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Does God’s foreknowledge entail fatalism?
by Jonathan Sarfati
One atheopath on the CMI Facebook page claimed to have a knock-down argument against
the God of the Bible: that God’s omniscience is inconsistent with free choice.
Did God create me knowing I was going to eat a bagel in the morning?
We know that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo, but our knowledge didn’t cause Napoleon’s loss. Rather, Napoleon’s loss caused our knowledge.
If yes, then I have no choice but to eat the bagel.
If he created me ‘knowing’ I was going to eat a bagel, but then I eat
something else instead, then god is not omniscient.
They’re mutually exclusive.
First of all, this is logically back to front. We know that Napoleon lost the battle
of Waterloo, but our knowledge didn’t cause Napoleon’s loss. Rather,
Napoleon’s loss caused our knowledge. We can apply this to the above:
God is the creator of time, thus outside time—so eating the bagel retro-actively
caused God’s foreknowledge of this.
There is another fallacy in the argument, involving an ignorance of modal logic.
This deals with necessity, possibility, and impossibility:
- A proposition is necessarily true if it follows from the laws of logic, mathematics,
or definition, such as “a brick, if it exists, is either red or non-red in
the same time and region”, “2+2=4”, “all fathers are male”.
Alternatively, it is logically impossible for a necessary proposition to be false.
- An impossible proposition cannot be true under any possible circumstances, or logical
contradictions: “It is raining and not raining in the same place at the same
time”, “2+2=5”, “my father is a woman”. I.e. it is
necessarily false.
- A possible proposition is one that may be true. E.g. “it is raining
today”, “x + 2 = 4”, “Bob is a father”, “the sky
is blue”. Any of these can be true, but doesn’t have to be because no
law of logic would be violated: i.e. it is not logically necessary that
the sky is blue. These are also called contingent matters. All
necessary propositions are possible propositions, but not vice versa.
Applying modal logic to the above, if eating a bagel is the proposition “p”,
and “having no choice” is equivalent to logical necessity, then the
argument is essentially:
Premise 1: Necessarily, God knows that I will do p.
Premise 2: Necessarily, if God knows that I will do p, then I will
do p.
Conclusion: Necessarily, I will do p (i.e. there was no choice).
But this is logically invalid—the conclusion doesn’t follow. The right
conclusion is:
“I will do p” rather than
“Necessarily, I will do p.”
The Fatalism Fallacy is a faulty distribution of the necessitation operator
The Fatalism Fallacy is a faulty distribution of the necessitation operator,
which can be understood by bracketing the scope of “necessarily”. That
is, a faulty change from:
Necessarily (if God knows that I will do p, then I will do
p) to
If God knows that I will do p, then necessarily (I will do
p).
Compare another similar example with the same form (based on one from philosopher
Norman Swartz):
Premise 1: Necessarily, if Jenny has two cats and a dog, then she has at least one
cat.
Premise 2: Jenny has two cats and a dog
Conclusion: Necessarily, Jenny has at least one cat.
Yet this is fallacious, because there was no logical necessity for her
to own any cats; this is just a contingent matter that
happens to be true. The correct conclusion is:
Jenny has at least one cat.
She had a choice in the matter—just like your eating a bagel.
Related articles
Further reading
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