A Simple-Foreknowledge Response
A SIMPLE-FOREKNOWLEDGE
RESPONSE
David Hunt
regory Boyd's case for the open view is richly grounded in Scripture, and my response must therefore take this into account. But I want to begin where Boyd himself begins-with his attempt to recast the debate in this book as one over creation rather than foreknowledge.
The Nature of the Dispute
Boyd claims that he "agrees unequivocally with the classical view that God is omniscient" (p. 14). Yet he also denies that God has exhaustive knowledge of the future. Isn't this a contradiction? Not necessarily. An omniscient being must know all truths; but where there are no truths, there is nothing for an omniscient being to know.
This is where the doctrine of creation is supposed to come in. God had the power to create a world in which everything is exhaustively settled in advance, and he had the power to create a world in which (at least) some things are not exhaustively settled in advance. If God created the first world, there would be a complete set of truths about the future, and God (being omniscient) would know them; but if he created the second world, there would be gaps in the set of future truths and correspondent gaps in God's foreknowledge. In both worlds God is omniscient; but because of differences in what he created, there are consequent differences in what he can know.
Interestingly, Boyd and Helm both think that divine foreknowledge somehow depends on the kind of world we live in-and both appeal to science in support of their opposite conclusions! Helm cites universal causal determinism as essential to scientific explanation, while Boyd appeals to quantum indeterminacy and chaos theory. But in my view such appeals are irrelevant. Consider a phenomenon favorable to Boyd's open view: the random decay of a radioactive particle as registered by a Geiger counter. Suppose the following pasttense sentence expresses a true proposition:
(p) This Geiger counter emitted a click at time T.
But if (p) is now true, then prior to T the following future-tense sentence would have expressed a true proposition:
(f) This Geiger counter will emit a click at time T
And how could (f) be true before the click occurs? The question itself is confused: that's just what it is for a statement to be about the future! A past-tense statement is about what has already happened; a future-tense statement is about what has not yet happened. Of course the random character of the click means that the scientist monitoring the Geiger counter could not have predicted (f). But this fact about the cognitive limitations of finite knowers is irrelevant to (D's truth. For (f) to be true, it is enough that the Geiger counter emits a click at T,• if it does, then (f) was true. And because (f) was true, a being who failed to know (f) would not be omniscient.
I suspect that Boyd's rendering of the dispute rests on an equivocation. There's a sense in which someone might "settle" or "determine" what happens by making it happen; there's also a sense in which someone might "settle" or "determine" what happens by finding out about it. With respect to a crime, for example, the criminal does the former whereas the detective does the latter. It's in this latter sense that exhaustive foreknowledge settles or determines the future-God simply finds out about it in advance. This does not entail that God or anyone has already settled or determined the future in the first sense.
Boyd and I in fact agree that God created a world in which at least some of the future has been left causally open, undetermined by the past and present. But we disagree about the conditions under which a future-tense sentence may express a true proposition. I think he's wrong, for the reasons just given. But this is a difference in the logical or metaphysical theories to which we subscribe, not a difference over the kind of world God created.
The Biblical Evidence
Boyd's first move, following the introductory clarification of his position, is to review the scriptural case for the classic "exhaustive foreknowledge" position and note that the texts do not absolutely require this position. This is correct, though not much follows from it. The case for the classic position is partly exegetical (Boyd himself allows that the scriptural evidence provides prima facie support for the classic view [p. 231), but it's only partly exegetical. Though Boyd proposes that "exegesis should always drive our philosophy, instead of the other way around" (p. 14), his own procedure shows this to be an oversimplification. After all, there are no proof-texts to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that God knows the past or present in exhaustive detail; yet Boyd is comfortable asserting that "God possesses perfect knowledge of the past and present" (p. 21). Why? My guess is that Boyd probably subscribes (as do the rest of us) to some version of Helm's principle A, which inclines us to maximize the scope of divine omniscience wherever possible. Good for him! We disagree about divine foreknowledge not because some of us resist while others succumb to the temptations of a philosophically driven exegesis, but because we make different inferences from a philosophical presupposition (itself grounded in but not entailed by Scripture) that we all share.
Since there is a prima facie exegetical/philosophical case in favor of exhaustive foreknowledge, the important question is whether there is an even stronger case against it. This brings us to the heart of Boyd's argument. Since I cannot possibly respond to the full variety of texts Boyd deploys, let me look just at the first set and, more briefly, the last.
