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Alan Rhoda
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Date Joined May 2002
Total Posts : 680
| Posted 5/4/2007 3:00 AM (GMT -6) |   | Suppose that free will theism is true.
Free will theism entails theism, the thesis that God exists, where 'God' is understood to denote a necessary being essentially possessing the greatest possible set of compossible great-making properties, including maximal power, knowledge, and goodness.
Free will theism also entails that God has created a world of creatures some of which are free in the 'libertarian' sense. Libertarian freedom is incompatible with determinism and thus implies that the future is 'causally open' with respect to creaturely free choices. In other words, there are 'future contingents'.
Suppose further that presentism is true. Presentism is the thesis that whatever exists, exists now, in the present.
Grant both of those theses (free will theism and presentism), along with two additional widely accepted notions - the correspondence theory of truth and the causal dependency of later states on earlier states - and one gets a straightforward argument for open theism, a species of free will theism that holds that the future is epistemically open for God in precisely those respects in which it is causally open.
Here's the argument:
1. God’s knowledge corresponds to what is true. (divine omniscience)
2. What is true corresponds to what is real. (correspondence theory of truth)
3. God’s knowledge corresponds to what is real. (from 1 and 2)
4. What is real corresponds to what is present. (presentism)
5. God’s knowledge corresponds to what is present. (from 3 and 4)
6. What is future stands to what is present as an effect does to its cause. (time order of causal dependency)
7. The future is epistemically settled for God iff the future is fully ‘present in its causes’. (from 5 and 6)
8. The future is not fully present in its causes. (future contingency)
9. The future is not epistemically settled for God. (from 7 and 8) | | Back to Top | | |
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PotOnWheel
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 5/4/2007 4:46 PM (GMT -6) | |
Alan Rhoda said...
Free will theism also entails that God has created a world of creatures some of which are free in the 'libertarian' sense. Libertarian freedom is incompatible with determinism and thus implies that the future is 'causally open' with respect to creaturely free choices. In other words, there are 'future contingents'.
Allen let me try. (Please.) You couched everything just fine. But let me highlight a part that seems important to me:
While "liberty" to act with free will is real, and while the "openness" of the future does contain "causual-nesses". . . that it not the whole story. (I can tell you are not saying that it is.) Also part of this is the goal-for-which-created or the inner-nature-as-created.
Even the Canons of Dort describe the depravity of the fall as a "bending" which does not eliminate the nature from the Creation. That nature remains, even if "fallen."
Here's something that occurs to me: You'd have to be a hyper-calvinist to be a super-libertarian!
What do I mean by that? I'm seeing a similarity with "hyper-calvinism" that lacks an appreciation of free will (Calvinist's I know, from Calvin College, highly appreciate free will!) and a hypothetical position I'll call "superlibertarian" which would also lack free will by virtue of how run away freedom can make us depart from our created nature.
This occurs to me against the backdrop of discussions D. is having.
What the nature of "cause" is interests me, and I think D. too.
THIS SHOWS A NON-HYPERCALVINIST POSITION, AND RELATES TO D'S CONCERNS.
Notice what the Banner article quotes from Dort:
Point three, Article 16 of the canons says, "Just as by the fall man did not cease to be man, endowed with intellect and will, and just as sin, which has spread through the whole human race, did not abolish the nature of the human race but distorted and spiritually killed it, so also this divine grace of regeneration. . . does not act in people as if they were blocks and stones; nor does it abolish the will. . . and its properties or coerce a reluctant will by force, but spiritually revives, heals, reforms. . ., and—in a manner at once pleasing and powerful—bends it back. As a result, a ready and sincere obedience of the Spirit now begins to prevail where before the rebellion and resistance of the flesh were completely dominant. It is in this that the true and spiritual restoration and freedom of our will consists. Thus, if the marvelous Maker of every good thing were not dealing with us, man would have no hope of getting up from his fall by his free choice, by which he plunged himself into ruin when still standing upright."
Reformed Matters: Whatever Happened to Free Will?
by Rob Braun
http://www.thebanner.org/magazine/article.cfm?article_id=994
Seems to me that the Greek Fathers chose to speak of the "image and likeness" of Christ. We are created "after the image" of Christ, and fail to reflect "the likeness." Imagine a mirror that is smeared and who's bends distort the reflected image in strange ways.
