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Truth-making and divine eternity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 August 2007

KEVIN TIMPE
KEVIN TIMPE
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of San Diego, 5998 Alcalá Park, San Diego, CA 92110
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Abstract

According to a widespread tradition in philosophical theology, God is necessarily simple and eternal. One objection to this view of God's nature is that it would rule out God having foreknowledge of non-determined, free human actions insofar as simplicity and eternity are incompatible with God's knowledge being causally dependent on those actions. According to this view, either (a) God must causally determine the free actions of human agents, thus leading to a theological version of compatibilism, or (b) God cannot know, and thus cannot respond to, the free actions of human agents. In the present paper, I argue that one can consistently maintain that God is not causally dependent on anything, even for His knowledge, without being committed to either (a) or (b). In other words, an eternal God can know the free actions of agents even if libertarianism is true.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , September 2007 , pp. 299 - 315
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

Notes

1. Eleonore Stump ‘Simplicity’, in P. Quinn and C. Taliaferro (eds) A Companion to Philosophy of Religion (Malden MA: Blackwell, 1999), 250.

2. Boethius The Consolation of Philosophy, book 5, prose 6 as quoted by Eleonore Stump Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003), 132.

3. Thomas Aquinas Summa Contra Gentiles, I.15. See also idem Summa Theologiae, Ia.10.1 and 10.2.

4. See also Brian Leftow Time and Eternity (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 155–157.

5. See Leftow Time and Eternity, 70f. However, on 2, Leftow writes: ‘we will see that within the theological tradition that concerns us, “God is eternal” asserts that God is in no way in time and also entails two other claims, that God is metaphysically “simple” and that God is alive’.

6. Alvin Plantinga, for instance, writes that he is ‘inclined to believe that this thesis – the thesis that God is both atemporal and such that everything is present for him – is incoherent’; Plantinga ‘On Ockham's way out’, in J. Sennett (ed.) The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 262. For a weaker evaluation of divine eternity as ‘mistaken’, ‘a host of needless perplexities’, and ‘utterly opaque’, see his ‘Does God have a nature?’, in Sennett The Analytic Theist, 234. In an interesting paper, Steven B. Cowan argues for the opposite conclusion that the doctrine of divine temporality is incoherent; Cowan, ‘A reductio ad absurdum of divine temporality’, Religious Studies, 32 (1996), 371–378CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. See Stephen T. Davis Logic and the Nature of God (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1983).

8. See William Hasker ‘Does God change?’, in S. Cahn and D. Shatz (eds) Questions about God (New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2002), 137–145; and Nicholas Wolterstorff ‘God everlasting’, in C. Orblebeke and L. Smedes (eds) God and the Good (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1975), 181–203.

9. See Nelson Pike God and Timelessness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 104ff.

10. See, for instance, David Ray Griffin God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy (Philadelphia PA: Westminster Press, 1976), 74ff.

11. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange God: His Existence and His Nature (St Louis MO: Herder, 1955), 546f and 538.

12. Katherin A. Rogers The Anselmian Approach to God (Lewiston NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), v.

13. Leo Elders argues that ‘God's knowledge of things other than himself can only be based on his causality. He knows things because he is their cause and he knows them in and through his causality …. The foundation of his knowledge must be a conditional decree of his will’; Elders The Philosophical Theology of St Thomas Aquinas (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990), 230 and 241. And Brian Shanley writes that ‘God's knowledge is not effected by and dependent upon what is known, but rather is itself causative of what is known’; Shanley, ‘Eternal knowledge of the temporal in Aquinas’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 71 (1997), 205CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. In contrast, Rogers argues that human agents have free will and that incompatibilism is true, but that as a result free creatures contribute to God's nature. For example, Rogers argues that ‘on the traditional doctrine of simplicity, if rational creatures have libertarian freedom then they contribute to God's freedom. This is a rather shocking conclusion on which the believer in freedom and divine simplicity may just have to bite the bullet’; Rogers, Katherin ‘The traditional doctrine of divine simplicity’, Religious Studies, 32 (1996), 166CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. For a brief discussion of some of the issues involved here, see my, ‘Why Christians might be libertarians: a reply to Lynne Rudder Baker’, Philosophia Christi, 6 (2004), 89–98Google Scholar.

16. See, for instance, Stump Aquinas, particularly chs 4 and 5.

17. See also Michael Bergmann and Jeffrey E. Brower ‘A theistic argument against Platonism (and in support of truthmakers and divine simplicity)’, in D. Zimmerman (ed.) Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) for another article on the relationship between truth-making and God's nature.

