Three fixity principles

In debates about free will and foreknowledge as well as about compatibility and incompatibilism, fixity-of-history theses come up. Here is such a thesis:

1. If a decision is causally or logically necessitated by the history behind the decision, then one could not have decided otherwise.

But now we have a crucial question as to what is meant by “the history behind the decision”. There are at least two takes on this. On the temporal version, the history behind the decision is the sum total of what happened temporally prior to the decision. On the causal version, the history is the sum total of what happend causally prior to the decision.

This is not just a nitpicking question. Linda Zagzebski for instance nicely shows that if we go for the causal-history version of (1), then the main argument for the incompatibility of free will and foreknowledge does not get off the ground assuming God’s forebelief is not causally prior to the action. On the other hand, if we go the temporal-history version, then we have a prima facie argument for such incompatibility (though I think it’s blockable).

I am pretty confident that we should go for the causal-history version, and this has to do with the fact that the temporal-history version is not strong enough to capture our fixity intuitions. Suppose that we live in a world with simultaneous causation—say, a Newtonian world with rigid objects such that if you push object A and A pushes B, then B begins to move at exactly the same time as you start pushing (rather than with a delay caused by then need for a compression wave traveling through nonrigid materials at less than the speed of light). Then we could imagine cases where someone’s decision is causally necessitated by something outside the agent that is simultaneous with the decision. Such causal necessitation would just much make it true that one could not have decided otherwise as would causal necessitation by something in the past.

Furthermore, if backwards causation is possible, then a neurosurgeon in the future who used a backwards-causing machine to determine your decision would clearly prevent you from deciding otherwise, even though the neurosurgeon’s action was not in the temporal history. We may not believe backwards causation is possible, but it is clear that if it were possible, then deterministic backwards causation would be just as threatening for free decisions as deterministic forwards causation. This shows that causal determination is indeed a threat.

Of course, my above argument only shows that if we need to choose between the causal and temporal history versions of (1), we should definitely go for the causal one. But perhaps we don’t need to choose. We could accept both versions. But if we think we accept both versions, I think what we really should accept is an even stronger principle, where “history” is causal-cum-temporal (cct). On that stronger principle, event A counts as in the cct history of event E provided that it is either temporally or causally prior to E. The resulting fixity principle is pretty strong principle, but also a bit gerrymandered. And I think accepting this principle not that plausible, because the much simpler causal version captures our intuitions about all the ordinary cases (not involving God, or backwards or simultaneous causation), since in all ordinary cases causal and temporal history coincide, and we should not go for a more complex principle without pretty good reason.

God's forebeliefs are soft facts

The most commonly discussed argument against the compatibility of foreknowledge and free will is based on the “fixity of the past”—that nothing you can do can affect how things were, and hence nothing you can do can affect what God had believed.

However, everyone except the logical fatalist agrees that the “fixity of the past” does not apply to so-called “soft facts”. An example of a soft fact (an expansion of an example of Richard Gale) is to suppose that Alice drank a cup of poison, but hasn’t died yet. Alice would survive if Bob calls 911, but he’s not going to. Then it’s a fact that Alice drank a fatal cup, but this is a soft fact, and there is no difficulty in saying that Bob can make this fact not to have obtained. It is only the hard facts about the past that are supposed to be fixed.

Thus, much of the discussion has focused on the question of whether God’s past forebeliefs could be soft facts. In this post, I want to note that classical theists have very good reason to think that God’s past forebeliefs are soft facts.

Start with the following plausible principle:

1. If a fact F expressed by a past-tense statement is partly grounded in a fact G about the present or future, then F is a soft fact.

Of course, defining a fact “about the present or future” is just as difficult as defining a soft fact, but I am not trying to give a definition of a soft fact, just giving a sufficient condition for being one.

Now, on classical theism, God is simple and hence has no intrinsic accidental features. God’s beliefs about contingent realities then have to be partly constituted by those contingent realities (this is the extrinsic constitution model, and it is unavoidable). Such partial extrinsic constitution is a type of grounding. Thus, God’s belief in a fact is partly grounded in that fact.

Hence, God’s having believed in a fact about the present or future is partly grounded in that fact, and thus by (1) is a soft fact. And everyone except the logical fatalist agrees that soft facts are not subject to the fixity of the past, and hence soft facts about God’s forebeliefs do not threaten free will.

