Justified True Belief

(●) God foreknows every choice his creatures will make, and his foreknowing takes nothing away from the one who chooses. + Tomorrow morning you will stand at the kettle and decide whether to phone your brother. Maybe you will. Maybe you will put it off one more week, the way you did last time. Whatever you settle on, two things Christians say about that moment sound, the first time anyone sets them side by side, as though they cannot both be true. The first is that God already knows which way it goes. Not guesses shrewdly, not reads you well. Knows, and has known since before there was a kettle or a brother or a you. The second is that the decision is yours. Nothing and nobody settles it except you, standing there with the water going off the boil. Theological fatalism says the two cannot stand together. If God knew in advance what you would do, the fatalist argues, then you could not have done anything else, and a deed you could not have avoided was never really yours. This is not a fringe position, and it is not a cheap one. Jonathan Edwards argued it at length and built on it. Some Christians have found it so forceful that they gave up God's knowledge of the future rather than live with it. Its modern form is a carefully built argument that has occupied professional philosophers for sixty years and shows no sign of going away. That last escape, the one that keeps human freedom by shrinking God, costs far more than it saves. A God who has to wait and see what happens is not the God who declares the end from the beginning, and that is not a trade worth making. Who holds what, on theological fatalism: - Support: Jonathan Edwards argued it in 1754, and Nelson Pike gave it its modern form in 1965. - Oppose: Origen answered it in the third century, and Alvin Plantinga gave the answer this argument adopts. The argument that follows refutes it.

(P1) God knows every choice his creatures will ever make. + God's knowledge of the future leaves nothing out, and it reaches the free acts of people as surely as it reaches the motions of the stars. (1) Declaring the future is the test Scripture uses to tell God from an idol. - Isaiah stages a trial and summons the idols to the stand. The challenge put to them is not a parlor trick, and it has nothing to do with thunder or spectacle: "Tell us what is to come hereafter, that we may know that you are gods" (Isaiah 41:23). Knowing what has not happened yet is offered as the credential of deity itself. - God's own answer to that challenge is a claim to do the one thing the idols cannot. He is the one "declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done" (Isaiah 46:10). - He also says, in so many words, why he bothered to announce things ahead of time: "before they came to pass I announced them to you, lest you should say, My idol did them" (Isaiah 48:5). A prediction issued after the event proves nothing whatever about the predictor. The entire force of the claim is that it came first. (2) The knowledge reaches particular acts of particular people. - What is on offer is not merely the broad shape of history, and not merely a report of what God has resolved to do himself. "Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O Lord, you know it altogether" (Psalm 139:4). A word half-formed and about to leave a mouth is about as free and as small as a human act ever gets. - Jesus tells the disciples about the betrayal before it happens and says exactly why he is doing it: "I am telling you this now, before it takes place, that when it does take place you may believe that I am he" (John 13:19). The foretelling of one man's treachery is put forward as evidence that the speaker is who he says he is. - The prediction to Peter is specific enough that anyone could check it before sunrise: "before the rooster crows twice, you will deny me three times" (Mark 14:30). Not a tendency, not a temperament. A count and a deadline. - Cyrus, the Persian king, is named outright and told what he will do with Jerusalem (Isaiah 44:28-45:1). Who wrote those chapters, and when, is an old argument, and it does not change what the text is doing. • Most critical scholars assign them to the exile, on several grounds at once: the audience addressed is already in Babylon, the city is spoken of as fallen and waiting to be rebuilt, and the vocabulary shifts. Old Testament scholars still defend a single author in print, and the argument between them belongs to their discipline. • On the traditional dating the text names a man who has not been born. On the