Eternal God: A Study of God without Time by Paul Helm

Author:Paul Helm
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2010-08-25T21:01:00+00:00

It is important to appreciate that Geach's arguments about the future not being nameable only apply to the restricted class of verbs, such as'prevent', 'call off', 'cancel', and 'avoid', the grammatical objects of which are non-occurrences. As Geach puts it, such verbs do not assert 'real relations' between individuals.`;

This is shown by the fact that human agency affects what happens in other ways than by calling things off, or preventing them. For example, human acts can speed up or delay events. Events can be brought forward, or put back. The opening of the Channel Tunnel can be brought forward, and my trip to London can be put back. Why in such cases may we not speak of a relation between an agent and a nameable event?

Geach's argument might be fatal to the fatalist (the question of fatalism is taken up in the next chapter) but it is hard to see why it should be conclusive against all forms of belief in a determinate future. He may be correct that thinking of the future as existing off-stage until brought onstage (or kept forever existing off-stage) helps to foster the idea of a determinate future, but this idea does not seem to require such a dubious picture.

Furthermore, such a rephrasing as Geach's still permits us to say that what is prevented was going to happen but did not happen. 14 It is this expression that the real argument is about. If the accident was avoided or prevented then the believer in the determinate future can say, with Geach, that there was no accident, but that this was because there never was to have been one. If accidents exist, then, by definition, they happen. But this particular accident never existed. To know what is going to happen is not to see the series of future events already existing; it is to know that certain events are going to come to pass.

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