Open Theism and divine promises

Open Theist Christians tend to think that there are some things God knows about the future, and these include the content of God’s promises to us. God’s promises are always fulfilled.

But it seems that the content of many of God’s promises depends on free choices. For imagine that all the recipients of God’s promise freely choose to release God from the promise; then God would be free not to follow the promise, it appears, and so he could freely choose not to act in according to the promise. Thus there seems to be a sequence of creaturely and divine free choices on which the content of the promise does not come about.

This argument may not work for all of God’s promises. Some of God’s promises are covenants, and it may be that covenants are a type of agreement in which neither party can release the other. There may be other unreleasable promises: perhaps when x promises to punish y, that’s a promise y cannot release x from. But do we have reason to think that God makes no “simple promises”, promises other than covenants and promises of punishment?

I do not think this is a definitive argument against open theism. The open theist can bite the bullet and say that God doesn’t always know he will fulfill his promises. But it is interesting to see that on open theism, God’s knowledge of the future is even more limited than we might have initially thought.

Open theism and the Incarnation

Here is a very plausible pair of claims:

1. The Son could have become incarnate as a different human being.

2. God foreknew many centuries ahead of time which human being the Son would become incarnate as.

Regarding 1, of course, the Son could not have been a different person—the person the Son is and was and ever shall be is the second person of the Trinity. But Son could have been a different human being.

Here is a sketch of an argument for 1:

1. If the identity of a human being depends on the body, then if the Son became incarnate as a 3rd century BC woman in India, this would be a different human being from Jesus (albeit the same person).

2. If the identity of a human being depends on the soul, then God could have created a different soul for the Son’s incarnation.

3. The identity of a human being depends on either the body or the soul.

I don’t have as good an argument for 2 as I do for 1, but I think 2 is quite plausible given what Scripture says about God’s having planned out the mission of Jesus from of old.

Now add:

3. If the Son could have become incarnate as a different human being, which human being he became incarnate as depends on a number of free human choices in the century preceding the incarnation.

Now, 1, 2 and 3 leads to an immediate problem for an open theist Christian (my thinking on this is inspired by a paper of David Alexander, though his argument is different) who thinks God doesn’t foreknow human free choices.

Why is 3 true? Well, if the identity of a human being even partly depends on the body (as is plausible), given that (plausibly) Mary was truly a biological mother of Jesus, then if Mary’s parents had not had any children, the body that Jesus actually had would not have existed, and an incarnation would have happened with a different body and hence a different human being.

Objection: God could have created Mary—or the body for the incarnation—directly ex nihilo in such a case, or God could have overridden human free will if some human were about to make a decision that would lead to Mary not existing.

Response: If essentiality of origins is true, then it is logically impossible for the same body to be created ex nihilo as actually had a partial non-divine cause. But I don’t want the argument to depend on essentiality of origins. Instead, I want to argue as follows. Both of the solutions in the objection require God to foreknow that he would in fact engage in such intervention if human free choices didn’t cooperate with his plan. God’s own interventions would be free choices, and so on open theism God wouldn’t know that he would thus intervene. One might respond that God could resolve to ensure that a certain body would become available, and a morally perfect being always keeps his resolutions. But while perhaps a morally perfect being always keeps his promises, I think it is false that a morally perfect being always keeps his resolutions. Unless one is resolving to do something that one is already obligated to do, it is not wrong to change one’s mind in a revolution. I suppose God could have promised someone that he would ensure the existence of a certain specific body, but we have no evidence of such a specific promise in Scripture, and it seems an odd maneouver for God to have to make in order to know ahead of time who the human that would save the world is.

What if the identity of a human depends solely on the soul? But then the identity of the human being that the Son would become incarnate as would depend on God’s free decision which soul to create for that human being, and the same remarks as I made about resolutions in the previous paragraph would apply.

Probability, belief and open theism

Here are few plausible theses:

1. A rational being believes anything that they take to have probability bigger than 1 − (1/10¹⁰⁰) given their evidence.

2. Necessarily, God is rational.

3. Necessarily, none of God’s beliefs ever turn out false.

These three theses, together with some auxiliary assumptions, yield a serious problem for open theism.

