilist’ and his opponent as an ‘incompatibilist’ as Fischer does is to use those terms with a meaning almost diametrically opposed to their customary usage. These terms have an accepted meaning with regard to questions pertinent to the nature of human freedom, and to use them in a non-standard way in the debate over foreknowledge and freedom seems misleading. For virtually every thinker who defends God's foreknowledge of future contingents is an incompatibilist, that is, a libertarian, whereas those who have employed the argument from divine foreknowledge to deny human freedom have often been compatibilists, that is, determinists. Given the roots of this debate in Greek logical fatalism, as it comes to expression, for example, in Aristotle's, De interpretatione 9Google Scholar, it is less misleading to characterize the argument Fischer defends as ‘theological fatalism’ and that of his opponent as ‘non-fatalism’.

On the terminological distinction between hard and soft facts, see the discussion in the text.

page 235 note 3 Hoffman, Joshua and Rosenkrantz, Gary, ‘Hard and Soft Facts’, Philosophical Review, XCIII (1984), 419–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 236 note 1 Fischer, , ‘Hard-Type Soft Facts’, p. 593.Google Scholar

page 236 note 2 Ibid. p. 595. Fischer does not seem to notice that his account here makes fixity person-relative, such that a past event may be fixed for some persons but not for other, more powerful persons, which seems not at all to capture our intuitions concerning the fixity of the past. Fixity ought not to be defined in terms of the power of agents at all, but in terms of whether some future event is the explanatory condition of a past or present reality. Where this is not the case, the past or present fact is fixed. Whether we can do anything to affect an unfixed fact will be a matter of what lies ‘within one's power’ and will vary on a case to case basis.

page 236 note 3 Ibid. p. 597.

page 236 note 4 Saunders, John Turk, ‘Of God and Freedom’, Philosophical Review, LXXV (1966), 219–25;CrossRefGoogle ScholarPike, Nelson, ‘Of God and Freedom: a Rejoinder’, Philosophical Review, LXXV (1966), 370.Google Scholar

page 236 note 5 I trace this development in my ‘Temporal Necessity; Hard Facts/Soft Facts’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, XX (1986), 65–91.

page 237 note 1 Adams, Marilyn McCord, ‘Is the Existence of God a “Hard” Fact?’ Philosophical Review, LXXVI (1967), 499.Google Scholar Adams interpreted Ockham to mean that one has the power to act in such a way that, were one so to act, God's knowledge would have been false belief. Based on her doctoral work under Pike (Adams, Marilyn McCord, ‘The Problem of God's Foreknowledge and Free Will in Boethius and William Ockham’ [Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1967], pp. 192–3, 203, 205–6)Google Scholar, this misinterpretation is reflected in the introduction to the first edition of Adams and Kretzmann's translation of Ockham's Tractatus (Adams, Marilyn and Kretzmann, Norman, ‘Introduction’, in William Ockham, Predestination, God's Foreknowledge, and Future Contingents, trans. with an Introduction, Notes, and Appendices by Adams, M. and Kretzmann, N., Century Philosophy Sourcebooks [New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1969], pp. 202–21)Google Scholar, but is excised from the second edition published by Hackett, in 1983.Google Scholar For a critique of Adam's interpretation, see my ‘William Ockham on Divine Foreknowledge and Future Contingency’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (forthcoming).

page 237 note 1 Fischer, , ‘Freedom and Foreknowledge’, p. 75.Google Scholar

page 237 note 3 Ibid. pp. 76–9.

page 239 note 1 Ibid. p. 76.

page 239 note 2 Fischer, , ‘Hard-Type Soft Facts’, p. 598.Google Scholar

page 239 note 3 Cf. the finest treatment of the notion of temporal necessity by the careful Freddoso, Ockham scholar Alfred J., ‘Accidental Necessity and Logical Determinism’, Journal of Philosophy, LXXX (1983), 257–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On his analysis, a proposition like ‘God believes p’ is not an ‘immediate’ proposition, since propositions expressing propositional attitudes which are alethically qualified constitute exceptions to the general rule that propositions involving present-time propositional attitudes are immediate. Since, ‘God believes p’ is equivalent to ‘God correctly believes p’, it is not an immediate proposition and therefore not, in the past tense, temporally necessary. Cf. Flint, Thomas and Freddoso, Alfred J., ‘Maximal Power’, in The Existence and Nature of God, ed. Freddoso, Alfred J. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), pp. 104–8.Google Scholar

page 240 note 1 Fischer, , ‘Hard-Type Soft Facts’, p. 575.Google Scholar

page 240 note 2 Molina, LudoviciLiberi arbitrii cum gratia donis, divina praescientia, providentia, praedestinatione et reprobatione concordia 4.52.Google Scholar An English translation of part of this work will soon be available as Molina, Luis, Molina on Foreknowledge, trans. with an Introduction and Notes by Freddoso, Alfred J. (forthcoming).Google Scholar Cf the argument of Hoffman, Joshua and Rosenkrantz, Gary, ‘On Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom’, Philosophical Studies, XXXVII (1980), 289–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar, that ‘having it within one's power’ is not closed under entailment.