I'm glad to see Dort using the language of "bent" and "bent back." I hope that all Calvinists get in the habbit of using that imagery in their thinking.
I appreciated your post, Alan. Thanks.
Bruce
(o)Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 5/6/2007 10:47:39 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
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Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 5/5/2007 10:37 AM (GMT -6) | | MANY: Sounds good. I wonder if some will want refinement or qualification on the movement in steps 1 to 3. It might sound like God's knowledge of reality is propositional first or even only. But we talked back awhile about God's knowledge of the world being direct and unmediated by propositions. Is it that God's experience of the world gets expressed propositionally? Of is it that God's experience of the world is propositional, period? Some might wonder how this question figures into props 1, 2, and 3.
Jeff: Interestingly, Alan's 1) doesn't even require omniscience. It only requires that WHAT God knows is true. This is why open theism is not only for Anselmian theists. In short, OT is just taking traditionally-held definitions of causality (final and non-final) to their logical implications.
To escape these implications, I don't see how one can do anything but appeal to mystery--UNNECESSARILY. It's the same move that Sirkeled? made a while back. That move requires defining "perfect" in such a way that incoherence is inevitable. But if you think about it, there's no way the Anselmian approach can avoid the fact that the formation of the concept "perfect" requires psychological development. Infants have no such clearly-defined concept as far as I can tell. And even Alan speaks of "compossible" perfections. And what does "compossible" mean except that which is possible for humans to conceive coherently?
Hence, even the Anselmian ontological approach seems to require some psychological development to account for the true definition of "perfection." For this reason, it seems that that psychological process needs to be accounted for and described before we can really see how the Anselmian approach is actually different than Noah Porter's approach--that the human mind sees God as the final cause (=creator) that grounds the intelligibility of the world--and as having those very attributes necessary to render that ground sufficient to account for what seem to be brute facts about the world, given the categories that regulate our apprehension of it.
I have a hard time seeing how Anselm, or anyone, can account for the proper development of the concept "perfect" (in the theologically ontological sense of that word) without alluding at some point to the more fundamental idea of final cause. And I suspect that when that process is explicated, it really is just what Noah Porter argued for over 100 years ago. And that is a process which rules out an APRIORI human definition or idea of "perfection"--as does Alan's "compossible" qualification, to my mind, since conceiving what is compossible is an act of forming concepts.
Hence, Anselm's argument can only be truly APRIORI if the same concept of "perfect" is universally held in all functioning human minds without any psychological development whatsoever required for the formation of that concept. That seems very implausible to me. Much more does it seem implausible to me that there is an APRIORI proposition that is universally held by all functioning human minds ("There EXISTS a PERFECT being").
Post Edited (jefscott) : 5/5/2007 10:47:07 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Alan Rhoda
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Date Joined May 2002
Total Posts : 680
| Posted 5/5/2007 3:40 PM (GMT -6) | | Thanks for the comments, guys. Few brief thoughts:
Tom, you raise a good question about the nature of God's thought, but it's one I'd like to bracket if possible. For my purposes here I think it suffices to say that "truth" is a relational property had by a truthbearer (a representation of a conceivable state of affairs) iff its corresponding truthmaker (the represented state of affairs) obtains. And I would like to say that God knows that a truthbearer is true iff it is true.
Jeff, you're right that each of my (1)-(5) can be read as one-way conditionals rather than as biconditionals, but I want to read them in the stronger, biconditional sense. Thus, "corresponds to" should be read as an "if and only if". I'll have to spell it out more precisely.
Also, Jeff, when I speak of God's exemplifying the greatest possible set of "compossible" great-making properties, I don't mean compossible in the sense of "conceivable to us humans without obvious or apparent contradiction". No, I mean "conceivable to a cognitively ideal agent without contradiction". In other words, I want "compossible" properties to be one's that are really co-possible and not just apparently so from a finite or limited perspective.
