Alasdair MacIntyre—one of greatest Catholic thinkers of his generation, and one of the most formative influences on my own intellectual development—has unfortunately capped his career by denying divine omniscience. At this weekend’s fall conference for the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame, MacIntyre delivered a keynote lecture entitled “The Apparent Oddness of the Universe: How to Account for It?” In this lecture, he argues that the Catholic tradition has been excessive in its praise for our All-Knowing God. For when it comes to future contingents—or at least the kind of creative and unpredictable future contingents that MacIntyre calls “singularities”—MacIntyre claims that God cannot know them any more than you or I can. “Until [a free created] agent finally makes her or his decision,” MacIntyre explains,
her or his future action is undetermined. There is no fact of the matter about what she or he is going to decide or to do, nothing to make any statement about, true or false. Not only does she or he not know what she or he is going to do, no one else can be said to know this either, including God. . . . So, even if an omniscient God does exist, there have been and will be numerous occasions on which he cannot be said to know what will be done or happen, until it is done or happens.
I think MacIntyre is horribly mistaken. In this essay, I will proceed in three parts: First, I will explain the orthodox tradition concerning God’s knowledge of future contingents, proceeding through Aristotle and St. Boethius and St. Thomas Aquinas. Second, I will say something about where Duns Scotus and William of Ockham fit into all of this, two thinkers whose accounts I do not accept, but who nevertheless agree with the conclusion of the orthodox tradition that God knows all things—including future contingents. Third, I will critique another modern Catholic philosopher who denied God’s omniscience in this regard, namely Peter Geach, whom MacIntyre cited in his replies to the objections in the Q&A, to justify his own imposition of limits on God’s knowledge.
Part I: The Orthodox Tradition
It is Aristotle who first elaborated the question of the truth value of judgments about future contingents, in the ninth chapter of his logical work on statements, the Peri Hermeneias. Centuries later, Christian thinkers had to grapple with how to understand Aristotle’s arguments in light of revelation’s claims for divine omniscience and immutability, in their attempts to reconcile the reality of change and the indeterminacy of future contingents, on the one hand, with the immutability of divine knowledge, on the other.
St. Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius wrote two commentaries on Peri Hermeneias IX, and he returned to this question again at the end of his life in the fifth chapter of his De Consolatione. His first and shorter commentary he intends as a simple exposition of what Aristotle says, and he takes the gist of Aristotle’s argument to be as follows: “Of those things that are contingent and future it is never the case that one is definitely true and the other false” (First Commentary, 125, 20ff). For if all statements about the future were to be true or false already, then the events they describe would necessarily come to pass, and so there would be nothing contingent at all (ibid., 111, 5ff). “The necessity of the state of affairs follows the truth of the proposition” (ibid., 114, 10ff; see also Second Commentary, 205, 20ff). But this is absurd, because “chance and that which is in either of two ways is abolished, and free will is also taken away, if everything whatever that will happen is necessarily going to be” (First Commentary, 112, 10ff). Boethius takes it as obvious that some things happen contingently, by chance or by free will—indeed, he thinks this is more obvious to us than any fancy philosophical argumentation (ibid., 120, 15ff). And so, for Boethius, Aristotle must be correct that statements about future contingents can be neither true or false.
In his longer commentary and in the De Consolatione, Boethius addresses the problem this Aristotelian conclusion poses for God’s knowledge. (Boethius claims to find some of this already in Aristotle, but while I would agree with him that it is consonant with Aristotle, nevertheless I do not think it is there explicitly.) He takes as his imaginary interlocutor someone who follows the Stoic or fatalist line, and who “says that God knows all things and that, for that reason, all things are necessarily going to be” (Second Commentary, 226, 1ff; see also De Consolatione, 5.3.pr4–5). To the contrary, Boethius argues, in that case God would believe that everything happens of necessity, but then God would be mistaken, “since not all things come about necessarily, but some contingently” (Second Commentary, 226, 1ff). Since God cannot be mistaken, therefore the Stoics must be wrong that divine omniscience entails fatalism. So Boethius’ task is to determine how God can know all future things even if not all future things are already determinate.