"God confronts the unexpected. " In Isaiah 5:4 the Lord is said to have expected (domesticated) grapes from a vineyard that instead yielded wild grapes. Boyd asks (p. 24):
Can a person expect something he is certain will never happen? Taking the passage at face value, does it not imply that God was not certain of the future of Israel, the "vineyard," until the Israelites settled it by choosing to yield "wild grapes" instead of the grapes God expected?
But there is no single "face value" reading of this passage. The statement "I expect that things will go this way" can express my belief about what will happen or it can announce my standards for future behavior ("these are my expectations"). The latter reading is no less natural than the former, and it implies nothing whatsoever about divine foreknowledge. "I expect you to be on your best behavior," I tell the five boys at my third-grade son's sleepover party, knowing full well that they will fall short of this standard during the course of the evening. Read this way, there is no problem seeing how God could expect one thing while knowing something else.
Boyd then refers to Jeremiah 19:5, where the Lord is surprised that Israel would do things "which I did not command or decree, nor did it enter my mind." Boyd adds, "However we interpret the difficult phrase `nor did it enter my mind,' it seems to preclude the possibility that the Israelites' idolatrous behavior was eternally certain in God's mind" (p. 24). I don't believe it does preclude this. Learning that my best philosophy student has plagiarized his term paper, I exclaim, "I can't believe it!" This "can't believe" must be distinguished from the ignorance I was in before the facts came out; it's a disbelief that's possible even when I know the truth. I'm simply dumbfounded that someone with such ability, who did not need to plagiarize in order to write an "A" paper, would stoop to cheating. God must be similarly frustrated that his chosen people, on whom he lavished so much attention, would betray him. "It would never cross my mind that someone with all your advantages would do such a thing," he might say; and he might say it even though he knew from all eternity what they would do.
Not only are there perfectly natural alternatives to the readings that Boyd offers, but his own readings can be turned against him, since they implicate God in various mistaken beliefs: the belief that the vineyard would yield grapes, the belief that Israel would return to him (the "I thought" passages in Jeremiah 3) and so on. Boyd is understandably anxious to deflect this criticism. He therefore argues that the thoughts and expectations in question were really perfect and inerrant probability estimates based on the information then available to God (p. 15). In other words, the Jeremiah 3 passages are really attributing to God a belief something like this:
(i) The probability that Israel will return to me, given how matters now stand, is greater than 0.5.
But Boyd denies that the passage attributes this belief to God:
(ii) Israel will return to me.
This is both thoroughly implausible and fatal to Boyd's argument.
It is implausible because the passages speak simply of God's expecting or thinking that something will happen; there is nothing whatsoever to suggest probability estimates. This reading is clearly driven not by the text, but by the need to avoid at all cost attributing any mistake to God. (Ironically, the very next paragraph [p. 251 finds Boyd chiding proponents of the classical view for interpreting such passages figuratively, resisting the literal meaning of the text and allowing their exegesis to be "motivated by a philosophical preconception of what is and is not worthy of God"!)
It is also fatal to his argument because these passages are supposed to provide evidence that God sometimes does not know what is going to happen, and (i) provides no such evidence. Suppose (i) is true and the passages simply convey God's recognition of this fact, without suggesting in any way that God also believes (ii). Then how is this a proof-text for limited foreknowledge? Only if these passages are asserting (ii) as well as (i) do they conflict with exhaustive foreknowledge; but Boyd's own "philosophical preconception of what is and is not worthy of God" rightly rules this out of bounds.
"God changes his mind. " Boyd illustrates this final motif with Jeremiah 18:4- 10, whose key passage is this: "At one moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, but if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on it." Boyd comments, "The point of this passage is to encourage people to believe that God is willing and able to change his mind" (p. 34). But why is that encouraging? We wouldn't be much encouraged to discover that God changes his mind arbitrarily! The point presumably is that God might change his mind in response to what we do. This, however, is perfectly consistent with exhaustive foreknowledge and even with Boethian timeless omniscience, both of which allow that God's knowledge (and the intentions based on it) may depend on what we do.
But while the point of the passage does not require that God's knowledge be incomplete, the temporal language of the passage seems to do so. A defender of exhaustive foreknowledge therefore has no choice but to appeal to an "accommodationist" hermeneutics. But what's wrong with that? If this hermeneutic can be abused (and it certainly can), the moral is not to abuse it.