POW, as often, the point of your comments is rather opaque to me. I don't get the sense that you're challenging either my premises or my logic. Nor do I get the sense that you're asking for clarification. Instead, it looks to me like you're using a couple of my thoughts as a springboard to advance some of your own thoughts on a different topic. That said, your slogan "You'd have to be a hyper-calvinist to be a super-libertarian" is hard to assess because (1) you don't define your terms (what's a 'super-libertarian'?), and (2) you don't make explicit the rationale behind your claim, but leave it to the rest of us to read between the lines. Offhand, I'd say that the connection you want to make is to say that both 'hyper-calvinists' and 'super-libertarians' effectively ignore human nature. But if that's the idea, why didn't you simply say so?
Regards,
Alan | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
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Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 5/5/2007 6:14 PM (GMT -6) | | Alan: when I speak of God's exemplifying the greatest possible set of "compossible" great-making properties, I don't mean compossible in the sense of "conceivable to us humans without obvious or apparent contradiction". No, I mean "conceivable to a cognitively ideal agent without contradiction". In other words, I want "compossible" properties to be one's that are really co-possible and not just apparently so from a finite or limited perspective.
Jeff: How can positing "compossible" properties "that are REALLY co-possible" do us any good epistemologically unless they are those which are "apparently so from a finite limited perspective?" We assume, do we not, that the very conceptual limitations imposed by our categories of causality is what rules out EDF. This is all I'm arguing for. That there is no universal apriori concept for "perfect" or universal apriori proposition held by all functioning minds.
I contend, rather, that our knowledge is worked out inductively and deductively from our experience, with the inductive and deductive processes themselves being grounded in those categorical relations universally apprehended by humanity. This means that to the extent that the ontological approach to modeling God is valid, it must explain itself. It's not grounded in apriori concepts or propositions. I've never seen it explained. It's just asserted as if it's obvious. To me (and to most people, I think) it's not obvious at all.
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Alan Rhoda
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Total Posts : 680
| Posted 5/5/2007 7:24 PM (GMT -6) | | Jeff: How can positing "compossible" properties "that are REALLY co-possible" do us any good epistemologically?
Alan: I'm not addressing epistemological considerations in my argument. It's intended only as a metaphysical argument. It's important to keep distinct the metaphysical question "Are these two properties compossible?" (Can they be co-exemplified in the same individual?) from the epistemological question "How can we ascertain whether these two properties are compossible?" We don't need an answer to the latter in order to make sense of the metaphysical claim that God's properties, whatever they are exactly, are compossible. What good does this do epistemologically, you ask? It helps us better to understand the conceptions we have so that when we get around to asking "Is this true?" we have a better idea of what sorts of arguments and evidence would even be relevant to answering the epistemological question.
Jeff: I contend, rather, that our knowledge is worked out inductively and deductively from our experience.
Alan: Sure it is, but the issue here isn't how we know whether a certain idea is true (such as the compossibility of God's properties), but rather what follows on the assumption that the idea is true. We couldn't even ask the epistemological question "How can we know that p" if we didn't already have a conception of p. All that metaphysical argumentation requires is that we have conceptions. How we get them and whether they are accurate or true are independent considerations. | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
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Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 5/5/2007 8:26 PM (GMT -6) | | | Alan: Sure it is, but the issue here isn't how we know whether a certain idea is true (such as the compossibility of God's properties), but rather what follows on the assumption that the idea is true.
Jeff: Right. But as I said, your syllogism works just fine with saying something as limited as, "What God knows is true." It doesn't require any specific claim about what constitutes perfect knowledge or whether there is such a thing. That's all I'm arguing. I'm allowing for non-Anselmians to be open theists.
Alan: We couldn't even ask the epistemological question "How can we know that p" if we didn't already have a conception of p. All that metaphysical argumentation requires is that we have conceptions. How we get them and whether they are accurate or true are independent considerations.
Jeff: Right, but we can conceive things that are logically consistent, and yet absurd. It can be logically consistent (in the mere sense of formal logical consistency) to claim we are in a matrix, or that we were created 5 minutes ago with all of our apparent memories. But who's gonna believe that? At some point, claims have to be justified in terms of how people think. It is not enough to claim something simply because it can not be proven to be incoherent. There are an infinite number of such claims that are, themselves, mutually exclusive.
