## 1. The argument for theological fatalism



There is a long history of debate over the soundness of the argument
for theological fatalism, so its soundness must not be obvious. Nelson
Pike (1965) gets the credit for clearly and forcefully presenting the
dilemma in a way that produced an enormous body of work by both
compatibilists and incompatibilists, leading to more careful
formulations of the argument.



A precise version of the argument can be formulated as follows: Choose
some proposition about a future act that you think you will do freely,
if any act is free. Suppose, for example, that the telephone will ring
at 9 am tomorrow and you will either answer it or you will not. So it
is either true that you will answer the phone at 9 am tomorrow or it
is true that you will not answer the phone at 9 am tomorrow. The Law
of Excluded Middle rules out any other alternative. Let *T*
abbreviate the proposition that you will answer the phone tomorrow
morning at 9, and let us suppose that *T* is true. (If
not-*T* is true instead, simply substitute not-*T* in
the argument below).



Let "now-necessary" designate temporal necessity, the type
of necessity that the past is supposed to have just because it is
past. This type of necessity plays a central role in the argument and
we'll have more to say about it in sections
 2.4,
2.5,
2.7,
 and
 5,
 but we can begin with the intuitive idea that there is a kind of
necessity that a proposition has now when the content of the
proposition is about something that occurred in the past. To say that
it is now-necessary that milk has been spilled is to say nobody can do
anything now about the fact that the milk has been spilled.



Let "God" designate a being who has infallible beliefs
about the future, where to say that God believes *p* infallibly
is to say that God believes *p* and it is not possible that God
believes *p* and *p* is false. It is not important for
the logic of the argument that God is the being worshiped by any
particular religion, but the motive to maintain that there is a being
with infallible beliefs is usually a religious one.



One more preliminary point is in order. The dilemma of infallible
foreknowledge and human free will does not rest on the particular
assumption of fore*knowledge* and does not require an analysis
of knowledge. Most contemporary accounts of knowledge are fallibilist,
which means they do not require that a person believe in a way that
cannot be mistaken in order to have knowledge. She has knowledge just
in case what she believes is true and she satisfies the other
conditions for knowledge, such as having sufficiently strong evidence.
Ordinary knowledge does not require that the belief *cannot* be
false. For example, if I believe on strong evidence that classes begin
at my university on a certain date, and when the day arrives, classes
do begin, we would normally say I knew in advance that classes would
begin on that date. I had foreknowledge about the date classes begin.
But there is nothing problematic about that kind of foreknowledge
because events *could* have proven me wrong even though as
events actually turned out, they *didn't* prove me wrong.
Ordinary foreknowledge does not threaten to necessitate the future
because it does not require that when I know *p* it is not
possible that my belief is false. The key problem, then, is the
infallibility of the belief about the future, and this is a problem
whether or not the epistemic agent with an infallible belief satisfies
the other conditions required by some account of knowledge, such as
sufficient evidence. As long as an agent has an infallible belief
about the future, the problem arises.



Using the example of the proposition *T*, the argument that
infallible foreknowledge of *T* entails that you do not answer
the telephone freely can be formulated as follows:


*Basic Argument for Theological Fatalism*



(1)
Yesterday God infallibly believed *T*. [Supposition of infallible
foreknowledge]
(2)
 If *E* occurred
in the past, it is now-necessary that *E* occurred then.
[Principle of the Necessity of the Past]
 (3) It is now-necessary
that yesterday God believed *T*. [1, 2]
 (4) Necessarily, if
yesterday God believed *T*, then *T*. [Definition of
"infallibility"]
 (5) If *p* is
now-necessary, and necessarily (*p* - *q*), then
*q* is now-necessary. [Transfer of Necessity Principle]
 (6) So it is now-necessary
that *T*. [3,4,5]
 (7) If it is now-necessary
that *T*, then you cannot do otherwise than answer the
telephone tomorrow at 9 am. [Definition of
"necessary"]
 (8) Therefore, you cannot
do otherwise than answer the telephone tomorrow at 9 am. [6, 7]
 (9) If you cannot do
otherwise when you do an act, you do not act freely. [Principle of
Alternate Possibilities]
(10) Therefore, when you
answer the telephone tomorrow at 9 am, you will not do it freely. [8,
9]


This argument is formulated in a way that makes its logical form as
perspicuous as possible, and there is a consensus that this argument
or something close to it is valid. That is, if the premises are all
true, the conclusion follows. The compatibilist about infallible
foreknowledge and free will must therefore find a false premise. There
are four premises that are not straightforward substitutions in
definitions: (1), (2), (5), and (9). All four of these premises have
come under attack in the history of discussion of theological
fatalism. Aristotle's concern about future contingent truth has
motivated an increasing number of compatibilists to challenge premise
(1). Boethius and Aquinas also denied premise (1), but on the grounds
that God and his beliefs are not in time, a solution that has always
had some adherents. William of Ockham rejected premise (2), arguing
that the necessity of the past does not apply to the entire past, and
God's past beliefs are in the part of the past to which the
necessity of the past does not apply. This approach to the problem was
revived early in the debate stirred up by Pike's article, and
has probably attracted more attention, in its various incarnations,
than any other solution. There are more radical responses to (2) as
well. Premise (5) has rarely been disputed and is an analogue of an
axiom of modal logic, but it may have been denied by Duns Scotus and
Luis de Molina. Although doubts about premise (9) arose relatively
late in the debate, inspired by contemporary discussions of the
relation between free will and the ability to do otherwise, the denial
of (9) is arguably the key to the solution proposed by Augustine. In
addition to the foregoing compatibilist solutions, there are two
incompatibilist responses to the problem of theological fatalism. One
is to deny that God (or any being) has infallible foreknowledge. The
other is to deny that human beings have free will in the libertarian
sense of free will. These responses will be discussed in section
 3.
 The relationship between theological fatalism and logical fatalism
will be discussed in section
 4.
 In section
 5
 we will consider whether the problem of theological fatalism is just
a theological version of a more general problem in metaphysics that
isn't ultimately about God, or even about free will.


## 2. Compatibilist responses to theological fatalism


### 2.1 The denial of future contingent truth



One response to the dilemma of infallible foreknowledge and free will
is to deny that the proposition *T* can be true, on the grounds
that *no* proposition about the contingent future is true: such
propositions are either false (given Bivalence), or neither true nor
false. This response rejects the terms in which the problem is set up.
Since God wouldn't believe a proposition unless it were true,
premise (1) is, on this account, a non-starter. The idea behind this
response is usually that propositions about the contingent future
become true when and only when the event occurs that the proposition
is about. If the event does not occur at that time, then the
proposition becomes false. This seems to have been the position of
Aristotle in the famous Sea Battle argument of *De
Interpretatione* IX, where Aristotle is concerned with the
implications of the truth of a proposition about the future, not the
problem of infallible knowledge of the future. But some philosophers
have used Aristotle's move to solve the dilemma we are
addressing here.



This approach to the problem had already been endorsed, three years
before Pike's seminal article, by A.N. Prior (1962), but it
received little initial attention. John Martin Fischer's first
anthology of essays on the problem (1989) does not contain a single
paper advocating this solution. It wasn't until the 1980s, when
it was defended by Joseph Runzo (1981), Richard Purtill (1988), and
J.R. Lucas (1989), that it began to gain traction in the debate. More
recently, Alan Rhoda, Gregory Boyd, and Thomas Belt (2006) have argued
for the "Peircean" semantics favored by Prior (1967,
113-36), on which the predictive use of the word
'will' carries maximal causal force and all future
contingents turn out false, while Dale Tuggy (2007) has defended the
position that future contingents are neither true nor false. A
critique of both Rhoda *et al*. and Tuggy may be found in Craig
and Hunt (2013). Another supporter of the
all-future-contingents-are-false solution to the problem of
theological fatalism is Patrick Todd (2016a), whose recent book (2021)
offers a vigorous defense of this approach against various objections.
Many (but not all) of those who reject future contingent truth base
their position, at least in part, on presentism, according to which
only the present exists. Statements about the future, especially the
contingent future, would then arguably lack the grounding necessary
for truth. D.K. Johnson (2009) has taken up this solution to both
logical and theological fatalism, as has Dean Zimmerman (2008). A
measure of how much the debate has shifted in this direction is that
Fischer's second anthology (Fischer and Todd 2015) contains an
entire section on "The Logic of Future Contingents." The
connection between this solution and "open theism" will be
discussed in section
 3.



