Divine Foreknowledge and Freedom: A Note on a Problem of Language

DIVINE FOREKNOWLEDGE AND FREEDOM: A NOTE ON A PROBLEM OF LANGUAGE RECONCILING DIVINE foreknowledge with human freedom has been a problem for philosophers and theologians of every age, but one of the most interesting treatments of the problem in recent years has been by Anthony Kenny, a fellow of Balliol College (Oxford), whose analysis of the language of St. Thomas Aquinas in this regard was originally presented at a conference in Liverpool in 1960 and more currently , in an article entitled "Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom." 1 Kenny concurs with Aquinas in that there is no incompatibility between human freedom and divine foreknowledge, and he approves the view of Aquinas that the classical objection, " Whatever is known by God is necessarily true," is based upon an equivocation, since the term " necessarily " may refer either to what God knows (something which may be necessarily true) or to the nature of his knowledge (and whatever God knows is, necessarily, true) . Kenny feels, however, that the answer which Aquinas gives to another problem is not satisfactory at all. The proposition analyzed by Aquinas is" If it has come to God's knowledge that such and such a thing will happen, then such and such a thing will happen." 2 Understanding Aquinas to rely on the principle that " an event is known as future only when there is a relation of future to past between the knowledge of the knower and the happening of the event" 3-and God knows all events as present -Kenny concludes that disastrous consequences follow upon 1 Aquinas: A Collection of Essays. Edited by Anthony Kenny (London: Macmillan , 1969), pp. 255-270. • Summa Theol., I, q. 14, a. 13. • Kenny, loc. cit., p. 261. 293 294 R. W. MULLIGAN such a concept of foreknowledge, because it forces one to deny that God knows future free actions in an authentic sense since he knows them as already present. To know the future, Kenny insists, means more than to know a fact which comes later in a time series than some other fact. One might know that the War of Roses took place later than the invasion of Egypt by Caesar, but knowing this as a future event, Kenny observes, hardly constitutes authentic knowledge of the future. " The whole concept of timeless eternity," Kenny writes, " the whole of which is simultaneous with every part of time, seems to be radically incoherent." 4 Simultaneity, he continues, is a transitive relation. If A happens at the same time as B, and B happens at the same time as C, then A happens at the same time as C. In St. Thomas's concept of a timeless eternity, Kenny believes, all things would happen simultaneously, so that the great fire of Rome would happen at the same time as the bombing of London by the Luftwaffe. Kenny's own analysis of the problematic proposition described by Aquinas is highly interesting. Seemingly based upon the axiom that whatever is implied by a necessary principle is itself necessary, the argument runs: "It has come to God's knowledge that such and such will be the case. As a consequence , it necessarily follows that such and such will be the case." The initial proposition," It has come to God's knowledge that such and such will be the case," is necessarily true since it refers to a past action. " Such and such will be the case " must then follow necessarily. As a consequence, if God knows any future event, that event cannot be contingent since it follows upon divine knowledge of what is necessary. Although it appears incontrovertible that what follows from a logically necessary proposition is itself necessary, Kenny questions whether it can be said that all propositions in the past tense are necessary in the sense that they would exclude even the freedom of the action they report-if they report a free action. If one says, for example, that the proposition " Cesare • Ibid., p. ~64. DIVINE FOREKNOWLEDGE AND FREEDOM ~95 Borgia was a bad man," is now necessarily true because it refers to the past, it does not follow from this alone that it was necessary when Borgia was born that he would be...