An Interesting But Flawed Idea About Free Will

 

Many popular formulations of propositions about free will don’t strike me as being very compelling, often because they rest on either category errors or definitional errors (sometimes both). But there’s one that posits that God’s foreknowledge of our actions doesn’t take away our freedom to act otherwise – which is problematic from a Christian perspective, but isn’t uninteresting (if you’ll excuse the double negative). The upshot of the proposition is this; even if God knows that I will do A, that doesn’t mean I’m compelled to do A. I remain capable of choosing differently. If I were instead to do B, then God’s knowledge would simply encompass that choice rather than A. In other words, it’s my decision that grounds what God knows, not God’s knowledge that determines my decision. I am therefore genuinely free in what I do, though whatever I freely choose is perfectly known by God.

There’s a problem with this idea, though - it amounts to the proposition that my action explains God’s knowledge, not the other way around. Even in His timeless realm, God’s knowledge can’t be dependent on the actual choices I make, because He sees them in an eternal present as part of His omniscient atemporal knowledge suite.

Knowledge depends on truth, and my future free action cannot metaphysically ground God’s eternal knowledge, since God’s knowing is not temporally or causally posterior to human action. Just because the action hasn’t yet occurred (from my perspective) it doesn’t negate the omniscience of the action from God’s perspective. There is too much modal tension in any alternative theory, because even if God’s knowledge depends on my choice, the truth that “God knows I will do A” is already necessary for God to be omniscient, meaning it’s not metaphysically possible that I do otherwise and God’s belief remain true. In other words, it’s epistemically impossible for God to be mistaken, yet metaphysically impossible for me to do otherwise without altering that necessary truth, so the argument comes to grief.