Whether the A-series or B-series theorists have it right
- that is, whether or not tensed utterances can be reduced to tenseless
propositions without a loss of meaning - for every tensed utterance, there is a
corresponding tenseless proposition. For example, on the assumption that the tensed utterance “I am
presently typing [now]” is true, the corresponding tenseless utterance “I
type on 4/29/2013” would also be true because either 4/29/2013 is the ever-flowing “now” or “the present” (A-series) or because the utterance of the tensed expression is simultaneous in the causal chain with the change in date to 4/29/2013 (B-series).
If we assume God is in time, as some Arminians but especially most Molinists are wont to argue, then the A-series theory is correct. But in that case, on Calvinism, God would know this and every other tenseless truth which corresponds to a tensed truth because He has predetermined all things. That is, even if God is in time, “the future” is not open to Him. God may “take on new knowledge” in the sense that His affirmation of tensed propositions would vary according to their change in truth-value, but God would know beforehand what that He will take on “new knowledge” as well as what the content of this “new knowledge” is.
On the other hand, for the Arminian or Molinist, God’s knowledge of tenseless truths relating to His creatures who act “freely” is contingent on their fulfillment in time. So the future is open to God, at least in this respect. Molinists will debate this, but I think the grounding objection is sound (link). When we say God “takes on new knowledge” in this case, then, we mean something more than “God believes to be true what He knew He would believe to be true.” For on Arminianism and Molinism, God didn’t know what He would believe with respect to our allegedly free choices before we made them. He couldn’t have, or else they weren't really “free” in the sense both Arminians and Molinists want to preserve. That is, if God knew beforehand what they would choose, then men couldn’t have exercised their wills according to two or more courses of action.
21 comments:
Yup, that makes good sense - God already prepared the future by his power, but is still in time, as a chess player who knows his future moves because he has power to perform them (and knows of his power).
Have you listened to Clark's lecture "Time and Eternity" where he seems to tentatively accept Augustine's formulation of time as a quality of being created (as opposed to God as uncreated being)?
If that's the same as his article with the same title, yes. The problem I find with it (again, this could just be my problem) is that it implies Clark's denial of a "succession of ideas" in the mind of God. That is, God's mind is static. His thoughts don't change.
If that is so, I find it unclear as to how there can be change in our thoughts. For if He is omniscient, would not God's thoughts of what are our thoughts change in conjunction with change in our thoughts? Maybe this can be answered, but it will turn on the meaning of "change."
I don't see how a succession of thoughts in a mind that is created and incapable of grasping the whole and all its particulars simultaneously implies that a mind that is omniscient must have a succession of thoughts as a consequence of the finite being's succession. Rather, it would seem that any succession of thoughts, in order to be rational, depends upon an unchanging whole to which they are moving and being governed.
I think the distinction between a logical order and a temporal one would be an example. The realization of a architectural blueprint requires a succession of steps, but that succession depends upon some unchanging teleological whole to which the steps are moving and by which they are governed.
I would have no problem grounding the realization of tensed truths on the basis of corresponding tenseless truths. This is beside the point.
How is it beside the point, if tenseless truths are definitive of tensed truths, which implies that God can know tensed truths without experiencing them successively?
Because unless God knows the tensed truths as well as they become successively realized or true, He would not be omniscient.
You seem to be equating the knowledge of something with the experience of it. God can know "tomorrow Ryan will awake at 6 a.m." without experiencing it Himself as future. How could it be a succession for His mind, which conceives of all instances as a complex whole?
"God can know "tomorrow Ryan will awake at 6 a.m." without experiencing it Himself as future."
That's false unless further qualified by reference to the tenseless truth to which that tensed statement can [allegedly] be reduced.
For the sake of argument, I am granting you that tensed statements can all be reduced to tenseless ones. That is, all propositions are tenseless. But as I said before, on that view, what can change mean? On Clark's view, change supposedly grounds time. We say the because an object changed, we have two different times to work with. But if all propositions are tenseless, what is the ontological "change" in an object in reference to?
Although all truths are eternal (tenseless), their instantiation is not eternal. There is a logical sequence that implies a temporal order to the instantiation of truths pertaining to Creation, and change is the witness of that instantiation by that Creation.
