#762 Foreknowledge and Fatalism Once More
December 12, 2021Dear Dr. Craig, our question is regarding the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom. It is something we have been debating about a lot but cannot come to grips. Sources: Defenders Podcast: Series 2 (May 23, 2010) > Doctrine of God (part 14) & The Only Wise God
You state the following premises:
1. Necessarily, if God foreknows X, then X will happen.
2. God foreknows X.
You conclude that:
3. Therefore, X will happen. (But not necessarily).
We are still struggling to understand your line of reasoning. Can you please elaborate on how this commits a fallacy in modal logic? According to your argumentation, it is not necessary that X will happen because it is still possible that X will not happen. (In that case God’s foreknowledge would have been different). The point we are struggling with is that, in our opinion, this case contradicts premise 2: premise 2 would not remain saying: “God foreknows X” and would therefore no longer be a premise, which should be invariable. We cannot understand how, if the premises remain the way they are stated above, necessity can be dismissed. In our opinion X will happen necessarily. Thank you very much for your great work.
In Christ,
Alex and Michael
Germany
Dr. craig’s response
A
The modal fallacy you refer to has been known classically as confusing the necessity of the consequence with the necessity of the consequent. If we symbolize the argument as Necessarily, P implies Q; P; therefore Q, it is correct that Q follows necessarily from the premises (necessity of the consequence). But it is fallacious to infer that Q is itself necessary (necessity of the consequent).
Perhaps a way to visualize this is in terms of possible worlds. In every possible world in which God foreknows X, X happens. There is no possible world that includes God’s foreknowledge of X but without X. But that doesn’t imply that X occurs in every possible world. If X is a contingent event, then there are possible worlds without X. In those worlds God foreknows something else, like Y. So even though, necessarily, if God foreknows X, then X will happen, it is not true that necessarily X will happen.
You say, “The point we are struggling with is that, in our opinion, this case contradicts premise 2: premise 2 would not remain saying: “God foreknows X” and would therefore no longer be a premise, which should be invariable.” In so saying, you are actually switching to the revised argument for fatalism, the second premiss of which is
2*. Necessarily, God foreknows X.
In saying that (2) should be invariable, you are expressing the necessity of the past. The claim is that if X were to fail to happen, then the past would have been different than it was, namely, God would not have foreknown X but rather not-X, which is alleged to be impossible.
I think you know from my work on this subject that I do not think that the past is necessary in this way. I agree that the past, like the future, cannot be changed and, moreover, that backward causation is metaphysically impossible. But the counterfactual dependency of God’s foreknowledge upon future contingents involves neither changing the past nor backward causation. Rather, as free agents, we have the ability to act in such a way that, were we to act in that way, then God would have foreknown differently than He did.
- William Lane Craig