Causal histories and freedom

Linda Zagzebski proposes the plausible principle that one is able to ϕ only if ϕing is compatible with one’s causal history relevant to ϕing.

Suppose Alice is considering whether to rob a bank. While she is doing so, God loudly announces to her nearby friend Bob that Alice will not rob the bank. God’s announcement is in Swahili, which Bob knows and Alice used to know in childhood but completely forgot. But the sound of the language her loving parents spoke to her as a child leads to Alice putting more emphasis on virtue in her deliberation, and she freely decides not to rob the bank.

Since God cannot lie, and since God’s announcement is a part of Alice’s causal history in her deliberation, Alice’s robbing the bank is incompatible with causal history and by Zagzebski’s principle, Alice cannot rob the bank. Yet it is unclear how God’s announcement removes her freedom to rob. After all, had God announced in Swahili that Alice will have breakfast, that would have influenced her deliberation in the same way, and yet obviously she would still have been free to rob the bank. But since Alice doesn’t know Swahili, the content seems causally irrelevant.

I think there are two ways out of this. First, we might cut events very finely. There is (a) God’s saying something or other in Swahili and there is (b) God’s saying in Swahili that Alice will not rob the bank. To determine the causal history, we pare away from the events all that’s causally irrelevant, and so we include (a) but not (b) in the causal history.

Alternately, we might say this. Whether or not Alice knows Swahili, her decision is affected by the detailed facts about the sounds in God’s announcement. Indeed, by essentiality of origins, her deliberation is a numerically different process because of the difference of sounds. And now we can say that God cannot make the announcement, because doing so would result in a circularity in the explanatory order: God would be making the announcement because Alice is not going to rob and Alice is not going to rob because God is making the announcement because she is not going to rob. So it is not so much that the announcement takes away God’s freedom, but that God cannot produce explanatory circularities.

It’s worth noting that Molinism does not seem to help. Sure, the subjunctive conditional of free will

1. Were God to announce in Swahili that Alice won’t rob, Alice wouldn’t rob

is true. But it is necessarily true independently of Molinism!

From three or four problems of omniscience down to one

The three most influential problems of omniscience are:

1. Boethius’ problem of foreknowledge: What is known is necessarily so, and thus if God knows what you will do, you will necessarily do it.

2. Pike’s problem of foreknowledge: If you can act otherwise, you can thereby make it be that either God didn’t exist or that God wasn’t omniscient or that God had believed otherwise than God actually did, and you just can’t do that.

3. The simplicity and knowledge of contingents problem: If the world had been different, God’s beliefs would have been different, which implies that God’s beliefs are accidents of God, contrary to divine simplicity.

Of these, (1) is fully solved by Boethius/Aquinas by distinguishing between necessity of consequence and necessity of consequent. The problem in (1) is just a simple matter of a fallacy of modal scope ambiguity. It’s a non-problem.

I now want to argue that the most widely accepted solution to (3) also solves (2).

This solution, likely already known to Aquinas, is that God’s belief in contingent facts is partly extrinsically constituted by creatures, and all the contingency is on the created side. For instance, God’s belief that there are zebras is grounded in essential facts about God that do not vary between possible worlds and the actual existence of zebras, which only obtains in some possible worlds.

Suppose we apply this solution to (3). Then God’s belief that you will ϕ at t is partly grounded in your ϕing at t and partly in essential facts about God. At this point it is obvious that:

4. If you were not to ϕ at t, God wouldn’t have believed you would ϕ at t.

For the contingent part of the grounds of God’s believing that you would ϕ at t is your actually ϕing at t, so when you take that away, God’s belief goes away. And if instead you ψ at t, your action thereby constitutes the contingent part of the grounds of God’s believing that you would ψ at t, and so:

5. If you were to ψ at t, God would have believe you would ψ at t.

If God’s past belief is partly constituted by our actions, it is no surprise that there is counterfactual dependence between our actions and God’s past belief. In other words, the classical theist who accepts divine simplicity has a way out of Pike’s argument that is motivated completely independently of considerations of time and freedom, namely by embracing counterfactuals like (4) and (5) that Pike considers absurd.