18. Following a fairly widespread tendency, in what follows I will speak of propositions being the primary truth-bearers, thinking that while sentences can also be true, they will be true only if they succeed in expressing true propositions.

19. Lewis, David ‘Critical notice of D. M. Armstrong, A Combinatorial Theory of Possibility’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 70 (1992), 218Google Scholar.

20. Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra Resemblance Nominalism: A Solution to the Problem of Universals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 33.

21. J. L. Austin ‘Truth’, in G. Pitcher (ed.) Truth (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 23.

22. D. M. Armstrong Truth and Truthmakers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

23. H. Beebee and J. Dodd (eds) Truthmakers: The Contemporary Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

24. See, for instance, Lewis, David ‘Forget about the “correspondence theory of truth”’, Analysis, 61 (2001), 275–280CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25. See, for instance, Melnyk, Andrew ‘On the metaphysical utility of global supervenience claims’, Philosophical Studies, 87 (1997), 277–308CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26. See D. M. Armstrong, C. B. Martin, and U. T. Place Dispositions: A Debate (London: Routledge, 1996).

27. See John Bigelow The Reality of Numbers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); D. M. Armstrong Universals: An Opinionated Introduction (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1989), and A World of States of Affairs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Fox, John F. ‘Truthmaker’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 65 (1987), 188–207CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a response to the truth-maker argument against nominalism, see Parsons, Josh ‘There is no “truthmaker” argument against nominalism’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 77 (1999), 325–334CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28. See Bigelow The Reality of Numbers, passim.

29. See Simon Keller ‘Presentism and truthmaking’, in D. Zimmerman (ed.) Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 83–104; and Mike Rea ‘Four-dimensionalism’, in M. Loux and D. Zimmerman (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 246–280.

30. See, for instance, the articles by Edward Wierenga, William Hasker, Thomas Flint, and Robert Adams, in W. Hasker, D. Basinger, and E. Dekker (eds) Middle Knowledge: Theory and Applications (Frankfurt: Peter Lang GmbH, 2000), as well as John Perry ‘Compatibilist options’, in J. Campbell, M. O'Rourke, and D. Shier (eds) Freedom and Determinism (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2004).

31. Dodd, Julian ‘Is truth supervenient on being?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 102 (2002), 70Google Scholar (italics added). It should be noted that Dodd rejects truth-making: ‘My convention is that the truthmaker principle … cannot be respectably motivated’; ibid., 71. While I think Dodd's criticisms of truth-making fail, partially because I think she fails to realize the role that tropes play in many formulations of truth-makers, developing this response in the present paper would take us too far afield.

32. Fox ‘Truthmaker’, 189.

33. Martin, C. B. and Heil, John ‘The ontological turn’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 23 (1999), 38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34. Bigelow The Reality of Numbers, 126.

35. Lewis, David ‘Truthmaking and difference-making’, Nous, 35 (2001), 606CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36. Cf. Simons, Peter ‘Negatives, numbers, and necessity: some worries about Armstrong's version of truthmaking’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 83 (2005), 253–261CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mumford, Stephen ‘The true and the false’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 83 (2005), 263–269CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Molnar, George ‘Truthmakers for negative truths’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 78 (2000), 72–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mulligan, Kevin, Simons, Peter, and Smith, Barry ‘Truth-makers’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 44 (1984), 287–321CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37. ibid. 300f. Cf. Read, Stephen ‘Truthmakers and the disjunction thesis’, Mind, 109 (2000), 67–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lewis ‘Truthmaking and difference-making’, 604; Restall, Greg ‘Truthmakers, entailment and necessity’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 74 (1996), 331–340CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38. See Armstrong Truth and Truthmakers, particularly chs 7 and 8.

39. Simons ‘Negatives, numbers, and necessity’, 253.

40. Lewis ‘Things qua truthmakers’, in H. Lillehammer and G. Rodriguez-Pereyra (eds) Real Metaphysics (London: Routledge, 2003), 27ff.

41. Armstrong A World of States of Affairs, passim.

42. Mulligan, Simons, and Smith ‘Truth-makers’, 278–321.

43. I intend TMK to be understood de dicto rather than de re. Understood de re, TMK is too strong insofar as (i) is not required for A to be the truth-maker of p. Instead, in speaking of A as the truth-maker for the content of X's knowledge that p, I understand that ‘content’ to be a proposition qua known and not merely qua true. It is this notion that the addition of (i), and the discussion in the next few paragraphs, is supposed to capture.

44. According to Edward Wierenga, however, condition (ii) here is at least redundant and possibly incoherent, since the addition of (ii) to (i) seems to presuppose the possible of God knowing all true propositions and yet still having a false belief. See his The Nature of God: An Inquiry into Divine Attributes (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 39.

45. Garrigou-Lagrange God: His Existence and His Nature, 546.

46. Rogers The Anselmian Approach to God, v.

47. See Kim, Jaegwon ‘Noncausal connections’, Nous, 8 (1974), 41–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48. Bigelow The Reality of Numbers, 125. Bigelow qualifies this in a number of ways in the following pages, the most important for present purposes being the following: ‘Truthmaker should not be construed as saying that an object entails a truth; rather, it requires that the propositions that that object exists entails the truth in question’ (ibid., 126). See also nn. 50 and 51 below.

49. Dodd ‘Is truth supervenient on being?’, 71.

50. Bergmann and Brower ‘A theistic argument against Platonism’, 376. Bergmann and Brower continue that ‘on the contrary, it is to be understood in terms of broadly logical entailment’ (ibid.). While Bergmann and Brower accept that truth-makers literally entail true propositions, they are willing to concede that some may prefer to speak of the proposition that a truth-maker exists entails the truth. In other words, if A is the truth-maker for p, Bergmann and Brower accept that A entails p, while others prefer to say that the proposition A exists entails p. Nothing here hinges on this preference.

51. It is precisely because the truth-making relation is a cross-categorical relation that it can be neither causation nor entailment. In causation (at least of the deterministic variety), something particular necessitates something else particular; in entailment, the truth-value of one proposition necessitates the truth-value of another proposition. But truth-making involves a particular necessitating the truth-value of a proposition. If we speak loosely of A being the truth-maker for a proposition p, and mean by that that the proposition A exists entails p as many people do, we still are left with the truth-making relation between A and A exists.

52. Aquinas Summa Theologiae, Ia.3.6.

53. Stump Aquinas, 121.

54. An anonymous referee for this journal raised this objection.

55. Similarly, Christopher Kirwan defines theological determinism as ‘every event and state of the world either is God's act or is brought about by God's act’; Kirwan Augustine (London: Routledge, 1989), 117.

56. Thomas P. Flint ‘Providence and predestination’, in Quinn and Taliaferro A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, 573.

57. See, for instance, the discussion in Thomas P. Flint Divine Providence: The Molinist Account (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), passim.

58. It is for this reason that Molinism allows for God to answer prayers even before they are offered. For a further discussion of this issue, both from the perspective of Molinism and other views in philosophical theology, see my, ‘Prayers for the past’, Religious Studies, 41 (2005), 305–332Google Scholar.

59. For further discussion, see Flint Divine Providence, 123ff.

60. ibid., 125.

61. This is true whether or not the Molinist embraces the doctrine of divine eternity. If God is eternal, then He neither exists nor has knowledge at a time. On the other hand, if God is everlasting (that is, if He is temporal and exists at all moments of time), then God everlastingly had middle knowledge.

62. For a similar treatment, though one that does not make explicit use of truth-maker theory, see Stump Aquinas, ch. 5.

63. This section, of course, does not provide a full doctrine of divine providence according to which (i) God is eternal, (ii) libertarianism is true, and (iii) Molinism is false. Detailing such an account in full is beyond the scope of this paper. However, for two discussions of divine providence along these lines, see Stump Aquinas, and Hunt, David ‘Divine providence and simple foreknowledge’, Faith and Philosophy, 10 (1993), 394–414CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64. Richard Creel Divine Impassibility: An Essay in Philosophical Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 11. There is another understanding of divine impassibility as the doctrine that God can't suffer or change; the present account is compatible with this latter understanding of impassibility.

65. Michael D. Robinson Eternity and Freedom: A Critical Analysis of Divine Timelessness as a Solution to the Foreknowledge/Free Will Debate (Lanham MD: University Press of America, 1995), 219.

66. Tully Borland, Jeff Brower, Eric Manchester, Matthew Mullins, Tim Pawl, Neal Tognazzini, the Editor, and an anonymous referee for Religious Studies provided helpful comments and criticisms on previous versions of this paper. I am also appreciative of the readers of the Prosblogion philosophy of religion blog for numerous conversations related to the contents of this paper.