While there is considerable prima facie appeal to the idea that
statements about the contingent future aren't *yet* true,
and that they *become* true only when the future arrives, both
the semantic and the metaphysical justifications for this idea can be
challenged. A semantics that collapses truth into necessity and
falsehood into impossibility, at least for propositions about the
future, may appear insufficiently attentive to people's actual
use of the predictive 'will', not to mention logically
problematic. The true futurist theory ("the thin red
line"), allowing for future contingent truth, is defended by
Ohrstrom (2009) and by Malpass and Wawer (2012).
Presentist opponents of future contingent truth, for their part, need
to explain how there can be contingent truths about the past but not
about the future, given that, on presentism, the past is no more real
than the future. (This is not a problem on the growing block theory.)
Rhoda (2009) and Zimmerman (2010), for example, have independently
suggested that truths about the past could be grounded in God's
present beliefs about the past; but if this move is allowed, it would
seem just as legitimate to assume God has present beliefs about the
future and use this to ground truths about the contingent future. The
semantic and metaphysical issues surrounding future contingent truth
are complex and highly contested, so it isn't possible to do
more than note them here.



It is not clear, however, that the denial of future contingent truth
is sufficient to avoid the problem of theological fatalism. Hunt
(2020) suggests that future contingents that fail to be true for
presentist reasons alone might nevertheless qualify as
"quasi-true" (Sider 1999, Markosian 2004), and argues that
the quasi-truth of God's beliefs about the future is enough to
generate the problem. The following consideration tends in the same
direction. According to the definition of infallibility used in the
basic argument, if God is infallible in all his beliefs, then it is
not possible that God believes *T* and *T* is false. But
there is a natural extension of the definition of infallibility to
allow for the case in which *T* lacks a truth value but will
acquire one in the future: If God is infallible in all his beliefs,
then it is not possible that God believes *T* and *T* is
either false or becomes false. If so, and if God believes *T*,
we get an argument for theological fatalism that parallels our basic
argument. Premise (4) would need to be modified as follows:



(4') Necessarily,
if yesterday God believed *T*, then *T* will become
true. 


(6) becomes:



(6')
 It is now-necessary that *T* will become true. 


The modifications in the rest of the argument are straightforward.



It is open to the defender of this solution to maintain that God has
no beliefs about the contingent future because he does not infallibly
know how it will turn out, and this is compatible with God's
being infallible in everything he does believe. It is also compatible
with God's omniscience if omniscience is the property of knowing
the truth value of every proposition that has a truth value. But
clearly, this move restricts the range of God's knowledge, so it
has religious disadvantages in addition to its disadvantages in
logic.


### 2.2 God's knowledge of future contingent truths



If *T* is true, there is still the question how God could come
to believe *T* rather than not-*T*, and believe it
without any possibility of error, given that *T* concerns the
contingent future. *T* is contingent only insofar as it is
still possible for you to refrain from answering the phone at 9
tomorrow morning, though we're supposing for the sake of
argument that you *will* answer the phone at 9. But then
it's still possible for *T* to turn out false (though it
won't), and still possible for the belief that *T* to be
incorrect (though it isn't). This is hard to square with the
claim in premise (1) that God's belief that *T* was
infallible.



This problem for infallible belief about a contingent future parallels
a problem for God's knowledge of a contingent future. Though the
argument for theological fatalism rests only on divine belief rather
than knowledge (since the additional conditions for knowledge, beyond
true belief, don't play any role in the argument), God
nevertheless wouldn't believe without knowing. But it's
unclear what could have been cognitively available to God yesterday,
when your answering the phone at 9 am tomorrow was still future and
contingent, to raise his belief that *T* from a correct guess
to genuine knowledge. Prior (1962) held this to be a further problem
for premise (1), beyond the nonexistence of future contingent truths.
For William Hasker (1989, 186-88), Richard Swinburne (2006,
22-26), and Peter van Inwagen (2008), who maintain (contrary to
Prior) that there are future contingent truths, the impossibility of
foreknowing them is *the* problem with premise (1). This
"limited foreknowledge" view has been critiqued by Arbour
(2013) and Todd (2014a), among others.



Defenders of divine foreknowledge need something to say in response to
skeptical questions about how such knowledge could be available to
God. One possible response is that it's a conceptual truth that
God is omniscient, and his knowledge, including his knowledge of
future contingent truths, is simply innate (Craig 1987). Skeptics
might regard this response as closer to a non-response. But others
have offered detailed if speculative proposals. These include Ryan
Byerly (2014), whose book-length treatment of the issue grounds
God's infallible foreknowledge in a divine "ordering of
times" that is supposed to leave human free will intact.



It is relatively easy to see how God can know what is (contingently)
"going to" happen if this refers to the present tendency
of things. All it takes is exhaustive knowledge of the present. But
what is "going to" happen can change, as the present
tendency of things changes, and what God foreknows on this basis (his
knowledge of *what is going to happen*) will change along with
this change in present tendencies. This "mutable future"
position, defended by Peter Geach, has been revived by Patrick Todd
(2011, 2016b). On the "Geachian" view, God's beliefs
about the contingent future constitute genuine knowledge, because they
track the changing truth about where the future is headed. What this
view doesn't provide is the infallibility required by premise
(1).



Fischer (2016, 31-45) tries to fill the gap with his
"boot-strapping" account of divine foreknowledge. Even
human beings are sometimes in a "knowledge-conferring
situation," or KCS, with respect to the contingent future. Since
God would be aware of all the evidence and other knowledge-conferring
factors that human beings are aware of in such situations, God is in a
position to know (some) future contingents in the same way that human
beings can know them: by being in the appropriate KCS. But this
presupposes a fallibilist theory of knowledge. What accounts for the
infallibility of God's beliefs? Fischer argues that God can
"bootstrap" his way to certainty by combining his beliefs
about the contingent future with self-knowledge of his own
infallibility. Hunt (2017b) objects that the account is circular, and
that it couldn't support anything close to exhaustive
foreknowledge, since most future contingent truths will lack
KCS's at any given time. Fischer (2017, and forthcoming)
elaborates and defends the view.



The most straightforward account of the matter, accommodating the
infallibility of God's beliefs, is that he simply
"sees" the future. If God is in time, this requires that
he be equipped with something like a "time telescope" that
allows him to view what is temporally distant. A hurdle faced by time
telescopes is that they probably involve retrocausation. If God is not
in time, however, he wouldn't need a time telescope to view the
future along with the present and past. This brings us to the next
solution.


### 2.3 The eternity solution



A third challenge to premise (1), independent of the first two, is
that it misrepresents God's relation to time. What is denied
according to this solution is not that God believes infallibly, and
not that God believes the content of proposition *T*, but that
God believed *T* *yesterday*. This solution probably
originated with the 6th century philosopher Boethius, who
maintained that God is not in time and has no temporal properties, so
God does not have beliefs at a time. It is therefore a mistake to say
God had beliefs yesterday, or has beliefs today, or will have beliefs
tomorrow. It is also a mistake to say God had a belief on a certain
date, such as June 1, 2004. The way Boethius describes God's
cognitive grasp of temporal reality, all temporal events are before
the mind of God at once. To say "at once" or
"simultaneously" is to use a temporal metaphor, but
Boethius is clear that it does not make sense to think of the whole of
temporal reality as being before God's mind in a single
*temporal* present. It is an atemporal present in which God has
a single complete grasp of all events in the entire span of time.