Of course the extrinsic constitution of divine beliefs is somewhat hard to swallow, notwithstanding excellent work by people like W. Matthews Grant to make it more plausible (I myself have swallowed it). But once we do that, problem (2) is gone, and problem (1) was never there as it was based on a fallacy.

There is a fourth problem, a more recondite one, which is about the incompatibility between God’s knowledge of what time is objectively present (assuming the A-theory of time) and divine immutability. Probably the most extensive pressing of this problem is in Richard Gale’s On the Nature and Existence of God. But Aquinas (according to the very plausible interpretation by Miriam Pritschet in an excellent paper I heard yesterday at the ACPA) responds to the fourth problem precisely by using the extrinsic constitution of God’s knowledge of continent facts (indeed this is why I said that the solution to the simplicity problem was likely known to Aquinas). So even that fourth problem reduces to the third—or just doesn’t get off the ground if the B-theory of time is true.

Open Theism and divine promises

Open Theist Christians tend to think that there are some things God knows about the future, and these include the content of God’s promises to us. God’s promises are always fulfilled.

But it seems that the content of many of God’s promises depends on free choices. For imagine that all the recipients of God’s promise freely choose to release God from the promise; then God would be free not to follow the promise, it appears, and so he could freely choose not to act in according to the promise. Thus there seems to be a sequence of creaturely and divine free choices on which the content of the promise does not come about.

This argument may not work for all of God’s promises. Some of God’s promises are covenants, and it may be that covenants are a type of agreement in which neither party can release the other. There may be other unreleasable promises: perhaps when x promises to punish y, that’s a promise y cannot release x from. But do we have reason to think that God makes no “simple promises”, promises other than covenants and promises of punishment?

I do not think this is a definitive argument against open theism. The open theist can bite the bullet and say that God doesn’t always know he will fulfill his promises. But it is interesting to see that on open theism, God’s knowledge of the future is even more limited than we might have initially thought.

Dry eternity

Koons and I have used causal paradoxes of infinity, such as Grim Reapers, to argue against infinite causal chains, and hence against an infinite causally-interconnected past. A couple of times people have asked me what I think of Alex Malpass’s Dry Eternity paradox, which is supposed to show that similar problems arise if you have God and an infinite future. The idea is that God is going to stop drinking (holy water, apparently!) at some point, and so he determines henceforth to act by the following rule:

1. “Every day, God will check his comprehensive knowledge of all future events to see if he will ever drink again. If he finds that he does not ever drink again, he will celebrate with his final drink. On the other hand, if he finds that his final drink is at some day in the future, he does not reward himself in any way (specifically, he does not have a drink all day).”

This leads to a contradiction. (Either there is or is not a day n such that God does not drink on any day after n. If there is such a day, then on day n + 1 God sees that he does not drink on any day after n + 1 and so by the rule God drinks on day n + 1. Contradiction! If there is no such day, then on every day n God sees that he will drink on a day later than n, and so he doesn’t drink on n, and hence he doesn’t ever drink, so that today is a day such that God does not drink on any day after it. Contradiction, again!)

Is this a problem for an infinite future? I don’t think so. For sonsider this rule.

2. On Monday, God will drink if and only if he foresees that he won’t drink on Tuesday. On Tuesday, God will drink if and only if he remembers that he drank on Monday.

Obviously, this is a rule God cannot adopt for Monday and Tuesday, since then God drinks on Monday if and only if God doesn’t drink on Monday. But this paradox doesn’t involve an infinite future, just two days.

What’s going on? Well it looks like in (2) there are two divine-knowledge-based rules—one for Monday and one for Tuesday—each of which can be adopted individually, but which cannot both be adopted, much like in (1) there are infinitely any divine-knowledge-based rules—one for each future day—any finite number of which can be adopted, but where one cannot adopt infinitely many of them.

What we learn from (2) is that there are logical limits to the ways that God can make use of divine foreknowledge. From (2), we seem to learn that one of these logical limits is that circularity needs to be avoided: a decision on Monday that depends on a decision on Tuesday and vice versa. From (1), we seem to learn that another one of these logical limits is that ungrounded decisional regresses need to be avoided: a decision that depends on a decision that depends on a decision and so on ad infinitum. This last is a divine analogue to causal finitism (the doctrine that nothing can have infinitely many things in its causal history), while what we got from (2) was a divine analogue to the rejection of causal circularity. It would be nice if there were some set of principles that would encompass both the divine and the non-divine cases. But in any case, Malpass’s clever paradox does no harm to causal finitism, and only suggests that causal finitism is a special case of a more general theory that I have yet to discover the formulation of.