The key, Boethius thinks, is God’s eternity, which Boethius defines as “the total and perfect possession of life without end” (De Consolatione, 5.6.pr4). For it is not the case that knowledge of future things imposes necessity on them, even for Aristotle; rather, it is the case that the only way we temporal men could know future things is if they were already necessary, independent of whether we happen to come to know them or not (ibid., 5.4.pr20). Yet in God’s case, unlike ours, he can know them even if they will come about contingently, because he does not look forward to them in the future, but sees all things in all times as present to him in his one eternal now (ibid., 5.6.pr15–17). “Those events which God sees in the present will undoubtedly come to be, but some will result from their innate necessity, and others at the discretion of those who perform them” (ibid., 5.6.pr35). For this reason, Boethius prefers the term “providentia” to “praevidentia” (ibid., 5.6.pr17). For while it is true that God knows future contingents, nevertheless he does not know them through their coming about at some time that is future to himself: “God derives this understanding and vision in the present not from the outcome of future events, but from his own simplicity” (ibid., 5.6.pr41–42). Granted, there is still a sense in which it is necessary that something is the case if God is seeing it, but that is just like the conditional necessity that Socrates is necessarily sitting if you see him sitting (ibid., 5.6.pr31–32)—and this isn’t opposed to contingency or freedom at all, and so poses no trouble for Christian Aristotelians like Boethius. Finally, Boethius gives the important disclaimer that we are not going to be able to understand or imagine how this works, any more than the distinct external senses can understand the simple unity of reason’s knowledge (ibid., 5.4.24–5.5.12), because God’s ways are infinitely above our ways: “The reason for the cloud that envelops you is that the process of human reasoning cannot attain to the simplicity of divine foreknowledge” (ibid., 5.4.pr2).
St. Thomas Aquinas agrees completely both with Aristotle and with Boethius, and so a lot of his treatment of these issues is just a rehashing of what we have already seen above. He insists that God truly knows the future, nevertheless not as future, but as present (De Veritate, Q. 2, a. 12, c.). He repeats that Socrates-sitting–style conditional necessity is no objection to this position (ibid., ad 2). He agrees with the fatalists that it would entail necessity if God knew future contingents as future, successively, and through their causes; but insists that God instead knows future contingents as present, simultaneously, and in themselves (ST Ia, Q. 14, a. 13, c.). And he accuses these fatalists of “judging of the cognition of the divine intellect and the operation of the divine will in the way in which these are in us, when in fact they are very dissimilar” (In Peri Hermeneias I.14.18). So far, so familiar.
St. Thomas’ distinctive addition to this Aristotelian-Boethian line of thought is what he has to say about the divine will. With Boethius he admits that knowledge as such does not impose necessity upon things. However, because the divine knowledge is also causal of things through the divine will, St. Thomas will have to do more work to show why even the Creator, who fully determines all things by his knowledge and will, still knows and wills some things as contingent and not as necessary. He insists that God’s will is always fulfilled, because “an effect cannot possibly escape the order of the universal cause” (ST Ia, Q. 19, a. 6, c.), and that “the will of God is entirely unchangeable” (ibid., a. 7, c.). Moreover, St. Thomas argues that “all things are subject to divine providence, not only in general, but even in their own individual selves” (ibid., Q. 22, a. 2, c.). He even affirms the existence of fate, if all we mean by “fate” is whatever is fore-spoken in God’s providential plan (ibid., Q. 116, a. 1, c.).
And yet, for Thomas, still some things are merely contingent, despite being infallibly caused by God. In order to fill out the ladder of being, as it were, God “has prepared for some things necessary causes, so that they happen of necessity; for others contingent causes, that they may happen by contingency, according to the nature of their proximate causes” (ibid., Q. 22, a. 4, c.). Yet since “properly speaking ‘necessary’ and ‘contingent’ are consequent upon being, as such,” therefore neither applies to God, whose perfect causality transcends this division (ibid., ad 3). “The divine will must be understood as existing outside of the order of beings, as a cause producing the whole of being and all its differences. Now the possible and the necessary are differences of being” (In Peri Hermeneias I.14.22). Ergo etc. Therefore St. Thomas is able to distinguish certainty from necessity: The former is said with regards to a thing’s first remote cause, namely God, the latter with regards to its secondary proximate causes (ST Ia, Q. 22, a. 4, ad 3). And so St. Thomas saves both the contingency of things and the perfection of divine knowledge and providence.
