It has been a long while since I've written a post. One reason for this is that I am studying again, taking papers that will, one day, count towards a Masters in Philosophy. For those readers who have been following my blog I thought I would present an essay that I wrote for one of these papers, a paper on Classical and Medieval Philosophy, the focus being on the nature of time. It only received a B because, although the class was concerned with Aristotle (a little), Boethius, St Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham, my essay dealt with these thinkers very badly. If you want to understand Aristotle and the medieval philosophers, this essay will be no help. I freely admit that for reasons of a technical nature I did not fully grasp the arguments of these scholastic philosophers. Why then publish this essay, you might ask? The reason I received a B rather than a lower grade is because, I think, I presented a theory of how humans experience time, my A theory, that may be original and may also be true, and it is this theory, a theory that I present early in the essay, that makes the argument worth setting out publicly. My attempt to relate this theory back to the typically Christian theologians we studied may be less than successful but I believe I am a competent enough writer that, even if my descriptions of these philosophers' positions is often incorrect, even if it is longer than most of my other posts, the essay is still altogether a good read.
I may have readers who follow this blog because they are interested in my life, in schizophrenia and the Mental Health System, or in issues related to sexuality. It is possible that I have readers who are interested in interpretations of films and novels and in narrative theory generally. I am still interested in these topics myself but have had difficulty mustering up the enthusiasm to talk about them again in this blog. I have, however, discussed philosophy sometimes and this essay relates back most closely to two posts I wrote about the ontological argument for the existence of God: "The Ontological Argument: Why CosmicSkeptic and the Pseudo-Intellectual Are Wrong" and "The Modal Ontological Argument". What I am struggling towards is a theory of truth, reality, language, and literature that avoids the mistakes other philosophers have made, a theory to which I can declare my heartfelt allegiance. It is perhaps because I could not accept the underlying assumptions made by theologians like Aquinas and Ockham that I had so much trouble understanding their arguments. In the end I am studying philosophy to deepen, enrich, and rationally justify my particular world-view, a world-view that I have been arduously establishing over many years, often through exploratory pieces published in this blog. I am not studying philosophy to paraphrase arguments by other philosophers, arguments that are often, in my view, incorrect or only partially correct. One day I will unleash upon the world a theory of fictional narrative that will turn everything upside down! But not yet.
And now, to quote Sam Harris, "without further ado", the essay. [Note: in cutting and pasting this essay, the font has come out smaller than is normal for my blog. I imagine the reader can simply zoom in, and this will make it easier to read.]
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Chance and Necessity
Some of the fundamental problems in philosophy relate to issues concerning the apparent indeterminancy of the future as compared to the apparent determinancy of the past, to whether free will is compatible with determinism or, if one believes in the Judeo-Christian God, with God’s omniscience and omnipotence, and to what extent past, present, and future events can be seen as necessary or contingent. These issues have spurred debate since the ancient Greek philosophers and continue to be debated today. However, one issue in making sense of classical and medieval philosophy from a contemporary standpoint, it seems to me, is that some important terms in the debate have different meanings today than they did for theologians like Boethius, St. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham. For example, people generally today (including many ostensibly religious people) accept that chance seems to play a role in determining events whereas the Christian philosophers of the medieval period, committed as they were to an omnipotent God, did not even seem to possess the concept of ‘chance’. Furthermore, the concepts of ‘necessity’ and ‘contingency’, of vital importance to the Christian philosophers, are understood quite differently today than they were for these earlier philosophers, although we can perhaps see Aristotle and the Christian philosophers as paving the way for future developments, such as the invention of modern modal logic. In this essay I shall present two models for understanding time, explicitly atheistic and derived from modern physics. I shall then playfully present an argument for the existence of God, suggested by these two models, which will pave the way for a discussion of the medieval philosophers. I shall discuss free will with respect to determinancy and chance, first from a modern perspective and then with respect to these ancient philosophers. I shall then discuss necessity and contingency, again first from a modern perspective and then with respect to these classical and medieval philosophers. Finally, I shall relate the discussion of these philosophers back to the two models of time I presented earlier in the essay.