Consider worlds created by God that contain four hundred people, each of whom has an independent 1/2 chance of freely choosing to eat an orange tomorrow (they love their oranges). Let p be the proposition that at least one of these 400 people will freely choose to eat an orange tomorrow. The chance of not-p in any such world will be (1/2)⁴⁰⁰ < 1/10¹⁰⁰. Assuming open theism, so God doesn’t just directly know whether p is true or not, God will take the probability of p in any such world to be bigger than 1 − (1/10¹⁰⁰) and by (1) God will believe p in these worlds. But in some of these worlds, that belief will turn out to be false—no one will freely eat the orange. And this violates (3).

I suppose the best way out is for the open theist to deny (1).

Guessing and omniscience

Suppose that yesterday you guessed that today I’d freely mow the lawn, and today I did freely mow the lawn. Then, the correctness of your guess is a doxastic good you possessed.

(Note: If the future is open, so that there was no truth yesterday that today I’d mow the lawn, it’s a little tricky to say when you possessed it. For when you guessed, it wasn’t true that you possessed the doxastic good of guessing correctly. Rather, now that it has become the case that this doxastic good is attributable to you.)

Now no one can have a doxastic good that God lacks. Thus, God had to have at least guessed the same thing yesterday. And God has no doxastic bads. So, God never gets anything wrong. But the only plausible way it can be true that

1. God always gets right the things we guess right, and

2. God never gets things wrong

is if God has comprehensive knowledge of the future.

Molinism and prophecy

Here’s a curious puzzle. Every theist—including the Molinist and the Open Theist—will presumably agree that this conditional is true:

1. If God were to announce that Trump will freely refrain from tweeting tomorrow, then Trump would freely refrain from tweeting tomorrow.

After all, both presumably accept that God wouldn’t affirm what he didn’t know to be the case.

However, plainly, the truth of (1) isn’t enough to justify God in announcing that Trump will freely refrain from tweeting tomorrow. For, plainly, something like Molinist middle knowledge or mere foreknowledge or theistic compatibilism would be needed for God to be justified in issuing the prophecy. Something like (1) that holds independently of theories of divine foreknowledge is not going to do the trick.

Suppose now Molinism is true. It seems to be one of the advantages of Molinism that it can explain prophecy. But what relevant proposition beyond (1) does God know in the Molinist case that justifies his announcement?

Here is one possibility:

2. Trump will freely refrain from tweeting tomorrow.

But God’s knowing (2) is insufficient to justify God’s announcement. For imagine that the reason why Trump will refrain from tweeting tomorrow is that Trump likes to surprise people and nobody predicted that he wouldn’t tweet tomorrow. Then (2) can still be true—but if that’s the reason why (2) is true, then the truth of (2) won’t justify God in announcing that Trump won’t tweet.

I think what we want to say is that on Molinism what justifies God’s announcement is something like this:

3. Claim (1) holds not just because God’s announcements are always true.

But now here is the problem. If claim (1) holds not just because God’s announcements are always true, there must be some further explanation for why claim (1) is true other than just because God’s announcements are always true. But what is that explanation? Presumably it lies in the truth of some Molinist conditional. But it seems that the most relevant Molinist conditional is (1) itself, and that just won’t do.

Here’s another way of putting the point. The Molinist’s best response to the grounding objection is to say that Molinist conditionals are true but ungrounded. Such a Molinist has to say that the only reason (1) is ever true is that God doesn’t make untrue announcements. But, plausibly, if the only reason (1) is true is that God doesn’t make untrue announcements, then God isn’t justified in issuing the announcement. So God is never justified in issuing the announcement.

If I were a Molinist, I would say that God cannot make prophecies that end up being explanatorily prior to the prophesied actions. But if one makes that restriction, one might as well accept mere foreknowledge.

Open theism and technical formal epistemology

If open theism is true and there is an infinite future afterlife full of free choices, then some of the puzzling cases involving non-measurable sets and probability that I like to discuss on this blog are faced by God. For any set A of sets of natural numbers, there is the proposition p_A that the set of days in heaven on which David will dance a jig is a member of A. But it seems likely that some sets A will be non-measurable relative to the relevant probability measure.