Part II: Duns Scotus and William of Ockham
William of Ockham does not continue in this Aristotelian-Boethian-Thomistic line, but argues from different premises of his own to the conclusion that God knows future contingents. Indeed, Ockham thinks Boethius and Thomas have misread Aristotle anyway, and that for the Philosopher, God simply would not know future contingents, since for Aristotle all knowledge is of what is determinately true, and this does not include future contingents (Tractatus de Praedestinatione, Q. 1, Assumption 5; see also Ordinatio, Distinction 38, M). However, it is neither Boethius nor St. Thomas that Ockham sets out explicitly to disprove, but rather Duns Scotus, who tried to solve these problems by appealing to the divine will and to distinct “instantes naturae“ in which God’s determinate knowledge of future contingents follows upon his volitional determination of them (ibid., Q. 1, Assumption 6; see also Ordinatio, Distinction 38, H). (Scotus’ position is nominally similar to St. Thomas’, but I would maintain that he prioritizes divine potency whereas Thomas prioritizes divine activity—but that is another question for another day.) Ockham’s primary objection against Scotus’ argument—and indeed against all our other thinkers—is that “divinely determined contingency” or “divinely determined freedom” is a contradiction: “The determination of the uncreated will does not suffice, because a created will can oppose the determination [of the uncreated will]” (Tractatus de Praedestinatione, Q. 1, Assumption 6).
And so Ockham must find a new way to reconcile contingency with divine omniscience. He admits, like Boethius, that this will be very difficult for us to understand or imagine (ibid.; see also Ordinatio, Distinction 38, M). But he thinks that ultimately the solution must be found in the perfection and identity of the divine essence and the divine knowledge: “The divine essence is intuitive cognition that is so perfect, so clear, that it is evident cognition of all things past and future, so that it knows which part of a contradiction [involving such things] is true and which part false” (Tractatus de Praedestinatione, Q. 1, Assumption 6). For Ockham, God knows future contingents because God just automatically knows everything (Ordinatio, Distinction 38, M). Yet, unlike Aristotelian-Thomists, Ockham thinks that God’s knowledge must be in the mode of the thing known, and so it must be contingent when the things known are contingent (ibid., Q. 2, O). Moreover, when things change or pass from indeterminacy to determinacy, in a certain sense God’s knowledge is changed with them, inasmuch as “God can know something that he did not know earlier” (Ordinatio, Distinction 39, C). Ockham devises various convoluted ways to try to argue that this is no threat to divine simplicity or immutability or omniscience. Some of us remain unconvinced. But for present purposes, the thing worth noting is that even Scotus and Ockham agree with Ss. Boethius and Thomas Aquinas that God has to know all future contingents.
Part III: The Mistakes of Peter Geach
Peter Geach, the twentieth-century analytic philosopher and husband to Elizabeth Anscombe, is often described as a Thomist. However, while there is no question that he had great respect for St. Thomas Aquinas, nevertheless his arguments on various topics often contradict those of St. Thomas in significant ways. Nowhere is this more evident than in Geach’s treatment of God’s knowledge of future contingents in his Stanton Lecture on “Omniscience and the Future.” In this final section, I will consider both where Geach follows St. Thomas on this question, and where he declines from the lofty wisdom of the Common Doctor.