Here's one reading that I think is nonabusive. God's intentions (like ours) are sensitive to the beliefs he holds, and his total intention reflects his total body of beliefs-which in God's case includes exhaustive knowledge of the future. But it's also possible to consider just part of a body of beliefs, in abstraction from the rest, and to consider the partial intention corresponding to this partial set of beliefs. Sometimes it's even useful. When deliberating about my plagiarizing student, I might reason like this: "Considering just the fact that he cheated, I'm inclined to give him an F; but considering the quality of his other work, I'm inclined to be more lenient." Likewise, when God considers just a nation's current wickedness, the appropriate response might be to punish it; and this partial intention (reflecting only part of the information available to God) is the relevant one to make known to that nation if it is to mend its ways. God "changes his mind," then, in the sense that his beliefs and intentions, while not themselves undergoing change, are nevertheless responsive in advance to the changing conditions that obtain at different moments of time.
Boyd and Open Theism
The open view of the future is also supposed to be liberating; but it's liberation from an illusory enslavement. Given exhaustive foreknowledge, it follows that the future is epistemically settled in the divine mind; but it does not follow that the future is causally settled in any way that conflicts with human freedom. Boyd's acceptance of this fallacious inference, and his consequent rejection of exhaustive foreknowledge in the interests of human freedom, has the ironic result that he finds less free agency in the Bible than I do; for every time the Scriptures are unambiguously clear that someone's actions are divinely foreknown, Boyd must deny the person's freedom. With respect to Josiah and Cyrus, God's foreknowledge "obviously established parameters around the parents' freedom to naming these individuals ... and also restricted the scope of freedom these individuals could exercise regarding particular foreordained activities" (p. 20). As for Christ's prediction that Peter would thrice betray him, Boyd must postulate divine manipulation of Peter's circumstances so that "three times Peter's true character was squeezed out of him" (p. 21). There is in this respect a striking convergence between Boyd and Helm, the opposite ends of the spectrum of opinion represented in this volume.
Of the two, my preference is for Helm, for at least a couple of reasons: (1) I am more troubled by the proof-texts that Helm could cite (but doesn't), like Romans 9:15-21, than I am by Boyd's proof-texts. (2) God is the ultimate explanation for all reality: for everything X, if there were no God, there would be no X. Think about that. Now ask yourself, how could such a being be revealed to us except by anthropomorphizing him?
Despite disagreeing with Boyd on the merits of his position, I think it's important to put this disagreement in perspective. Both sides agree that God (sometimes) speaks about himself as though he changes his mind. If it were religiously important that we believe that God never changes his mind-important in the sense that, if we believed otherwise, we might fall into grievous error, perhaps even jeopardizing our salvation-it would be absolutely inexplicable why God would present himself as though he changes his mind. So while I disagree with Boyd on whether God changes his mind and on the best way to interpret Scripture, I can't get too exercised over our differences. No one's salvation hangs on this dispute.
A MIDDLE-KNOWLEDGE
RESPONSE
William Lane Craig
he debate over the nature of God's foreknowledge is primarily a debate about the scope or perfection of God's knowledge. Despite his protestations to the contrary, Gregory Boyd espouses a view that threatens to undermine divine omniscience. First, as I explain in my essay, both the standard definition of omniscience (0) and the revisionist's own (inadequate) definition (0") require that if future contingent propositions or counterfactuals of creaturely freedom (CCFs) are true, then they must be known by God. Since Boyd affirms divine omniscience and yet denies that God knows future contingents, he must hold that such propositions are not true. If such propositions are true, then Boyd's view undermines divine omniscience.
Second, (0) also requires that God hold no false beliefs. But on Boyd's account God does appear to hold many false beliefs, since God believes and expects that certain things will happen and is sometimes disappointed and even regretful about how things turn out. Boyd could try to wriggle out of this implication by pointing out that since future contingent propositions and CCFs are neither true nor false, God, in believing them, cannot be said to hold a literally false belief. But this escape route is of no avail. For if God believes p, he believes that it is true that p. But on Boyd's view the proposition It is true that p is presently false; therefore, God does hold a false belief. Moreover, CCFs, if they are not true, are-on the customary semantics for such propositions-uniformly false, so that in believing, say, that the Israelites would repent under certain circumstances, God holds a false belief. Therefore, even if future contingent propositions are neither true nor false, it turns out that on Boyd's view God is not omniscient.
