Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 276 - Back to the Future - Foreknowledge and Predestination.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Back to the Future – Foreknowledge and Predestination. Suppose you and I are arguing about the outcome of an upcoming election. I think that candidate A will prevail over candidate B and I have good reasons for my view. All the polls suggest that candidate A has an insurmountable lead and candidate B is manifestly unfit for office. You however insist that candidate B may just bring a surprise victory. When the vote is held, candidate B does indeed win the election. In addition to my dismay at the outcome, I must shoulder the additional burden of admitting that you were right and I was wrong. Or perhaps not. I might say to you, look, when you predicted the outcome of the election, the result was still open. The voters still had the capacity to choose between both candidates. So it cannot already have been true then that candidate B would win. That only became true once the election was actually held. So in fact, when you and I were having our argument, neither of us was right because there was as yet no truth of the matter. Now please excuse me while I look into the rules for acquiring Canadian citizenship. Since you are a faithful listener of this podcast, my argument will probably remind you of a passage in Aristotle. I covered it a mere 241 episodes ago, so you probably remember it quite well. But just in case, here's a recap. In the 9th chapter of his logical work, On Interpretation, Aristotle presents an argument for determinism using the example of a sea battle. The argument goes that if it is now true that there will be a sea battle tomorrow, then the sea battle's occurrence is already guaranteed. So there's no point deliberating about whether to fight the battle. The present truth shows that it is already settled that it will happen. Worse still, the same pattern of argument can be used for any future event. Since there are present truths about all the things that will happen in the future, all things will happen necessarily. Of course, this conclusion will be unproblematic for certain cases. No one will mind it being true now, and thus unavoidable, that 1 plus 1 will still equal 2 tomorrow. And Aristotle, at least, would have no objection to saying that the sun will necessarily rise tomorrow. The argument is disturbing only when it comes to what philosophers call future contingents, that is future events that seem as though they may or may not happen, like the outcome of an election or the waging of a sea battle. As Aristotle points out, these future contingents are exactly the things we ponder and deliberate about as if more than one option were still open. It is not entirely clear how Aristotle intended to avoid the problem, but in the 14th century it was generally accepted that his solution was simply to deny that there are present truths about future contingents. We find this in Occam's commentary on Aristotle's Uninterpretation, for instance. This is the response I just proposed taking in the example of the election. Before an election is held, there is no truth one way or another about its outcome, since that outcome remains open. But the medieval's could not easily take this simple way out. If there are no present truths about future contingents, then it would seem that God cannot know the future, and admitting this would mean denying His omniscience. Actually, the Parisian scholastic Peter Aureole did stick to what he took to be Aristotle's solution here, arguing that God's knowing in advance what we will do would render our actions necessary. But he was the exception. Most philosophers of the period felt the need to explain how God can know what will happen without rendering future events necessary. A traditional solution was to follow the late ancient thinker Boethius. He proposed that the way in which God knows things might be different from the way those things are in themselves. Thus, God could eternally know things that happen in time, and necessarily know things that are contingent. Thomas Aquinas adopted a version of this response to the problem, explaining that the contingency of things has to do with the contingency of their immediate causes, not any uncertainty or contingency in God's ultimate causation or in His knowledge. Thus, the voters, in their limited wisdom, would contingently determine that candidate B wins the election, whereas God, in His infinite wisdom, would have eternal and necessary knowledge of this outcome. But in the early 14th century, this view came under fire. It was rejected by Duns Scotus, for example, and also by William of Ockham's teacher Henry of Harclay, who insisted that God's perfect knowledge must involve knowing things as they are. We may use immaterial psychological powers to grasp a stone, yet we grasp the stone as material. In the same way, God can be said to know all things necessarily, but know the contingent things as contingent. It was open for thinkers in this generation to abandon the Boethian solution because of the new advances made by Scotus in thinking about possibility. Remember that for him, a freely choosing agent, whether human or divine, can choose to do a certain thing, while in that same moment retaining the possibility of choosing differently. Even as I stand in the ballot box putting down my vote for A, there is an unrealized, yet still real, possibility that I vote for B. When we looked at Scotus's theory of possibility, we thought about it in this context of divine and human freedom, but it's obviously relevant to the problem of future contingents too. The reason that I can be free to choose B even while choosing A is that for Scotus, something remains possible or contingent so long as it implies nothing contradictory. Clearly, no contradiction follows from supposing that there will be a sea battle tomorrow, nor does a contradiction follow from supposing that there will be no sea battle tomorrow. Thus, both are possible. In light of this, Scotus can and does resolve the problem by saying that, when it is presently true that there will be a sea battle tomorrow, it remains possible that there will not be a sea battle. Just as my choice of A doesn't make it impossible that I choose B, a proposition about the future can be true while possibly being false. But one thing about determinists is that they are very determined. They will stubbornly insist that the problem is not really yet resolved by arguing that past events are necessary. And this makes sense. If an election has already been held and produced a clear result, we don't argue about what the outcome was, though we might disagree about why the voters chose as they did. And no one deliberates about whether to have a sea battle yesterday. Past events are not open, but decided or determined, so it is natural to think that they are necessary. The reason this is problematic is that, if we admit against Aristotle and Peter Auriol that there are present truths about the future, then how can we resist thinking that there were also past truths about the future? Just as it is true now that a sea battle will occur tomorrow, so it was already true yesterday that the sea battle will occur tomorrow. So if everything in the past is necessary, the truth of this proposition is necessary after all. To avoid this problem, the Scholastics extended the new theory of possibility even to facts about the past. They said that in general, truths may be either determinate or indeterminate, meaning that they may or may not exclude their contraries. Thus for instance, the statement, there will be a sea battle on Monday, is indeterminately true, since it is true even though it could have been false. By contrast, the statement 1 plus 1 equals 2 is determinately true. It is true and can never be false. In a reminder of the value of anonymous material from the Scholastic tradition, this idea is first found in a manuscript of unknown authorship. And in a reminder of the value of identified but fairly obscure medieval thinkers, it is embraced by such non-household names as Arnold of Strelley and Richard Kamsall. According to this way of thinking, even truths about the past can be indeterminate, which is often expressed by saying that, despite being true, they can always have been false. Applying this to God's knowledge, we can say that God knows that candidate B will win the election. Since this is a contingent event, God's knowledge still leaves it possible that candidate A will win, and even possible that it could always have been true that candidate A would win, despite the fact that, as it happens, this is and has always been false. All of this is just a spelling out of what it means for something to be true, but contingently or indeterminately true, rather than necessarily true. Unsurprisingly, one of the most sophisticated treatments of this issue is found in William of Ockham. In his treatise On Predestination, he sets out the implications of his voluntarism for the problem of divine foreknowledge. Like Scotus and others, he argues that God can know something to be true without its contrary being impossible, so that the truth he knows could never have been true. Admittedly, we do say that God necessarily has knowledge of everything, but it is only necessary that he knows without what he knows being necessary. As Ockham puts it, For example, God knows that this person will be saved is true, and yet it is possible that he will never have known that this person will be saved. And so that proposition is immutable and is nevertheless not necessary but contingent. But what about the problem that, if propositions were already true in the past, they will be necessarily true because the past is necessary? Ockham concedes that, in general, past things are necessary, but he denies that there are necessary past truths about future things. It is misleading to say that if it was true yesterday that there would be a sea battle tomorrow, then the truth about the sea battle is a fact about the way things were in the past. Rather, it was a fact about the future, and remains so until the sea battle occurs. This solves the problem because, as we've just seen, facts about the future are contingent. Someone might raise a different worry here. God knows that God knows in advance that I will vote for candidate A. According to Ockham, God's knowing this leaves it still possible that I vote for candidate B. I still have free will as to which I will choose. But then it looks as if it is in my power to make God be wrong. It is open for me to act in a way contrary to what he predicts. This objection thinks Ockham is a mistake. God knows I will vote for candidate A, since this is how I will choose. But if I were to choose candidate B, then God would always have known this instead. He compares the objection to denying that when Socrates is sitting, it is possible for Socrates to be standing. Of course it is possible for Socrates to be standing now even when he is sitting. What is impossible is that he be standing on the assumption that he is sitting, that is, that he be sitting and standing at the same time. So it is with God's knowledge. It's possible that he knows I will choose A, and possible that he knows I will choose B, because either option is possible for me. What is not possible is that God knows I will choose B while also knowing that I will choose A. With these distinctions, Scotus, Ockham, and the other 14th century voluntarists have offered a powerful, and in fact I think correct, solution to the age-old dilemma of future contingents. With the exception of Aureole, they are driven to admit that there are present and past truths about the future because they don't want to give up on divine omniscience. But this is the right move for purely philosophical reasons, since once we have a grip on contingency, as Scotus understands it, such truths can be acknowledged without any deterministic consequences. Indeed, the whole issue gives us a nice example of the fact that theological considerations could prompt genuine philosophical advances, advances that should be welcomed even by staunch atheists. Unfortunately, there was another theological problem lurking here, one that would not be so easy to solve. This is a problem we saw much earlier in medieval history, back in the 9th century, with Eriugena and his opponents in the predestination debate. If we need God's grace to be saved, then are we still free? Like God's knowledge, this problem had never gone away and it erupted with