The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

Notes 165
the past. But if God is non-temporal, there is no time at which he believes
that I shall lie tomorrow. The fact that he has this belief is therefore not a
fact about the past, and an ability to bring it about that he does not have
this belief is not an ability to change the past.
It is by no means clear that supposing that God is non-temporal
solves the problem of reconciling divine omniscience and human freedom,
for a non-temporal God has the power to reveal to temporal
creatures—prophets—facts about what is to temporal creatures the future,
and one can construct an argument for the incompatibility of non-temporal
divine omniscience and human freedom by appealing to the possibility that
he exercise this power: My ability to tell the truth (when a divinely inspired
prophet has prophesied that I shall lie) must be an ability either to bring
it about that this prophecy was never made—to change the past—or to
bring it about that it was mistaken. Whatever the merits of this argument
may be, however, it is certainly less straightforward than the argument that
is based on the foreknowledge of a God who is in time.
7. I’m trying to avoid merely technical considerations in these lectures. I’ll
leave it to this note to point out that this statement needs qualification. For
suppose that an omniscient being began to exist at t, andthat,although
there had been free agents before t, there would be no free agents at t or
afterwards. That seems possible. But the qualification this would require is
irrelevant to our purposes, since there never was a time when God was not.
(The following two statements would seem to be true without qualification:
no everlasting being is always omniscient in any possible world in which
there are free creatures; if it is possible for there to be creatures with free
will, no necessary being is essentially omniscient.)
8. Cf. Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil, 133–4.
9. I will say this much. In every case in which the biblical narrative might
seem to represent God as foreknowing the free actions of a human being,
either the foreknown action is in fact not free, or the foreknowledge is to
be understood as conditional: knowledge of what the consequences of a
certain free choice would be if it were made.
10. In ‘‘The Christian Theodicist’s Appeal to Love’’, Daniel and Frances
Howard-Snyder defend the position that this thesis, the thesis that free
will is necessary for love, is inconsistent with the Christian doctrine of the
Trinity. The argument, stripped to its bare essentials, is this: according
to that doctrine, the Persons of the Trinity love one another as a matter
of metaphysical necessity. None of the Persons, therefore, has any choice
about whether he shall love either of the others.
I would say this in reply. (I reply as a Christian. A Jew or a Muslim
who wants to make use of the free-will defense in the text will not need
to attend to the matters discussed in this note. But I should not like to
think that the defense I am having Theist present was inconsistent with