Aquinas adopted the Boethian solution as one of his ways out of
theological fatalism, using some of the same metaphors as Boethius.
One is the circle analogy, in which the way a timeless God is present
to each and every moment of time is compared to the way in which the
center of a circle is present to each and every point on its
circumference (*SCG* I, 66). In contemporary philosophy an
important defense of the Boethian idea that God is timeless was given
by Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (1981), who applied it
explicitly to the foreknowledge dilemma (1991). Recently it has been
defended by Katherin Rogers (2007a, 2007b), Kevin Timpe (2007),
Michael Rota (2010), Joseph Diekemper (2013), and Ciro De Florio
(2015).



Most objections to the timelessness solution to the dilemma of
foreknowledge and freedom focus on the idea of timelessness itself,
arguing either that it does not make sense or that it is incompatible
with other properties of God that are religiously more compelling,
such as personhood (e.g., Pike 1970, 121-129; Wolterstorff 1975;
Swinburne 1977, 221). Zagzebski has argued (1991, chap. 2 and 2011)
that the timelessness move does not avoid the problem of theological
fatalism since an argument structurally parallel to the basic argument
can be formulated for timeless knowledge. If God is not in time, the
key issue would not be the necessity of the past, but the necessity of
the timeless realm. So the first three steps of the argument would be
reformulated as follows:



(1t) God timelessly
knows *T*.
(2t) If *E* is
in the timeless realm, then it is now-necessary that
*E*.
(3t) It is
now-necessary that *T*.


Perhaps it is inappropriate to say that timeless events such as
God's timeless knowing are *now*-necessary, yet we have
no more reason to think we can do anything about God's timeless
knowing than about God's past knowing. The timeless realm is as
much out of our reach as the past. So the point of (3t) is that we
cannot now do anything about the fact that God timelessly knows
*T*. The rest of the steps in the timeless dilemma argument are
parallel to the basic argument. Step (5t) says that if there is
nothing we can do about a timeless state, there is nothing we can do
about what such a state entails. It follows that we cannot do anything
about the future.



The Boethian solution does not solve the problem of theological
fatalism by itself, but since the nature of the timeless realm is
elusive, the intuition of the necessity of the timeless realm is
probably weaker than the intuition of the necessity of the past. The
necessity of the past is deeply embedded in our ordinary intuitions
about time; there are no ordinary intuitions about the realm of
timelessness. One possible way out of this problem is given by K.A.
Rogers, who argues (2007a, 2007b) that the eternal realm is like the
present rather than the past, and so it does not have the necessity we
attribute to the past.



If God's timeless knowledge doesn't threaten free will,
there's still the question whether it can be confined to the
timeless realm; if not, it might still cause trouble for free will.
Van Inwagen (2008) argues against the Boethian solution on the grounds
that a timeless deity could still bring about the existence in time of
a "Freedom-denying Prophetic Object," for example, a stone
slab on which are inscribed the words, "Peter van Inwagen will
answer the phone at 9:00 am on May 27, 2034." An interesting
puzzle for Christian defenders of the Boethian solution is the problem
of whether the knowledge of Jesus Christ during his time on earth was
infallible. The problem here is that the incarnate Christ was in time
even if God is timeless. A particular problem discussed by Timothy
Pawl (2014a, 2014b) is whether Christ had infallible foreknowledge of
his own future choices, and if so, whether his created will was free.
Pawl defends the compatibility of Christ's infallible
foreknowledge and the freedom of his created will.


### 2.4 God's forebeliefs as "soft facts" about the past



The next solution is due to the fourteenth century philosopher William
of Ockham, and was revived in the contemporary literature by Marilyn
Adams (1967). This solution rejects premise (2) of the basic argument
in its full generality. Following Ockham, Adams argues that premise
(2) applies only to the past strictly speaking, or the
"hard" past. A "soft" fact about the past is
one that is in part about the future. An example of a soft fact about
the past would be the fact that it was true yesterday that a certain
event would occur a year later, or the fact that you saw Paris for the
last time. Adams argues that God's existence in the past and
God's past beliefs about the future are not strictly past
because they are facts that are in part about the future.



Adams's argument was unsuccessful since, among other things, her
criterion for being a hard fact had the consequence that no fact is a
hard fact (Fischer 1989, introduction), but it led to a series of
attempts to bolster it by giving more refined definitions of a
"hard fact" and the type of necessity such facts are said
to have--what Ockham called "accidental necessity"
(necessity *per accidens*). The resulting formulations became
so refined and elaborate, in an effort to avoid possible
counterexamples, that they risked becoming detached from the simple
intuition they were intended to capture. Recent discussions of the
hard fact/soft fact distinction may be found in Todd (2013) and
Pendergraft and Coates (2014). Plantinga (1986) argued that a
successful Ockhamist response to theological fatalism needn't
await the definitive formulation of necessary and sufficient
conditions for soft facthood, because paradigm examples of soft
facts--facts that are surely soft, if any facts are soft--are enough
for the job. It's clear that proposition *T*, for
example--that you will answer the phone tomorrow at 9 am--does not
express a hard fact about the past. (It doesn't express a fact
about the past at all.) But if God is necessarily existent and
essentially omniscient, this fact about what you will do tomorrow both
entails, and is entailed by, God's yesterday believing
*T*. Assuming that hard and soft facthood are closed under
logical equivalence, it follows that God's having believed
*T* is not a hard fact about yesterday, a conclusion that
doesn't rely on any particular answer to the general question
how the hard fact/soft fact distinction is to be articulated.
Responses to this defense of Ockhamism may be found in Brant (1997)
and Hunt (2002).



There was considerable debate over Ockhamism in the eighties and
nineties. Some of the defenses in this period appear in Freddoso
(1983), Kvanvig (1986), Plantinga (1986), Wierenga (1989), and Craig
(1990). Some of the criticisms appear in Fischer (1983, 1985a, 1991),
Hasker (1989), Widerker (1990), Zagzebski (1991), and Pike (1993). The
Ockhamist strategy, relying as it does on the distinction between
facts about the past that are really about the past and facts about
the past that are really (at least in part) about the future, is
intertwined with work on the reality of the past and future. Finch and
Rea (2008) have argued that the Ockhamist solution requires the
rejection of presentism.



Perhaps the toughest obstacle confronting the Ockhamist solution is
that it is very difficult to give an account of the necessity of the
past that preserves the intuition that the past has a special kind of
necessity in virtue of being past, but which has the consequence that
God's past beliefs do not have that kind of necessity. The
problem is that God's past beliefs seem to be as good a
candidate for something that is strictly past as almost anything we
can think of, such as an explosion that occurred last week. If
God's past beliefs about the future are soft facts, but the past
explosion is a hard fact, that must be because of something special
about God's past beliefs that is intuitively plausible apart
from the attempt to avoid theological fatalism. Perhaps God's
doxastic states are best understood in terms of "wide
content" or a functionalist account of the mental (Zemach and
Widerker 1987); perhaps divine omniscience is dispositional rather
than occurrent (Hunt 1995), or doesn't involve beliefs at
all (Alston 1986). If God's foreknowledge is special in any of
these ways, premise (2) is arguably false. But there are theological
costs to these conceptions of divine omniscience. The appeal to
Putnam's point that "meanings ain't in the
head" conflicts with the "incompatibilist
constraint" in Fischer (1983); see also Hasker (1988) for a
response to Alston, and Hughes (1997) for a response to Hunt. Since
these accounts of divine foreknowledge aren't independently
plausible, however interesting they might be theoretically, it is hard
to avoid the conclusion that the Ockhamist solution is *ad
hoc*.