Molinism and prophecy

Here’s a curious puzzle. Every theist—including the Molinist and the Open Theist—will presumably agree that this conditional is true:

1. If God were to announce that Trump will freely refrain from tweeting tomorrow, then Trump would freely refrain from tweeting tomorrow.

After all, both presumably accept that God wouldn’t affirm what he didn’t know to be the case.

However, plainly, the truth of (1) isn’t enough to justify God in announcing that Trump will freely refrain from tweeting tomorrow. For, plainly, something like Molinist middle knowledge or mere foreknowledge or theistic compatibilism would be needed for God to be justified in issuing the prophecy. Something like (1) that holds independently of theories of divine foreknowledge is not going to do the trick.

Suppose now Molinism is true. It seems to be one of the advantages of Molinism that it can explain prophecy. But what relevant proposition beyond (1) does God know in the Molinist case that justifies his announcement?

Here is one possibility:

2. Trump will freely refrain from tweeting tomorrow.

But God’s knowing (2) is insufficient to justify God’s announcement. For imagine that the reason why Trump will refrain from tweeting tomorrow is that Trump likes to surprise people and nobody predicted that he wouldn’t tweet tomorrow. Then (2) can still be true—but if that’s the reason why (2) is true, then the truth of (2) won’t justify God in announcing that Trump won’t tweet.

I think what we want to say is that on Molinism what justifies God’s announcement is something like this:

3. Claim (1) holds not just because God’s announcements are always true.

But now here is the problem. If claim (1) holds not just because God’s announcements are always true, there must be some further explanation for why claim (1) is true other than just because God’s announcements are always true. But what is that explanation? Presumably it lies in the truth of some Molinist conditional. But it seems that the most relevant Molinist conditional is (1) itself, and that just won’t do.

Here’s another way of putting the point. The Molinist’s best response to the grounding objection is to say that Molinist conditionals are true but ungrounded. Such a Molinist has to say that the only reason (1) is ever true is that God doesn’t make untrue announcements. But, plausibly, if the only reason (1) is true is that God doesn’t make untrue announcements, then God isn’t justified in issuing the announcement. So God is never justified in issuing the announcement.

If I were a Molinist, I would say that God cannot make prophecies that end up being explanatorily prior to the prophesied actions. But if one makes that restriction, one might as well accept mere foreknowledge.

Open theism and technical formal epistemology

If open theism is true and there is an infinite future afterlife full of free choices, then some of the puzzling cases involving non-measurable sets and probability that I like to discuss on this blog are faced by God. For any set A of sets of natural numbers, there is the proposition p_A that the set of days in heaven on which David will dance a jig is a member of A. But it seems likely that some sets A will be non-measurable relative to the relevant probability measure.

So, open theists should have motivation to work on highly technical formal epistemology. The more working on that, the merrier. :-)

Open theism and "never" facts

Suppose a version of open theism on which facts about future free choices have non-trivial truth values which God doesn’t know. Then here is a disquieting feature of this open theism, given eternal life. It implies that there are truths that God never finds out.

For instance, even in an infinite future, there are free actions that I will never do, but which I will have an opportunity to do on infinitely many days. For instance, perhaps I will never sing Amazing Grace three minutes to midnight on a Tuesday, or drink wine at 7:12 am of a prime-numbered day (numbering, say, from the first day of eternal life), even though both of these are possible. Likely, I will never recite all of War and Peace in French, though I would be free to do so. But such “never” facts facts will always depend on future free actions. Thus, on the variety of open theism under discussion, God will never know these facts. He will always just know an increasing number of “never-yet” facts: Alex has never yet recited War and Peace in French, but maybe he will.

It seems harder to reconcile the existence of facts that God will never know with omniscience than the existence of facts that God does not yet know. If there are facts that God will never know, then there is an aspect of reality that is closed to God. That can’t be right.