The syllogism works fine just the way you wrote it. It doesn't matter whether people get their ideas about God by some kind of apriori, ontological proof or not. The syllogism just requires that IF there is a God, and IF what He knows is true and the rest about causality, THEN the future is not epistemically settled for God.
I just don't see the need in marrying a specific brand of ontological theology to open theism. But you seem to be doing that in your last paper and in your introductory post. For you say, there, "Free will theism entails theism, the thesis that God exists, where 'God' is understood to denote a necessary being essentially possessing the greatest possible set of compossible great-making properties, including maximal power, knowledge, and goodness.."
But why go beyond free-will and the existence of God? Those specific "perfect" claims about God are independent of those claims that get us to open theism in the causal sense of openness. That's why I would say a process theist is an open theist. Because he/she typically holds to your causal claims, a belief in LFW, and the existence of God. These are all that is necessary to make the syllogism work.
It seems like you're trying to say that open theism can only be true if God is understood as some very specific ontological conception rather than something as simple as the creator of the world. I don't see that logical connection. And I'm always troubled when people seem to want to present things less inclusively than they need to to make their point. Not saying your doing that. It just seems that way. Which is why I a get on my soap box about it every time. 
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PotOnWheel
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 5/5/2007 9:54 PM (GMT -6) | |
Alan Rhoda said...
POW, as often, the point of your comments is rather opaque to me. I don't get the sense that you're challenging either my premises or my logic. Nor do I get the sense that you're asking for clarification. Instead, it looks to me like you're using a couple of my thoughts as a springboard to advance some of your own thoughts on a different topic. That said, your slogan "You'd have to be a hyper-calvinist to be a super-libertarian" is hard to assess because (1) you don't define your terms (what's a 'super-libertarian'?), and (2) you don't make explicit the rationale behind your claim, but leave it to the rest of us to read between the lines. Offhand, I'd say that the connection you want to make is to say that both 'hyper-calvinists' and 'super-libertarians' effectively ignore human nature. But if that's the idea, why didn't you simply say so?
Yes, thank you Alan, my point is exactly that: "both 'hyper-calvinists' and 'super-libertarians' effectively ignore human nature." Thank you for saying it that way for me. I thought that the notion is interesting. Part of the reason this interests me is that--perhaps--not many here think of Calvinists at all, but my kids go to a Westminster Confession junior and high school.
And you are right, I didn't define the terms. I might have made up the second (superlibertarian); but "hyper-calvinism" is something Calvinists talk about and have to deal with in their neighborhood. Again, my kids have to deal with it.
And you are correct again, that I did not "challenge either your premises or your logic?" My only intention was to read what you'd written and to think about it. And when I moved to apply it to my own neighborhood, I got some things that are very useful to me.
Thanks.
Thank you for keeping my mind engaged for a while! 
(P.S. This post has been revised. The original was dashed off when my nephew's life was in danger: needing an operation while also getting married. He made it to the hospital and they helped him. His wife slept their wedding night in the same room on the bed next to him. We are releaved now. Thanks.)
(o)Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 5/7/2007 10:55:06 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Alan Rhoda
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Total Posts : 680
| Posted 5/6/2007 9:17 PM (GMT -6) | | Jeff: But why go beyond free-will and the existence of God? Those specific "perfect" claims about God are independent of those claims that get us to open theism in the causal sense of openness. That's why I would say a process theist is an open theist. Because he/she typically holds to your causal claims, a belief in LFW, and the existence of God. These are all that is necessary to make the syllogism work.
Alan: I understand what you're driving at, Jeff, and I understand the rationale for wanting to define 'open theism' more inclusively than I have so as to make room for process theists in a sort of "big tent". My worries with this are twofold. One, we can't allow the tent to stretch indefinitely. Unless we are prepared to say something fairly definite about what sort of being the term 'God' minimally denotes, 'theism' ceases to be a meaningful term. So we've got to draw a line at some point. Two, at which point should we draw the line? I appeal to establish usage. The reason why I define OT so as to exclude process theism is because all of the major self-professed open theists (Hasker, Boyd, Sanders, Basinger, Rice, Pinnock, etc.) have explicitly contrasted OT with process theism. Consequently, to use the phrase 'open theism' in an "inclusive" sense, such that process theists would qualify, amounts to hijacking already established terminology. Rather than aiding ongoing discussion, I fear this would result in unnecessary linguistic confusion and to a blurring of important distinctions. | | Back to Top | | |
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Alan Rhoda
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Total Posts : 680
| Posted 5/7/2007 12:16 PM (GMT -6) | | Jeff: Don't process theists reject EDF for the same reasons (those of your syllogism) we do? I certainly oppose many [tenets] of process theism. But I was of the understanding that they rejected EDF for pretty much the same reasons we do.