Let’s begin with the issues on which Geach and St. Thomas see eye-to-eye. Most importantly, Geach agrees with St. Thomas that “whatever we can say is going to be, we can also say is known by God” (“Omniscience and the Future,” p. 44). He further affirms with St. Thomas, over and against certain contemporary philosophers (and Ockham), that God’s knowledge is completely unchanging in every respect, even with regard to its objects (ibid., p. 41). He also agrees with the Boethian Aquinas that “we cannot hope in this life for a positive understanding of God’s way of knowing things” (ibid., p. 42)—for, as Thomas would say, to know the divine mind is the same as to see the divine essence. Moreover, Geach follows St. Thomas in arguing for the reality of time and change in created things: “If time and change are only apparent, not real, features of the world, Christian . . . theism is altogether destroyed” (ibid.). He also argues, with St. Thomas and against the fatalists, for the contingency of many of the things that happen in this changing world: “In a philosopher’s study a man may accept the thesis that if something has happened nobody was in a position to prevent it; in practical life nobody thinks this way for a moment” (ibid., pp. 49–50). Geach also agrees with Thomas that divine omnipotence does not extend to making contradictions simultaneously true: “A senseless sentence does not become an intelligible proposition because we write it down after, “God knows that…’” (ibid., pp. 43–44)—and thus “before we can hope to talk sense about God’s knowledge of the future we must learn to talk sense about the future” (ibid., p. 44). Finally, Geach agrees with St. Thomas that the past is determinate, but the future is not: “To represent time by a single fixed line . . . is not too misleading about the past, for the past cannot be changed; but it is seriously misleading as regards the future, for what is going to happen can sometimes be avoided or prevented” (ibid., p. 51). Thus, says Geach, “Future-land is a region of fairytale” (ibid., 52).
The early portions of this lecture might lead one to think that Geach is simply going to re-present and reaffirm St. Thomas’ whole argument for God’s knowledge of future contingents. Unfortunately, this is not the case. One begins to suspect something is off when Geach remarks that “the past, . . . though it is not presently actual, does exist in the sense of ‘exist’ expressed in formal logic by the existential quantifier” (ibid., p. 54)—although maybe it could be argued that this is just a way of translating St. Thomas’ Aristotelian logic into contemporary analytic terms. Shortly thereafter, however, Geach’s departure from St. Thomas becomes much less ambiguous.
Perhaps the most significant disagreement Geach has with St. Thomas is over the mode of God’s knowledge vis-à-vis time. As we have seen above, St. Thomas, following Boethius, argues that God does know future things, but that he does not know them as future, but rather as present to him in his divine eternity (De Veritate, Q. 2, a. 12, c.; ST Ia, Q. 14, a. 13, c.). Geach, on the contrary, thinks that God’s knowing future things as present would mean that God is confused about them, believing them to be present when in fact they are future; or else that Thomas’ claim involves some sort of contradiction, since God’s knowledge would have to be future and not future at the same time and in the same respect. “To say that God sees future events as they are in themselves, in their presentness, and not as future,” says Geach, “is to ascribe to God either misperception or a patently self-contradictory feat” (“Omniscience and the Future,” p. 57). Speaking explicitly against the image St. Thomas offers of God looking down from a great height on all things simultaneously, Geach declares, “I think this phrase, ‘seeing the future as present’, embodies a hopeless confusion” (ibid., p. 62).
Of course, for the Aristotelian-Thomist, the natural response to Geach is that it is not necessary for true knowledge that things be known in the mode in which they are in themselves (In Metaphysica, III, n. 422, 446, 455; VII, n. 1300–1305). I can know a material tree without knowing it in a material way—and indeed, if I did not know it immaterially, I would not know it at all, for all knowledge is immaterial. Likewise here, God can know things that are future without knowing them in a future way. (Moreover, they are not future to God anyway, who does not change and who is therefore not measured by time—they are future to us.) Knowledge is in the mode of the knower, rather than in the mode of the thing known (In Divinis Nominibus, 191). And so there is no absurdity in Thomas’ claiming that God really knows these things in themselves, but knows them in his own eternal mode. God is not misjudging them, any more than I misjudge a tree when I possess its material form in an immaterial way in my intellect. Pace Geach (and MacIntyre), God judges that these things are future relative to the other created things that come before them, but since God is not himself one of those other created things, he himself does not look forward to them as future, but rather beholds them as present to him in his eternal now.
