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God Knows the True Future: Ockhamism

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Book cover Divine Omniscience and Human Free Will

Part of the book series: Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion ((PFPR))

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Abstract

This chapter is devoted to Ockhamism. We present the main ingredients of this theory: the concepts of true future and soft fact. Then, we provide a semantics that characterizes the Ockhamist view. In the critical part, we scrutinize the notion of soft fact and we advance an argument against the compatibility of Ockhamism and Presentism.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In particular, and less roughly, God is ignorant about the future events that depend on the free choices of agents.

  2. 2.

    Sometimes we will use the label “Eternity” to indicate the timeless existence of God. Of course, this must not be confused with the Eternalism discussed in the metaphysics of time.

  3. 3.

    The End of Timeless God is the title of a book by Mullins (see Mullins 2016), where the author provides good theological arguments to defend the temporality of God.

  4. 4.

    In De Florio et al. (2017), we will provide a model according to which it is possible to maintain that God timelessly knows tensed features of reality contra Craig. We will review this model in Sect. 6.5.

  5. 5.

    For some scholars, the relationship between Classical and Modern Ockhamism is almost a lexical coincidence: according to Arthur Prior, for example, a semantics is Ockhamist if it evaluates propositions with respect to times and histories. On the contrary, others maintain that it can, nonetheless, be useful to point out at least some intuitions that can be ascribed to William of Ockham and that are fundamental in current Ockhamism.

    Ockham advocates the determinateness of the truth of future contingent propositions. For Ockham, future contingent propositions are determinately true or false because the states of affairs to which they correspond will determinately be or not be actually present. (cf. Ockham Tractatus de praedestinatione et de praescientia dei respectu Juturorum contingentium, 1.O–P and Craig (1988, p. 148)).

  6. 6.

    See, for instance, Saunders (1966), Adams (1967).

  7. 7.

    As we will see, Molinism also rejects premise 2 of the fatalist argument, and this connects these two views.

  8. 8.

    Adams (1967), Freddoso (1983), Hoffman and Rosenkrantz (1984), Zemach and Winderker (1987) and Todd (2013) exploit example such as SF1, in order to provide a definition of soft fact.

  9. 9.

    Clearly, not all the correlations are signs of deep causal relationships, as several fallacies show very well.

  10. 10.

    Much ink has been spent on this point. There are accounts of causation that relax this condition, including, for instance, causes contemporary with their effects or forms of backwards causation. We will see these options in a moment.

  11. 11.

    It is contradictory only if a view is embraced whereby the temporal order of events is determined by the causal order of events. For such a view, see Reichenbach (1956).

  12. 12.

    For a discussion on the idea of backward causation, see Craig (1991, pp. 94–157).

  13. 13.

    On this line of thought, see Craig (1986, 1991), Merricks (2009, 2011) also claims that his approach is not committed to backward causation.

  14. 14.

    For instance, Lewis (2013) says: “If c and e are two actual events such that e would have not occurred without c, then c is a cause of e” (p. 563).

  15. 15.

    See, for instance, the collection of excellent essays in Correia and Iacona (2012).

  16. 16.

    A situation similar, in some respects, is Tarski’s famous remark in his Tarski (1944); as is well known, Tarski claims that his conception of truth is compatible with various epistemological and metaphysical views. One can be a realist, idealist and so on and, nevertheless, accept what the semantic theory of truth says about the notion of truth and its formal properties.

  17. 17.

    There are problems with the very formulation of the presentist thesis. See Meyer (2005) and Mozersky (2011).

  18. 18.

    This is Alex Baia’s formulation (see Baia 2012).

  19. 19.

    This is a problem already known by Plato: what makes the proposition “Theaetetus does not fly” true? The alleged negative fact that Theaetetus does not fly? But are there such facts? The truth-making problem also concerns mathematical (a particular case of necessary truths), ethical and aesthetic truths. We are in the Procrustes bed: it is complicated to give up a robust notion of truth in those fields of investigation, but, at the same time, it is committal to buy ontologies that include ethical, mathematical and aesthetic facts.

  20. 20.

    Clearly, the opponents could attack this account on the basis of the poor explanatory power of this view (see, for instance, Jago (2013)) But this debate is out of our goals.

  21. 21.

    As often happens, some positions that belong to the same general strategy of solution are, actually, very different.

  22. 22.

    See, for instance, Bigelow (1996).

  23. 23.

    For haecceitas as truth-makers of past propositions, see Keller (2004, pp. 96–99).

  24. 24.

    For a similar theory, see Keller (2004, pp. 99–101).

  25. 25.

    This point has been advocated in great detail by Tallant and Ingram (2015).

  26. 26.

    For instance, Sanson and Caplan (2010), Tallant (2009a, 2010), Baia (2012), and Tallant and Ingram (2015).

  27. 27.

    For a defence of Tensional TSB, see Tallant (2009a,b, 2010), Sanson and Caplan (2010), Baia (2012), Tallant and Ingram (2015). For criticisms to this principle, see Torrengo (2013, 2014), Asay and Baron (2014), Baron (2015).

  28. 28.

    For a discussion, see Armstrong (2003) and Restall (1996).

  29. 29.

    For a defence of the compatibility of Eternalism and libertarian free will, see Ocklander (1998).

  30. 30.

    Actually, the presentist has at her disposal a third option: she can endorse determinism. This is Markosian (2013)’s view, who states that the grounding of future truths must lie in the present state of the world and the laws that rule it. He argues:

    This is the short version of my proposed solution to The Truthmaker Problem. If things now are such that it is a deterministic matter that there will be Martian outposts in 1000 years, then I say [that this proposition is] true now. Otherwise, I say, let [this proposition] be false now. […] In this way, the truth about the past and the future will be determined by the way present things are right now, in accordance with Presentism and The Truthmaker Principle. (Markosian 2013, p. 7)

    We do not discuss this view since it cannot be defended by the Ockhamist: Ockhamism is, in fact, an indeterminist position. If it were not so, the very concept of TRL would make no sense.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy

    Ciro De Florio & Aldo Frigerio

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  1. Ciro De Florio
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Correspondence to Ciro De Florio .

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De Florio, C., Frigerio, A. (2019). God Knows the True Future: Ockhamism. In: Divine Omniscience and Human Free Will. Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31300-5_4

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