Presented to the Socratic Club at CBU by Jonathan Bryan on October 18th, 2007
It may seem fairly obvious that an all-knowing God could not be said to take any risks. A risk seems to necessitate that something is unknown to the risk-taker. Betting money on a horse, for example, is considered risky because the gambler does not know which horse will win. If the gambler were omniscient, then he would know which horse would win and so could not, even if he wanted to, take any kind of risk. Even if he bet on a horse he knew would lose, he would not be taking a risk, but merely throwing away money. I will, however, argue that if God knows the free actions of creatures by way of perceiving them, and knows the free actions of creatures only by way of perceiving them, it is logically possible, in so far as it does not contradict anything else about God, for God to take risks even while knowing all things. My purpose is not to show that God actually did or does take risks, nor is it to argue that this particular understanding of God’s knowledge is correct (or incorrect). All I wish to do here is argue that if we attribute God’s knowledge of free choices to his perceiving those choices, then we may conclude that God’s knowledge of all things does not make it logically impossible for God to take risks.
Suppose God knows that you will freely choose to eat a banana tomorrow. How does God know this? God could know it because he determined that you freely choose to eat a banana tomorrow. This would be just fine if it were possible to determine that something be freely chosen. It is arguable that this is not the case, however, and so this conception of God’s knowledge of free actions may not be a good one. Another way that God could know that you will freely choose to eat a banana tomorrow is by perceiving everything about you today and deducing what you will do tomorrow. This would be just fine if knowledge of freely chosen actions could be deduced in this way. It is arguable that this is not the case, however, and so this conception of God’s knowledge of free actions may not be a good one. Yet another way that God could know that you will freely choose to eat a banana tomorrow is by perceiving the actual eating of the banana. If God is outside of time, then God could see you eating the banana tomorrow as if it were occurring this very instant. If God is not outside of time, I suppose God could still see into the future and observe you eating the banana (much like a fortune teller sees through a crystal ball, except without the crystal ball and the strange attire). Either way, God would know that you freely choose to eat a banana tomorrow in much the same way that you and I can know the free choices of other people. We know that someone is smiling at us, for example, because we see them smiling at us. We do not know that they are smiling at us because we determined them to smile at us, nor do we know that they are smiling at us because we can deduce from everything we know about them and everything we know about the surrounding conditions that they are necessarily smiling at us. We know they are smiling at us because we perceive what they are doing through our senses. God does not have “senses” in the same way we do, of course — God does not have literal eyes or ears by which he literally sees or hears us doing things. But I think it is reasonable to say that God can perceive exactly what we are doing in a far more acute way than humans can with the physical senses.
Let us suppose that God creates world X, in which there are the following: A room with two buttons (A and B), and a person (let’s call him Nate) with free will. Let us also suppose that the happiness of Nate is determined by which button he pushes, and that God wants Nate to be happy. If Nate chooses to push button A, which makes him unhappy, and God perceives Nate pushing button A, then God knows that Nate pushes button A. Now Nate’s pushing button A is dependent on a number of things. World X, first of all, has to exist. In addition, Nate has to exist and Nate has to choose to push button A. God’s knowledge of Nate’s pushing button A, then, is dependent on God creating the world X, on God creating Nate, and on Nate choosing to push button A.
Now, supposing that God did not know which button Nate would push, God could be said to have taken a risk when he created world X. Nate might become happy by pushing button B, which God wants, but Nate might also become unhappy by pushing button A, which is not what God wants. Given, however, that God knows which button that Nate will push (because he perceives Nate pushing the button) we might want to say that God does not take a risk in creating world X, and may thus want to ask why God would create world X if he knew that Nate would push button A and not button B.
I think we would be mistaken, however, in thinking that because God knows which button Nate will push; that it necessarily follows that God would not be taking a risk in creating world X. This is because God’s knowledge of Nate pushing button A is dependent on God perceiving that Nate push button A, and Nate pushing button A is dependent on his existence and the existence of world X. Thus God cannot know that Nate will push button A unless he actually creates world X, and so the reasons for which God creates world X cannot include his knowledge of Nate’s choice to push button A.
Suppose God is deciding whether to create world X. If God looks into the future and perceives Nate choosing to push button A (or if God is outside of time, God simply perceives Nate choosing to push button A), and uses this knowledge to decide to not create world X, then God contradicts himself. For in order for God to know that Nate actually chooses to push button A, God would already have decided to created world X (or if God is outside of time, God would be deciding to create world X and creating world X simultaneously). That is, God would be deciding not to create world X on the basis of knowledge which he can only know because he does create world X. It isn’t that God doesn’t know what the actions of Nate will be until Nate takes action. Rather, God does know the actions of Nate from all eternity, but God’s decision to create world X cannot be based on his knowledge of Nate’s actions, because his knowledge of Nate’s actions is itself a result of his creating world X. Thus it seems to me that God takes a risk in creating world X, not because he doesn’t know what Nate’s actions will be, but because he cannot take that knowledge into consideration when creating world X. God would not have that knowledge unless he does create world X, and so the knowledge cannot be a reason for God’s creation. God must have created world X for entirely other reasons than his knowledge of Nate’s actions.
The obvious objection to all this is to say that an omniscient God, while he may not know that Nate does in fact choose button A unless he creates world X, he would still know with absolute certainty that Nate would choose button A if world X were created. And he would know this regardless of whether world X were actually created, and so God could take this into consideration when deciding to create world X.
This is a good point, but I’m not sure if this knowledge of what someone would freely choose in a hypothetical circumstance is really knowledge. If actions are freely chosen, and not determined by prior circumstances (that is, if it is true that we are free in the libertarian sense), then can it ever be true to say that someone would freely do X in circumstance Y? I am not just saying that it would be impossible to know what someone would freely do in a hypothetical situation; I am questioning whether saying what someone would freely do in a particular situation has any real meaning. If we know that someone did in fact choose X in circumstance Y, does it follow that it is true to say that he would choose X in circumstance Y? If you put a free creature in a laboratory and observed what he chooses in a particular situation, you couldn’t conclude that he would do that same thing in the exact same circumstances; otherwise it seems that the choice he makes is not really free in the libertarian sense.
