Omniscience, Causation, and Human Freewill

By John Feakes

Introduction

For centuries atheists have attempted, unsuccessfully, to erect some sort of positive case for God’s non-existence. The problem of evil, for example, was initially presented as systemic contradiction within the Christian worldview. The argument runs thus:

1.    An all good, all powerful God would want to destroy evil.
2.    Evil is not destroyed.
3.    Therefore, an all good and all powerful God does not exist.

The conclusion does indeed flow logically from the premises. The debate however centers on the truthfulness of the premises and whether or not the argument contains hidden premises. In this case the premises themselves, it seems to me, are more probable than their negation. However, it is clear that the conclusion rests upon hidden premises. I can think of at least two. First, it places an unfounded time limit upon God to vanquish evil. Second, it assumes without justification that God could not possibly have a morally sufficient reason for permitting evil. In fact, in the light of other positive arguments for God’s existence, the syllogism itself could reasonably be turned on its head to reach a very different conclusion:

1.    An all good, all powerful God exists.
2.    An all good, all powerful God would want to destroy evil.
3.    Therefore, evil will be destroyed.

Atheist philosophers sometimes counter that it’s the presence of gratuitous evil makes God’s existence highly improbable. The problem of course is demonstrating that any given instance of evil is actually gratuitous. That is to say, as long as it’s possible that God has a morally sufficient reason for permitting a given instance of evil, the atheist’s logical case against God is invalid. A Christian counter argument could run thus:

1.    If an all good, all powerful God exists, there will be no gratuitous evil.
2.    An all good, all powerful God exists.
3.    Therefore, there is no gratuitous evil.

Philosophers now widely recognize that the existence of God is therefore not logically incompatible with the presence of evil in this world. This fact has effectively demoted the problem of evil from a logical contradiction to a probabilistic argument at best. The problem of course is that this probabilistic argument quickly degenerates into no argument at all.  This is because the Being under discussion is supposedly omniscient and omnipotent. How can we properly assess the probability of what a Being like this would do or allow without possessing these attributes ourselves? Of course we can’t. The problem of evil therefore remains a very real problem emotionally, but creates no logical problem within the Christian worldview.

Contradictory Attributes?

As noted above, because atheism lacks any sort of logical case for its truthfulness, it must rely upon probabilistic arguments instead. Of course these arguments utterly fail because we are dealing with a Being Who not only exercises libertarian freewill, but possesses all great-making attributes to an infinite degree. As we have seen, this fact strips away any probability based upon our observations that God does not exist . Some atheists have countered by claiming that the Christian God cannot exist because the attributes He is claimed to possess would lead to logical absurdity. Here the atheist does the Christian a great service in that he shows conclusively that Christianity is not a pliable faith system that can be warped and molded in order to resist falsification. Christian Theism can be falsified and pointing out logical contradictions between God’s “omni” attributes is one of the ways in which it can be done.

Omniscience, Causation, and Human Freewill

One atheist I was dealing with claimed that there exists a logical contradiction between the Christian doctrine of God’s omniscience and human freewill. If God knows that I will eat a cookie at 10:00 tomorrow, the argument goes, then I have to eat the cookie at 10:00 tomorrow. Doesn’t this run contrary to the Christian worldview that humans are free agents? Several points can be made to this objection.

First, not all Christians believe that humans do enjoy libertarian freewill. Therefore, the atheist’s argument does not create a logical problem within all Christian worldviews. There are a good number of Christians who do indeed hold to the position that God’s omniscience is dependent upon His strongly actualizing future events. On this view, God knows with certainty what humans will do because it is He that is strongly determining their actions. Human freewill, they argue, is an illusion. Though I do not hold to this view myself, it is nonetheless a Christian worldview that remains impervious to this particular atheist objection.

Secondly, if we assume that God does infallibly know what my future free actions will be, what certain causal connection can be made? If God knows I will eat a cookie, how does that knowledge actualize my eating of the cookie? In other words, how can we legitimately equate knowledge with causal force? I can’t think of a way in which this can even possibly be done. It is clear that the atheist is smuggling the assumption that God cannot know something unless He plans to strongly actualize it. This assumption however, needs justification. For the atheist to make his objection work, he must show that it is logically impossible for God to know what His creatures will freely choose to do. As far as I’m aware, this has not been done.

Future Tense Propositions

Some argue that it is impossible for God to know future events infallibly unless He strongly actualizes their occurrence. After all, aren’t propositions caused to be true when they correspond to a particular fact? This “grounding objection” loses force when we consider future tense propositions. Suppose for example, at exactly 12:00 noon I held up a coin and said, “At 12:01 I will flip this coin and it will come up heads.”  At exactly 12:01 I do flip the coin and, in fact, it does fall heads up.  What do we conclude about the statement that I made at 12:00?  Was it true when I uttered it or not?  The statement that I made is known as a future tense proposition, making it time sensitive, so to speak.  It wouldn’t be true at 12:01, after I’ve flipped the coin.  If the statement was true at all, it would have to have been true before I flipped the coin.  But according to the reasoning behind the grounding objection, the statement could not have been true prior to my flipping the coin because no concrete referent existed at that time.  Some go so far as to actually deny the validity of future tense propositions altogether.  Our metaphysical intuitions, I think, know better than this.  There is nothing ostensibly incoherent about the statement, “At 12:01 I will flip this coin and it will come up heads.”  The statement has content and appears meaningful.  It seems, to me at least, to follow that a coherent, meaningful statement must be either true or false.  If we can agree to this then the grounding objection to God’s having counterfactual knowledge of possible free agents begins to evaporate.

Statements referring to the non-existence of something also pose a problem for advocates of the grounding objection.  The statement “Baal does not exist” is obviously true.  Baal really does not exist.  But if the grounding objection is to hold any water, one would have to show how something that doesn’t even exist could act as a cause for making a statement true.  Again, the detractor will have to first come up with a different ontology for truth and then show it superior to the ontology currently understood by philosophers today.  Until and unless this is done, Christians (of whom I am one) who see the connection between propositions and the facts they correspond to as logical – not causal - are perfectly rational in our beliefs. On this view God can certainly know the future without strongly actualizing it.

The Irony

This particular atheist objection to Christian theism involves arbitrarily inserting causation into the equation. As we have seen, not only is the assumption of causal force between proposition and fact completely without justification, but it seems to be contradicted by both future tense propositions and statements of non-existence. The irony here is that typically, atheists will accept causation as a valid principle in just about every area of life, even arbitrary inserting into truth-making. This strict adherence to causation as a valid metaphysical principle is, however, often abandoned when the discussion comes around to cosmogony. The reason for this strange denial of causation is not hard to find. If the atheist accepts causation in the area of cosmogony, the next question is, ‘what caused the universe?’ The atheist knows that whatever caused our space-time universe must itself be eternal that is to say, timeless. It would also be by necessity immaterial, and possessing unimaginable power. In other words, the cause of the universe would have to possess the core attributes of the biblical God.

Conclusion

There is no logical contradiction between the doctrine of God’s omniscience and human freewill. For a contradiction to exist there must be some necessary causal force in operation which extends from simply knowing to the actualization of what is known. To my knowledge, no such causal connection can be demonstrated. Because the connection appears to be exclusively logical rather than causal, this atheist attempt to demonstrate systemic contradiction within the Christian worldview utterly fails. Furthermore, the atheist’s abandonment of the causal principle in the area of cosmogony appears arbitrary if not downright self-serving.