So, open theists should have motivation to work on highly technical formal epistemology. The more working on that, the merrier. :-)

Open theism and "never" facts

Suppose a version of open theism on which facts about future free choices have non-trivial truth values which God doesn’t know. Then here is a disquieting feature of this open theism, given eternal life. It implies that there are truths that God never finds out.

For instance, even in an infinite future, there are free actions that I will never do, but which I will have an opportunity to do on infinitely many days. For instance, perhaps I will never sing Amazing Grace three minutes to midnight on a Tuesday, or drink wine at 7:12 am of a prime-numbered day (numbering, say, from the first day of eternal life), even though both of these are possible. Likely, I will never recite all of War and Peace in French, though I would be free to do so. But such “never” facts facts will always depend on future free actions. Thus, on the variety of open theism under discussion, God will never know these facts. He will always just know an increasing number of “never-yet” facts: Alex has never yet recited War and Peace in French, but maybe he will.

It seems harder to reconcile the existence of facts that God will never know with omniscience than the existence of facts that God does not yet know. If there are facts that God will never know, then there is an aspect of reality that is closed to God. That can’t be right.

It’s worse than that. On this version of open theism, not only are there truths that God never comes to know, but there are truths that God never comes to know but that he can know. Here is an example: Either today I don’t write a blog post or I never recite War and Peace in French (assuming that I won’t recite it). Since God will always know that I do write a blog post today, he won’t know this disjunction, or else he’d be able to figure out from it that I will never recite War and Peace in French. (Cf. this paper.)

This is an uncomfortable position.

Perfect rationality and omniscience

1. A perfectly rational agent who is not omniscient can find itself in lottery situations, i.e., situations where it is clear that there are many options, exactly one of which can be true, with each option having approximately the same epistemic probability as any other.

2. A perfectly rational agent must believe anything there is overwhelming evidence for.

3. A perfectly rational agent must have consistent beliefs.

4. In lottery situations, there is overwhelming evidence for each of a set of inconsistent claims, namely for the claims that one of options 1,2,3,… is the case, but that option 1 is not the case, that option 2 is not the case, that option 3 is not the case, etc.

5. So, in lottery situations, a perfectly rational agent has inconsistent beliefs. (2,4)

6. So, a perfectly rational agent is never in a lottery situation. (3,5)

7. So, a perfectly rational agent is omniscient. (1,6)

The standard thing people like to say about arguments like this is that they are a reductio of the conjunction of the premises 2 through 4. But I think it might be interesting to take it as a straightforward argument for the conclusion 7. Maybe one cannot separate out procedural epistemic perfection (perfect rationality) from substantive epistemic perfection (omniscience).

That said, I am inclined to deny 3.

It’s worth noting that this yields another variant on an argument against open theism. For even though I am inclined to think that inconsistency in beliefs is not an imperfection of rationality, it is surely an imperfection simpliciter, and hence a perfect being will not have inconsistent beliefs.

Truth-value open theism

Consider the view that there are truth values about future contingents, but (as Swinburne and van Inwagen think) God doesn’t know future contingents. Call this “truth-value open theism”.

1. Necessarily, a perfectly rational being believes anything there is overwhelming evidence for.

2. Given truth-value open theism, God has overwhelming but non-necessitating evidence for some future contingent proposition p.

3. If God has overwhelming but non-necessitating evidence for some contingent proposition p, there is a possible world where God has overwhelming evidence for p and p is false.

4. So, if truth-value open theism is true, either (a) there is a possible world where God fails to believe something he has overwhelming evidence for or (b) there is a possible world where God believes something false. (2-3)

5. So, if truth-value open theism is true, either (a) there is a possible world where God fails to be perfectly rational or (b) there is a possible world where God believes something false. (1,4)

6. It is an imperfection to possibly fail to be perfectly rational.

7. It is an imperfection to possibly believe something false.

8. So, if truth-value open theism is true, God has an imperfection. (6-7)

And God has no imperfections.