In 1908, John M.E. McTaggart published the landmark essay “The Unreality of Time”. In this essay, McTaggart introduced the concepts of the A-series of time and the B-series of time, concepts that not only have been useful going forward but as conceptual tools useful when looking back at classical and medieval philosophers. The A-series, which McTaggart argues is fundamental to the way we experience time, is a way of classifying events as past, present, or future. Our human perception of time is that future events become present events and then become past events. The B-series, by contrast, is a way of ordering events according to whether they occur before or after other events or, to put it another way, by attaching dates and times to them. Although we experience events as being in the A-series, the B-series, if we accept William Lane Craig’s interpretation of Aquinas, could be viewed as the way God perceives events; I shall come back to this idea later. I shall not attempt to critique McTaggart’s argument in this essay. However, the two models of time I shall present below can be viewed, analogously to McTaggart’s exposition, as an A-theory and a B-theory, the first an account of the way human beings experience time and the second as a way of describing what time, metaphysically, actually is.
Almost all the laws of physics are time-reversible, in the sense that almost all the laws would still hold true even if time were to start flowing backwards. The significant exception to this is the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of a macroscopic system always increases. The second law provides, in physics, the direction of time’s arrow. Although this essay is not concerned with an extended discussion of entropy and I shall not define entropy here, there are two important points to be made about it. At the turn of the twentieth century, there was debate among physicists about whether the second law was an absolute law of nature or a statistical law. The second view won out. The second law of the thermodynamics today could be better rephrased in the following way: “The entropy of a macroscopic system almost always tends to increase”. It is always possible, although extremely unlikely, for the entropy of a macroscopic system to spontaneously decrease. The second important point is that views can be found in the contemporary world that evolution and the development of human civilisation into ever more complex and organised forms somehow violate the second law of thermodynamics: this view is false. Overall and even in smaller systems considered separately, entropy not only tends to increase but usually increases dramatically.
The reason entropy almost always increases is that there are far fewer ordered states of a system than disordered states; so if a system is changing, it is almost always moving from a more ordered state to a more disordered state. Entropy can be considered a measure of disorder. This leads me to make what I think might be a very innovative and interesting claim. Because there are far fewer ordered states than disordered states, it is much easier to make inferences about the past than the future. Suppose I walk into my kitchen today and find a smashed egg beside the refrigerator – I will be able to infer that a human being almost certainly opened the fridge door, took out an egg and accidentally dropped it. It is possible however that a chicken flew into my kitchen and laid an egg from a height. Both inferences are possible although the first seems much more likely and it seems we can safely assume that it is the first that is true. However if I looked at the fridge yesterday, I could not infer with any certainty that either scenario would occur today. According to the theory I am proposing here, what I have termed my A-theory, the past, like the future, is indeterminate. It is simply that the past is far less indeterminate than the future. The theory I am proposing here contrasts sharply with the views of the important classical and medieval philosophers. Although Aristotle, Aquinas, Scotus and Ockham all hold that many facts about the future cannot be known with certainty, they all also hold that the past is absolutely fixed. An argument that comes up again and again throughout the history of philosophy is the ‘consequence argument’, the argument that a proposition expressed in the past about the future must necessarily be true or false because everything in the past is necessary, and that consequently the future must also be necessary. (The usual form of this argument is to move from God’s omniscient foreknowledge in the past to the necessary truth of future events.) William of Ockham complicates this picture somewhat – I shall come back to Ockham later in this essay.
I am arguing here that the past, like this future, is indeterminate. The difference is that the past is much less indeterminate than the future – the difference between the past and future is quantitative rather than qualitative. It might be objected to this that we can remember the past. I would reply to this objection by saying that our memory is fallible. If I ask you what you were doing at noon July 12 2010, it is likely you will not be able to recall. A friend and I might disagree about what happened when we met for drinks three months ago, and without independent evidence in the present, there is no way to settle this dispute. If we consider historical events that occurred before living human memory, the picture becomes even more indefinite. Without archaeological evidence, we have no idea what Aristotle was doing January 12 370BCE. Whatever he did that day most likely might as well never have happened, unless whatever he did left some trace in the present. In the same way that there are multiple possible futures that are compatible with the present, there are multiple possible pasts that are compatible with the present; furthermore, the past only exists in the present through the traces it has left, for instance in our brains. As I have said above, this view contrasts starkly with classical and medieval philosophers.
