Polytheism

I was recently asked to write a review for a book defending Polytheism. When I first saw the book, I could not take it seriously. Paganism today has always struck me as innocuous but intellectually empty. I love the image of hippies dancing naked in the woods, chanting around a big fire. Its a pleasing, if romanticized image, like Socrates's first version of the ideal city. The one dismissed by Glaucon because of the lack of meat and prostitutes.

When Bertrand Russell was asked whether he was an atheist or agnostic he answered "agnostic," and immediately drew an analogy with Hera and Zeus. "These too may exist", Russell said, but we have no reason to think that they do. The intent of the remark was to emphasize how dismissive Russell was of theism, not to pave the way for serious consideration of the existence of a multitude of gods.

And yet, when I stop and ask myself what reasons I have for thinking there is not a plurality of gods, I find very little to substantiate my prejudice. Its true I also have no reasons, as of yet, for thinking there are many gods, but this may be simply because I have not investigated the matter. I am, after all, just a beginning my research into polytheistic apologetics!). I t would certainly not do to imitate some of my students, who often assume that the old theistic arguments are unsuccessful before they even understand what the arguments are.

What this brings to mind is two quite different ways in which people use the word "absurd."

In one way, "absurd" means logically contradictory or in contradiction to some other known or strongly justified belief. Used in this way, absurdity can be an effective an rational means of critiquing someone's belief.

But another way "absurd" just means contrary to prevailing opinion, or contrary to comon belief. Absurd just means "too weird."

But this second sense is just another way of expressing a prejudice. Its like my old professor who, when he did not have an argument would say, "Surely you don't want to hold that view."

When reason fails, just contort your face the right way and put the right emphasis on your words.

Anything can be thought "too weird." Weirdness, unlike truth, is a culturally or psychologically relative notion. Christianity was too weird to pagan Rome. Evolution is too weird to fundamentalist Christians. Paganism is too weird for most of us hard nosed analytic philosophers.


Are there many gods? Right now I doubt it. I have stirring in my mind some reasons that may lead me to reject it. But I could be wrong.

An argument against molinism

Molinists hold that God has knows what choices any possible free creature will make in any possible circumstance. To supporters of molinism, the view has the twin advantage of allowing for a very strong variety of divine providence while still insisting on a libertarian view of creaturesly freedom (it is crucial to the view that God knows what choices a creature would *freely* make in the circumstances specified). To others, like myself, the view makes no sense at all. The most common objection is the so-called "grounding problem." If a future choice is really free, then there seems nothing (now) that would make it true that a person really would make any particular choice. What God has, with respect to free choice, is at best probabilities. there is no fact, prior to creation, of how I will freely choose to spend my evening, and if there is no such fact, there is nothing that couldmake these "counterfactuals of freedom" true (though the non-existence of such facts might make these counterfactuals all false).

I think the grounding objection is a good one, but I want to explore the possibility of another argument against molinism. The following seems to be true about liberatarian views of free will.

(1) If a person has free will, then the person's choice is not determined.

Note that (1) asserts only a necessary condition for free will. All free actions are undetermined, but not all undetermined actions are necessarily free. One of the odd things about free will is that while it requires on the one hand a lack of determinism, it also requires, it seems to me, a kind of responsibility-If I freely choose, it is *I* that is doing the choosing. A purely random event is not sufficient to capture this sense of personal responsibility.

Be that as it may, lets now consider what God knows, according to the molinist scheme. One example of God's knowledge would be this:

(2) God knows that if Obama wins the election Joe will freely choose to drink a beer.


If free will requires indeterminism, then God must also know the following.


(3) Joe's choice of drinking a beer is not determined.

Here is the thing: I think (2) and (3) contradict one another. But its not obvious why this should be so. Consider:


(4) God knows that yesterday I freely chose to mow my yard

and

(5) God knows that Yesterday I was not determined to mow my yard.

There is clearly nothing contradictory about these two statements. From the fact that I did an act, it does not follow that the act was determined. Indeed, it has long been recognized that
the argument for the incompatibility of freedom and foreknowledge requires not

Necessarily, if God knows Joe will drink a beer, joe will drink a beer

But:

If God knows Joe will drink a beer, then, Necessarily, Joe will drink a beer.

But we have to be careful of the sense of necessity here. If we think of necessity in terms of possible worlds, then all sorts of unfree actions are not going to be necessary.

There is a possible world in which I go to the moon tommorow, but this is not something I can actually choose to do. Likewise, the fact that the current phase of the moon is determined does not preclude there being other possible worlds in which in which the moon is in a different phase or even in which there is no moon at all.

To capture the sense of necessity required to deny free will, we must consider not the entire set of possible worlds, but the set of possible worlds which are identical in all respects up to the point of the choice in question.

Once we have available this subset of possible worlds, we can see that an action will be determined if all worlds that are exactly like this one up to this point also contain the action in question and an action will be undetermined if there is at least one possible world with exactly the same history and in which the choice is different

Now it seems to me that already we have a refutation of molinism based on the grounding objection: Either there is something about this world which allows God to know what Joe will choose or there is not. If there is something, then all identical possible world segments will also contain this fact (maybe, as Plantinga says, its a brute counterfactual fact), and so in all those worlds Joe will choose to drink the beer-and Joe's choice will not be free.

But what about my claimed contradiction? To see it, we need to realize that God knows what Joe would choose to do in a way that does not involve temporal modalities. God is knowing all of this, on the Molinist view, prior to creation. So if joe's choice is free, God knows its not determined. Yet God knows also, "at the same time," that Joe has a finite probability of making this choice.
But if Joe does make the choice, the probability in question is 1--. But God cannot know both
(1) the probability of Joe making the choice is 1 and (2) the probability of Joe making the choice is less than one. These are inconsistent. So, once again, Molinism is false

After writing this, I think the earlier argument regarding possible world segments may be more convincing. But is this an example of another, independent argument?