To argue for (2), just let p be the proposition that somebody will freely do something wrong over the next month. There is incredibly strong inductive evidence for (2).

Open theism and divine perfection

1. It is an imperfection to have been close to certain of something that turned out false.

2. If open theism is true, God was close to certain of propositions that turned out false.

3. So, if open theism is true, God has an imperfection.

4. God has no imperfections.

5. So, open theism is not true.

I think (1) is very intuitive and (4) is central to theism. It is easy to argue for (2). Consider giant sentence of the form:

6. Alice’s first free choice on Monday is F₁, Bob’s first free choice on Tuesday is F₂, Carol’s first free choice on Tuesday is F₃, …

where the list of names ranges over the names of all people living on Monday, and the F_i are "right", "not right" and "not made" (the last means that the agent will not make any free choices on Tuesday).

Exactly one proposition of the form (6) ends up being true by the end of Monday.

Suppose we’re back on the Sunday before that Monday. Absent the kind of knowledge of the future that the open theist denies to God, God will rationally assign probabilities to propositions of the form (6). These probabilities will all be astronomically low. Even though Alice may be very virtuous and her next choice is very likely to be right, and Bob is vicious and his next choice is very likely to be wrong, etc., given that any proposition of the form (6) has 7.6 billion conjuncts, the probability of that proposition is tiny.

Thus, on Sunday God assigns miniscule probabilities to all the propositions of the form (6), and hence God is close to certain of the negations of all such propositions. But come Tuesday, one of these negated propositions turns out to be false. Therefore, on Tuesday—i.e., today—there a proposition that turned out false that God was close to certain of. And that yields premise (2).

(I mean all my wording to be neutral between the version of open theism where future contingents have a truth value and the one where they do not.)

Moreover, even without considerations of perfections, being close to certain of something that will turn out to be false is surely inimical to any plausible notion of omniscience.

Open theism and utilitarianism

Here’s an amusing little fact. You can’t be both an open theist and an act utilitarian. For according to the act utilitarian, to fail to maximize utility is wrong. It is impossible for God to do the wrong thing. But given open theism, it does not seem that God can know enough about the future in order to be necessarily able to maximize utility.

Near certainty and open theism

Suppose that in heaven there will everyday be a choice that we can make, and that we can make it without its coming to be a habit that we choose in a particular way, so that there is some approximate independence between the choices. For definiteness, let's suppose it's a choice of what to have for breakfast. For any infinite sequence B of possible breakfasts (pancakes, nothing, waffles, waffles, egg sandwich, ...) let E_B be the proposition that B is the sequence of breakfasts I will eat. Also suppose that I am in heaven. Then the probability of E_B is zero or infinitesimal, for pretty much the same reason that the probability of any infinite sequence of coin tosses has zero probability.

Given classical theism, God can just tell which infinite sequence B of possible breakfasts will be had by me. But given open theism, all he has are these probabilities. So for every infinite sequence B of possible breakfasts, God assigns zero or infinitesimal probability to E_B, and hence assigns a probability of one or one minus an infinitesimal to ~E_B. Say that an agent is nearly certain of p provided that the agent assigns a probability of one or one minus an infinitesimal to p. Then God is nearly certain of ~E_B for every B.

So far it seems to me that open theists are likely to agree with me. But now let's explore some varieties of open theism in connection with this.

1. Suppose, as some open theists (van Inwagen and Swinburne) believe, that there can be a fact of the matter about future contingents. Then one of the E_B propositions is true, even though God is nearly certain that it's false. This by itself seems incompatible with perfection. To be nearly certain of a falsehood is bad for you. But God is perfectly blessed. He doesn't suffer from bad states.

2. Suppose there are no facts about future contingents. Then God is nearly certain of ~E_B even though he knows that there is no fact about ~E_B. It is irrational to be nearly certain of that which one knows there to be no fact about.