If the past and the future are both indeterminate with respect to how people experience time, does this mean that the present is also indeterminate? I would argue ‘yes’. My A-theory of time involves looking at time and the world from the perspective of an embodied consciousness. The same way that I lack absolute confidence about the past and the future, I lack absolute confidence about events that are occurring right now in the present in parts of the world outside my direct perception. I simply have no idea what Joe Biden is doing right now as I write this sentence. Thus my A-theory could be described as a psychological, phenomenological or perhaps epistemological account of how people experience time and the world.
In contrast with the A-theory, I would now like to propose another way of looking at time, the B-theory. According to the B-theory, the past, present, and future are fully determined. The B-theory, unlike the A-theory, is reasonably popular among many philosophers and scientists today. (For example the neuroscientist and popular public intellectual Sam Harris defends it). The motivating idea is that causes deterministically lead to effects and the metaphor that is often used, a metaphor originating with Descartes I believe, is that the universe is a kind of machine in which everything develops according to fixed laws of nature. (Today this idea is extended to the human brain which is considered a kind of material machine, an extrapolation Descartes himself would probably have opposed). The B-theory had become the prevailing theory among physicists by the early twentieth century but was seriously challenged by the development of the probabilistic interpretation of quantum physics. Although it is commonly recognised that the laws of quantum physics, such as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, under the Copenhagen interpretation, entail that the future state of a system after a measurement is taken is underdetermined, it is less well known that, because the laws of quantum physics are themselves time-reversible, the past is also underdetermined – the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics thus supports my A-theory more than the B-theory. However it is possible to interpret quantum physics in ways that are compatible with determinism (such as for instance superdeterminism). For example, it could be argued that quantum physics does not necessarily entail that the universe is objectively uncertain but rather that these laws set limits on what it is possible to know about the universe. In the end, it is impossible to prove that the universe develops deterministically – it is rather an article of faith that seems intuitively reasonable to many people in the same way that faith in God seems reasonable to the many people who believe in God.
The B-theory does not concern time and the world as they appear to embodied consciousnesses as the A-theory does but rather time and the world as they actually are. This leads to my argument for the existence of God which I shall present as follows:
- Everything that exists exists in the mind of some consciousness.
- The B-series exists.
- The B-series, in its entirety, is not known to any living human.
- Therefore, some non-human consciousness or consciousnesses must exist that together know the whole B-series.
The first premise is derived from George Berkeley’s Idealistic philosophy and is probably the most questionable link in the argument. However, I am not presenting this argument completely seriously but as a kind of experiment in natural theology. It does not lead directly to the conclusion that some single consciousness exists that is omniscient, that knows the future as well as the present and past, a consciousness that we can call God, but it takes a significant step in that direction. The argument enables us to move on to a discussion of some of the significant theologians we have looked at in this course: Boethius, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dun Scotus, and William of Ockham. These theolgians accept the existence of the Christian god and His omniscience (along with His other attributes such as omnipotence, omnibenevolence, simplicity, immutability, infallibility, perfect justice and so on) as axiomatic. Thus, setting out provisionally an argument for an omniscient being paves the way for discussing these Christian theologians.