At this point I don't think we'll make any headway until a satisfactory definition of time has been agreed upon.
What does it mean for a truth to be "instantiated"?
I don't necessarily mind the idea that time is the medium in which change [or perhaps "becoming"] occurs a la Parkinson, it's just that if truths are eternal, fixed, and indeed unchanging as Clark thought, I'm not sure where change could enter the picture. For there to be change, it seems to me a given subject under consideration must become (accidentally if not essentially) what it wasn't before. There is a "from" and a "to" aspect to change: Adam went "from" upright "to" depraved. He became depraved, which is to say time is uni-directional. But direction, becoming, change, etc. in the first place all suggest in turn that there are tensed truths which cannot be reduced to tenseless truths. The truth-values of tenseless truths never change; the truth-values of tensed truths do. Thus, if tensed statements reduce or mean the same thing as tensed truths, there is for that very reason no change. Or so it seems to me.
The "from" and the "to" are taking place in the consciousness of individual, created persons. They are thinking God's thoughts after Him, which, insofar as it regards their selves, is an example of instantiation of a truth, namely, a truth about oneself. Adam knew himself upright prior to his disobedience, and then discovered himself depraved in the aftermath of disobedience. So far as God is concerned, the entirety of Adam's existence is what He knows, but so far as Adam is concerned, he is always learning more about who he is (presumably, even now, in his intermediate state).
We may think we are changing, but those thoughts would be illusory because they are eternal or unchanging truths. Or else time is completely subjective. I'll think about it some more.
On another note, I just realized the problem of change is also connected to Clark's theory of personhood. If a person just is what he thinks, and created persons are temporal because they experience a succession of ideas to which different times allegedly correspond, then although there may be some overlap in thoughts, because it will not be co-extensive, at any two points in time there must necessarily be two different persons in view. So a person could not exist at more than one time by definition.
They wouldn't be illusory for the individual whose mind is adding new propositions to its understanding. If time is a condition of created beings, then why shouldn't it be subjective, or rather relative to the general characteristics of a species with mild variations for the individuals within a species? Can one know whether the three days lifespan of a fruit fly does not seem as a duration of eighty years to its own experience?
I don't see anything lost by defining time in relative terms, nor do I think it negatively impacts personhood, since an individual who gains new propositions isn't losing others, and that complex to which the new are added is both different from every other complex (guarantying its individuality) and aware of its own previous experience of lack and its new experience of gain as an identity.
Even something as shocking to the individual as regeneration retains the aspect of self-identity, "I never knew before that God love ME."
However, even if there is an alleged problem with self-identity, the cohering of any individual's identity is dependent upon God's thinking that individual as such, so even the change which an individual experiences is grounded in God's eternal thought, which ensures the coherence of the individual, even in the instance where that individual experiences what may be described as a loss of identity (such as memory loss, dementia, alzheimers, etc.)
"They wouldn't be illusory for the individual whose mind is adding new propositions to its understanding. If time is a condition of created beings, then why shouldn't it be subjective, or rather relative to the general characteristics of a species with mild variations for the individuals within a species? Can one know whether the three days lifespan of a fruit fly does not seem as a duration of eighty years to its own experience?"
Fruit flies aren't intelligent, so the question is moot. But if time is subjective, what of objectively asserted period of time in Scripture? 6 day creation, seven day weeks, three day resurrection, etc... are all these just filtered through the author's own perceptions?
"I don't see anything lost by defining time in relative terms, nor do I think it negatively impacts personhood, since an individual who gains new propositions isn't losing others, and that complex to which the new are added is both different from every other complex (guarantying its individuality) and aware of its own previous experience of lack and its new experience of gain as an identity.
Even something as shocking to the individual as regeneration retains the aspect of self-identity, "I never knew before that God love ME.""
This doesn't interact with my criticism, for what is in question just is who or what "I" am. Your response presupposes that I can have a new thought without becoming a new person, which on Clark's [usual] view (persons just are what they think) appears impossible.
"However, even if there is an alleged problem with self-identity, the cohering of any individual's identity is dependent upon God's thinking that individual as such..."
