The Only Wise God The Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

But this manner of reasoning is logically fallacious, as we have seen. All Flew has a right to conclude is that the cause will occur, not that it must occur. The cause can still fail to occur, but in fact it will not (otherwise the effect would not have happened). If the cause were not to happen, neither would the effect have happened.

As for Flew’s bilking experiment, it is an implicit endorsement of fatalism. From the effect’s occurring; however, it follows only that we shall not prevent the cause, not that we cannot. If we were to prevent the cause, the effect would not have occurred. To return to our lighthearted illustration, once the professors saw the block appear after three minutes’ time, they should have known that two minutes hence the block was not going to be prevented from going back in time—maybe the professor would stumble and accidentally drop the block into the machine, or maybe someone else would place the block in the machine. For if the block were going to be prevented from going back, it would not have appeared after three minutes’ time. Remember, the effect’s occurring depends entirely on the cause’s occurring, so that if the cause were not going to occur, the effect would not have occurred.

It seems, therefore, that backward causation is logically possible. The logical objection to backward causation is, as Dummett noted, exactly parallel to the argument for fatalism and commits the same fallacy. This does not mean that backward causation is really possible. As we saw earlier (pp. 79–81), the nature of time and objective becoming preclude backward causation, even if that notion involves no logical contradiction.

What, then, of retrospective prayer? In the first place, this is not a genuine example of backward causation at all. The prayer itself does not effect something in the past. Rather, God, foreknowing the prayer, brings about something in the present. For example, God, because he foreknows the prayer, has already decided before the shipwreck occurs to save the son when his vessel goes down. Thus, technically, retrospective prayer (just like the truth of future-tense statements and God’s foreknowledge based on them) does not involve backward causation, even if such prayer has many of the same practical consequences as does backward causation.

Are we saying that God honors retrospective prayer after all? Philosophically I see no objection to this idea, but that does not mean that God does indeed answer retrospective prayer. The issue is a theological one. I have in fact heard Christians claiming answers to retrospective prayer. A particularly vivid example occurred when Jan and I were working with Campus Crusade for Christ, recruiting students to attend Explo ’72, a conference aimed at training a hundred thousand Christians in personal evangelism. In advance of the conference we heard a speaker tell of how God had used the recruitment drive in the lives of the headquarters staff. As the date for Explo ’72 drew near, he explained, applications were alarmingly low. Finally, in

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