condensed: the nature of god, free will and eternity

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introduction

we are mortal beings and our language reflects this. god does not experience this passage of time, so he will not make mistakes or suffer consequences. things decay in time, and god cannot decay. he is timeless and so he is perfect. what can his relationship to us be? we don’t necessarily have free will just because we think we do. if god is timeless, then he made us knowing our fate. since augustine, the question of free will and predestination has been a concern, and the timelessness of god is very significant.

boethius

boethius’ book ‘the consolation of philosophy’ was written in prison awaiting execution, and contributed greatly to philosophical thought on the nature of god. he wrote his book to explain why he had been left to die by god and fortune. it is a dialogue between himself and lady philosophy.

divine eternity and divine action in time

boethius argued for the timelessness of god.

our now makes time…as if it were running along. but the divine now remains, not moving, standing still, makes eternity.

boethius

in his day scientists believed the stars and planets were necessary, like god. for boethius god is outside and unaffected by time. he is in his own eternity where everything is now. boethius argues that ‘eternity is the complete possession all at once of illimitable life’.

some claimed boethius placed god completely outside the time process, which is not true. he wanted to distinguish from aristotle’s everlasting, unchanging and indifferent god.

boethius goes further, asking the difference between our knowledge of god and god’s own knowledge. boethius uses time-bound words but he wants to deny that god is in time, in a reality beyond our understanding. for boethius, god has both duration and atemporality at once.

criticisms

for boethius, the eternal is not reducible to time but is also not in any way incompatible with time. this poses two problems: is boethius’ notion of eternity coherent? how can the eternal interact with the temporal?

but the notion of time is complicated. some philosophers say time is the duration of objects and not separate from this. time is what we attribute to the lasting of things. if there are no objects, there is nothing. god is not an object, so maybe he could be outside the time process. he has no duration, so he has no time.

we are aware that time may not be the unchanging thing that we experience every day. we use language to imply that time is a process. but if time’s continuity is an illusion, how do we understand it?

a key question here is if god can change the past. for boethius, he can’t. we are temporal so we have a past, but god does not. eleonore stump argued that ‘god cannot alter the past but he can alter the course of the battle of waterloo’ because it is not in the past for him. but simply saying god cannot alter the past leaves the question of how he can alter the present or future.

boethius on divine ‘foreknowledge’

if god knows what we are doing, then why is he not held responsible in some way for evil?

boethius calls god’s ‘foreknowledge’ providence instead, to avoid the temporal word. god knows what will happen, and for him it will necessarily happen. because he knows the choices i will make, and i cannot not make them, they are bound to happen.

but we experience things as having continual choices. if god knows our choices, then we have no free will. this is calvin’s view, who firmly states that we are predestined.

free will, types of necessity

god’s foreknowledge does not impose necessity on things.

boethius distinguishes the difference between knowing what will happen and causing that to happen. i know there will be a presidential election in 2020, but i don’t cause it. if god knows my future, doesn’t mean he causes it.

boethius goes further to solve the issue of if god knows what i will do i have no choice but to do it. it seems necessary that i will act in that way. boethius says there are two types of necessity: simple and conditioned.

simple necessity is this: some things are just the case, and are necessary in that way. humans are mortal, we will die. no matter what we do we cannot change that fact; it is simply necessary.

conditional necessity is thus: something cannot be and not be at the same time. i cannot be walking and not walking at once so i am necessarily walking. if i am walking, god sees i am necessarily walking. the ‘if’ is the condition of necessity. i only necessarily walk because i have chosen to do so. this is the consequence of a choice.

if the providence of god sees anything as present to himself, then that must necessarily be the case, although it is bound by the necessity of nature.

a way to remember conditional necessity is the construction ‘if…then…’.

in this way then, we still have free will. henry sidgwick makes the point that we have the consciousness of choosing. sometimes these choices are difficult. they are my choices. boethius makes this same appeal to our experiences as ourselves as being free people.

criticism of boethius’ notion of timelessness

a criticism of boethius is that it preserves the greatness of god at the expense of other qualities. god is also loving, to the point that D.Z. Phillips argued that god is love.

is boethius’ god truly just or benevolent? is it loving to allow someone to suffer greatly if he knows it will happen? god is also omnipotent, so we might ask if it is just or benevolent not to use those powers.

if boethius is wrong, then a god within time may be surprised that even hitler may be open to redemption. a god who accompanies us into an open future has a different relationship with us.

st anselm

divine eternity and divine action in time, anselm’s four-dimensionalist approach

anselm relied heavily on boethius for proslogion 3. he was familiar with boethius and attempts to reconcile the timelessness of god with free will.

he insists on the timelessness of god as a result of his omnipotence; being ‘that than which nothing greater can be conceived’.

you surely cannot deny that the uncorrupted is better than something corrupt, the eternal than the temporal, and the vulnerable better than the invulnerable.

anselm says not god is not merely atemporal, not able to be affected by that outside of himself. he is simple and outside of time. anselm is faced with the same problems as boethius: are we predestined? do we have free will?

he treats free will differently. we know free will as freedom of choices or alternatives. for anselm, freedom is more tied to doing the right thing. part of the rightness of any action is choice. he agrees with augustine’s premise that evil is a privation of good, and so choosing evil is choosing nothing. choosing means choosing good. god by nature can only choose good, so free will is the ability to choose right.

foreknowledge is still difficult. anselm argues that god knows the future, what will happen, and that it is unchangeable to him. he goes into depth on his understanding of the eternal present, considering the nature of eternal knowledge. he argues eternity is non-temporal. it would make sense to call it a fourth-dimension. this leaves our world valid, temporally, but leaves the question of how the two interact.

richard swinburne

many modern philosophers deny the timelessness of god. swinburne argues that the timeless god is unbiblical; that the ‘hebrew bible shows no knowledge of the doctrine of timelessness’. he claims protestant theologians karl barth and paul tillich argued a timeless god makes no sense. tillich argues an atemporal god would not be the biblical, living god. barth adds that the example of christ shows how god interacts intentionally with human history.

swinburne claims the idea of timelessness and god is incoherent. he argues believers wish to say many things about god. but when did he do those things? a timeless god would not be very compatible with these ideas. for him, there is no good reason to maintain the atemporality. seeing god as in time makes more sense for prayer and worship. a god unmoved by prayers of the suffering is a denial of faith.

alvin plantinga

plantinga is a modern responder as a part of the problem of evil. plantinga’s argument is based on two ideas: radical free will and god’s omnipotence. he said free will ‘is not to be confused with unpredictability’. reason are not causes. we do things for reasons, ‘i did this because it was a good idea’, or for a cause, ‘i did this because i sneezed’. plantinga says there are morally good choices, and the choice makes the action good.

he argues we are significantly free to perform moral actions, but they must also be chosen as good and freely performed. he agrees with aquinas’ idea that god’s omnipotence means being able to do the logically possible. he concludes that a world that contains moral actions by free choice is the best possible world, otherwise it is logically absurd. if god had eliminated the possibility of moral evil, there would be no possibility of moral good.