Then a person is not defined by his thoughts but by God's thoughts about "him." I admit Clark did - at least once, somewhere in Clark and His Critics - agree with Leibniz on this, but given God's thoughts are eternal, if we just are what God thinks we are, then we are eternal too.
A man can be defined by God's thoughts and his own, which is what it means to think God's thoughts after Him, in one sense of that phrase.
That God knows all and man knows part does not mean man does not know for what he lacks.
As for time, I think it is relative, varying by degrees within the class of man. Even one's own experience of time varies by degrees. Besides, if you wanted to posit an objective time, all it would require is that God regulate the experiences of created things by a fixed measurement, which coincides with the account of the Creation of the sun and moon for measuring the times and seasons. God superintention does not make time any less plausibly an attribute of created minds.
Finally, how could we be anything other than what God thinks we are? The only thing that makes and upholds Creation is God's thought, including the thinking of human minds.
"A man can be defined by God's thoughts and his own, which is what it means to think God's thoughts after Him, in one sense of that phrase.
That God knows all and man knows part does not mean man does not know for what he lacks."
God doesn't think "I am a sinner." God doesn't think "I am human." There is a difference between propositions and thoughts, which Clark made clear in his book on the Trinity. The Father alone thinks "I am the Father" and so forth. But all three divine persons are omniscient, not because they have the same thoughts, but because they know the same propositions. So to say both we are our thoughts and we are God's what God knows we are doesn't cut it, for there is a distinction between God's knowledge that I am a human and my thought that I am a human.
But to more explicitly show how relevant this is, consider that God's thoughts are all true, yet our thoughts are not always true. Given this, it should be fairly obvious that the idea a person is what he thinks is not usually the same (even in a restricted sense) as the idea a person is what God thinks he is.
"As for time, I think it is relative, varying by degrees within the class of man. Even one's own experience of time varies by degrees."
In this case, one day could be as a 1000 years for man as well as God. Not plausible, especially given that, again, day, hour, week, etc. have univocal meanings in Scripture.
"Besides, if you wanted to posit an objective time, all it would require is that God regulate the experiences of created things by a fixed measurement, which coincides with the account of the Creation of the sun and moon for measuring the times and seasons. God superintention does not make time any less plausibly an attribute of created minds."
The essential question is what time is, not how it can be measured. When God stopped the sun for Joshua's battle, did time stop? No.
"Finally, how could we be anything other than what God thinks we are? The only thing that makes and upholds Creation is God's thought, including the thinking of human minds."
What we are corresponds to non-propositional realities. Later Clark would not have agreed, which is why he denied the correspondence theory of truth (cf. his reply to Nash in Clark and His Critics).
This is no small point. Consider that if God just is what He thinks of Himself, and He thinks "I am creator," then God depends on creation.
Ryan, I am beginning to wonder if you are trying, or if you just enjoy being contrarian.
To the first point, it is irrelevant that an individual's thought about himself is not God's thought in form--the propositions have the same meaning. E.g. God thinks, "Tom believes himself a sinner," and Tom thinks, "I believe I am a sinner." Same truth, but it is only occurs to Tom because it originates in the mind of God.
As for false beliefs, we are talking about beliefs about oneself, not any kind of belief. When God thinks, "Tom believes himself to be a woman," and Tom thinks, "I believe I am a woman," Tom's belief is a false belief, but it nonetheless impacts how he comports himself--insofar as he tries to be consistent to his belief he will live as a woman, and I think Bahnsen's idea of self-deception is very helpful here, that is, that on a certain level one knows that one's belief is false, yet one convinces oneself that it is true against what one knows.
And if you want to extend it to false beliefs about other things than the self, they too still depend upon God's own thought of the individual thinking falsely. One's self-determination (even in error) is depended upon God's predetermination of the very same.
I'll answer the others in subsequent posts.
"In this case, one day could be as a 1000 years for man as well as God. Not plausible, especially given that, again, day, hour, week, etc. have univocal meanings in Scripture."