### 2.5 The dependence solution



One of the best-known Ockhamist proposals after Adams was made by
Alvin Plantinga (1986), who defined the accidentally necessary in
terms of lack of counterfactual power. For someone, Jones, to have
counterfactual power over God's past beliefs, the following must
be true:



(CPP) It was within
Jones' power at *t*2 to do something such that
if he did it, God would not have held the belief he in fact held at
*t*1.


Plantinga argued that counterfactual power over God's past
beliefs about human free choices is coherent and if it occurs, these
beliefs are not accidentally necessary; they do not have the kind of
necessity the past is alleged to have in premise (2) of the basic
argument.



Notice that counterfactual power over the past is not the same thing
as changing the past. Under the assumption that there is only one time
line, changing the past is incoherent since it amounts to there being
one past prior to *t*2 in which God has a certain
belief at *t*1, and then Jones does something to
make a different past. That requires two pasts prior to
*t*2, and that presumably makes no sense. What (CPP)
affirms instead is that there is only one actual past, but there would
have been a different past if Jones acted differently at
*t*2. (CPP) also does not require the assumption
that what Jones does at *t*2 causes God to have the
belief he has at *t*1. There is much debate about
the way to analyze the causal relation, but it is generally thought
that causation does not reduce to a counterfactual dependency of an
effect on its cause. The dependency of God's belief on
Jones' act need not be a causal dependency. (CPP) is therefore
weaker than the claim that Jones' act at *t*2
causes God's belief at *t*1. A discussion of
the counterfactual dependence of God's past belief on human
future acts is given in Zagzebski (1991, chap 4).



The idea that God's past beliefs depend upon our future free
acts has been enlivened by Trenton Merricks (2009), who argues that
the idea appears in Molina (see section 2.6). There is some question
how distinct Merricks' approach is from classic Ockhamism:
Fischer and Todd (2011, 2013) argue that Merricks' solution is
simply a form of Ockhamism and suffers from the same defects, while
Merricks (2011) replies that the dependency relation between
God's past beliefs and human acts is different from the one at
work in Ockham's approach. The idea, in any case, is that the
dependence of God's foreknowledge of future contingents on the
foreknown events themselves, including future exercises of human free
will, along with the *in*dependence of human actions from
God's foreknowledge of them, is the key to defending the
compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom. This
"Dependence Solution" has gained sufficient currency that
it deserves a section of its own, regardless of its relationship to
the original Ockhamist strategy.



The *Ur*-text for this approach is the following passage in
Origen of Alexandria's *Commentary on the Epistle to the
Romans:*



> 
> it will not be because God knows that an event will occur that it
> happens; but, because something is going to take place it is known by
> God before it happens.
> 



The because-relationship in question is stronger than counterfactual
dependence, because it can be absent even when counterfactual
dependence is present, as in the case of divine foreknowledge. (Though
you won't answer the phone tomorrow at 9 am *because* God
foreknew you would do so, your answering it at 9 tomorrow is
nevertheless counterfactually dependent on God's foreknowledge:
were God to have believed yesterday that you won't answer the
phone at 9 tomorrow, you wouldn't answer the phone at 9
tomorrow, and were God to have believed that you will answer at 9, you
would answer at 9.) What's needed is the stronger relationship
of *explanatory* dependence.



Fischer and Tognazzini (2014), in a response to Merricks (2009, 2011),
McCall (2011), and Westphal (2011), ask how the dependence point alone
shows that the hard past isn't fixed. That would require that
the agent upon whose action the past depends really can act otherwise,
and this is just asserted rather than argued. After all, this is the
very point at issue, so simply assuming it is to beg the question. Cyr
and Law (forthcoming) defend the dialectical appropriateness of the
assumption that doing and refraining are both open to the agent.



Todd (2013) challenges the courage of dependence theorists'
convictions with a scenario in which, instead of simply foreknowing
that you will perform a certain action tomorrow, God prepunished you
for it yesterday. The explanatory relations are the same in the two
cases, but your undergoing that punishment yesterday is surely a fixed
fact about the past, and your performing that action tomorrow is
surely unavoidable. We have no less reason to think that God's
foreknowledge belongs to the fixed past and that foreknown actions are
unavoidable. Swenson (2016) and Law (2020) dispute the moral Todd
draws from his prepunishment case, appealing to time travel scenarios
in which some fact about the past depends on what might yet happen in
the future, where our intuitions are supposedly more open to the
possibility that the past isn't entirely fixed.



Swenson (2016) argues that what's fixed isn't the past
*in toto*, but so much of the past as isn't dependent on
the future. Rather than modifying the principle of the fixity of the
past, Law (2020) advocates junking it altogether and replacing it with
the principle of the fixity of the independent. Law (2021) continues
the case for replacing the fixity of the past with the fixity of the
independent by arguing that the former, insofar as the past
*is* fixed, is derivative from the latter. In two recent
papers, Ryan Wasserman stakes out positions that differ from most
other defenders of the dependence solution. After reviewing modal,
counterfactual, metaphysical, and logical analyses of explanatory
dependence, and taking in lessons from time travel cases, Wasserman
(2021) concludes that *causal* dependence is the best model for
understanding how God can foreknow what you will do *because*
you will do it, and in Wasserman (forthcoming) he argues that the
defense of libertarian freedom against theological fatalism is best
served by emphasizing the independence of future actions from
God's foreknowledge rather than the dependence of God's
foreknowledge on the foreknown actions.



The dependence solution redirects attention from the temporal to the
explanatory order, in which divine foreknowledge depends on future
events while future events do not depend on divine foreknowledge. It
then proposes that what's relevant to assessing libertarian
agency is the explanatory order--the temporal order is relevant only
insofar as it follows the explanatory order, and (when it does follow
it) *because* it follows it. Thus a fact about the past, such
as God's believing yesterday that *T*, is irrelevant to
the libertarian status of a future action if that fact does not
explain, and is instead explained by, that future action. This much is
consistent with the past's being fixed and necessary in just the
way that premise (2) requires, and consistent with the solution
we'll look at in
 2.8.
 What the dependence solution adds is that openness in the explanatory
order overrides the necessity of the past: any facts about the past
that aren't yet explanatorily fixed, aren't yet temporally
fixed either. So (2) isn't true in its full generality, and
divine foreknowledge is one of the exceptions, blocking the inference
to (3).



Whether this additional move is plausible depends on the strength of
one's intuitions about the necessity of the past. If the police
are already on the way, summoned by the tachyonic alarm system the
bank teller is about to activate, not everyone will share the
intuition that the teller still has the option not to press the alarm
button.


### 2.6 The transfer of necessity



The next premise in the argument is (5), the principle that licenses
the "transfer" of necessity from (3) to (6) via (4).
Ockhamists and Dependence Theorists both allow that the necessity of
the past, when applicable to past events, transfers to the future.
Whether this transfer principle is valid depends on the modality being
transferred and the modality effecting the transfer. Logical
necessity, for example, is validly transferred by entailment:
#*p*, #(*p* [?] *q*), [?]
#*q*. But some modalities, like non-accidentality (Slote
1982), are not closed under entailment. How about the necessity of the
past? A much-discussed transfer principle, playing the same role in
Peter van Inwagen's Consequence Argument that (5) plays in the
argument for theological fatalism, is rule b (van Inwagen 1983).
The necessity-operator featured in this principle is
**N**, where **N***p* is to be read,
"*p*, and no one has, or ever had, any choice about
whether *p*." Rule b states that, given
**N***p* and **N**(*p* [?]
*q*), it follows that **N***q*.
Counterexamples to rule b were soon discovered, e.g., by McKay
and Johnson (1996). But it was easy to amend the Consequence Argument
to rest on **N***p*, #(*p* [?]
*q*), [?] **N***q*, and this principle
appears to have no counterexample. The parallel principle for
theological fatalism is #t*p*,
#(*p* [?] *q*), [?]
#t*q*, where #t*p* is
to be read, "p is fixed, accidentally necessary, no longer
avoidable, etc., relative to time *t*." This principle,
too, seems to have no counterexample.



