From: William Lane Craig <info@reasonablefaith.org>Subject: Question of the Week - Does Correspondence Preclude the Truth of Counterfactuals of Freedom?

Date: February 27, 2012 7:40:47 PM GMT+08:00To: lowellgomezperez@aol.com

Reply-To: William Lane Craig <info@reasonablefaith.org>

#254

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Does Correspondence Preclude the Truth ofCounterfactuals of Freedom?

Question:

Dear Dr.Craig,

In the book "Four Views on Divine Providence", scholar Paul Kjoss Helseth raised some questions aboutyour molinist model that you hadn't the chance to reply in detail.

For me the most important and crucial of Helseth's questions is this:

"What is the ontological status of counterfactuals of creaturely freeedom for Molinists generally andDr.Craig in particular.?" (p.101)

In my opinion, the molinistic model stands or falls with the reply to the above question.

As far I understand Helseth's question, he's asking if such counterfactuals refers to an ontologicallyobjective reality. (He's not asking if such counterfactuals, qua propositions, exist as abstract objects inany Platonic sense).

Moreover, I'd add a similar question to Helseth's: Which is the ontological status of the "will" statementswhich belong to God's foreknowledge? Do they refer to an ontologically existent, actual, objective realityin the moment of God's foreknowledge?

In your book "The only wise God", you argue that God's foreknowledge that Jones "will" do X, doesn'timply that Jones "must" do X. (Jones is still free to do otherwise, only that he won't do).

I find this argument unsatisfactory in the light of Helseth's question: Which is the ontological status theaction X (that will be performed) by Jones?

If x exists (objectively), then it is impossible that Jones could ACTUALLY do otherwise, and thedistinction between "will" and "must" seems to be merely semantic or linguistic, not ontological. (Notethat Jones "could" do otherwise only in a purely theoretical or logical sense, not in an ontological ormetaphysical one because what he will do is factually and metaphysically unavoidable).

If X doesn't exist objectively (but only AFTER Jones actually do it), then statements about the future arenot true, and God's foreknowledge cannot be knowledge at all (in the sense of justified true belief).Hence, God couldn't have foreknowledge of creaturely free decisions.

So, does a "will" statament refers to something objectively existing (i.e. to an actually existing state ofaffairs)?

My lay opinion is this:

Future events grounded in creaturely free decisions don't exist before they're performed. The futuredoesn't exist in any objective sense. Therefore, all the "will" statements (not based on inference but inactual foreknowledge of free decisions) cannot be true, and hence God doesn't have foreknowledge.

Free decisions become true ONLY after they're freely taken by the individual and just in this momentthey have truth values that can be known by God.

So, propositions about the future are not true before the future is actualized.

However, what is true are the future CONSEQUENCES of sum of everybody actions in a given time, andpossibly this is what could be known in cases of human precognition and divine "foreknowledge".

People with precognitive faculties could know (bia paranormal means, let's to grant) the consequencesof people's actions (performed in given time, let's say in February 18th, 2012)

For example, the consequences of people's actions in February 18th of 2012 will produce, ceterisparibus, such and such specific effects in 2016, and this effects could be known NOW (via paranormalmeans) by certain human beings and God. But this effects can be changed by the actions of people inMarch of 2012.

So, for each actual action, a given future consequence will follow, and in principle it can be known. Butthe next action could change these consequences, and to produce others consequences, which in turncould be known too.

I don't know if this proposal is too naive or ignorant, but it seems to me to be right at least in anintuitive level, as the best way to make sense of the compatibility of foreknowledge, precognition andhuman freedom.

Thanks,

MaryVenezuela

Dr. Craig responds:

I’m glad for your question, Mary, because it enables me to expand on my remarks to my fellowcontributors that I read at the ETS convention last November. There are some confusions in yourquestion, so let me come at it incrementally.

First, what is the ontological status of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom? This is a question thatboth Highfield and Helseth pose. Helseth does not unfold what the problem is supposed to be. At timesHighfield seems to suggest that Molinism is committed to Platonism about propositions. He alleges,

There exists a co-eternal reality that is neither God nor God’s creature; yet, this quasi-divinereality determines and limits what God can be and do. Necessary truths determine what sort ofdivinity God can be, and the truths of middle knowledge determine what sort of world God cancreate.

