God, Time, and Knowledge

by William Hasker

In God, Time, and Knowledge, William Hasker explores the major issues concerning God's knowledge of the future in relation to time and human freedom: divine foreknowledge, middle knowledge, and divine timelessness. Although he focuses on discussions that have taken place within analytic philosophy in the last thirty years, Hasker also places the issues within the context of the history of philosophical and theological reflection on these matters.

Proceeding from a libertarian standpoint, Hasker begins by providing a series of arguments against the possibility of middle knowledge. He next considers and rejects all of the major methods by which the compatibility of foreknowledge and freedom have been defended: the contention that facts about God's past beliefs are soft (or relational) facts about the past, the claim that we have counterfactual power over the past, and the belief that we have the power to bring about or even cause past events. Hasker then carefully examines the notion of God as timelessly eternal and finds it provisionally intelligible; nevertheless, he charges that the doctrine of divine timelessness is inadequately motivated apart from the Augustinian-Neoplatonic metaphysics that was its historical source. He concludes by arguing for a view according to which the future is open and divine providence involves risk-taking.

Lucidly and engagingly written, God, Time, and Knowledge is a significant contribution to the contemporary debate over freedom and foreknowledge. It will generate discussion and controversy among philosophers of religion, metaphysicians, and theologians.

224 pages, Paperback

Published May 15, 1998

Reviews

[Raymond Lam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book by Hasker has become a go to classic for the topic of divine foreknowledge and freedom. It is elegantly and clearly written with a nice structure surveying the theoretical landscape of the subject.  Though Hasker wrote it from the perspective of an open theism perspective, his discussions of the various views are clear and well represented.
In the first chapter he gave a helpful historical survey of the views of Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas, Ockham and Molina. In the second chapter, he goes straight into middle knowledge and counterfactuals of freedom. He first considers the issue of the grounding of counterfactuals freedom and how they can be grounded just by the action of an agent when he exercises his libertarian free will to bring it about an action under a condition presented to him as discussed by Plantinga and Suarez which is the tradition  Molinist approach. Hasker helpfully formulates this notion as: if an event of an event type T occurs, then the event brings it about the counterfactual Q true.  If that event does not instantiate, then Q is not true.  Hasker thinks the problem is an agent has the power to bring about an action P only if the counterfactual Q is true presumably the event being so instantiated. So he seems to think an agent's power to bring about an action as subject to the truth of the counterfactual he finds himself. Hasker hence does not think such counterfactuals of freedom exist if an agent is free in the libertarian sense. But it seems that on middle knowledge view, a counterfactual Q being true is just Q reflecting what agent is doing in the event. If agent refrains from action P, the counterfactual Q would not be true but some other counterfactual Q' would be true instead

In chapter three, Hasker considers simple foreknowledge, namely God just simply knows what happens in the future without involving how various conditions can bring about future events. This notion of simple foreknowledge would not offer God option to intervene in the events of the world to make it different since what he knows in the future already happened.

In chapter four, Hasker considers two arguments for incompatibilism based on necessity of the past and divine infallibility which makes them incompatible with libertarian freedom. In chapter five, Hasker discusses the hard and soft fact distinction which should be to explain propositions being about the past. Hasker thinks it is difficult to make God's beliefs to be soft facts. The next two chapters are about the past, counterfactual powers over the past and bringing about the past, which Hasker finds the notions as intelligible but there is an asymmetry between the past and the future. It is always within our powers to bring about which two ways things in the future are to be but not in our powers which two ways the past was to be, and this asymmetry does not depend on backward causation. Hasker also goes into Mavrodes distinction of changing  the past and affecting the past. Mavrodes does not think you can change the past but there is a coherent notion of affecting the past based on a B theory of time. In chapter eight and nine, Hasker discusses whether a timeless God is intelligible and whether God is timeless. He finds a timeless God is intelligible but it is limiting that if God is eternal and outside time, he can only perceive beings in time in his own similitudes a representation of us.  That is like as if God is watching a TV transmission of us or at most a virtual reality.  But it seems the mode of presentation does not diminish God's knowledge of his creation.

This book covers adequately all the important topics of divine foreknowledge and human freedom and delineates the arguments elegantly and clearly, and will no doubt continue to be an important source for anyone who studies the issue