Duns Scotus (Kenny 1979, 56-58) appears to have challenged this
principle. Fischer (1985b) responds to the challenge. But the theory
of divine omniscience that has been most closely associated with the
denial of (5) is the doctrine of Middle Knowledge. This doctrine was
vehemently debated in the 16th century, with the version of
Luis de Molina, referred to as "Molinism," getting the
most attention in the contemporary literature. Recently the doctrine
has received strong support by Thomas Flint (1998) and Eef Dekker
(2000). Unlike the other compatibilist solutions we are considering,
which aim only at showing that infallible foreknowledge and human
freedom are compatible, Molinism provides an account of *how*
God knows the contingent future, along with a strong doctrine of
divine providence. Middle knowledge is called "middle"
because it is said to stand between God's knowledge of necessary
truths and his knowledge of his own creative will. The objects of
Middle Knowledge are so-called counterfactuals of freedom:



If person *S* were in circumstances *C*, *S*
would freely do *X*.



Middle knowledge requires that there are true counterfactuals of this
form corresponding to every possible free creature and every possible
circumstance in which that creature can act freely. These propositions
are intended to be contingent (a claim that has been disputed by some
objectors), but they are prior to God's creative will. God uses
them in deciding what to create. By combining his Middle Knowledge
with what he decides to create, God knows the entire history of the
world.



There are a number of objections to Middle Knowledge in the
contemporary literature. Robert Adams (1991) argues that Molinism is
committed to the position that the truth of a counterfactual of
freedom is explanatorily prior to God's decision to create us.
But the truth of a counterfactual to the effect that if I were in
circumstance *C* I would do *A* is strictly inconsistent
with my refraining from *A* in *C*, and so my refraining
from *A* in *C* is precluded by something prior in the
order of explanation to my act in *C*. This is inconsistent
with my acting freely in *C*. Climenhaga and Rubio
(forthcoming) clarify the nature of explanatory priority and in so
doing affirm the essential correctness of Adams' analysis. There
are a number of other objections to Middle Knowledge in the
literature, as well as replies by its defenders. William Hasker (1989,
1995, 1997, 2000) has offered a series of objections and replies to
William Craig, who defends Middle Knowledge (1994, 1998). Yet other
objections have been proposed by Walls (1990) and Gaskin (1993).
Recent critical discussions of Molinism appear in Fischer (2008),
Guleserian (2008), and Fales (2010). Defenses of Molinism appear in
Bruntrup & Schneider (2011) and Kosciuk (2010), and a
critique in Shieber (2009). Perszyk (2011) is a collection of essays
examining Molinism and its future direction, while Perszyk (2013)
provides a survey of the recent literature.



Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the doctrine of Middle
Knowledge is defensible. How does that avoid the conclusion of the
argument for theological fatalism? Middle Knowledge does not entail
the falsehood of any premise of the basic argument. Freddoso (1988,
53-60) argues that Molina rejects the closure of accidental
necessity under entailment, but for reasons closer to those inspiring
the Dependence Solution (though Molina does not dispute the necessity
of the past). Flint (1998) rejects some of the steps of the fatalist
argument in addition to defending Middle Knowledge, and more recently
blends of Ockhamism and Molinism have been defended (Kosciuk 2010),
which suggests that even though the theory of Middle Knowledge is a
powerful theory of divine knowledge and providence, it is neither
necessary nor sufficient to avoid theological fatalism by itself.


### 2.7 The necessity and the causal closure of the past



Doubts about premises (2) and (5) can be combined into a more radical
critique of the argument. We have already discussed the Ockhamist
response, which accepts (2) as applied to what is strictly past, but
rejects it as applied to that part of the past that is not wholly or
strictly past. It is worth asking, however, whether there is any such
thing as the necessity of the past at all. What do we mean when we say
that the past, the strict past, is *necessary?* When people
say, "There is no use crying over spilled milk," they
presumably mean that there is nothing anybody can do now about the
spilled milk; the spilling of the milk is outside the realm of our
causal control. But it is not at all clear that pastness *per
se* puts something outside the realm of our causal control.
Rather, it is pastness in conjunction with the metaphysical law that
causes must precede their effects. If we decided that effects can
precede their causes, it's quite possible that we would no
longer speak of the necessity of the past.



So the necessity of the past may simply be the principle that past
events are outside the class of causable events. There is a temporal
asymmetry in causability because everything causable is in the future.
But some of the future is non-causable as well. Whether or not
determinism is true, there are some events in the future that are
causally necessary. If a future event *E* is necessary, it is
causable, and not *E* is not causable. But if the necessity of
the past is the non-causability of the past, it would be odd to pick
out the class of propositions about the past as possessing an
allegedly distinct kind of necessity since some of the future has that
same kind of necessity.



This leads to a deeper problem in the idea of the necessity of the
past. Zagzebski (2014) argues that the interpretation of the necessity
of the past as a purely temporal modality is confused. What people
generally mean by the necessity of the past is that the past is
causally closed, meaning the past is neither causable nor preventable.
Understood that way, the necessity of the past is not a purely
temporal modality, and it is not a form of necessity. The categories
of causability and non-causability do not correspond to the standard
modal categories of the necessary, possible, and impossible. The
attempt to assimilate the causal categories to modal categories is a
mistake.



Let us see what happens to the argument for theological fatalism if
the necessity of the past is understood as the causal closure of the
past.



Let us begin with a *definition of causal closure*:



*E* is causally closed =df There is nothing now that
can cause *E*, and there is nothing now that can cause not
*E*.



To use this principle in an argument for fatalism, the principle of
the necessity of the past will need to be replaced with the following
principle:



**Principle of the Causal Closure of the Past**:
  

If *E* is an event in the past, *E* is causally
closed.



We will then need to replace the transfer of necessity principle by
the following:



**Transfer of Causal Closure Principle**:
  

If *E* occurs and is causally closed, and necessarily (if
*E* occurs then *F* occurs), then F is causally
closed.



To recast the argument for theological fatalism, let us again consider
the proposition that you will answer the telephone tomorrow at 9am and
call it *T*:



(1) Yesterday God
infallibly believed *T*. [Supposition of infallible
foreknowledge]
(2) If *E* is an
event in the past, *E* is causally closed (Principle of the
causal closure of the past). 
(3) God's
believing *T* yesterday is now causally closed. [1, 2]

(4) Necessarily, if
yesterday God believed *S* will answer the telephone tomorrow
at 9am, then *S* will answer the telephone tomorrow at 9am.
[Definition of infallibility]
(5) If *E*
occurs and is causally closed, and necessarily (if *E* occurs
then *F* occurs), then *F* is causally closed. [Transfer
of causal closure principle]
(6) *S*'s
act of answering the telephone tomorrow at 9am is now causally closed.
There is nothing now that can cause *S* to answer the telephone
tomorrow and there is nothing now that can cause *S* not to
answer the telephone tomorrow. [1, 4, 5]


But (6) denies that there are causes of the future. Certainly we
believe that something now, whether agents or events, can cause future
events, and the fatalist does not deny that. What the fatalist denies
is that we can cause something *other* than what we cause. So
the relevant half of the principle of the causal closure of the past
is as follows:



**Principle of the Unpreventability of the Past**:
  

If *E* is an event in the past, nothing now can cause not
*E*.