exilic dating it still announces the fall of Babylon and the rebuilding of a ruined city before either had happened. Either way, announcing what is not yet done is offered as the credential of the God who speaks, which is what (P1) needs. (3) The verses that simply say God knows everything are not what carries the weight. - Two verses get quoted in this dispute more than all the others together, and honesty requires saying at the outset that neither one settles it. Hebrews says that "no creature is hidden from his sight" (Hebrews 4:13). John says that "he knows everything" (1 John 3:20). - Both of them put a limit on nothing, and that is precisely the trouble. Neither verse stops to say whether tomorrow's free acts are among the things there are to know, and that is the very point in dispute. An open theist can affirm both sentences without blinking. - The weight sits on the other texts, on the trial in Isaiah and the rooster in the courtyard, and those are not summaries of a doctrine. They are the argument God makes about himself, staged in a courtroom and tested against rivals who are invited to try the same thing. (4) A being who did not know the future would not be the greatest there could be. - The reasoning here is old and it is short. God is the greatest being there could possibly be, which is what Anselm meant when he called him that than which nothing greater can be conceived. A being who knows everything there is to know is greater than one who does not. So God knows everything there is to know. - Open theists, Christians who hold that the future is genuinely unsettled until it happens, have a reply ready for that. A free act nobody has performed yet is not sitting there waiting to be known, they say, so failing to know it is no more a defect in God than failing to draw a square circle is a defect in a draftsman. - The reply comes in two versions, and they are worth keeping apart. On the first, there is as yet no truth at all about what you will freely do tomorrow. On the second, the truth is there and nobody whatever, God included, could get at it in advance. - Both versions have a heavy load to carry. Ordinary speech treats yesterday's "he will resign" as having been true or false all along. And a prediction of one man's treachery at one supper table, offered as a reason to believe a claim about the speaker, only works if there was something there to get right in the first place (John 13:19). Of the two, the second version carries the heavier load, because a foretelling offered as a ground of faith needs the truth to have been not merely there but within reach of the one who spoke it. (5) The texts that look like God learning speak of him in human terms. - These belong on the table before anyone else puts them there. God "regretted that he had made man on the earth" (Genesis 6:6). After the golden calf "the Lord relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people" (Exodus 32:14). At Nineveh, "God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it" (Jonah 3:10). - Read cold, with nothing else in view, those look like a God who did not see it coming. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest. - For the relenting texts Jeremiah states the standing rule the stories are following. If God announces that he will pluck up a nation, "and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it" (Jeremiah 18:7-8), and the same policy runs in reverse for a promise (Jeremiah 18:9-10). An announced judgment carries a condition whether or not the condition is spelled out, and a condition being met is not a surprise to the one who attached it. - Genesis 6:6 has no announced condition anywhere near it, and it does not need one. The verse pairs the regret with grief of heart, and grief is not surprise. A father who saw from ten years off exactly how his son would turn out can still be cut open by watching it happen. - The same books say the opposite of what the surface suggests, sometimes on the same page. Samuel is told that "the Glory of Israel will not lie or have regret, for he is not a man, that he should have regret" (1 Samuel 15:29), and Balaam that "God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind" (Numbers 23:19). - The king of Nineveh gives the game away himself. "Who knows? God may turn and relent" (Jonah 3:9). The uncertainty in that story belongs to the Ninevites, who had no idea what was coming. It was never said to belong to God. Therefore, the future God knows includes the choices his creatures will make, down to the word before it is spoken.