Another claim of Geach’s that cannot be found in St. Thomas is that “God knows the future by controlling it” (“Omniscience and the Future,” p. 57; emphasis in original). Granted, it is true that for Thomas things themselves are a kind of middle between God’s knowledge and ours, since God’s knowledge is the cause of things whereas our knowledge is caused by things (ST Ia, Q. 14, a. 8, ad 3). And as we have seen above, it is also true that St. Thomas believes that all things fall under the causality of divine providence (ibid., Q. 19, a. 6, c.). God does know things, for St. Thomas, because he is the first efficient cause of things (ibid., Q. 14, a. 5, c.). Nevertheless, St. Thomas is not saying that God gains his knowledge of things through his manipulation of them in the way Geach is imagining. For Geach, “God is the supreme Grand Master [in chess] who has everything under his control” (“Omniscience and the Future,” p. 58), and it is in virtue of this manipulative mastery that God knows the future. This view owes more to Scotistic or even Ockhamist voluntarism than it does to the teaching of St. Thomas. Thomas teaches that is precisely God’s knowledge which makes things to be, that gives form to the divine will that brings them into being. Geach, on the other hand, makes God’s knowledge an effect of his making and governing, which for Thomas is to put things perfectly backwards.
The last place where Geach departs from St. Thomas in a significant way is in his teaching about God’s relation to sin. He mentions something like Thomas’ view—without acknowledging it as such—“that God is the cause of the act which is sinful, and thus can foreknow it as it will happen, but is not the cause of its sinfulness” (ibid., p. 62). (Of course for Thomas God is not foreknowing it, properly speaking, but simply knowing it.) But Geach raises this possibility only to dismiss it: “I must confess that I find this explanation beyond my understanding” (ibid.). For Geach’s chess-master theory of divine knowledge, sin poses a serious problem. Indeed, he confesses that for him it is “an intractable problem” (ibid., p. 63). If God only knows things because he is controlling them, then how can he know sin, since if he were controlling it he would be guilty of the sin himself, and perhaps the created agent would not be guilty and so no creature could truly sin? But even with this insoluble dilemma that Geach has created for himself, he does not reverse course and return to a proper Thomistic understanding of God’s knowledge of future contingents. Instead, he takes refuge in the dark unintelligibility of sin. Yet this also brings him into contradiction with St. Thomas, because whereas Thomas teaches that sin as such is unintelligible, and is known even by God only through the good of which it is a deprivation (ST Ia, Q. 14, a. 10, c.), for Geach “the darkness of sin, which is opaque to us, is transparent . . . to God, to whom the night is as clear as the day” (“Omniscience and the Future,” p. 65). He thinks it is just a limitation of our finite minds that we cannot know evil in itself. On a Thomistic assessment, this move of Geach’s makes evil out to be far more real and reasonable than it actually is.
Peter Geach is sometimes a lucid exponent of Thomistic philosophy. But on the question of God’s knowledge of future contingents, he both misunderstands St. Thomas’ teaching, and adopts a position that is completely at odds with the true Thomistic answer.
Conclusion
In the Q&A following his lecture, Alasdair MacIntyre faced a number of objections to his troubling and heterodox view on divine ignorance, from priests and professors and doctoral students and undergrads alike. In response to their arguments, MacIntyre doubled down: “It’s not an imperfection in God that he doesn’t know these things; it’s an impossibility to say this intelligibly. And at this point we are, I think, doing harm to our theology by paying meaningless compliments to God.” When pressed about how God can be the universal efficient cause of all creation if he does not even know what a created agent is going to do, MacIntyre limited not just God’s knowledge but also his efficiency: “The agent her- or himself, if you like, is the efficient cause of the singularity that she or he utters. It’s Shakespeare who utters the sonnet. It’s Einstein who utters the equation.” God could not foresee these utterances in advance, MacIntyre says, before Shakespeare and Einstein make them, and so it is to the created agents themselves that efficiency must be attributed in such cases. Again, according to MacIntyre, “No one can be said to know [these future contingent singularities], including God.”
I hope this little essay has gone some way to showing why MacIntyre is gravely mistaken. When we Christians profess that God is omniscient, we really do mean it. God knows all things: all things that were, all things that are, all things that ever shall be. The stakes here could not be higher. For if MacIntyre were right, and God really were still waiting on us to discover what will happen next, he would not be God at all. “Even before there is a word on my tongue, behold, O Lord, you know it all” (Ps 138:4). “For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him (Jn 6:64). “I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me—declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done” (Is 46:9–10).