Alan: I think you're right about that, Jeff. There's certainly significant overlap between process theism and open theism. But there are important differences too. In some contexts, such as discussions of EDF, the differences don't particularly matter, and so both process and open theists can happily join forces. In other contexts, such as discussions of divine providence and God's ability unilaterally to perform miracles like the Resurrection, the differences matter quite a bit.
The central driving force behind open theism as a distinctive theological movement has been to strike a balance between process theism and classical theism, while avoiding the extremes of each. Open theism proposes to marry the robust perfect-being theology of classical theism with the dynamic relationality of process theism. | | Back to Top | | |
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PotOnWheel
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Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 5/7/2007 1:35 PM (GMT -6) | |
Alan Rhoda said...
. . . perfect-being . . . with . . . relationality
Best not to introduce division between these two. Doing so is a tragic innovation.
To quote Robert Webber's book title: "Ancient-Future Faith."
(o) Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 5/7/2007 1:51:42 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
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Date Joined Apr 2004
Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 5/8/2007 6:23 AM (GMT -6) | | | Alan: The central driving force behind open theism as a distinctive theological movement has been to strike a balance between process theism and classical theism, while avoiding the extremes of each.
Jeff: I see your point, Alan. I guess I just like using the qualifiers "process" and "classical" to do the distinguishing about theism (since we do use them just that way) and the qualifier "open" to refer to the ideas in your syllogism. But if precedent is set, it may cause more confusion to change, now.
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SerialForeknowledge
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Date Joined Aug 2007
Total Posts : 21
| Posted 8/4/2007 5:21 PM (GMT -6) | | The issue I have with your logic is presentism. If that is true, then God is in our time, experiencing things side-by-side with us. If God wants to know what happens next week he will just have to wait. That seems strange to me, but I admit "seeming strange to me" isn't much of an argument. On this model, God doesn't know anything about the future for sure.
Furthermore, (assuming relativity is true) our time is very odd. It's properties change near a large gravity sources and dependent on how fast an observer is traveling. Just what reference point is God observing his creation from? Is the nature of God's knowledge affected by physical things like stars? You would have a better case if we were dealing with an absolute time as envisioned by Newton.
P.S. I'm new here and those Emoticons to the left of the comment box are quite distracting.  | | Back to Top | | |
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SerialForeknowledge
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Total Posts : 21
| Posted 8/4/2007 10:10 PM (GMT -6) | | Thanks for the heads-up Jeff. I have never heard of Lorentzian relativity. I googled it a while and it is pretty interesting. I will have to keep an ear open.
If there is a universal time reference and if presentism is true, then I think Alan's proposal ties up logically.
I'm not sold on either. Of the two I think Lorentzian relativity has more chance of being correct, but I wouldn't tie my wagon to it.
Presentism has difficult implications. Nothing (not even God) can time-travel. God is experiencing events at the same pace as us. The more I think about that the more difficult that concept becomes. It seems that God should be able to experience things faster (say... instentaneously), but with presentism he just doesn't. He is just plodding along at what must be an excrutiatingly slow pace for the almighty. I don't know what would prevent him from speeding himself up while leaving us at our own pace. | | Back to Top | | |
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PotOnWheel
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Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 8/7/2007 8:23 PM (GMT -6) | |
SerialForeknowledge said...
Presentism has difficult implications. Nothing (not even God) can time-travel. God is experiencing events at the same pace as us. The more I think about that the more difficult that concept becomes. It seems that God should be able to experience things faster (say... instentaneously), but with presentism he just doesn't. He is just plodding along at what must be an excrutiatingly slow pace for the almighty. I don't know what would prevent him from speeding himself up while leaving us at our own pace.
THIS thread has some good quotes to think about:
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