To use this principle in a fatalist argument, we need the
following:



**Transfer of Unpreventability Principle**:
  

If *E* occurs and it is not now causable that *E* does
not occur, and necessarily (if *E* occurs, then *F*
occurs), then it is not now causable that *F* does not
occur.



This principle is virtually identical to the transfer of
unpreventability principle proposed by Hugh Rice (2005), and is
similar to a strengthened form of the well-known principle Beta first
proposed by Peter van Inwagen (1983).



Using this principle, we get the following argument for theological
fatalism:



(1) Suppose that
yesterday God infallibly believed *T*. 


From the Principle of the unpreventability of the past we get:



(2) There is nothing
now that can cause God not to have believed *T*
yesterday.


From the definition of divine infallibility we get:



(3) Necessarily, if God
believed yesterday that S will answer the telephone at 9am tomorrow,
then S will answer the telephone at 9am tomorrow.


From 2, 3, and the transfer of unpreventability principle we get:



(4) There is nothing
now that can cause *S* not to answer the telephone at 9am
tomorrow.


From a variation of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities, we
get:



(5) If nothing can
cause *S* not to answer the telephone at 9am tomorrow, then
*S* does not answer the telephone freely. 


From (4) and (5), we get:



(6) *S* does not
answer the telephone freely.


This argument for theological fatalism is better than the standard
argument if a purely temporal necessity is problematic. The second
premise of the above argument is only the principle that the past is
unpreventable, not a questionable premise that the past has a special
kind of necessity distinct from the causal structure of the universe
simply in virtue of being past. But since the unpreventability of the
past is not a form of necessity in the formal sense, then the transfer
principle licensing the crucial inference to (4) is not a transfer of
necessity. Unlike the transfer of temporal necessity principle in our
original argument, it is not a variation of an axiom of logic, and is
far from indisputable. This suggests that the idea of the necessity of
the past may be confused. On the one hand, we have inherited from
Ockham the idea that the past has a kind of necessity for which we can
formulate an analogue of the formal principles of logical necessity.
But the intuitions supporting such a form of necessity are largely
intuitions about causability, and the modalities of
causability/non-causability do not parallel necessity, possibility,
and impossibility. If this is correct, then if there is a true
transfer of causability or non-causability principle, it is not
because it is like logical necessity in its formal structure. The
problem, then, is that the fatalist argument needs a kind of necessity
that the past has and which is also transferred to the future via a
valid transfer of necessity principle. In section
 5
 we will look at how this is a general problem that extends beyond the
issue of fatalism.


### 2.8 The rejection of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP)



Compatibilists who hold that it's possible for an agent to do
otherwise, in the sense required for free will, even if her action is
causally determined, will probably be untroubled by an argument
purporting to show that no one can do otherwise, given divine
foreknowledge. The relevant interlocutors for the argument for
theological fatalism are those who endorse a libertarian conception of
free will (Alston 1985).



With that in mind, let us now look at premise (9). This is a form of
the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP), a principle that has
become well-known in the literature on free will ever since it was
attacked by Harry Frankfurt (1969) in some interesting thought
experiments. The point of Frankfurt's paper was to drive a wedge
between responsibility and alternate possibilities, and to thereby
drive a wedge between responsibility and libertarian freedom. In
general, those defending libertarian freedom also defend PAP, and
those attacking PAP, like Frankfurt, defend determinism, but some
philosophers have argued that PAP is false even if we have libertarian
free will. The literature that clearly distinguishes the claim that
free will requires alternate possibilities from the claim that free
will requires the falsehood of determinism is contemporary. The former
is a thesis about events in counterfactual circumstances, whereas the
latter is a thesis about the locus of causal control in the actual
circumstances. Aside from the foreknowledge literature, support for
the rejection of PAP from the perspective of an incompatibilist about
free will and determinism can be found in Stump (1990, 1996), Hunt
(1999b), Zagzebski (1991, 2000), Pereboom (2000), and Shabo (2010).
This view was originally called hyper-incompatibilism by John Martin
Fischer, but has recently been called source incompatibilism. For a
recent critique of this version of incompatibilism for solving the
foreknowledge problem, see Werther (2005) and Talsma (2013).



Here is an example of a typical Frankfurt case intended to show that
an agent can act freely even when she lacks alternate
possibilities:



Black, an evil *neurosurgeon*, wishes to see Smith dead but is
unwilling to do the deed himself. Knowing that Mary Jones also
despises Smith and will have a single good opportunity to kill him,
Black inserts a mechanism into Jones's brain that enables Black
to monitor and to control Jones's neurological activity. If the
activity in Jones's brain suggests that she is on the verge of
deciding not to kill Smith when the opportunity arises, Black's
mechanism will intervene and cause Jones to decide to commit the
murder. On the other hand, if Jones decides to murder Smith on her
own, the mechanism will not intervene. It will merely monitor but will
not affect her neurological function. Now suppose that when the
occasion arises, Jones decides to kill Smith without any
"help" from Black's mechanism. In the judgment of
Frankfurt and most others, Jones is morally responsible for her act.
Nonetheless, it appears that she is unable to do otherwise since if
she had attempted to do so, she would have been thwarted by
Black's device.



Most commentators on examples like this agree that the agent is both
morally responsible for her act and acts freely in whatever sense of
freedom they endorse. They differ on whether she can do otherwise at
the time of her act. Determinists generally interpret the case as one
in which she exercises compatibilist free will and has no alternate
possibilities. Most libertarians interpret it as one in which she
exercises libertarian free will and has alternate possibilities,
contrary to appearances. As mentioned above, some philosophers have
interpreted it as a case in which she exercises libertarian free will
but does not have alternate possibilities. If Frankfurt cases can be
successfully interpreted in this third way, then they can be used to
show the compatibility of infallible foreknowledge and libertarian
freedom. Hunt (1999a) argues that this is essentially the solution put
forward by Augustine in *On Free Choice of the Will*
III.1-4, though Augustine's own considered position on
free will was not libertarian.



But there is another way Frankfurt cases can be used to argue for the
compatibility of foreknowledge and freedom. There is an important
disanalogy between a Frankfurt case and infallible foreknowledge that
might lead one to doubt whether an agent really lacks alternate
possibilities when her act is infallibly foreknown. A crucial
component of the standard Frankfurt case is that the agent is
prevented from acting freely in close possible worlds. That aspect of
the case is not in dispute. Black's device is counterfactually
manipulative even if it is not actually manipulative. In contrast,
infallible foreknowledge is not even counterfactually manipulative.
There is no close possible world in which foreknowledge prevents the
agent from acting freely. Of course, if theological fatalism is true,
nobody ever acts freely, but the point is that there is no
manipulation going on in other possible worlds in the foreknowledge
scenario. The relation between foreknowledge and human acts is no
different in one world than in any other. But it is precisely the fact
that the relation between the Frankfurt machine and Mary's act
differs in the actual world from what it is in other close worlds that
is supposed to make the Frankfurt example work in showing the falsity
of PAP.