It’s worse than that. On this version of open theism, not only are there truths that God never comes to know, but there are truths that God never comes to know but that he can know. Here is an example: Either today I don’t write a blog post or I never recite War and Peace in French (assuming that I won’t recite it). Since God will always know that I do write a blog post today, he won’t know this disjunction, or else he’d be able to figure out from it that I will never recite War and Peace in French. (Cf. this paper.)

This is an uncomfortable position.

Truth-value open theism

Consider the view that there are truth values about future contingents, but (as Swinburne and van Inwagen think) God doesn’t know future contingents. Call this “truth-value open theism”.

1. Necessarily, a perfectly rational being believes anything there is overwhelming evidence for.

2. Given truth-value open theism, God has overwhelming but non-necessitating evidence for some future contingent proposition p.

3. If God has overwhelming but non-necessitating evidence for some contingent proposition p, there is a possible world where God has overwhelming evidence for p and p is false.

4. So, if truth-value open theism is true, either (a) there is a possible world where God fails to believe something he has overwhelming evidence for or (b) there is a possible world where God believes something false. (2-3)

5. So, if truth-value open theism is true, either (a) there is a possible world where God fails to be perfectly rational or (b) there is a possible world where God believes something false. (1,4)

6. It is an imperfection to possibly fail to be perfectly rational.

7. It is an imperfection to possibly believe something false.

8. So, if truth-value open theism is true, God has an imperfection. (6-7)

And God has no imperfections.

To argue for (2), just let p be the proposition that somebody will freely do something wrong over the next month. There is incredibly strong inductive evidence for (2).

Open theism and divine perfection

1. It is an imperfection to have been close to certain of something that turned out false.

2. If open theism is true, God was close to certain of propositions that turned out false.

3. So, if open theism is true, God has an imperfection.

4. God has no imperfections.

5. So, open theism is not true.

I think (1) is very intuitive and (4) is central to theism. It is easy to argue for (2). Consider giant sentence of the form:

6. Alice’s first free choice on Monday is F₁, Bob’s first free choice on Tuesday is F₂, Carol’s first free choice on Tuesday is F₃, …

where the list of names ranges over the names of all people living on Monday, and the F_i are "right", "not right" and "not made" (the last means that the agent will not make any free choices on Tuesday).

Exactly one proposition of the form (6) ends up being true by the end of Monday.

Suppose we’re back on the Sunday before that Monday. Absent the kind of knowledge of the future that the open theist denies to God, God will rationally assign probabilities to propositions of the form (6). These probabilities will all be astronomically low. Even though Alice may be very virtuous and her next choice is very likely to be right, and Bob is vicious and his next choice is very likely to be wrong, etc., given that any proposition of the form (6) has 7.6 billion conjuncts, the probability of that proposition is tiny.

Thus, on Sunday God assigns miniscule probabilities to all the propositions of the form (6), and hence God is close to certain of the negations of all such propositions. But come Tuesday, one of these negated propositions turns out to be false. Therefore, on Tuesday—i.e., today—there a proposition that turned out false that God was close to certain of. And that yields premise (2).

(I mean all my wording to be neutral between the version of open theism where future contingents have a truth value and the one where they do not.)

Moreover, even without considerations of perfections, being close to certain of something that will turn out to be false is surely inimical to any plausible notion of omniscience.

Open theism and utilitarianism

Here’s an amusing little fact. You can’t be both an open theist and an act utilitarian. For according to the act utilitarian, to fail to maximize utility is wrong. It is impossible for God to do the wrong thing. But given open theism, it does not seem that God can know enough about the future in order to be necessarily able to maximize utility.

Do God's beliefs cause their objects?

Consider this Thomistic-style doctrine:

1. God’s believing that a contingent entity x exists is the cause of x’s existing.

Let B be God’s believing that I exist. Then, either

2. B exists in all possible worlds

or

3. B exists in all and only the worlds where I exist.

(Formally, there are other options, but they have no plausibility. For instance, it would be crazy to think B exists in some but not all the worlds where I exist, or in some but not all the worlds where I don’t exist.)

