Time, foreknowledge, and alternative possibilities

In this article we respond to arguments from William Hasker and David Kyle Johnson that free will is incompatible with both divine foreknowledge and eternalism (what we refer to as isotemporalism). In particular, we sketch an Anselmian account of time and freedom, briefly defend the view against Hasker’s critique, and then respond in more depth to Johnson’s claim that Anselmian freedom is incompatible with free will because it entails that our actions are ‘ontologically necessary’. In defending Anselmian freedom we argue that our ordinary intuitions do not support Johnson’s case and that Anselmian freedom is compatible with deliberation. Anselmian freedom and ontological necessity In order to have libertarian freedom you must be able to choose between alternative possibilities. But divine foreknowledge poses a problem for libertarian freedom in that it entails a kind of necessity about future choices. It entails at least – to adopt the terminology of David Kyle Johnson – ‘ontological’ necessity, the necessity generated by the state of determinate reality; if it is the case today that you will choose X tomorrow, then it is necessary that you will choose X tomorrow. Ontological necessity is more than merely analytic and the foreknowledge dilemma is not solved simply by noting (as Augustine did in On Free Will) that it is illicit to move from ‘It is necessary that (if I choose X tomorrow, then I choose X tomorrow)’ to ‘If I choose X tomorrow, then it is necessary that Religious Studies, Page 1 of 14 © Cambridge University Press 2011 doi:10.1017/S0034412511000151