According to the Principle of Bivalence, for any proposition p, p is either true or false. By affirming divine omniscience while denying God's knowledge of the future, Boyd has painted himself into the corner of denying that the Principle of Bivalence holds for future contingent propositions and CCFs. Now as a biblical theologian, is Boyd really prepared to defend so extraordinary and widely rejected a claim as the assertion that the Principle of Bivalence fails for future contingent propositions? In my book The Only Wise God, I assessed this claim and found it unwarranted, faced with formidable objections, and having absurd consequences.' It will be interesting to see how Boyd responds to my three arguments on behalf of premise (2) that "there are true CCFs" in my essay in this volume.
It needs to be clearly understood that Boyd cannot affirm that there are any such true propositions, for then the definition of omniscience requires that God know them, in which case God has knowledge of the determinate truth about an "unsettled" aspect of reality, which Boyd denies. If Boyd rejoins that the future contingents known to God are "settled" after all, then contingency (Boyd's "possibilities") is not incompatible with being "settled." That would contradict Boyd's view that God's knowing future contingents is as logically impossible as God's making a stone too heavy for him to lift.
This raises the question of what Boyd means when he says that future reality is "composed of both settled and open aspects" (p. 14). Frankly, I do not know what Boyd means by these metaphors-and I have a strong suspicion that he does not either. The best sense that I can make of his claim is that on all other views, God has decreed everything that will come to pass. In a sense, that is true; but then the question is whether God cannot decree, as Molinists affirm, that some events come to pass contingently. It is noteworthy that Boyd equates God's settling something with God's determining or controlling it. But on the Molinist view God does not decree how free agents behave in the circumstances in which he places them. There is thus the real possibility that the events foreknown by God will fail to happen; but if they were to fail to happen, God would have known that instead. Thus, this sense of being "settled" does not exclude possibilities from reality but, on the contrary, affirms them.
Boyd, then, faces two philosophical challenges: (1) to defend the claim that the Principle of Bivalence fails for future contingent propositions and CCFs, and (2) to show that his view alone is able to affirm real possibilities in the world.
Unfortunately, Boyd does not take up these challenges but chooses instead to focus on biblical passages. Even here, however, his philosophical naivete hampers his exegesis. Consider, first, the biblical warrant for God's knowledge of future contingents. Boyd's strategy is to show that the texts do not justify exhaustive knowledge of the future on God's part. The problem with Boyd's procedure is not merely that it takes on the appearance of arguing that someone could pick his way unharmed through an avalanche by theoretically calculating the trajectory of each rock; the problem is that the defender of divine foreknowledge need only show that God knows just one future contingent proposition or CCF, for in that case (1) there is no logical incompatibility between divine foreknowledge and future contingents, (2) the Principle of Bivalence does not fail for such propositions, and (3) it becomes ad hoc to claim that other such propositions are not also true and known to God.
So take just one example of each sort of proposition, say, "Before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times" (Mk 14:30) and "None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory" (1 Cor 2:8). Both statements are bivalent and true. So are they contingent? They cannot describe events caused by God, since they concern sinful acts, of which God cannot be the author. Neither are they plausibly determined by secondary causes. Boyd's attempt to explain away Jesus' prediction of Peter's denials as an inference from his flawed character is fanciful. Granted that Jesus could infer that Peter would fail him, how could he infer that Peter's failure would come in the form of denials, rather than, say, flight or silence, and how could he infer three denials before the cock crowed twice? In the absence of middle knowledge, Boyd's claim that God "orchestrated" the circumstances implies that God took away the freedom of the servant girl and all the others in the courtyard of the high priest's house, as well as of those at the arrest of Jesus. Thus, perversely, the open view winds up destroying contingency and freedom-what we end up with is, in fact, Paul Helm's compatibilistic account of divine foreknowledge! Similarly, it is implausible to think that the demonic forces referred to in 1 Corinthians 2:8 were determined by secondary causes so that this is not a CCF. Thus, Boyd's handling of the evidence on behalf of divine foreknowledge of future contingents is desperate.