3. Interestingly, the above line of thought so far fits well with Alan Rhoda's variety of open theism. Rhoda thinks all claims about contingent futures with a wide-scope "will" operator are false, and E_B can be seen as a conjunction of such claims. Thus, God is not only nearly certain of ~E_B, but he is actually certain. But now let N_B be the claim that tomorrow my breakfast will be other than the first item in B, the day after tomorrow it will be other than the second item in B, and so on. On Rhoda's view, N_B is false. But the probability of N_B is one or one minus an infinitesimal. So on Rhoda's view, God ends up being nearly certain of something that he also knows to be false.

Open theism and risk

We have many well-justified beliefs about how people will freely act. For instance, I have a well-justified belief that at most a minority of my readers will eat a whole unsweetened lemon today. Yet most of you can. (And maybe one or two of you will.) Notice that a fair amount of our historical knowledge is based on closely analogous judgments. When we engage in historical analysis we base ourselves on knowledge of how people freely act individually or en masse. We know that various historical events occurred because of what we know about how people who report historical events behave--given what we know about human character, we know the kinds of things they are likely to tell the truth about, the kinds of things they are likely to lie about and the kinds of things they are likely to be mistaken about. But it would be strange to claim knowledge about past human behavior and disclaim knowledge about future human behavior when exactly similar probabilistic regularities give us both.

But if open theism is true, then God cannot form such beliefs about the future. For open theists agree that God is essentially infallible in his beliefs: it is impossible for God to hold a false belief. But if God were in a habit of forming beliefs about how people will in fact act, then in at least some possible worlds, and probably in this one as well, God would have false beliefs—it may be 99.99% certain that I won't eat a whole unsweetened lemon today, but that just means that there is a 0.01% chance that I will.

So the open theist, in order to hold on to divine infallibility, must say that God keeps from having beliefs on evidence that does not guarantee truth. Why would God keep himself from having such beliefs, given that they seem so reasonable? Presumably to avoid the risk of being wrong about something.

But now notice that open theism has God take really great risks. According to open theism, in creating the world, God took the risk of all sorts of horrendous evils. The open theist God is not at all averse to taking great risks about creation. So why would he be so averse to taking risks with his beliefs?

The open theists who think that there are no facts about the future have an answer here. They will say that my belief that at most a minority of my readers will eat a whole unsweetened lemon today is certainly not true, since the fact alleged does not obtain, and hence that I shouldn't have this belief. Instead, I should have some probabilistic belief, like that present conditions have a strong tendency to result in the nonconsumption of these lemons. My argument here is not addressed to these revisionists.

Limiting God to solve the problem of evil

Long ago, I remember reading with great curiosity Rabbi Kushner's Why Bad Things Happen to Good People? How disappointing that Kushner's intellectual answer seemed to be that God isn't omnipotent. (His practical answer not to worry about the question but just to do good is much better.) The idea of limiting divine attributes in part to answer the problem of evil has recently had some defense (e.g., here and in the work of open theists), so I guess it's time to blog the objection to Kushner—which applies to the others as well—that I had when I read him, with some elaboration.

Basically, the objection is that as long as God remains pretty good, pretty smart (he was smart enough to create us!) and powerful enough to communicate with us (Kushner at least accepts this), then serious cases of the Problem of Evil remain. Moreover, these cases do not seem significantly easier to solve than the cases of the Problem of Evil that were removed. Consequently, the intellectual benefit with regard to the Problem of Evil is small. And the intellectual loss with regard to the simplicity of the theory is great—the theory that God has all perfections is far simpler.

Start by considering a deity whose goodness is unlimited but whose knowledge and power are fairly limited.

Consider, first, the problem of polio. This is certainly a horrendous evil. And the limited deity could have alleviated a significant portion of the problem hundreds of years earlier simply by whispering into some people's ears how to make a vaccine—surely any deity smart enough to create this world would be smart enough to figure out how to make vaccines. Maybe the limited deity couldn't have prevented all cases, in the way that an unlimited God could. But given that neither did the wholesale prevention happen nor did the partial prevention by vaccines happen as early as it could have.

Consider, second, the many cases where innocent people suffered horrendously at the hands of attackers, where the attack could have been prevented if the people had been warned. Even a deity of limited power and knowledge should be able to see, for instance, that the Gestapo are talking about heading for such-and-such a house, and could then warn the occupants. (I am not saying that such warnings were never given—for all I know, they were in a number of cases. But I am saying that there are many cases where apparently they were not.)

