‘Nice Soft Facts’: Fischer on Foreknowledge

Logical fatalism is the thesis that, necessarily, if the logical principle of bivalence is true, no one acts freely; bivalence is the principle that every proposition is either true or false, and no proposition is both true and false. Theological fatalism is the thesis that, necessarily, if an essentially omniscient God exists, no one acts freely; God is essentially omniscient if and only if God knows the truth value of every proposition, and it is impossible for God to be mistaken about the truth value of a proposition. In what follows, I will present arguments for both kinds of fatalism and consider four types of response: (i) denying the validity of the arguments; (ii) drawing a distinction between hard facts and soft facts (i.e., Ockhamism); (iii) claiming that propositions are not true at times or that God does not have knowledge at times (i.e., Boethianism); and (iv) insisting that the future is open (the open future view) or that God does not know the future (open theism).

The idea that some of God's past beliefs depend on our future actions has a long history, going back to Origen in the third century CE. However, it is not always clear what this idea amounts to, since it is not always clear what kind of dependence is at issue. This paper surveys five different interpretations of dependence and, in each case, considers the implications for the debate over theological fatalism. Along the way, we discuss a number of related issues, including the nature of explanation, the scope of metaphysical grounding, and the possibility of backward causation.