Omniscience and freedom
Michael Lacewing
enquiries@alevelphilosophy.co.uk
Omniscience
• Omni-: ‘all’; scient: ‘knowing’
• Is it possible to know everything?
• God is the most perfect possible being. So
omniscience is ‘knowing all the truths
that it is possible to know’.
• What form does ‘perfect’ knowledge
take?
– Does God know via language or propositions
or inference? Or only ‘directly’?
• Is it possible for God to know the future?
God outside time
• If God is outside, then yes: God knows all
events in time in the same way
– Past, present and future are the same to God
– Is this compatible with free will?
• If God is within time, and the answer is ‘no’,
then is God omniscient?
On omniscience and free
will
• For me to do an action freely, I must be
able to do it or refrain from doing it.
• If God knows what I will do before I do it,
then it must be true that I do that action.
• Therefore, it cannot be true that God
knows what I will do before I do it and be
true that I don’t do that action.
• If it is true that I do that action, then
nothing I can do can prevent it coming
true that I am doing that action.
On omniscience and free
will
• Therefore, if God knows what I will do before I do
it, then I cannot refrain from doing that action.
• Therefore, if God knows what I will do before I do
it, then that action is not free.
• (Therefore, conversely, if my actions are free,
God does not know what I will do before I do it.)
• This argument claims that omniscience and free
will are incompatible.
• We could just abandon free will and defend
omniscience – but…
Goodness and free will
• Free will is a great good that allows us to do
good or evil and to willingly enter into a
relationship with God or not.
• If God is supremely good, he wants our lives to
be morally significant and meaningful, so he has
given us free will.
• One response: God does not know what we will
choose. But it is impossible to know what a free
agent will choose, so there is nothing that it is
possible to know that God doesn’t know.
– Is this a satisfactory conception of omniscience?
Kenny’s solution
• God can know what I will do before I do it and
yet I can act freely.
• The confusion
– Whatever God knows is true – this claim is
necessarily true
– Whatever God knows is necessarily true – this
claim is false.
• So God can know what I will do, but the fact
that I will do it is contingent – it is not
necessary that I do it
– It is not true that I must do it, only that I will do.
Objection
• To do something different from what God knows I
will do would mean changing God’s knowledge –
either changing what God knows (I will do) or
making it that God doesn’t know what I will do,
because I do something else.
• If God already knows what I will do, then changing
what God knows would mean changing the past.
• I can’t change the past, so I can’t change what
God knows.
• So I can’t change what I will do.
• So there is nothing I can do except what God
already knows that I will do.
Kenny’s reply
• We don’t change the future – the future is
what is (what is true) after all the changes are
in.
• Instead, our actions make a truth about the
future become a truth about the past
– ‘I will eat’ becomes ‘I have eaten’
– Notice we can change the past: ‘I have not
eaten’ becomes ‘I have eaten’.
• When I act, my action is what makes God’s
belief about what I will do true. But this
doesn’t show that I can’t decide what to do.
Confused?
• Kenny doesn’t explain how God could
know the future while I remain free.
• I can know that my friend will help this
old lady across the street
– He is kind, in a good mood, and he just said
he would
– But his action is still free.
• But God’s knowledge is complete and
infallible
– How, if our choices are not determined?
Knowledge and determinism
• If God knows my future choices because he has
infallible knowledge of my character, this won’t be
enough to predict my future in detail, e.g. whether
I’m alive!
• If God knows this, this suggests that the future is
fixed in some way.
• If the future is not fixed, then how does God know
the future?
• Reply: we can’t answer this – we don’t know.
• However, we have shown that omniscience is not
logically incompatible with free will.