new force in the first half of the 14th century. In fact, the problem could now be posed with unprecedented clarity. According to Scotus and other voluntarists, a free agent is one who can choose between genuinely possible alternatives. But in the case of a human action, there are two free agents involved, not just one. God and the human who performs the action. So long as someone freely chooses what will happen, contingency is safeguarded, but it is not much comfort to be told that my action is contingent if it was chosen by God instead of by me. It was felt that Scotus may have fallen into this trap, since he speaks as if it is God's will alone that selects from all possible things which ones will happen and which will not. The way out of the difficulty may seem obvious. Why not just say that it is up to us to choose what to do, for instance whether to commit a sin or not, with God knowing what we will do, but not choosing or willing it? After all, we would hope that God always wills for all of us to be perfectly good, but all too often, the attractions of sin prove too powerful. Just ask candidate B. Unfortunately, Christian dogma made this solution at least problematic and possibly heretical. In one of the more decisive moments in the history of Christian belief, St. Augustine had prevailed against the followers of Pelagius, who held that it is in the power of humans to be good and thus merit salvation. No, Augustine replied, God's grace is needed if we are to be saved. Following Augustine, most medieval's felt constrained to admit that God somehow predestines both the elect and the damned, freely choosing to offer grace to the former and not to the latter. If that is the whole story, then it looks like all the good philosophical work done by our voluntarists in solving the problem of future contingents has done nothing to safeguard human freedom. God does not just know what we will do, He also forces us to do it or even chooses for us. Not only would this deprive us of freedom, it would make God responsible for sin. To avoid this disappointing result, several voluntarists argue that God helps those who help themselves. A good example is the Dominican thinker Durandus of St. Poisson. He considers that, even though a human cannot merit salvation all on her own, she can at least try to be good. When she sincerely wills goodness, this natural and free act of willing prepares the way for God's grace, which is then infused as the theological virtue of charity. God's freedom to predestine the elect is not compromised, since He is entirely free in bestowing grace upon those who will be saved. Durandus compares this to the way a king might voluntarily gift a horse to one of his knights to reward the knight for good service. Occam takes a broadly similar approach, making the merit that yields salvation a kind of joint product of divine and human action. While God's involvement is absolutely needed, the starting point lies with the human agent's initial choice to will goodness. Durandus, Occam, and other scholastics who adopted this theory of cooperative grace believed they had avoided the Pelagian heresy by stressing God's freedom to bestow grace. God owes us nothing, and it is up to Him whether or not to come to our assistance even once we show that we deserve it. But not everyone was impressed. A thunderous condemnation of their position was presented by Thomas Bradwardine, a remarkable thinker who studied at Oxford and, shortly before dying of the Black Death in 1349, became Archbishop of Canterbury. For Bradwardine, the theory of grace found in Durandus, Occam, and others was nothing but rank Pelagianism, since it took the initiative for salvation out of God's hands. Instead, we must admit that nothing can happen in the created world without God's willing it. He is the co-mover of every motion. And this must apply even to determinations of the human will. So when someone first wills to try to be good, this too requires God's freely offered assistance and involvement. With Bradwardine, we have a good example of voluntarism that roots all contingency in God's untrammeled freedom. Of course, this view is not without its problems. While it is evident that Bradwardine is no Pelagian, it isn't so clear how he can account for our moral responsibility. After all, if God is responsible or co-responsible for everything I do, then isn't God to be blamed for my sins just as He is to be credited with bestowing merit and grace? Here Bradwardine takes recourse to the quite literally ancient expedient of saying that evil is nothing but a privation of good, a theory first articulated by the late ancient Platonist Plotinus and then embraced by Augustine. Since sin is a privation or deficiency of goodness, it is not something God actually has to create and its presence in our world is ultimately due to human frailty. Sadly, this is not very persuasive. Bradwardine wants to have things both ways. He argues that God is intimately implicated in everything we do, speaking of God's agency as being co-effective, simultaneous and mixed with human agency. Yet he still wants to ascribe sin to human will and not divine will. As God knew already in the mid-14th century, the debate between Bradwardine and his so-called Pelagian opponents was not the end of the story. Bradwardine is a striking anticipation of what we will find in the Protestant Reformation, to the point that we even find him saying that God eternally predestines a specific number of elect who will receive salvation. As with the emergence of secularist political theories and philosophy in vernacular languages, developments we associate with the 15th and even 16th centuries are already to be found here in the later medieval period. Another such development, as we'll see soon, was a step in the direction of early modern science, and among the men responsible for that was none other than Thomas Bradwardine. Not only that, but he was a major contributor to debates in that most fundamental discipline of scholastic philosophy, logic. So his name is guaranteed to come up several times in future episodes, as we turn our attention to developments in both logic and the physical sciences here on The History of Philosophy without any gaps. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.