 Ages.
44 Existence, p. 49. 45 Existence, p. 43.
or impoverishes the results of inquiry precisely through a similarly reductionist or ideologically driven approach. Taking Charnock’s ﬁrst discourse as an example, it is clear that if we approach the text and ask merely metaphysical or doctrinal questions, then we will ﬁnd only metaphysical or doctrinal answers; and yet, in so doing, we miss not simply Charnock’s own intended purpose in writing the treatise but also the original signiﬁcance of precisely those metaphysical and doctrinal aspects of the treatise that are only there, in the ﬁrst instance, because they subserve the larger pastoral purposes for which the treatise was written. In other words, we may have analysed and expounded, albeit accurately and precisely, the nature of something which was, in fact, of little or no importance to Charnock himself in this context, concerned as he was in this text not primarily with framing a coherent ontology for theological construction but rather with overwhelming his believing audience with so many persuasive arguments for theism that their faith and their identity would be thoroughly reinforced. We must realize that such theological texts are not simply theological phenomena. They are also historical phenomena, shaped by many factors that are not theological or metaphysical in the strict sense of the word. We cannot simply excise the theology and philosophy for separate analysis – historical phenomena require some form of historical explanation and if Puritan theology is not simply a theological even but also an historical event, we cannot answer the various scholarly problems it raises simply in terms of purely theological categories. Historical context, literary genre, and authorial intention, to name but three, must all be taken into account if we are to move towards a rounded understanding of the place of Puritan theology and Reformed Orthodoxy in the larger history of ideas. Only then will we be able to avoid having our analyses openly hijacked or subtly subverted by yet one more unhistorical and ideologically driven theological or philosophical method of analysis. Charnock’s discourse demonstrates, I believe, both the necessity and the advantages of this approach. Despite using the classic proofs, he is not really trying to prove God’s existence but to persuade his hearers of the fundamental soundness of their theism – and that is an insight available only to those prepared to look further than the verbal content of a few key passages.
No Way Out? Christopher Hughes Along with Arthur Prior and Richard Swinburne, and in opposition to Alvin Plantinga, Norman Kretzmann, and many others, Paul Helm maintains that whatever God knows is (now) necessary. Although I am not sure whether he is right, I am convinced that formidable difﬁculties beset any account on which God has (infallible) foreknowledge of not yet necessary truths. Accounts on which God timelessly has infallible knowledge of not yet necessary truths avoid at least some of those difﬁculties; but they seem incompatible with other beliefs about God that theists (or, at any rate, Christians) have traditionally held. 3.1 Plantinga on Ockham’s Way Out Necessarily, squares have four sides. Indeed, it has always been, and always will be necessary that squares have four sides. It appears, though, that not everything that is (now) necessary has always been necessary. For example, if you have read this far, it is (now) necessary that you have at read at least some of this piece. After all, if someone enjoined you not to read a single word of it, you could truthfully reply: ‘that is no longer possible’. And if your not having read a single word of it is not (now) possible, then your having read some of it is (now) necessary. But although your having read some of this piece is necessary, it wasn’t always so: inasmuch as your reading none of this piece is no longer possible, your reading some of this piece was once not yet necessary. Your having read some of this chapter is, we might say, an ex-contingency; and your having read none of it is an ex-possibility. Consider the following (venerable)1 argument: 1. Where S is an arbitrarily chosen subject, and P an arbitrarily chosen proposition, suppose S knew yesterday that P. 2. If S knew yesterday that P, then it is now necessary that S knew yesterday that P. 3. So it is now necessary that S knew yesterday that P. 4. S knew yesterday that P entails P. 5. Whatever is entailed by what is now necessary is itself now necessary. 6. So it is now necessary that P. 7. So if S knew yesterday that P, it is now necessary P.
1 The argument set out here is essentially the same as one discussed by Aquinas (cf. Summa Theologiae, Ia, 14, 13, and De Veritate, 2, 12) and Jonathan Edwards (Freedom of the Will, 12), inter alios.
8. Given that S and P were chosen arbitrarily, anything anyone ever knew to be the case yesterday is now necessary. Generalizing the reasoning in (1)-(7), anything anyone ever has known or knows to be the case is now necessary: and anything anyone ever will know to be the case will be then necessary. No one’s knowledge – not even God’s – ever has extended, or ever will extend, past what is (then) necessary. Is this argument sound? Ockham would say: No. Let S be God, and let P be a proposition that is true, but not yet necessary – say, that it will rain tomorrow. God has always known all truths. So God knew yesterday that it would rain tomorrow. Since it is not yet necessary that it will rain tomorrow, but true that God knew yesterday that it would rain tomorrow, it is false that if God knew yesterday that it would rain tomorrow, then it is now necessary that it will rain tomorrow.
But, supposing that the argument goes wrong when S = God, and what S knows is a not-yet-necessary truth, where exactly does it go wrong? (1) is an assumption to be discharged at the end of a conditional proof, and (3) follows by modus ponens from (1) and (2). (4) is a conceptual truth about knowledge, and (5) is a conceptual truth about necessity. (6) straightforwardly follows from (3)-(5), and (7) from (1)-(6). The upshot is that if the argument goes off the rails, it goes off the rails at (2). And this is indeed what Ockham would say.2 But can we make sense of the idea that, say, it is true, but not-yet-necessarily true that God knew yesterday that it would rain tomorrow? As Alvin Plantinga sees it, we can, once we take on board a distinction Ockham draws between propositions that are genuinely and strictly about the past or present, and those that are – at least verbally (vocaliter, secundum vocem) – about the past or present, but are (partly or entirely) about the future. It may seem initially plausible that any truth about the past (or present) is now necessary. But, upon reﬂection, we see that there is no reason to think that all truths that are only verbally about the past (or present) are now necessary. Suppose it is in fact true that it will rain tomorrow. Absent an argument that it is now necessary that it will rain tomorrow, there is no reason to think it was true yesterday that it would rain tomorrow is now necessary, in spite of its being verbally about the past. Similarly, suppose it is in fact true that Kate correctly guessed yesterday that it would rain tomorrow. That is no reason to conclude that Kate correctly guessed yesterday that it would rain tomorrow is now necessary, in spite of the fact that Kate correctly guessed yesterday that it would rain tomorrow is (partly) about the past. For Plantinga, a truth (or fact) about a time is a hard fact about that time only if it is genuinely and strictly (i.e. exclusively) about that time.3 Even if hard facts about the past or present are now necessary, he maintains, the same does not hold for soft facts about the past or present: only hard facts about the past are plausibly 2 Cf. Ockham’s Tractatus de Praedestinatione et de Praescentia Dei et de Futuris Contingentibus, especially Question I. 3 See Plantinga’s ‘On Ockham’s Way Out’ in J.F. Sennett, ed., The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader, p. 271.
Only the hard facts about the past are now necessary.
and not true by deﬁnition that ii) Only facts genuinely and exclusively about the past are hard facts about the past. As we have seen, though, Plantinga uses ‘hard fact’ in such a way that (ii), rather than (i), is true ex vi terminorum. Why does this matter? Well, the argument Plantinga sets out in favor of the non-necessity of God knew yesterday that it will rain tomorrow, and attributes to Ockham, goes something like this: God knew yesterday that it will rain tomorrow is not a hard fact about the past. Only the hard facts about the past are (plausibly deemed) now necessary. — God knew yesterday that it will rain tomorrow is not (plausibly deemed) now necessary.6 4 There is a complication. Plantinga doesn’t say quite what I have said. He says: