The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

The Global Argument Continued 81
argument by trying to show that divine omniscience and human free
willarecompatible,forthatiswhatmosttheistsbelieve.ButIfind
the arguments—which I will not discuss—for the incompatibility of
omniscience and freedom, if not indisputably correct, at least pretty
convincing. I will, rather, respond to the argument by engaging in some
permissible tinkering with the concept of omniscience. At any rate, I
believe it to be permissible. (You will recall that I discussed the question
of what constitutes permissible tinkering with the list of divine attributes
in the second lecture.)
In what follows, I am going to suppose that God is everlasting but
temporal, not outside time. I make this assumption for two reasons.
First, I do not really know how to write coherently and in detail about a
non-temporal being’s knowledge of what is to us the future. Secondly,
it would seem that the problem of God’s knowledge of what is to us the
future is particularly acute if this knowledge is foreknowledge, if what
is from our point of view the future is the future from God’s point of
view as well. 6
In the second lecture, I considered two definitions of omniscience.
Let us look at the problem from the perspective provided by the second
definition: An omniscient being is a being who, for every proposition
believes either that proposition or its denial, and whose beliefs cannot
(this is the ‘cannot’ of metaphysical impossibility) be mistaken. Now
consider these two propositions:
X will freely do A at the future moment t.
Y, a being whose beliefs cannot be mistaken, believes now that X will
do A at t.
These two propositions are consistent with each other or they are not.
If they are consistent, there is no problem of omniscience and freedom.
Suppose they are inconsistent. Then it is impossible for a being whose
beliefs cannot be mistaken now to believe that someone will at some
future moment freely perform some particular action. Hence, if free will
exists, it is impossible for any being to be omniscient. (More exactly:
no being is omniscient in any possible world in which there are free
agents. 7 ) Now this conclusion would seem, at least to the uninitiated,
to tell against not only the possibility of omniscience (given free will),
but the possibility of omnipotence as well. For if the two propositions
are incompatible, then it is intrinsically or metaphysically impossible
for a being whose beliefs cannot be mistaken now to find out what the
future free acts of any agent will be. But this argument is invalid on