Now the challenge of Platonism to divine aseity is one that we must all face. As Highfield’s example ofnecessary truths shows, the problem is not limited to counterfactual propositions. If propositions of anysort are uncreated abstract objects, then God’s aseity is fatally compromised. (See the symposium in themost recent number of Philosophia Christi, the journal of the EPS, where there is an exchange of threeviews on the topic.) There is no position on this question which is de rigeur for Molinists. For my part Iincline toward a nominalist perspective, which denies the existence of abstract objects like propositions,including those expressed by counterfactuals. We can usually avoid ontic commitment to propositionssimply by refusing to “ascend semantically” and, instead of asserting the truth of some proposition, justmaking the relevant assertion.

There are a wide variety of nominalist perspectives available to the theist today. I noted that Highfield’sown view is a sort of nominalism: he denies that propositions are abstract objects existingindependently of God or even concepts in God’s mind. On Highfield’s view there really are nopropositions. Rather God just knows Himself as a concrete object. In knowing Himself, God knows whatwe articulate as necessary truths like “2+2=4,” “If it is raining, then it is raining,” “If p or q, and not-p,then q,” etc.

Highfield thinks that his account does not leave room for middle knowledge. But is that correct? Inknowing Himself, God also knows the logical limits on His power to actualize certain states of affairs.For example, He knows that He cannot create a stone heavier than He can lift. But in exactly the sameway, the Molinist can claim that God knows that He cannot bring it about that if Peter were incircumstances C, he would freely affirm Christ three times. We articulate what God knows by saying thatGod knows that the counterfactual proposition expressed by “If Peter were in C, he would freely denyChrist three times” is true. But God’s knowledge is not propositional in its mode; He just knows Himselfand what He is able to do.

So I don’t think the counterfactual propositions known to God via His middle knowledge in any wayexist.

Now this is not how you interpret Helseth’s question. You think that he is asking whether suchcounterfactuals “refer to an ontologically objective reality.” Similarly, you want to know whetherpropositions expressed by future-tense sentences “refer to an ontologically existent, actual, objectivereality in the moment of God's foreknowledge.”

Here is where confusion sets in. Propositions or sentences don’t refer to things. Reference is a functionof what are called singular terms (words like proper names, definite descriptions, and demonstrativeslike “this” and “that”). What true propositions or sentences do, at least on a correspondence theory oftruth, is correspond with reality.

So the question becomes, do true counterfactuals of freedom and future-tense statements correspondwith reality? I think they do. It seems to me that taking truth to be the property of corresponding withreality does not require that all the singular terms in a true sentence refer to objects existing in theworld. Far too many philosophers, I think, are still in the thrall of a sort of picture theory of languageaccording to which successfully referring terms must have corresponding objects (or denotations) in theworld. Such a view is quite mistaken. We frequently assert true statements which contain singular termswhich do not denote existent objects. Consider the following examples:

• The weather in Atlanta will be hot today.• Sherrie’s disappointment with her husband was deep and unassuageable.• The price of the tickets is ten dollars.• Wednesday falls between Tuesday and Thursday.• His sincerity was touching.• James couldn’t pay his mortgage.• The view of the Jezreel Valley from atop Mt. Carmel was breath-taking.• Your constant complaining is futile.• Spasky’s forfeiture ended the match.• He did it for my sake and the children’s.

It would be fantastic to think that all of the singular terms featured in these plausibly true sentenceshave objects in the world corresponding to them.

Examples like these are legion. In fact, I suspect that singular terms which refer to real world objectsmay actually be the exception rather than the rule in ordinary language. Consider the followingparagraph quoted by the British philosopher Michael Dummett from a London daily:

Margaret Thatcher yesterday gave her starkest warning yet about the dangers of global warmingcaused by air pollution. But she did not announce any new policy to combat climate change andsea level rises, apart from a qualified commitment that Britain would stabilize its emissions ofcarbon dioxide—the most important ‘greenhouse’ gas altering the climate—by the year 2005.Britain would only fulfill that commitment if other, unspecified nations promised similar restraint.

Nothing unusual about such discourse—but, as Dummett observes, “Save for ‘Margaret Thatcher,’ ‘air’and ‘sea,’ there is not a noun or noun phrase in this paragraph incontrovertibly standing for or applyingto a concrete object. . . .”1 There is no need to swell our ontology with such bizarre objects as would bethe denotations of the singular terms in the above paragraph.

So the unit of correspondence, so to speak, need not be thought of as individual words or othersubsentential expressions. Rather correspondence may be taken to obtain between a statement as awhole and the world. Such holistic correspondence is given disquotationally by Alfred Tarski’s so-calledT-schema:

T. For any statement “S,” “S” is true if and only if S.

So, for example, “Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white. That’s all there is to truth ascorrespondence! So, to return to one of our examples above, the sentence “Wednesday falls betweenTuesday and Thursday” is true if and only if Wednesday falls between Tuesday and Thursday. It iswrong-headed to seek correlates in reality (in this case Wednesday) for all of the singular terms featuredin the sentence S.