page 240 note 3 Fischer, , ‘Hard-Type Soft Facts’, p. 600.Google Scholar

page 240 note 4 Ibid.

page 241 note 1 Putnam, Hilary, ‘Time and Physical Geometry’, Journal of Philosophy, LXIV (1967), 240–7;CrossRefGoogle ScholarMellor, D. H., ‘Special Relativity and Present Truth’, Analysis, XXXIV (1973–1974), 74–7.Google Scholar

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page 241 note 4 Ibid. p. 343.

page 241 note 5 E.g. Sinks, John D., ‘On Some Accounts about the Future’, Journal of Critical Analysis, II (1971), 8–16;CrossRefGoogle ScholarChapman, T., Time: a Philosophical Analysis, Synthese Library (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1982), chaps. III IV.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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page 243 note 2 For a more extensive discussion, see my ‘Tachyons, Time Travel, and Divine Omniscience’, Journal of Philosophy, LXXXV (1988), 135–50.

page 243 note 3 Dwyer, Larry, ‘Time Travel and Some Alleged Logical Asymmetries between the Past and Future’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, VIII (1978), 15–58;CrossRefGoogle ScholarDwyer, Larry, ‘Time Travel and Changing in the Past’, Philosophical Studies, XXVII (1975), 348;Google ScholarHorwich, Paul, ‘On Some Alleged Paradoxes of Time Travel’, Journal of Philosophy, LXXII (1975), 435.Google Scholar

page 243 note 4 Fitzgerald, Paul, ‘On Retrocausality’, Philosophia, IV (1974), 514;Google Scholar cf. Fitzgerald, Paul, ‘Tachyons, Backwards Causation, and Freedom’, in PSA 1970, ed. Buck, Roger C. and Cohen, Robert S., Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 8 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 197,), pp. 428–34.Google Scholar

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page 244 note 1 Horwich, , ‘Paradoxes’, p. 440.Google Scholar

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page 244 note 3 Mackie, J. L., ‘The Direction of Causation’, Philosophical Review, LXXV (1966), 456;Google ScholarMackie, J. L., The Cement of the Universe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 176.Google Scholar

page 244 note 4 Scriven, Michael, ‘Randomness and the Causal Order’, Analysis, XVII (1956–1957), 5–9;CrossRefGoogle ScholarBrier, Bob, Precognition and the Philosophy of Science (New York: Humanities Press, 1974), pp. 27–8Google Scholar and throughout the work.

page 245 note 1 For the original statement of the problem, see Nozick, Robert, ‘Newcomb's Problem and Two Principles of Choice’, in Essays in Honor of Carl G. Hampel, ed. Rescher, Nicholas, Synthese Library (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1969), pp. 114–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 245 note 2 Bar-Hillel, Maya and Margalit, Avishai, ‘Newcomb's Paradox Revisited’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, XXIII (1972), 301;Google ScholarLocke, Don, ‘How to Make a Newcomb Choice’, Analysis, XXXVIII (1978), 21.Google Scholar

page 245 note 3 Horgan, Terence, ‘Counterfactuals and Newcomb's Problem’, Journal of Philosophy, LXXVIII (1981), 331–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 245 note 4 Horgan, Terence, ‘Newcomb's Problem: A Stalemate’, in Paradoxes of Rationality and Cooperation, ed. Campbell, Richmond and Sowden, Lanning (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1985).Google Scholar

page 245 note 5 Nozick himself approved of identifying the predictor as God in Gardner, Martin, ‘Mathematical Games’, Scientific American, (03 1974), p. 102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The application of Newcomb's Problem to theological fatalism is made by Ahern, Dennis M., ‘Foreknowledge: Nelson Pike and Newcomb's Problem’, Religious Studies, XV (1979), 475–90;CrossRefGoogle ScholarPlantinga, Alvin, ‘On Ockham's Way Out’, Faith and Philosophy, III (1986), 254–7;Google Scholar and in my own ‘Divine Foreknowledge and Newcomb's Paradox’, Philosophia, XVII (1987), 331–50.