Moreover, even if one limits the goodness of the deity, and only claims that he is pretty good, the problem remains. For unless the deity had a very serious reason not to tell people about vaccines and not to warn the innocent victims of horrendous attacks, it seems plausible that the deity did something quite bad in refraining from helping, so bad as to be incompatible with being pretty good. (If the deity had a reason that fell a little short of justifying the refraining, then that might be compatible with being pretty good; but a reason would have to be pretty serious for it to fall only a little short of justifying the refraining when the evils are so horrendous.) So even if one thinks that the deity has limited power and knowledge and is only pretty good, the problem of finding very serious reasons for the deity's non-interference remains.

Granted, the problem is diminished, especially if one has decreased the belief in divine goodness. But notice that the decrease in belief in divine goodness is the most religiously troubling aspect of a limited God doctrine. And even that does not make the problem go away.

Moreover, the sorts of things one can then plausibly say about the remaining problems of evil are things that, I suspect, the traditional theist can say as well about this and many other cases. Perhaps God does not prevent all attacks on innocent people (for all we know, he prevents many) because he wants humans to have effective freedom of will. Perhaps he wants to give victims opportunities for forgiveness of their aggressors in an afterlife. Perhaps God does not prevent disease because he wants us to help our neighbor and to develop medical science to this purpose. Or to give us an opportunity to join him on the cross in redeeming humankind. Or perhaps God prevents many evils, but his purposes do not allow him to prevent all, and some arbitrary line-drawing is needed. I am not saying that these answers are sufficient (though I think some contain a kernel of something right), but only that they can be equally used in the case of a limited and unlimited God, and in the case of an unlimited God such answers may well have rather general applicability.

Omnipotence and omniscience

1. Every omnipotent being is perfectly free.
2. Every perfectly free being knows every fact and is not wrong about anything.
3. Therefore, every omnipotent being knows every fact and is not wrong about anything.

Premise (1) is, I think, very plausible. What about (2)? Well, perfect freedom requires perfect rationality and a lack of "imaginative constraints". Imaginative constraints are cases where one cannot will something because one can't think of it. For instance, Cleopatra couldn't will to speak Esperanto, because she didn't have the concept of speaking Esperanto. A lack of imaginative constraints requires quite a bit of knowledge—one has to know the whole space of possible actions. But not only must one know the whole space of possible actions, one must also know everything relevant to evaluating the reasons for or against these actions. But, plausibly, every fact will be relevant to evaluating the reasons for or against some action. Consider this fact, supposing it is a fact: tomorrow there will occur an even number of mosquito bites in Australia. This is a pretty boring fact, but it would be relevant to evaluating the reasons for or against announcing that tomorrow there will occur an even number of mosquito bites in Australia. If this is right, then perfect freedom requires complete knowledge of everything.

In particular, open theists can't take God to be omnipotent.  There is another route to that conclusion.  If open theism is true, God can't now know whether tomorrow I will mow my lawn.  But if God couldn't now know what I will write in my next sentence, then he can't intentionally bring it about that right now (open theists need to accept absolute simultaneity, of course) on Pluto there exists a piece of paper saying what my next freely produced sentence will be.  But to be unable to do that would surely be a limitation of God's power.

Open theism and divine error

1. (Premise) If p is overwhelmingly probable on the balance of God's evidence, then God believes p.
2. (Premise) If open theism is true, then some of the propositions that are overwhelmingly probable on the balance of God's evidence are false.
3. Therefore, if open theism is true, God believes some falsehoods.
4. (Premise) God believes no falsehoods.
5. Therefore, open theism is false.