The reason some philosophers take correspondence to imply real world objects correlated with astatement’s singular terms is that they conjoin to a correspondence theory of truth another theorycalled truthmaker theory. This is the doctrine that (some) statements are true if and only if there issomething in the world that makes them true. Truthmaker maximalism is the doctrine that every truestatement has a truthmaker. Most truthmaker theorists identify a statement’s truthmaker with the factor state of affairs disclosed by the T-schema above. But some philosophers seem to think that astatement’s truthmakers are the denotations of the singular terms employed in the statement.Accordingly, the truth of the afore-mentioned sentence requires that Wednesdays exist as real things inthe world! But I think that this assumption is unjustified for two reasons.

First, if the unit of correspondence is entire statements, then correspondence with reality does notrequire that a statement’s truthmakers be the objects (if any) correlated with its singular terms. For

example, the statement “John couldn’t pay his mortgage” is true and so corresponds to reality, but itstruthmakers will not include a non-entity like a mortgage. What some theorists call a statement’s “truthinducers” may not be the objects, if any, referred to in the statement in question. But they are stilltruthmakers, for they are what make the relevant statement true. Truthmaker proponents like John Heiland Heather Dyke have emphasized that the truthmakers of a sentence need not be the referents of thesingular terms in the sentence. Dyke calls the assumption that descriptions of reality generate ametaphysics “the representational fallacy.” It is a fallacy because “Just knowing that sentence is truedoes not tell you what makes it true.”2 She notes that if the whole statement, rather than its words, isthe primary bearer of meaning, we do not have to accept that there is some entity which is the referentof every word. She maintains merely that if a discourse includes true sentences, then there is somethingabout the world that constitutes the truthmaker for those sentences. Thus, the failure of a sentence’ssingular terms to have real world referents does not imply that such a sentence is not a true descriptionof reality and so fails to correspond to reality.

Second, not all statements corresponding to reality need have truthmakers. Truthmaker maximalism is acontroversial doctrine held by a minority of thinkers. Trenton Merricks has argued persuasively that atthe very most only truths about what properties are actually had by actually existing things must havetruthmakers.3 He furnishes a good number of exceptions to the doctrine of truthmaker maximalism,such as negative existentials and universal generalizations like “Hobbits do not exist” and “All ravensare black,” moral truths like “Innocent persons ought not to be tortured,” tensed truths like “The Trojanswere defeated,” modal truths like “There might have been a dozen more fundamental particles,”counterfactuals of freedom like “If agent S were in circumstances C, he would freely do action A,” anddispositional truths like “If this glass were struck, it would shatter.” Merricks concludes that “Sometruths are not true in virtue of how they are related to any existing entity or entities.”4 Still such truthsdo tell us about how the world is and so can be said to correspond with reality. If we think ofcorrespondence along the lines of the T-schema, then, as Merricks’ examples illustrate, truthscorresponding to reality need not have truthmakers at all. If someone insists on truthmakers forcounterfactuals and future-tense statements, then one can simply appeal to the counterfacts and tensedfacts disclosed by the T-schema as their truthmakers.5

On the basis of what I’ve said, Mary, I think you can see why your statement “If X doesn't existobjectively (but only AFTER Jones actually do it), then statements about the future are not true, andGod's foreknowledge cannot be knowledge at all” is unjustified. I agree with your theory of time thatfuture events do not exist. But it doesn’t at all follow from a tensed theory of time that future-tensestatements about contingent events are not true. Such a view involves a deviant logic which eitherdenies the Principle of Bivalence (the principle that every proposition p is either true or false) orconstrues all future-tense statements as false, with all the logical dislocations which result. It is,moreover, an unbiblical view which is incompatible, not only all the true future-tense statements inScripture, but especially with God’s foreknowledge and prophecies of future contingent events.

Notes

1 Michael Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1991), p. 231.2 Heather Dyke, Metaphysics and the Representational Fallacy, Routledge Studies in ContemporaryPhilosophy (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 5; cf. John Heil, From an Ontological Point of View (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 2003), chap. 7.3 Trenton Merricks, Truth and Ontology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), p. xvii; cf. p. 168.4 Ibid., p. 181.5 See my article on this site “Middle Knowledge, Truth-Makers, and the Grounding Objection,” Faith andPhilosophy 18 (2001): 337-52.

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