Sunday, September 12, 2010

The Modal Scope Fallacy

Does divine foreknowledge threaten libertarian free will? Or, to put it another way, is an omniscient agent incompatible with The Garden Of Forking Paths model of free will, the one in which we could have done otherwise?

I think not. But what if somebody says, the fact that god is omniscient means that god infallibly knows that I will eat cornflakes for breakfast tomorrow. God can't fail to know this, being omniscient. The idea then, is that necessarily god knows I will eat cornflakes for breakfast tomorrow. Hence, necessarily, I will eat cornflakes tomorrow and that means it is not possible that I won't eat cornflakes for breakfast tomorrow, and this implies that I can't do otherwise, which refutes libertarian free will.

However, I think this argument fails. What do you think?