Refuting Pike's Sempiternality and an Argument for Necessary Atemporality
Refuting Pike's Sempiternality and an Argument for Necessary Atemporality
In his paper “Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action,” written in 1965, Nelson Pike sets forth an argument in which God's existence is incompatible with free will. This argument rests on a set of assumptions that contain within them certain inconsistencies that ultimately lead to an inconsistent argument for fatalism. In this paper, I will set up his argument for God's sempiternality and show how it is inconsistent on the basis of God's omniscience and her eternality. This will require a reexamination of the concept of knowledge, which implies also a reinterpretation of truth; these in turn will lead to an implication of temporality that will point out the fallacy in Pike's argument for a sempiternal God. Then, I will provide an argument for God's atemporality on the basis of these redefined ideas of knowledge, truth, and eternality.
Pike's conception of sempiternality first relies on the idea that God is existing at every moment in time, which implies eternality. He also assumes that God is necessarily omniscient, as per the requirement for the office or being of God. With those assumptions established, he goes on to show that her existence at every moment logically leads to her omniscience at every moment:
1.God is necessarily omniscient.
2.She has existed at every moment.
3.Therefore, she bas been necessarily omniscient at every moment.
4.Therefore, she infallibly knows of every event at every moment.
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5.Therefore, she knows of every event before it occurs.
At first, this seems logically sound. But a close reexamination points out a few issues that need resolution, the first of which is the problem of knowledge, which requires a redefining of what knowledge actually implies.
There are multiple types of knowledge that exist. Many of these can be thrown out on a semantic level: “I know that macaroni and cheese is the best food ever,” for example, is not knowledge, because knowledge must imply truth, and there is not an actual truth in that statement—only belief. The same goes for the more metaphysical statement “I know that there is/isn't a God.” Again, there is no truth, except that the belief-event as a mind state is a truth. This leads us to a closer examination of the the understanding that knowledge implies truth. How exactly is truth determined?
Firstly, there are many a priori truths, such as the timelessly true propositions of mathematics. But there are other truths that are determined in a temporal way: Humans can have causally determined “knowledge” of the future, such as “I know the sun will rise tomorrow.” This is knowledge based on present and past knowledge of the sun necessarily rising every day prior to that day. But, while that is causally determined, it is not necessitated until the actual event of the sun's rising the following morning. This new definition of knowledge in required partially due to the scientific existence of randomness, which is an aspect of Quantum Theory. Specifically, while humans can have inductive, causal knowledge of the world, there are also infinite possibilities for random events to occur that have no causal explanation whatsoever. That is, they are not truths and thus cannot be known until they are necessitated by their existence, which only can occur in the past by way of fixety of the past, and by the present as a conditional necessity (as the Ming vase falls to the floor, its falling is necessitated by the fact that it is presently obtaining).
Thus, knowledge must ultimately require some kind of necessitation and determinateness. The only way to achieve the necessitation required for knowledge and the truth it implies is by way of temporality:
1. Knowledge requires determinateness and necessitation, due to the fact that Quantum Theory illustrates the possibility of randomness that potentially undermines even the most precise causal knowledge.
2. Necessitation and determinateness require existence, in order for all possibility to be eradicated and only one event or fact to have obtained.
3. Therefore, knowledge requires existence (the existence of an obtained fact or event).
And to clarify what is meant by temporality and existence:
4. Existence implies temporality.
5. Only the past and the present are necessitated, as implied by existence.
6. The future is not in existence, and the past and present are.
7. Therefore, the future is not necessitated and the past and present are.
We will call this kind of knowledge “worldly knowledge.” As was just shown, worldly knowledge requires the witnessing or observation of the event—a fact can only become a fact, and thus knowledge, when all of the infinite possibilities, as understood through Quantum Theory, have collapsed into one single present obtained fact or set of facts. Thus, we have reached the implied conclusion that there can be no such thing as foreknowledge, as knowledge relies on and is necessarily constrained by that which has temporally come into existence, and there is no way to know that which is not yet in existence.
By this argument, Pike's conception of a sempiternal God is inconsistent, since God cannot be eternal yet temporal and have the foreknowledge that his conception of omniscience implies. Now, the second inconsistency must be addressed in light of the reexamination of knowledge, specifically on the basis of the temporality that knowledge implies.
As Pike has established, God must necessarily and essentially be omniscient—that is, knowing all truths, worldly, a priori, and otherwise. God must also necessarily and essentially be eternal, as per the office of God and as eternality is necessary to know all truths, including future truths. The inconsistency lies in the concept of knowledge: It is impossible for a temporal being to know all truths, simply due to the fact that the future has not obtained and thus cannot be known, as per the previous argument. In other words, if you are a temporal being, you are limited to the obtained knowledge of the past and present.