To make this point clear, let us look at how the standard Frankfurt
case would have to be amended to make it a close analogy to the
situation of infallible foreknowledge. As Zagzebski has argued (1991,
chap. 6, sec. 2.1), the device implanted in Mary's brain would
have to be set in such a way that no matter what Mary did, it never
intervened. It is not even true that it *might have*
intervened. Any world in which Mary decides to commit the murder is a
world in which the device is set to make her commit the murder should
she not decide to do it, and any world in which she does not decide to
commit the murder is a world in which the device is set to prevent her
from deciding to do it if she is about to decide to do it. Now of
course this might be an impossible device, but it would have to be as
described to be a close analogy to the foreknowledge scenario. And our
reactions to this amended Frankfurt case are very different from
typical reactions to the standard Frankfurt case. In the standard case
it at least appears to be true that the agent cannot do otherwise,
whereas in the case amended to be parallel to the foreknowledge case
there is a very straightforward sense in which the agent can do
otherwise because her will is not thwarted by Black in any reasonably
close possible world. The machine is ready to manipulate her, but it
does not manipulate her, nor might it have manipulated her since it
does not even manipulate her in counterfactual circumstances. We might
think of the machine as a metaphysical accident--an extraneous
addition to the story that plays no part in the sequence of events in
any possible world. Possibly it is not clear in the amended story
whether or not Mary has alternate possibilities. What the story shows,
then, is that alternate possibilities are not always relevant to the
possession of libertarian freedom.



Disanalogies between the cases are relevant, however, only if the
prospects for exempting divine foreknowledge from PAP depend on how
closely it mimics Frankfurt-type counterexamples. That assumption may
be unwarranted. Augustine's counterexample to PAP was divine
foreknowledge itself, not a proto-Frankfurtian thought experiment
featuring a counterfactual intervener. Since God infallibly believed
yesterday that you will answer the phone at 9:00 am tomorrow, there is
no alternative possibility on which you fail to answer the phone at
9:00 tomorrow morning; but since "a man does not therefore sin
*because* God foreknew that he would sin" (*CG*
V.10) and, more generally, "God's foreknowledge does not
force the future to happen" (*FCW* III.4), we can still
regard your action as free, even in the libertarian sense. So PAP is
false, for the same reasons Frankfurt pronounced it false in his story
about Black, Smith and Jones: God's foreknowledge, no less than
Black's mechanism, played no role at all in leading the agent to
perform the action, could have been subtracted from the situation
without making any difference to what happened or why it happened, and
is completely irrelevant to understanding why the agent acted as she
did (Frankfurt 1969, 836-7). Divine foreknowledge constitutes
its own counterexample to PAP (Hunt 2003).



If this is correct, the following dilemma critique of theological
fatalism becomes available (Hunt 2017a). Either the argument fails
somewhere along the way to (8), or it succeeds up through (8). If it
fails at one of these earlier steps, it fails full stop. That's
the obvious horn of the dilemma. But if it reaches step (8)
successfully, and reaches it *for those reasons*, we have a
case in which you cannot do otherwise than answer the phone tomorrow
morning, but you are presumptively free in doing so, since you are
acting on your own, and the circumstances that deprive you of
alternatives do not in any way explain your action. So (9) is false,
and it's falsified by (8). Whether (1)-(8) succeeds or fails,
then, the fatalistic inference to (10) is blocked.



Note that this solution shares an intuition with the dependence
response surveyed in 2.5, namely, that God's foreknowledge is
explanatorily dependent on future events, and not the other way
around. The difference is that the Dependence Solution retains PAP by
denying the general necessity of the past, while the
Augustinian/Frankfurtian approach is to abandon PAP and stick with the
necessity of the past.


## 3. Incompatibilist responses to the argument for theological fatalism



Ever since the dilemma of this article was identified, there have been
philosophers who thought that something like our basic argument
succeeds in demonstrating that infallible foreknowledge is
incompatible with human free will. If they are incompatible, one of
them must be given up. It's possible to give up both, of course,
but that's more than the argument requires, and one reason the
dilemma has attracted so much attention in the history of philosophy
is that both the belief in a being with infallible foreknowledge and
belief in the existence of libertarian free will are strongly
entrenched in the world view of many philosophers. To give up either
of these beliefs is difficult and often has many ramifications for
one's other beliefs.



The denial of libertarian freedom has always had many supporters. The
idea of making causal determinism the focal point of discussions of
free will is modern in origin, and some philosophers think that the
modern framing of the issue is confused. Philosophers who deny
libertarian freedom may affirm a type of free will compatible with
determinism, or they may instead simply accept the consequence that
human beings lack free will. It is worth noting, however, that theists
who deny libertarian freedom are typically theological
*determinists* rather than *fatalists;* it's
primarily considerations of divine omnipotence or sovereignty, rather
than foreknowledge, that motivate them. When Augustine, for example,
rejected human freedom apart from divine control--"I tried
hard to maintain the free decision of the human will, but the grace of
God was victorious" (*Retractationes* 2.1)--it
wasn't because of the fatalist argument from divine
foreknowedge, which (as we've seen) he regarded as a complete
failure. Jonathan Edwards, on the other hand, based his Calvinist
denial of libertarian freedom, in part, on a sophisticated version of
the argument for theological fatalism (*FW* II.12).



The other incompatibilist position is to affirm libertarian free will
along with the principle of alternate possibilities (premise 9), and
to deny the possibility of infallible foreknowledge. This position has
recently come into prominence through its association with "open
theism" (Pinnock *et al*. 1994). Open theists reject
divine timelessness and immutability, along with infallible
foreknowledge, arguing that not only should foreknowledge be rejected
because of its fatalist consequences, but the view of a God who takes
risks, and can be surprised and even disappointed at how things turn
out, is more faithful to Scripture than the classical notion of an
essentially omniscient and foreknowing deity (Sanders 1998, Boyd
*et al* 2001, 13-47). See Rhoda *et al*
(2006) for an argument that the key issue in the open theism debate is
the nature of the future, and Tuggy (2007) for an overview of the
different positions open theists can take on this question. A reply to
both Rhoda *et al.* and Tuggy may be found in Craig and Hunt
(2013). Fischer, Todd and Tognazzini (2009) offers a wide-ranging
appraisal of responses to Pike's argument, paying special
attention to open theism and issues in the philosophy of time. For an
argument that open theism necessitates the view that propositions
about the future lack truth value, see Arbour (2013). Todd disagrees
on behalf of the open theist, defending (but without endorsing) the
mutability of the future (2016a), and arguing that future contingents
are all false rather than truth-valueless (2016b). Boyd (2015)
attempts to turn the tables against critics on the grounds that the
openist God's knowledge of all the ways the future
*might* go represents *more* knowledge than the
classical theistic God's knowledge of the way the future
*will* go. Arbour (2019) is a recent collection of commisioned
essays criticizing open theism on philosophical grounds.



One influential argument that open theists use against defenders of
foreknowledge who do not also accept Molinism is that foreknowledge
without middle knowledge is useless for divine providence. In a number
of papers (1993, 1997, 2009), David Hunt has defended the providential
utility of foreknowledge without middle knowledge, describing cases in
which foreknowledge enhances God's providential prospects
without generating the "metaphysical problem" of
explanatory circles, and arguing that the "doxastic
problem" of agential impotence when one already knows what one
is going to do rests on a principle that is in fact false. Responses
to Hunt include Kapitan (1993), Basinger (1993), Robinson (2004a,
2004b), and Hasker (2009). Zimmerman (2012) is friendlier to
Hunt's position.



A related objection to foreknowledge without middle knowledge is that
prophecy requires middle knowledge. See Pruss (2007) for a defense of
a foreknowledge-only account of prophecy. Another issue related to
divine providence is the efficacy of past-directed prayers. Kevin
Timpe (2005) argues that adherents of simple foreknowledge or timeless
knowledge and Molinists have the resources to explain the efficacy of
prayers about the past, but open theism does not.


## 4. Logical fatalism



A form of fatalism that is even older than theological fatalism is
logical fatalism, the thesis that the past truth of a proposition
about the future entails fatalism. Aristotle discusses this form of
fatalism in his famous Sea Battle Argument, mentioned in section
 2.1
 above. A clearer and more sophisticated form of the argument was
proposed by Diodorus Cronus, whose argument is remarkably similar in
form to our basic argument for theological fatalism. The logical
fatalist argument parallels our basic argument as follows:


*Argument for logical fatalism*


Let *S* = the proposition that there will be a sea battle
tomorrow.