At the heart of the problem these theologians were grappling with is how to reconcile God’s omniscience and omnipotence with human free will. Although these theologians accept that God is omniscient, they do not accept the B-theory I have presented above, the idea that all events in the future, like events in the past and, with the exception of Duns Scotus, the present, occur necessarily. Instead they insist upon people possessing free will. One reason for their rejection of total predetermination is the ‘lazy man’ argument originally set forth by Aristotle. According to Aristotle, if all future events occur necessarily, there is no reason to deliberate about our actions or plan for the future; the fact that we do seems evidence that we possess free will. (It could be argued however that we deliberate and plan because we possess the illusion of free will. I shall come back to this idea later.) The idea that we have free will is so deeply engrained in the minds of these philosophers (and still in the minds of most people today I believe) that Duns Scotus even jokes that a person who believes that the future is as necessary as the past should be tortured until he admits that he could possibly not be tortured. Other reasons for espousing the idea that we have free will arise from Christianity itself. If virtuous people go to heaven while sinners are condemned to hell but our actions are predetermined, this would suggest that God is not just. Additionally, if everything is predetermined and God is the ultimate cause, this makes God ultimately responsible for people’s sins, suggesting he is not omnibenevolent. Considerations such as these provide strong motivation for attempts by Christian thinkers to find some plausible account of free will.
It is important to note here that, although I have posed the problem as being how to reconcile free will with God’s omniscience, this is not how the major Christian theologians framed the problem. For Boethius and Aquinas, the terminology used is the distinction between ‘contingency’ and ‘necessity’. What we call free will is, for them, the self-evident truth that some facts about the future are contingent (although many facts about the future, and all facts about the past, are necessary). The concept of free will seems to emerge with Dun Scotus, although only in a nascent form. I shall discuss ‘contingency’ and ‘necessity’ in greater depth later in this essay.
I shall begin the discussion of free will by considering the contemporary understanding of this idea. Most ordinary people today, I believe, tend to uncritically assume that free will must exist without ever devoting much thought to it; among young philosophers and other thinkers however it is increasingly popular to reject the concept of free will entirely. Examples I can think of include popular influencers like Sam Harris, Alex O’Conner and Sabine Hossenfelder, who can be found on Youtube. One reason for this is the direct or indirect influence of the rather wonderful essay “The Powers of Rational Beings: Freedom of The Will” by Peter Van Inwagen (2015) and the types of arguments he presents in it. Another reason is the sophistication of modern science, particular neuroscience, and the concomitant acceptance that our actions originate in the brain, a physical organ subject to the laws of nature. (Neurobiology was of course completely alien to the medievals.) The weakening of the old religious notion of free will is evidenced by the modern debate as to whether many social phenomena, such as criminality, are best explained as being the result of nature or nurture; in either case we are assuming that such phenomena have deterministic causes. This contrasts with the views of religiously minded people that individuals freely choose between virtue and vice. The decline in belief in free will, I would argue, can be correlated with the decline in religion generally.
Even if we deny materialism and adopt some religious worldview, such as Cartesian dualism, the problem of free will remains. I can show this with an example. Suppose at time t, Jane is faced with a choice of either willing A or willing not-A. Suppose she chooses to will A. If we assume determinism, her choice is founded on reasons that wholly explain her decision; these reasons themselves follow from prior events and reasons which themselves follow from prior events and reasons right back to prior reasons completely outside her control, what Inwagen calls “untouchable facts”. If we are religious, we might have to say that the first cause for Jane’s decision, the ultimate untouchable fact, is God. Of course, such a regression is anathema to most Christians (unless they are Calvinists) and so they must reject it. The problem remains if we assume the universe is indeterministic. Suppose there are no reasons at all for Jane willing A or willing not-A and she decides to will A: it seems then that her choice is made on the basis of pure chance. Ingawen argues that a decision based on a chance event, a kind of neuronal coin-flip, can be considered as little under her control as it would have been if the world was deterministic. Inwagen does not justify this claim rigorously – such a justification would have to define what it means for an action to be under a person’s control, and counter the objection that a chance event that occurs inside a person’s brain is quite different to a chance event that occurs outside it. Nevertheless, Inwagen’s claim that free will seems to be incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism seems correct to me. The claim that all events either follow deterministically from prior events, result from pure chance, or occur because of an admixture of determinism and chance, strikes me as intuitively plausible; I also find it plausible that if all events are of this character, the idea of free will becomes incoherent. Everything is the result of either chance or necessity, and this leaves no room for free will.