For God, since she must necessarily be eternal, she must necessarily be atemporal:
1.God is necessarily omniscient—has complete worldly knowledge, aka knows all truths including future truths.
2.God is necessarily eternal, that is she exists at all temporal times, including the future.
3.Therefore, God has knowledge of future events.
4.No being in time has knowledge of future events.
5.Therefore, God cannot logically be in time while remaining omniscient.
6.Therefore, God is out of time.
This argument dissolves Pike's argument for the fatalising nature of God's foreknowledge, since the argument itself is inconsistent. The only way in which Pike's argument could be seen as consistent would be to change the definition of eternality to simply “never dying or ceasing to exist.” This would make her omnipotence temporal, which is still consistent with Pike's argument for God's omniscience. She still exists at every point and knows all truths, and exists sempiternally—that is, everlasting within the temporal continuum.
This is a valid argument and is logically consistent. But, in this conception of God, God actually knows nothing more than what any human can know—not necessarily what any human does know, but there would be nothing God knows that we could not also know, since she can only know those truths which have already obtained and become temporally-necessitated truths (necessitated by fixety of the past or by the conditional necessitation of the present). The only thing that still separates God from humans in this model is that God is immortal and humans are obviously not. And in this model, there would still be no possibility of God's necessitating foreknowledge, since God could not know any truth before it was obtained. Even if God could know every causal relationship and therefore perfectly predict future truths on the basis of causality—God as the “perfect scientist”— randomness still makes absolute foreknowledge impossible.
Now that it has been shown that God must necessarily be atemporal, there are a great deal of philosophical issues that arise, many of which have already undergone examinations by philosophers and theologians for centuries. The first philosopher to arrive at the conclusion of God's atemporality was Boethius, who lived from 480 to 525 c.e. Though he arrived at the conclusion of atemporality by way of a very different argument than the one presented, the concept is the same and thus carries the same logical dilemmas. The idea of atemporality is a philosophically precarious concept, in large part because atemporality requires that no temporal term be applied to God. While this immediately seems to intuitively and cleanly resolve the problem of God's fatalising foreknowledge—foreknowledge obviously implies “before,” which is not possible for an atemporal being unconstrained by temporal relations—it by the same hand rejects most attempts at semantically and metaphorically understanding and arguing the particular nuances and aspects of the conceptualization.
The difference between the conception of a temporal God and the conception of an atemporal God brings up some interesting relations to the theological basis for these philosophical arguments, particularly that the concept of omniscience has not always been a necessary theological condition for a God, while eternality historically has. Take Hercules for example, who achieves immortality and thus becomes a God because of his heroism. This is an interesting commentary on the Greek mythos in particular, in which the Gods have been historically viewed as quite “human.” In this case, philosophical arguments for a non-omniscient but eternal God might actually be theologically sound and therefore all that is necessary. But theologically, Christianity is directing this omnipotent, eternal philosophical debate on the nature of God. And not just Christianity in general, but the Augustinian/Pauline conceptualization of a cosmic, all-knowing, eternal God, versus a less theologically and philosophically developed, more “human” previous Christian God.
The newer Christian philosophical conception of God is also in contrast to other conceptions of God, such as the Hindu belief that God, or Brahman, cannot ever truly be fully understood or known, or the Ojibwe creator diety Gitchi Manitou, translated roughly as “Great Mystery”—these conceptions totally evade philosophy altogether. The evolution of the Christian theology has directed the evolution of the philosophical reactions to the theology—indeed, some of the greatest advances in the philosophy of fatalism and God have been made by famous Christian theologians such as Thomas Aquinas and more recently, such philosophers as Marilyn Adams. Within Christianity itself, the theology itself tends to constantly argue and contradict itself—a prime example of this is the interesting idea of dipolar theism—so it's no wonder the philosophy carries similar contradictions.
Pike himself would later state that there was an essential contradiction in the theology that made the philosophy necessarily inconsistent on the basis of God's inerrant and infallible beliefs versus the eternal (though assumed temporal) nature of God's existence. This points out the fact that even Pike himself had a intuition of fallacy about the argument, that the pieces somehow weren't all in accordance from the start. This solution of atemporality is arguably the only logical way in which the theology and thus the philosophy can maintain all necessary aspects of God's existence. Though atemporality is itself laden with philosophical conundrums, it is the only way in which eternality and omnipotence can remain essential characteristics of God without contradiction.
