Some people are attracted to this idea:
- God gives infinitely many chances for everyone to be saved.
At the same time, by and large (with the main exception being Origen) the Christian tradition accepts:
- Whether you are saved or not is determined at the time of death.
It’s interesting to note that if you deny Causal Finitism, you can have both (1) and (2). You can suppose, for instance, that God miraculously sets up a supertask for you in the millisecond prior to death, miraculously accelerating the functioning of your soul in such a way that in the first half millisecond you have one choice whether to be saved or not, in the next quarter millisecond you have another choice, in the next eighth you have another, and so on. And then you’re saved if any of these infinitely many choices was made for God, and damned only if all them were against God.
While I buy Causal Finitism, and hence probably have to deny the conjunction of (1) and (2) since on (1) and (2) your state post-death appears to be determined by infinitely many causes (the choices), I think this is a somewhat attractive reason to deny Causal Finitism.
Personally, I'm not a fan of finitist arguments in general (especially the ones related to the Kalam cosmological argument, distinguishing between potential and actual infinities), because I'm a proponent of divine simplicity and timelessness.
ReplyDeleteIf actual infinities are logically impossible, but potential infinities are okay, then the past cannot be infinite, but the future being infinite is completely fine.
However, this reasoning requires the A-theory of time to be true. If the B-theory of time is true, the future is also an actual infinity.
There's a problem: if God is simple and timeless, don't the past, present, and future all have to exist for Him simultaneously? And wouldn't that mean the passage of time in our universe can't be A-theoretic; that it must be B-theoretic from God's point of view? (I'm aware of the Boethian move that God's eternity is "simultaneous" with every time only in some non-transitive sense, but I confess I don't see how that's supposed to work.)
But if that's right, wouldn't finitism and divine timelessness together imply that God cannot even create a universe with an infinite future? So much for eternal life...
I think that's why proponents of the Kalam cosmological argument deny divine simplicity and timelessness, and argue that God must exist in time.
Personally, I'm not willing to give up divine simplicity to save the Kalam cosmological argument, because it's a pretty weak argument for the existence of God. As far as I can tell, it cannot secure any of the divine attributes. It only secures a first cause that was initially changeless and then created the first change. No way to prove it must be omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, etc.
The arguments that rely on divine simplicity, on the other hand, seem to be able to secure the full suite of divine attributes by further reasoning.
So I'm a big fan of divine simplicity.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but, to my mind, it seems like if divine simplicity and timelessness are true, God could create the universe in a way that appears, from our point of view, as if it has existed for an infinite amount of time in the past.
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ReplyDeleteReuben: Causal finitism does not rule out an infinite past. It just rules out an infinite causal chain leading up to an event.
ReplyDelete@Bernhardt David, Yeah, I had the Craig-style ban on actual infinites in mind, not causal finitism in general. But some people think both are the same thing. The problem is that if a ban rules out infinite pasts and B-theory is true, infinite futures are ruled out too. And if divine simplicity and timelessness require B-theory to be true (which I suspect, but won't say for certain), then keeping the Craig-style ban costs you an infinite future as well.
DeleteIt depends on what your reason for a ban on infinite pasts is. If you think (a) there cannot be infinite backwards causal chains and (b) a timeline is always causally interconnected (as Kant thinks), then you get a bad on an infinite past that says nothing about the future. Moreover, it doesn't matter for a causal finitist story whether we have the A- or the B-theory.
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