Towards the conclusion of the essay Ingawen asserts that “It would seem to be an evolutionary necessity that beings like ourselves should believe in their own free will .” (p.215) However, in the end he rejects the idea that free will is an illusion – it seems that his own conviction that he possesses free will is too strong to be vitiated by the arguments that he has proposed himself earlier in the essay. Ingawen’s justifications for choosing to believe in free will are partly a modern restatement of Aristotle’s lazy-man argument and partly his strong sense that, if free will is an illusion, this would mean morality is also an illusion, an implication that he repudiates. In the end Ingawen says that free will is a mystery but is a mystery he is forced to accept.
Before I turn to the medieval philosophers, I wish to digress for a moment and discuss determinism as it applies to human actions because it is important to my general thesis. I shall assume for the moment that causal determinism is true. The naïve understanding of causal determinism is that of a series of temporally ordered events in which each event is necessarily entailed by the prior event and necessarily entails the subsequent event. A necessarily entails B which necessarily entails C and so on. However this naïve understanding of determinism fails to explain human actions. Suppose I assert, “If my friend Warren dies tomorrow, I will attend his funeral next week.” The problem with this, from the perspective of naïve determinism, is that the consequent “attending the funeral” is not wholly determined by the antecedent “my friend Warren dies”. We have to say instead, “If my friend Warren dies tomorrow, I will attend the funeral tomorrow unless I catch Covid or get hit by a car or decide out of spite not to attend or the church burns down or the funeral is delayed for reasons x, y, or z, and so on.” If we accept determinism and say that our human actions are determined, we must also accept that there are a vast multitude of causes that determine a particular action. A concept that is useful here is the Buddhist idea of Pratītyasamutpāda or dependent arising, an idea that incorporates both the notion that everything has causes and the idea that everything is connected to everything else. Pratiyasamutpada enables those among us who believe in determinism to explain why it is, in practice, impossible to predict with absolute certainty the future actions of a person we know (although, as I discussed with respect to the A theory, it is much easier to work out the past actions of a person by for instance asking her and assuming she will tell the truth.)
In the preceding passages I have discussed the key ideas of “free will” and “chance” and I shall now discuss these terms in relation to the classical and medieval philosophers. As I understand it, Aristotle believed that a person’s actions are engendered by his or her character and that people will be led to the right action by sound reasoning. The more modern idea of “free will” does not arise in Aristotle’s writing. Nor does the concept of “free will” appear in the writings of Boethius and Aquinas, although they are both very much concerned with reconciling God’s foreknowledge and future contingent truths. The concept of “free will”, as we understand it today (and which is subject to charges of incoherence by the determinists I mention above) seems to originate with Dun Scotus. Prior to Scotus, philosophers had believed that the freedom of the will consisted of a person being able to will A at one time and will not-A at a later time. Scotus’s major innovation was to propose that at the instant a person wills A, he or she possessed the potentiality or capacity to will A or will not-A. This potentiality or capacity does not occur temporally prior to the act of willing but naturally prior to it. We can perhaps imagine Scotus’s proposal in the following way: a line representing a person’s past life bifurcates at the instant of the present and then follows two different possible trajectories into the future – Scotus is asking us to focus on the instant of bifurcation. (Of course, this picture is complicated by God’s foreknowledge.) William of Ockham criticised Scotus’s argument by saying that a capacity or potentiality that is not realised is not a real potentiality. However, I believe Ockham’s criticism is self-contradictory. Ockham is committed to the idea that contingent truths exist in the future; to say a state of affairs is contingent is to say that it could be or could have been some other way; so, if it could be some other way, it must possesses the potentiality to be some other way. Despite Ockham’s criticism, Scotus’s idea of potentiality in the present I believe won out and underpins our understanding of free will today.