Let’s consider (3) first. This, after all, seems the more obvious option. God’s beliefs are necessarily correct, so in worlds where I don’t exist, God doesn’t believe that I exist, and hence B doesn’t exist. Then, B is a contingent being that causes my existing. Now apply the Thomistic principle to this contingent being B. It exists, so God believing that B exists is the cause of B’s existing. Let B₂ be God’s believing that B exists. Since B₂ causes B, B₂ must be distinct from B, as causation cannot be circular. Furthermore, if (3) is the right option in respect of B and me, then an analogue for B₂ and B should hold: B₂ will exist in all and only the worlds where B exists. The argument repeats to generate an infinite regress of divine believings: B_n is God’s believing that B_n − 1 exists and B_n causes B_n − 1. This regress appears vicious.

So, initial appearances aside, (3) is not the way to go.

Let’s consider (2) next. Then B exists in some possible world w₁ where I don’t exist. Now, at w₁, God doesn’t believe that I exist, since necessarily God’s beliefs are correct. This seems to be in contradiction to the claim that B exists at w₁. But it is only in contradiction if it is true at w₁ that B is God’s believing that I exist. But perhaps it’s not! Perhaps (a) the believing B exists at the actual world and at w₁ but with different content, or (b) B exists at w₁ but isn’t a believing at w₁.

Let’s think some more about (2). Let w₂ be a world where only God exists (I am assuming divine simplicity; without divine simplicity, it might be that in any world where God exists, something else exists—viz., a proper part of God). Then by (2), B exists at w₂. But only God exists at w₂. So, God is identical to B at w₂. But identity is necessary. Thus, God is actually identical to B. Moreover, what goes for B surely goes for all of God’s believings. Thus, all of God’s believings are identical with God.

It is no longer very mysterious that God’s believing that I exist is the cause of my existence. For God’s believing that I exist is identical with God, and of course God is the cause of my existence.

The difficulty, however, is with the radical content variation. The numerically same mental act B is actually a believing that I exist, while at w₂ it is a believing that I don’t exist. Furthermore, if truthmaking involves entailment, we can no longer say that B truthmakes that God believes that I exist. For B can exist without God’s believing that I exist.

All this pushes back against (1). But now recall that I only called (1) a “Thomistic-style” doctrine, not a doctrine of St. Thomas. The main apparent source for the doctrine is Summa Theologica I.14.8. But notice some differences between what Aquinas says and (1).

The first is insignificant with respect to my arguments: Thomas talks of knowledge rather than belief. But (1) with knowing in place of believing is just as problematic. Obviously, it can’t be a necessary truth that God knows that I exist, since it’s not a necessary truth that I exist.

The second difference is this. In the Summa, Aquinas doesn’t seem to actually say that God’s knowledge that x exists is the cause of x’s existence. He just says that God’s knowledge is the cause of x’s existence. Perhaps, then, it is God’s knowledge in general, especially including knowledge such necessary truths as that x would have such-and-such nature, that is the cause of x’s existence. If so, then God’s knowledge would be a non-determining cause of things—for it could cause x but does not have it (and, indeed, in those worlds where x does not exist, it does not cause x). This fits well with what Aquinas says in Article 13, Reply 1: “So likewise things known by God are contingent on account of their proximate causes, while the knowledge of God, which is the first cause, is necessary.”

Maybe. I don’t know.

Open theism and risk

We have many well-justified beliefs about how people will freely act. For instance, I have a well-justified belief that at most a minority of my readers will eat a whole unsweetened lemon today. Yet most of you can. (And maybe one or two of you will.) Notice that a fair amount of our historical knowledge is based on closely analogous judgments. When we engage in historical analysis we base ourselves on knowledge of how people freely act individually or en masse. We know that various historical events occurred because of what we know about how people who report historical events behave--given what we know about human character, we know the kinds of things they are likely to tell the truth about, the kinds of things they are likely to lie about and the kinds of things they are likely to be mistaken about. But it would be strange to claim knowledge about past human behavior and disclaim knowledge about future human behavior when exactly similar probabilistic regularities give us both.

But if open theism is true, then God cannot form such beliefs about the future. For open theists agree that God is essentially infallible in his beliefs: it is impossible for God to hold a false belief. But if God were in a habit of forming beliefs about how people will in fact act, then in at least some possible worlds, and probably in this one as well, God would have false beliefs—it may be 99.99% certain that I won't eat a whole unsweetened lemon today, but that just means that there is a 0.01% chance that I will.

So the open theist, in order to hold on to divine infallibility, must say that God keeps from having beliefs on evidence that does not guarantee truth. Why would God keep himself from having such beliefs, given that they seem so reasonable? Presumably to avoid the risk of being wrong about something.