Moreover, he fails to consider the full scope of the evidence. As I explain in my essay, it is impossible to have a biblically sound doctrine of providence on the open view. Consider the account of Saul's death in 1 Samuel 31:1-6 and 1 Chronicles 10:8-12. Both writers describe Saul's suicide. But then the Chronicler adds this stunning comment: "Therefore the LORD slew him and turned the kingdom over to David" (1 Chron 10:14). Now how is the open theologian to make sense of this assertion? Saul's suicide was considered a sinful and disgraceful deed and therefore could not have been causally determined by God. Yet his suicide, says the Chronicler, was God's doing. Or think of Joseph's statement to his brothers in Egypt: "You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result" (Gen 50:20). Again, the brothers' crime could not have been caused by God; and yet God sovereignly directed events toward his previsioned end. Open theology is impotent to explain this coalescence of human freedom and divine sovereignty. Ironically, open theology is forced to revert to Calvinistic determinism to account for God's providence and thus actually winds up destroying human freedom. By contrast, Molinism provides a perspicuous account of divine sovereignty and human freedom in terms of God's middle knowledge.
The second half of Boyd's biblical argument is his citation of passages implying God's ignorance of future contingents. Certainly there are such passages; the whole question is how we should understand them. Here two points need to be made.
First, a consistent application of Boyd's hermeneutic leads to a defective concept of God. It is striking how similar Boyd's literalistic hermeneutic is to that of Mormon theologians, who employ it to justify their belief in a God who is not only ignorant of future contingents but is a physical being with human form. Like Boyd, the Mormon theologian insists on taking the biblical descriptions of God at face value. "Look here," he says, "the Scripture says that God was walking in the cool of the garden. Walking necessitates having legs. God says he has eyes and ears and arms and hands. If God can't convince us by explicitly saying that he can and does have bodily parts, how could he convince us if he wanted to?' It is difficult to see how one can adopt Boyd's naive literalism with respect to divine knowledge and yet reject it with respect to divine corporeality.' Mormon theologians realize this and have therefore opened the doors of Brigham Young University to openness theologians to present guest lectures there.
The fundamental flaw of this hermeneutic is its failure to appreciate that the Bible is not a textbook in systematic theology or philosophy of religion but that it is largely a collection of stories about God's dealings with men. These stories are told from the human perspective and evince all the liveliness of the storyteller's art. God is sometimes portrayed as ignorant not only of future contingents but even of present states of affairs and past events (e.g., Gen 3:9-11; 18:21). It is hard to exaggerate how pervasive in Scripture anthropomorphic portrayals of God are. Not only are there the obvious anthropomorphisms, like God's having arms and legs, but the unconscious anthropomorphisms, such as God's "seeing" the distress of his people or "hearing" their prayer or "striking" his enemies. Contrary to Boyd, we have every reason to be suspicious of a literal interpretation of passages that portray God as finite or limited.
But then what, Boyd demands, is the truth communicated by such anthropomorphic portrayals of God? That leads me to my second point: Molinism can make sense of the passages adduced by Boyd in defense of his view. In general, the truth communicated to us by these passages is that God's sovereignty does not consist of blind decrees operating irrespective of free human responses; rather, God's decrees take into account and are conditioned by the free acts of creatures. This truth is expressed anthropomorphically from the human point of view in terms of God's disappointment or frustration or relenting on planned action. Thus, I agree with Boyd that such passages do undermine a Calvinistic conception of an all-determining God. But Boyd's problem is that the only alternatives he knows are either Calvinistic determinism or openness. His essay shows no awareness of a Molinist alternative.; Luis de Molina developed his view precisely in response to the theological determinism of Calvin and Luther, and the brilliance of his achievement is that he did so without sacrificing divine sovereignty. Unfortunately, contemporary open theology sprang up as a reaction to Calvinism in ignorance of the Molinist alternative. Are openness theologians so entrenched in their perspective that, now having learned of Molinism, they will persist in their overreaction to Calvinism? Or are they willing to embrace the more moderate rapprochement afforded by Molina?
AN AUGUSTINIANCALVINIST RESPONSE
Paul Helm
he main issue raised by Gregory Boyd's essay is not the meaning of this or that text of the Bible, nor is it some point of theological or philosophical clarification; it is the issue of method. Because the difference between open theism and classical theism is a fundamental difference of interpretation of what Scripture has to say about God, Boyd cannot settle the matter simply by appealing to Scripture.