Philosophy Paper

Erin Wollschleger
Professor Greg Spendlove

PHIL 1000
30 Nov 2015
Divine Foreknowledge and Free Will
In Kevin Timpes essay on free will he states We most often think that an agents free
actions are those actions that she does as a result of exercising her free will (Timpe). So
something like choosing to believe in God would be a consequence of us having free will.
Divine foreknowledge implies that a divine being, such as God has knowledge of the future at
any time. So if God knows what you are going to do in the future there is no way you can do
otherwise. Thus, making it impossible for humans to choose freely. In this essay I will argue that
divine foreknowledge and free will are compatible. I will be doing this by offering the Boethian
critique to the argument of divine foreknowledge, objection to the critique and also a response to
the objection.
To have a compatibilist view of divine foreknowledge and free will means that you
accept that they both can be true. Compatibilists must either identify a false premise in the
argument for theological fatalism or show that the conclusion does not follow from the premises
(Zagzebski).The Boethian critique rejects the first premise for the argument of divine
foreknowledge. The first premise states that God believed x yesterday. This is not the denial of
God having foreknowledge but instead of him having that knowledge yesterday. Meaning that
God is not a temporal being and cannot have beliefs about time. He cannot know the past present
or future or have beliefs about a certain point in time. Boethius was the first philosopher to
propose that God was a timeless being. He describes God as seeing the entirety of time in one
moment (Zagzebski).
One way to object to this argument would to deny Gods timelessness. That is to say that
God is a temporal being. If God sustains the universe by performing different actions at
different moments of time, then he changes from moment to moment. If God changes, then he is
temporal (Ganssle). It seems that classical theism gives God other characteristics of a temporal
being, such as answering prayers. He cannot answer a prayer until one is received, so he must be
aware of time. This is to say that He does not answer a prayer before a human has thought of the
prayer or started to pray (Ganssle).
A reply to this objection might be to say we are temporal beings, so we use time to signify
action, but is time necessary for action? We may experience things as being in time or using time
to describe a moment because we are temporal (Leftow, The Philosophical Review 101.2). God
on the other hand can still without time interact with us and have beliefs about the world.
Temporality is not contingent to action or belief. This can be described with Brian Leftows
theory of Quasi-Temporal Eternity or QTE. Which states that timeless beings can have
characteristics of temporal beings and still be atemporal. Experiences can come before and after
others like a sequence of a temporal beings life but instead its happening all at once (Leftow,
Boethius on Eternity).
In conclusion the Boethian critique offers one of the many problems of divine
foreknowledge and free will. The future does not exist to God and so He cannot have knowledge
of it in the temporal sense. That being the case the first premise for the argument of divine
foreknowledge is false and God is a timeless being. Therefore it is still possible for us to have
free will and for God to have divine foreknowledge.
Works Cited
Ganssle, Gregory E. "God and Time." n.d. Internet Encylopedia of Philosophy. Web. 28
November 2015.
Leftow, Brian. "Boethius on Eternity." April 1990. JSTOR. Web. 28 November 2015.
Leftow, Brian . "The Philosophical Review 101.2." April 1992. JSTOR. Web. 28 November
2015.
Timpe, Kevin. "Free Will." n.d. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Web. 27 Nov 2015.
Zagzebski, Linda. "Foreknowledge and Free Will." 25 August 2011. Stanford Encylopedia of
Philosophy. Web. 28 November 2015.

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Erin Wollschleger

Professor Greg Spendlove

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