I consider now the concept of “chance”. I find it interesting that the idea of chance appears in Aristotle but is virtually absent from the Christian theologians who followed him. One reason for this is that for Boethius and the thinkers who came after God had a providential plan for humanity; everything happens for a reason. To believe in chance is to believe that sometimes events turn out one way or another for no reason at all, an idea that runs counter to the Christian dogma of an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent Creator. It seems, furthermore, that in the same way that people are compelled to believe in free will, we are compelled to believe that events, especially our own actions, result from prior reasons. Even though I am a pessimist, I find the idea that I might stop writing this essay at this point and go for a walk as a result of a random quantum fluctuation in my brain difficult to believe even though it may true; I might invent a story in which I tell myself that the reason I decided to go for a walk was because I needed to think about the next paragraph. It seems to me that Scotus comes close to rediscovering chance: it is only a step from his idea of freedom of the will, from the idea of potentiality or possibility, to the idea of randomness, causeless events. Duns Scotus, however, does not take this step.
Duns Scotus famously believed that the concepts we use to describe humans could also be used to describe God; his discussion of human free will is a preliminary step towards discussing God’s free will. According to Scotus, in the same way that we act contingently (rather than necessarily) upon those things over which we have power in the present, God acts contingently (rather than necessarily) upon the world. The difference between divine free will and human free will is that the former is perfect while the latter is imperfect. As I understand this claim, Scotus is saying that all logically possible states of affairs are potentially realisable by God although he chooses to actualise only the world in which we live. However, if God can be understood in human terms, the idea that He has free will is also subject to Ingawen’s criticisms. Either an action by God, the actualisation of a particular possibility, is necessitated by reasons that are prior to the action temporally (if God is in time) or prior naturally (if God is outside time), or God’s action is the result of pure chance; if the reasons for God’s action form a chain under his control, at some point we must arrive at a causeless first cause that can only be random. This point can also be made by employing an old saw: why is there something rather than nothing?
As mentioned above, for Aristotle and the Christian theologians who followed him the key concepts are “contingency” and “necessity” and I shall now discuss these concepts first from a modern perspective and then as these ideas are elaborated in the medieval tradition. Consider the proposition: “Donald Trump could have won the 2020 American presidential election.” In English, this sentence is ambiguous. It could mean, “It is possible that Donald Trump did win the 2020 presidential American election”, a proposition that most people (although not all) would regard as false. It could also however be understood as a claim that there existed a potentiality at the time for Donald Trump to win the election – “Donald Trump might have won the 2020 election if more people had freely chosen to vote for him” perhaps. I suspect that many people would regard the second sense of the sentence as true. I contend that most people today would regard the proposition “Donald Trump lost the 2020 American presidential election” as a contingent fact because it could have been otherwise – even though it occurred in the past. The modern understanding of necessity and contingency is very much influenced by the development of modal logic by Kripke and Lewis: according to this modern understanding a fact is necessary if it is true in all possible worlds (examples include the facts that water is H20 and a human being is not a prime number) and contingent if it is true is some possible worlds and false in others. It is because we can imagine a possible world in which Trump won that we regard his loss as contingent rather than necessary. If we accept modern modal logic, if a fact is contingent at one time it is contingent at all times and if a fact is necessary at one time it is necessary at all times – Donald Trump’s 2020 loss was contingent in 2019, contingent when it occurred and still contingent today. Likewise if a fact is necessary, it is necessary whether we look at it as existing in the past, present or future. I cannot be sure that this way of looking at “contingency” and “necessity” is the mainstream understanding of these terms today but it is certainly the way I myself understood these terms.