Here is what made me think you weren't even trying. I said explicitly: "As for time, I think it is relative, varying by degrees within the class of man." God is not in the class of man, excepting the Incarnate Christ, whose humanity would be included. The point of the 1,000 years actually helps to establish my point, which is that different classes of sentient beings experience time and space differently.
"The essential question is what time is, not how it can be measured. When God stopped the sun for Joshua's battle, did time stop? No."
Yes, I undertand that, but you were criticizing my argument that time is relative (a statement about what it is) by saying that time becomes entirely subjective since its measurements are filtered through an individual's experience of them. My point was that the measurements may be fixed, without the experience of them being identical. For some, a day seems to last a long time, but to others, it seems to pass by quickly. The relative experience of time I take to be confirmation that it is a function of created minds, and not an attribute of God. I realize that doesn't establish the point, but I don't think you were reading me correctly.
I'll get to your last point in another post.
"What we are corresponds to non-propositional realities. Later Clark would not have agreed, which is why he denied the correspondence theory of truth (cf. his reply to Nash in Clark and His Critics).
This is no small point. Consider that if God just is what He thinks of Himself, and He thinks "I am creator," then God depends on creation."
I think you are confused about the nature of "non-propositional" realities. A piece of dirt isn't propositional in the sense of it being made up of its own thoughts, but it is propositional in the sense that without God thinking "There is a rock(1) at times(t1,t2, t3. . .) in places(p1, p2, p3. . .)" there would be no rock(1) there to have "non-propositional" reality.
Your second claim is patently false. God's thinking that He is creator does not entail that He is "dependent" (an ambiguous term) in a way that means God's attributes are lost if there is no creation. Rather, God's thinking "I am creator" is further defined by other propositions, such as, "I am the God who determines to glorify Myself by manifesting my eternal attributes in Creation," which grounds Creation in the will of God, and not in His being, thus acknowledging Creation as dependent upon God's willing, and not God's attributes being determined by Creation.
I'll let you have the last word, as I cannot devote any further time to these matters.
I have been playing devil's advocate somewhat, though my questions are genuine. As I said, I still have no made up my mind.
What you said about persons and propositions helps. How would you get around "A person is what he thinks" does not comprise the same number of propositions as "A person is the sum total of what God thinks he is"?
"Here is what made me think you weren't even trying. I said explicitly: "As for time, I think it is relative, varying by degrees within the class of man." God is not in the class of man, excepting the Incarnate Christ, whose humanity would be included. The point of the 1,000 years actually helps to establish my point, which is that different classes of sentient beings experience time and space differently."
I have no idea why you think I wasn't trying. You go on to say:
"My point was that the measurements may be fixed, without the experience of them being identical. For some, a day seems to last a long time, but to others, it seems to pass by quickly. The relative experience of time I take to be confirmation that it is a function of created minds, and not an attribute of God."
But you not only relativized the experience of time, you relativized time itself. How can measurements of time be fixed if time is itself relative?
"I think you are confused about the nature of "non-propositional" realities. A piece of dirt isn't propositional in the sense of it being made up of its own thoughts, but it is propositional in the sense that without God thinking "There is a rock(1) at times(t1,t2, t3. . .) in places(p1, p2, p3. . .)" there would be no rock(1) there to have "non-propositional" reality."
No, I am not confused. This gets to my statement in the OP on the post "Metaphysics and Correspondence" about whether "images truth-makers or are truths image-makers." As you believe God is timeless, your answer to this question - the latter - is not surprising at all.
"Your second claim is patently false. God's thinking that He is creator does not entail that He is "dependent" (an ambiguous term) in a way that means God's attributes are lost if there is no creation."
Can "creator" be predicated of God if He did not create? No. I think you are underestimating this objection.
"Rather, God's thinking "I am creator" is further defined by other propositions, such as, "I am the God who determines to glorify Myself by manifesting my eternal attributes in Creation," which grounds Creation in the will of God, and not in His being, thus acknowledging Creation as dependent upon God's willing, and not God's attributes being determined by Creation."
What do you mean by "the being of God"? God is what He thinks, is He not? And one of the propositions God thinks is "I am creator." You can qualify and elaborate on the meaning of the statement however you like. But the meaning doesn't change.
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