I think (2) is not that hard to argue for on the assumption that there will be infinitely many approximately independent free choices made in the future. Here is a plausibility argument for that assumption: at least some persons will live forever (this follows from divine goodness), and it is plausible that they will always be choosing freely (this follows from the value of freedom). To argue from this to (2), I will make the simplifying assumption that by law the choices are always between options A and B, and that the nth choice occurs exactly n years from now. For any prime number k, let p_k be the proposition that the choice made k years from now, or the choice made k² years from now, or the choice made k³ years from now, ..., or the choice made k¹⁰⁰ years from now will be A. The probability of p_k is 1−2⁻¹⁰⁰ given the setup. Then p_k will be overwhelmingly probable on the balance of God's evidence if open theism is true. But it is also all but certain that at least one of the propositions p_k, where k is a prime, is false. For they are independent, and given infinitely many independent propositions of probability 1−2⁻¹⁰⁰, it is all but certain that at least one is false. Hence some overwhelmingly probable proposition is false.
What about (1)? This is tougher. It is false that rationality requires us to believe everything that is overwhelmingly likely. We have to be careful not to clutter our minds with junk beliefs, because our minds are limited. But this concern does not apply to God. But, maybe, we could say that God should be very careful to avoid false beliefs. However, it would be a sign of irrationality, of an undue punctiliousness, to withhold belief simply because there is some tiny non-zero probability of the belief being false. God is not irrational. So God will believe what is overwhelmingly likely.

Excluded Middle and an Open Future

Some people deny the Law of Excluded Middle (LEM--for all p, p or not-p) because they are convinced it leads to fatalism. But they really shouldn't deny LEM.

Suppose Helga is convinced that utilitarianism is true. You offer Helga a reductio argument against utilitarianism on the assumption that the hedonistic theory of happiness holds and another reductio argument against utilitarianism on the assumption that the hedonistic theory of happiness does not hold. Helga accepts both reductios and comes to deny hedonistic utilitarianism and non-hedonistic utilitarianism, but continues to accept utilitarianism. Pressed on how Helga's new position squares with logic, Helga asserts that based on her belief that utilitarianism holds, and her new beliefs that if hedonism holds, utilitarianism is not true, and if hedonism doesn't hold, utilitarianism is not true, she has concluded that LEM does not hold. There seems to be something irrational about this. Surely, she should either find fault with at least one of the reductios or abandon her belief in utilitarianism. It is hard to imagine premsies whose plausibility should trump LEM.

Arguments the depend on LEM are not, I think, uncommon in philosophy. If Molinism is true, evil and the existence of God are compatible (by Plantinga's free will defense). If Molinism is not true, evil and the existence of God are compatible (by Adams' free will defense). Hence, evil and the existence of God are compatible. It is pretty likely that Helga uses LEM-based arguments in other contexts, and it is pretty likely that the defender of the Open Future who denies LEM also uses LEM in other contexts.

Could they both say that LEM applies in some contexts (e.g., non-normative ones in Helga's case, or in ones that do not involve the future in the freedom case) but not others? Yes. But once we denied the plausible view that LEM follows from the meaning of the words "or" and "not", and denied the general intuition that between p and not-p tertium non datur, it seems that we have undercut the grounds we could have for thinking LEM holds even in those contexts in which it is supposed to hold in. Besides, the defender of the Open Future who denies LEM presumably does so on the basis of something like a temporalized modal logic according to which if p already holds, then not-p is no longer possible. But surely the principles of classical non-temporal non-modal logic are more plausible and more deeply embedded in our thinking than those of temporalized modal logic.

Anyway, it seems much better to hold on to LEM, and just deny the principle that if not(will(p)), then will(not-p), where "will(p)" means p will hold. The principle that if not(will(p)), then will(not-p) is a dubious one if we see "will" as a modal-type operator, maybe akin to "would" except for being a one-place operator, and that is precisely how we will see "will" if we have presentist or growing-block intuitions. Moreover, it is a principle that is less central to our thinking than LEM, particularly because it applies only to our thinking about the future, while LEM applies to all our thinking. It seems clear to me that this is what the person impressed by the argument for logical fatalism should say, boldly holding that there is a fact of the matter whether Jones will mow the lawn tomorrow: it is false that Jones will mow the lawn tomorrow, just as it is false that he will fail to mow the lawn tomorrow. And God's omniscience will be unrestricted: he knows that it is false that Jones will mow the lawn and that it is false that he will not mow the lawn.

Of course, it's best to hold on to both LEM and if not(will(p)), then will(not-p).