One of the challenges I faced in studying these medieval philosophers is that they understood “necessity” and “contingency” rather differently than I do. For Aquinas and Scotus, many (although not all) facts about the future are contingent; when such a fact becomes present for Aquinas it becomes necessary and for Scotus it remains contingent; when it is past for both of them it becomes necessary. (This way of looking at facts, as a flow of events from future to past, is to some degree a B-theory perspective.) The deep conviction that the future is open, at least partly contingent, although the past is entirely fixed, necessary, is, of course, the reason why so many philosophers have fought against the consequence argument. The problem these theologians seek to address, as mentioned above, is how to reconcile future contingents with God’s omniscience or foreknowledge which might suggest that everything in the future is fixed. Aquinas’s solution is to put God outside time and space and to say that all history is perceptible for Him (the term he uses is scientia visionis) in the same way the present moment is perceptible for us: what is present to me is in a sense necessary at that moment and all time is present to God and thus in the same sense necessary to Him. According to William Lane Craig’s interpretation of Aquinas, an interpretation I think is fair, Aquinas is distinguishing between two different types of necessity: causal necessity and temporal necessity. Future contingents are contingent in the causal sense (they do not follow necessarily or deterministically from prior causes) but temporally necessary in the same way that my sitting in this chair writing this sentence right now is temporally necessary – at this moment, it could not be any other way. (Distinguishing between different types of necessity is not an uncommon manoeuvre among these theologians: William of Ockham distinguishes between necessity simpliciter and necessity per accidens.) Aquinas’s solution to the problem presumes that the present, like the past, is necessary, but I am not sure if this proposed solution really resolves the problem of future contingents because it does not address our core conviction that if something is contingent, it could be some other way . If God necessarily knows eternally that I will do something in my future, I fail to see how we could then describe my action as contingent. (Nelson Pike (1965) makes a very similar argument). We are forced to agree with Craig that Aquinas must be a B theorist of time (where B theory here refers both to McTaggart’s essay and my own B theory) and that, despite talk of future contingents, it entails the absence of free will. Importantly, because Scotus believes that the present is contingent rather than necessary, Aquinas’s proposed solution is not available to him. I admit it is not clear to me how Scotus reconciles divine foreknowledge with future contingency although he could perhaps be regarded as more of an A-theorist than Aquinas.
The more modern understanding of necessity and contingency is partly anticipated by William of Ockham when he distinguishes between accidentally necessary facts (facts which were contingent when they were in the future but are now past and so fixed, necessary), and facts which are are not strictly about the past and so can, in a sense, be described as contingent even if the propositions through which they are expressed prima facie seem to be concerned with the past. This is another major innovation. Another way of looking at this distinction is, as Marilyn McCord Adams discusses, to see it as being between “hard facts” and “soft facts”. Thus, for instance, “Julius Caesar died in 44BC” expresses a hard fact whereas “God believed eighty years ago that Joe Biden would win the 2024 Presidential Election”, if true, expresses a soft fact. In “On Occam’s Way Out”, (1986( Alvin Plantinga considers various difficulties related to how we can best understand accidental necessity, soft and hard facts, and the idea that some propositions are “strictly about” the past while others are not and concludes that the best way to define accidental necessity is as follows:
p is accidentally necessary at t if and only if p is true at t and it is not possible both that p is true at t and that there exist agents S1 . . . Sn and actions A1 . . . An such that (1) Ai is basic for Si, (2) Si has the power at t or later to perform Ai, and (3) necessarily, if every Si were to perform Ai at t or later, then p would have been false. (p. 261)
There are some problems with this definition. First, Plantinga is not clear in his essay as to why we require the idea of ‘basic action’. Second, Plantinga does not distinguish between necessity simpliciter and necessity per accidens – he is ostensibly defining the second but the definition also applies to the first. There is another significant problem. Suppose t occurs in the future? If it can then, according to the definition, there are three possible options. Either it is possible to have accidentally necessary propositions about the future, or no proposition about the future can be true, or all propositions about the future can potentially be falsified as the result of subsequent actions by an agent or group of agents. Consider now the symmetric case, the proposition “God believed eighty years ago that Jones would mow his lawn last Thursday”. If Jones did not mow his lawn, God’s belief was wrong which is impossible because God is infallible. Therefore Jones never had the power not to mow his lawn last Thursday which would mean that, by definition, the proposition is accidentally necessary. But does this mean that it was accidentally necessary forty years ago? The same three interpretations apply. Either the proposition was accidentally necessary forty years ago even though the mowing was then in the future, or the proposition was not true before last Thursday but became true when Jones mowed his lawn or Jones did indeed have the power forty years ago not to mow his lawn last Thursday despite God’s belief to the contrary. I suspect that Plantinga would reject the first and third option in both sets and embrace the second – Plantinga is following in Aristotle’s footsteps in saying that many propositions about the future are neither true nor false but become true or false when they become present, Aristotle’s own answer, according to the standard interpretation, to the consequence argument and the problem of logical determinism. But, although Aristotle’s solution is Plantinga’s solution, it is not Ockham’s solution. Ockham, as I understand it, believed in the law of the excluded middle as it applies to propositions about the future and believed that God has true knowledge about future contingents. Despite Plantinga’s claim that his essay has shown that “neither God’s foreknowledge nor God’s forebelief poses a threat to human freedom”, it seems to me that his way out is simply to deny that God has infallible knowledge of the future.