But now notice that open theism has God take really great risks. According to open theism, in creating the world, God took the risk of all sorts of horrendous evils. The open theist God is not at all averse to taking great risks about creation. So why would he be so averse to taking risks with his beliefs?

The open theists who think that there are no facts about the future have an answer here. They will say that my belief that at most a minority of my readers will eat a whole unsweetened lemon today is certainly not true, since the fact alleged does not obtain, and hence that I shouldn't have this belief. Instead, I should have some probabilistic belief, like that present conditions have a strong tendency to result in the nonconsumption of these lemons. My argument here is not addressed to these revisionists.

Limiting God to solve the problem of evil

Long ago, I remember reading with great curiosity Rabbi Kushner's Why Bad Things Happen to Good People? How disappointing that Kushner's intellectual answer seemed to be that God isn't omnipotent. (His practical answer not to worry about the question but just to do good is much better.) The idea of limiting divine attributes in part to answer the problem of evil has recently had some defense (e.g., here and in the work of open theists), so I guess it's time to blog the objection to Kushner—which applies to the others as well—that I had when I read him, with some elaboration.

Basically, the objection is that as long as God remains pretty good, pretty smart (he was smart enough to create us!) and powerful enough to communicate with us (Kushner at least accepts this), then serious cases of the Problem of Evil remain. Moreover, these cases do not seem significantly easier to solve than the cases of the Problem of Evil that were removed. Consequently, the intellectual benefit with regard to the Problem of Evil is small. And the intellectual loss with regard to the simplicity of the theory is great—the theory that God has all perfections is far simpler.

Start by considering a deity whose goodness is unlimited but whose knowledge and power are fairly limited.

Consider, first, the problem of polio. This is certainly a horrendous evil. And the limited deity could have alleviated a significant portion of the problem hundreds of years earlier simply by whispering into some people's ears how to make a vaccine—surely any deity smart enough to create this world would be smart enough to figure out how to make vaccines. Maybe the limited deity couldn't have prevented all cases, in the way that an unlimited God could. But given that neither did the wholesale prevention happen nor did the partial prevention by vaccines happen as early as it could have.

Consider, second, the many cases where innocent people suffered horrendously at the hands of attackers, where the attack could have been prevented if the people had been warned. Even a deity of limited power and knowledge should be able to see, for instance, that the Gestapo are talking about heading for such-and-such a house, and could then warn the occupants. (I am not saying that such warnings were never given—for all I know, they were in a number of cases. But I am saying that there are many cases where apparently they were not.)

Moreover, even if one limits the goodness of the deity, and only claims that he is pretty good, the problem remains. For unless the deity had a very serious reason not to tell people about vaccines and not to warn the innocent victims of horrendous attacks, it seems plausible that the deity did something quite bad in refraining from helping, so bad as to be incompatible with being pretty good. (If the deity had a reason that fell a little short of justifying the refraining, then that might be compatible with being pretty good; but a reason would have to be pretty serious for it to fall only a little short of justifying the refraining when the evils are so horrendous.) So even if one thinks that the deity has limited power and knowledge and is only pretty good, the problem of finding very serious reasons for the deity's non-interference remains.

Granted, the problem is diminished, especially if one has decreased the belief in divine goodness. But notice that the decrease in belief in divine goodness is the most religiously troubling aspect of a limited God doctrine. And even that does not make the problem go away.

Moreover, the sorts of things one can then plausibly say about the remaining problems of evil are things that, I suspect, the traditional theist can say as well about this and many other cases. Perhaps God does not prevent all attacks on innocent people (for all we know, he prevents many) because he wants humans to have effective freedom of will. Perhaps he wants to give victims opportunities for forgiveness of their aggressors in an afterlife. Perhaps God does not prevent disease because he wants us to help our neighbor and to develop medical science to this purpose. Or to give us an opportunity to join him on the cross in redeeming humankind. Or perhaps God prevents many evils, but his purposes do not allow him to prevent all, and some arbitrary line-drawing is needed. I am not saying that these answers are sufficient (though I think some contain a kernel of something right), but only that they can be equally used in the case of a limited and unlimited God, and in the case of an unlimited God such answers may well have rather general applicability.