(1L) Yesterday it was
true that *S*. [assumption]
(2L) If some
proposition was true in the past, it is now-necessary that it was true
then. [Form of the Necessity of the Past]
(3L) It is
now-necessary that yesterday it was true that *S*. [1,
2]
(4L) Necessarily, if
yesterday it was true that *S*, then now it is true that
*S*. [omnitemporality of truth]
(5L) If it is
now-necessary that *p* and if necessarily (*p* then
*q*), then it is now-necessary that q. [Transfer of Necessity
Principle]
(6L) Therefore, it is
now-necessary that now it is true that *S*. [3L, 4L,
5L]
(7L) If it is
now-necessary that now it is true that *S*, no alternative to
the truth of *S* is now-possible. [definition of
"necessary"]
(8L) So no alternative
to the truth of *S* is now-possible [6L, 7L] 
(9L) If no alternative
to the truth of a proposition about the future is now-possible, then
what the proposition is about will not be brought about by free human
choice. [Version of Principle of Alternate Possibilities]
(10L) Hence, the sea
battle tomorrow will not be brought about by free human choice. [8L,
9L]


Unlike the argument for theological fatalism, the argument for logical
fatalism has few defenders. One reason is that (2L) is less plausible
than (2). (3L) is a soft fact about the past, if anything is.
Nevertheless, some philosophers, like Susan Haack (1974) and William
Lane Craig (1987), have maintained that theological fatalism is just a
gussied up version of logical fatalism, and that the former is no more
impressive than the latter once one looks past the theological
window-dressing. This seems to be Merricks' (2009) position as
well, since he holds that theological fatalism fails for essentially
the same reason as logical fatalism. Warfield (1997) has argued for
the equivalence of the two forms of fatalism if God is necessarily
existent and essentially omniscient. Responses have been given by
Hasker (1998) and Brueckner (2000), and Warfield (2000) offers a
rejoinder to both. Hunt (2002) links Warfield's argument with
Plantinga's (1986), discussed in
 2.4,
 inasmuch as both exploit the logical equivalence of propositions
about the contingent future with God's believing those
propositions, and argues that they both fall prey to the same
reductio: the closure principles they invoke (closure of consistency
under logical equivalence for Warfield, closure of hard/soft facthood
under logical equivalence for Plantinga) would equally support the
compatibility of free will with divine determinism, an unacceptable
result for a libertarian. Peter Graham (2008) argues that the
consensus about consistency to which Warfield appeals emerged against
the backdrop of an assumption that there is no necessarily existent
being, and is therefore question-begging.


## 5. Beyond theological fatalism



There's more at stake here than the coherence of libertarian
theism, as evidenced by the many non-libertarians and non-theists who
have contributed to the debate. A comparison might be helpful.
There's more at stake in Zeno's Achilles paradox than the
fleetness of Achilles and the torpidity of tortoises. If that's
all there was to it, the discovery that Achilles was actually a
quadraplegic, or that the tortoises of ancient Greece were as fast as
jack rabbits, would resolve the puzzle. But that would simply exempt
Achilles and/or the tortoise from complicity in the problem; it would
do nothing to address the real issues presented by Zeno's
argument. The situation is arguably the same when it comes to the
argument for theological fatalism (Hunt 2017a). If the argument
gets God wrong by assuming that he's in time when he
isn't, the problem possibly goes away for God, once the mistake
is corrected, but it's easily reinstated by replacing God with
Gud, an infallibly omniscient being who exists in time. If the
argument gets human beings wrong by assuming that they have
(libertarian) free will when they don't, the problem can be
reformulated in terms of Gud's infallible beliefs about the
future actions of Eleutherians, a race of extraterrestrials stipulated
to possess libertarian freedom. This is to understand the argument for
theological fatalism as a thought experiment. Whether or not divine
foreknowledge and libertarian freedom are real, we're being
asked, what if? Could libertarian freedom really be incompatible with
divine foreknowledge *for the reasons given in the argument*?
The answer to this question may involve rethinking more than God and
free will.



Zagzebski has argued that the dilemma of theological fatalism is
broader than a problem about free will. The modal or causal asymmetry
of time, a transfer of necessity principle, and the supposition of
infallible foreknowledge are mutually inconsistent. (1991, appendix).
If there is a distinct kind of necessity that the past has
*qua* past, and which is not an implicit reference to the lack
of causability of the past, then it is temporally asymmetrical. The
past has it and the future does not. The necessity of the past and the
contingency of the future are two sides of the same coin. To say that
the future is contingent in the sense of temporal modality does not
imply that we have causal control over the entire future, of course.
We lack control over part of the future because part (or even all) of
it is causally necessary. But if the necessity of the past is distinct
from the lack of causability, and is a type of necessity the past has
just because it is past, the future must lack that particular kind of
necessity.



The idea that there is temporally asymmetrical modality is
inconsistent with the transfer of necessity principle and the
supposition of infallible foreknowledge of an essentially omniscient
deity. The inconsistency can be demonstrated as follows:



*Dilemma of Foreknowledge and Modal Temporal Asymmetry*



Again, let *T* = the proposition that you will answer the
telephone tomorrow at 9 am.



(1f) There is (and was
before now) an essentially omniscient foreknower (EOF) [Assumption for
dilemma]


(1f) and the Principle of the Necessity of the Past tells us that



(2f) Either it is
now-necessary that the EOF believed *T* before now or it is
now-necessary that the EOF believed not *T* before now.



From (1f) and the definition of an EOF it follows that



(3f) Necessarily (The
EOF believed before now that *T* - *T*), and
necessarily (The EOF believed before now that not *T* -
not *T*). 


By the Transfer of Necessity Principle (TNP), (2f) and (3f) entail



(4f) Either it is
now-necessary that *T* or it is now-necessary that not
*T*.


(4f) is logically equivalent to



(5f) Either it is not
now-possible that *T* or it is not now-possible that not
*T*.


From the Principle of the Contingency of the Future we get



(6f) It is now-possible
that *T* and it is now-possible that not
*T*.


But (6f) contradicts (5f).



The inconsistency shown in this argument has nothing to do with free
will or fatalism. In fact, the problem is even more general than this
argument illustrates. The reason essential omniscience conflicts with
temporal modality and the transfer principle is that the existence of
an EOF requires that a proposition about the past entails a
proposition about the future. But it straightforwardly follows from
TNP that a proposition that is now-necessary cannot entail a
proposition that is not now-necessary. So if the past is now-necessary
and the future is not, a proposition about the past cannot entail a
proposition about the future. The conclusion is that if asymmetrical
temporal modality is coherent, it can obey TNP, or it can permit a
proposition about the past to entail a proposition about the future,
but not both.



The root of the problem, then, is that it is impossible for there to
be a type of modality that has the following features:



(a) The past and future
are asymmetrical in that the past qua past is necessary with respect
to this type of modality, whereas the future qua future is contingent
with respect to this type of modality.
(b) There are
propositions about the past that entail propositions about the future.

(c) TNP
obtains.


So the problem of the alleged incompatibility of infallible
foreknowledge and free will is a special case of a more general
problem about time and necessity. It was suggested in section
 2.6
 that the problem may be (a) above. There is no temporally
asymmetrical necessity. But regardless of what one thinks of fatalist
arguments, the general problem in the logic of time and causation
needs to be addressed. Both the alleged modal asymmetry of time and
the causal asymmetry should be examined in more detail.



The problem of foreknowledge and fatalism has been around for a long
time, but the amount of philosophical attention it has attracted since
1965 is truly remarkable. The literature on this problem is enormous,
and it continues to grow.