You’re thinking whether to become an assembly-line worker or an artist. Then you reflect on the value of knowledge. And you become a factory worker, on the grounds that if you become an assembly-line worker, you will know what you’ll be doing every working day of your future, but if you’re an artist, your activities will be unpredictable.
Some remarks. First, there is something perverse about using the value of knowledge in this way. The normal way to pursue the value of knowledge is to find out things that are independent of your pursuit. But here you are pursuing knowledge by making there be less to know about the world (or your world). Yet, paradoxically, it sure seems like the line of thought above makes sense.
Second, the my initial story depends on Molinism being false. For if there are comprehensive subjective conditionals of free will, then by becoming an artist you get to know the conditionals about what you would do in the various artistic situations you’re in. But on the assembly line story, you don’t get to know these. So the Molinist doesn’t have the paradox. I suppose that’s a bit of evidence for Molinism.
6 comments:
Hello Dr. Pruss! My apologies that this isn't relevant to the post, but I was wondering if you had any recommendations on masters degrees for Christian/Catholic apologetics. Is there a college and/or program you'd recommend? Thanks!
Dear Professor Pruss,
This question is unfortunately not relevant to the post.
I am very convinced that there is a necessary concrete entity. But I (1) do not accept that something like per se synchronic dependency exists, and (2) I'm convinced by the "precise" argument in your 2006 book, that the PSR is true. Do you think that if the physicists discover that the universe is in fact past eternal, then I would have to give up on at least one of my commitments? And would you still defend causal finitism if physics told us that the universe is eternal? If so, then if someone wants to hold these two commitments, do you think there is no necessary being for them?
I am not sure what it means to say that physicists "discovered" that the universe is past eternal. Suppose we discovered that Newtonian physics was correct, and hence the paths of the particles could be deterministically traced back arbitrarily far into the past. Does it follow from this that there was no beginning? Surely not. Many Newtonians were Christians who thought the world had a beginning. They would presumably say that you *could* trace back the particle paths, but at some point in the past God just made the particles with the relevant momenta.
Off-hand, maybe one scenario which I can sort of imagine where physics discovers the universe is past is eternal is something like this. It turns out that an effect at time 1 can cause an effect at time 3 without an intermediate event at time 2. We could then suppose that physics concludes that the present state of the universe was directly influenced by an infinity of past events. That would, indeed, be strong evidence against causal finitism. How strong? Well, it depends on how good the physics theory was, what the competitors to the theory were like, etc.
I don't see why a necessary being requires synchronic dependency. After all, a necessary being might not even be in time.
Sorry, I don't really have a sense of this.
Dear Professor Pruss,
Thank you for your reply. As I understand your point, even if a plausible physical theory is time-symmetric or time-independent, it does not follow that the universe itself extends infinitely into the past. Rather, such a theory is merely compatible with an infinite past, without establishing that the past is in fact infinite.
However, I am still struggling with a related issue. In particular, I do not fully understand the distinction you are drawing between a synchronic explanans of the universe and an atemporal explanans of the universe.
My difficulty is this: I do not accept synchronic dependency relations, that is, I do not think that the universe (or contingent entities) depends for its existence at each moment on some sustaining cause. Given this, I find it hard to see how an infinite temporal causal regress of material entities could be grounded.
At the same time, I do not clearly understand how an atemporal explanans is supposed to differ from a synchronic explanans in a way that avoids this problem. If an atemporal explanans explains the existence of the universe as a whole (including an infinitely regressing temporal series), how is this different from saying that the universe depends on something for its existence at each moment?
Could you please clarify, in explicit terms, how an atemporal explanans explains the universe, and how this differs from a synchronic dependence relation?
Plausibly (but some, including me, reject this) if you throw a rock at noon, and it flies through the air for two seconds, there is a backwards infinite causal sequence of events. The state of the rock at noon+2sec is caused by the state of the rock at noon+1sec, which is caused by the state of the rock at noon+0.5sec, which is caused by the state of the rock at noon+0.25sec, and so on. But all of this infinite chain is caused by your action at noon.
If all of this infinite chain can be caused by your action at noon, it could also all equally well be caused by a timeless being's action. After all, causation doesn't require time.
But there is no real difference between an infinite chain of causes between noon (non-inclusive) and noon+2sec (inclusive) than between a chain of causes going back to minus infinity. So if the timeless being could cause the first infinite chain, it could cause the second.
Now, you might respond by saying that there is no infinite chain of causes in the case of the rock (I think that, in fact). If so, then my argument won't convince you. But now you need to ask: Why do you think there is no infinite chain of causes in the case of the rock? A very good reason to say that there isn't such an infinite chain is that one believes in causal finitism. But causal finitism will rule out all backwards regresses, thereby solving the problems.
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