Consider, now, that it seems is reasonable to suppose that actions taken in the present can potentially affect the future; if so, it seems reasonable to alter Plantinga’s definition by saying that actions taken before t can potentially falsify p. If this is the case, then all true propositions about the past, present, and future are accidentally necessary except those that could potentially have been falsified by the free actions of agents either before or after. This would accommodate the modern view that Trump’s 2020 loss was contingent rather than necessary. But Ockham, as mentioned above, believed that was no such thing as unrealised potentialities: if there is no such thing as unrealised potentialities, all true propositions, according to both Plantinga’s original definition and the amended definition, must be accidentally necessary. It is not in anyone’s power to change the future, let alone the past.
In their writings, Ockham, and his inheritors Adams and Plantinga, argue that although the future is to some extent open, accidentally necessary facts, facts strictly about the past, are fixed, unalterable. I wish to now approach this idea first through the prism of the A-theory and then the B-theory. Consider the following thought experiment. Suppose a group of powerful authoritarian conspirators seek to erase all traces of Peter Damian from all the libraries and museums and so on, and forbid those philosophers familiar with Damian from talking about him or even mentioning his name. Within a generation, Damian will be forgotten. According to the A theory, this amounts to changing the past (even though these conspirators have acted in the present). To put it another way, if God intervenes tomorrow and erases all evidence that Damian existed from the world, including people’s memories (as God could, being omnipotent), He will then have changed the past even though He is acting in what is today the future. According to the A-theory, the past only exists in people’s minds as it can be inferred or reconstructed from the traces it has left in the present and so we can change the past by changing the present. This suggests that all facts, including those ‘strictly about the past’, are soft (in the sense, for instance, “Julius Caesar died in 44BC” could become false if God decides right now that the present shall be such that he didn’t). If, however, we espouse the B-theory, it is trivially true to say that all facts, including those about the future, are hard. Either way, the hard fact-soft fact distinction collapses.
I wish to conclude this essay by referring back to the A-theory and B-theory I proposed earlier. I have titled this essay “Chance and Necessity” because I believe the only options are indeterminism (in which chance plays a role in the world) or determinism. The A-theory is compatible not only with indeterminism but also, if we accept the argument I proposed above when discussing dependent arising, determinism; the B-theory is, by definition, only compatible with determinism. Can we reconcile these two theories? I would like to suggest, contrary to modal logicians like Lewis, that there is only one world, the actual world, and that it evolves deterministically, necessarily, even if no one but a possibly fictitious omniscient being knows all the facts of past, present and future. How then do we understand statements like “It is possible that the Covid 19 virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan in late 2019” or “It is possible that Joe Biden will win the American presidential election in 2024”? I would argue that when a person articulates such sentences today, she is asserting not that some possible world exist in which the lab leak occurred and others in which it did not, that some possible worlds exist in which Joe Biden will win and some in which he will not, but really rather that the claims these sentences present as possible are either definitely true or false and she doesn’t know which. Talk of possibility is really talk of either uncertainty or ignorance. For centuries, scholars have been spilling ink on the issue of how to reconcile free will with divine omniscience; it seems to me that the simple answer is to either give up on an omniscient God, give up on free will, or give up on both. The A-theory and B-theory are ways of doing just that.
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