(P2) A thing certainly known is not thereby a thing that had to happen. + The fatalist's argument, in the form most people meet, goes wrong at one identifiable step, and the step has a name. Naming it does more good than any amount of appeal to mystery, and the harder version of the argument, the one that avoids the step altogether, is taken up in (P3) and (P4). (1) Two sentences look almost alike and say quite different things. - Start in a kitchen. Your daughter is standing in the doorway and you are looking straight at her. Necessarily, if you see her standing in the doorway, she is standing in the doorway. Your seeing settles that much and not one thing more. It does not plant her feet. If she turned around and went back upstairs, you would simply be watching that instead. - Now put God where your eyes were, and tomorrow where the doorway was. Two sentences come out of that. They sound nearly identical, and only one of them is true. - True: necessarily, if God knows you will do something, you will do it. The word "necessarily" governs the whole of the if-then. Given the knowing, the doing follows, and there is no way to have the one without the other. - Not true: if God knows you will do something, then you will necessarily do it. Here "necessarily" has slid off the if-then and landed on the last part all by itself, where it now says something else entirely, that the deed could not have gone otherwise. - Aquinas named the pair being confused. The necessity of the consequence is the airtightness of the inference, the fact that the second thing really does follow from the first. The necessity of the consequent is the thing inferred being unable to have been otherwise (Summa Theologiae I.14.13). The first is true here. The second does not follow from it, and the fatalist's whole case needs it. - Anselm had drawn the same line before him, separating a necessity that forces a thing to happen from a necessity that merely follows it once it is happening (De concordia I). (2) Certainty describes the knower, not the event. - To be certain is to be without doubt, and that is a fact about a mind. For an event to be necessary is for it to have been unable to turn out any other way, and that is a fact about the world. Sliding from the one to the other is the engine of the whole mistake. - Think of it this way: a forecaster who has not been wrong in a thousand years says it will rain on Thursday, and on Thursday it rains. Her certainty did not fall on the fields. And the rain could perfectly well have failed, in which case she would have said so, because that is what being that good at forecasting amounts to. - The fatalist moves from "God cannot be mistaken" to "the deed cannot be otherwise." One of those is a claim about a knower. The other is a claim about an act. Nothing carries you from the first to the second. (3) The argument runs just as well with God left out of it. - Take God out of the picture and put in Smith, a neighbor who merely happens to be right about what you will do tomorrow. Necessarily, if Smith correctly believes you will do it, you will do it. Smith does correctly believe it. So, by the very same reasoning, you must. - Now take Smith out as well and leave the bare truth standing on its own. Necessarily, if it is true that you will do it, you will do it. It is true. So you must. - On that reasoning every "I told you so" in history turns out to have been a sentence passed on the person told, and the theological fatalist rejects that conclusion as firmly as anyone else does. - The substitution is a test of the inference rather than a comparison between knowers, and the difference is worth being careful about. It would be no good at all to say that human foreknowledge compels nobody and therefore divine foreknowledge compels nobody, because a human forecaster can be wrong and God cannot. - What the substitution shows is narrower than that, and harder to escape. The inference uses nothing about the believer except that his belief is true. So whatever is wrong with it in Smith's hands is wrong with it in God's. - Pressed on this, the fatalist repairs his argument by putting back what the substitution left out. Not merely that God believes, but that it is now beyond anyone's reach that he believed, the belief being lodged in a past nobody can get at and held by a believer who could not have been mistaken. That is a different and a far better argument, and (P4) is where it is taken. - One more thing is worth knowing about the popular version. It is Greek logical fatalism, the fatalism you can run on a bare true statement with no God anywhere in it, and it is older than any Christian doctrine of foreknowledge. Aristotle met it as the puzzle of tomorrow's sea battle (On Interpretation 9), the Stoics were arguing over it before a word of the New Testament was written, and the Mishnah has the rabbis setting the two halves down side by side without the least embarrassment: everything is foreseen, and freedom of choice is given (Avot 3.15). Adding God changes nothing in the reasoning except who finds it impressive. (4) A constraint nobody can describe is not a constraint. - Notice how little the fatalist actually claims about the act itself. He does not say your choice was caused by anything. He grants that nothing pushed you, that no prior state settled it, that you weighed it up and decided. He says only that it was somehow fixed anyway. - Fixed by what? Not by a cause, since he has just conceded there was none. The answer usually given is that the constraint is logical rather than causal: what you do has to be consistent with a belief that was already held, and consistency really is a limit, even where nothing pushes. - Limits of that kind are lying around everywhere and nobody calls them coercion. A man who played basketball last winter cannot now play basketball for the first time, and that is impossible in the strictest sense there is. It does not keep him off the court this evening. To say that Jones's staying home would be inconsistent with a belief that was in fact held is a remark about which descriptions fit together. It is not a report of anything Jones is unable to do. - Think of Zeno's arguments that motion is impossible. They are ingenious, they are genuinely hard to answer, and philosophers were still publishing solutions two thousand years later. Nobody ever concluded that the arrow was standing still. - Run the test yourself. Delete God's knowing from the picture, and the fatalist agrees the act is free. Put it back, and suddenly it is not. Nothing whatever about the act has changed in between. A knowledge that makes no difference to its object cannot be what makes the object unavoidable. (5) The distinction does real work on a real case. - Luther called this very distinction "a play on words," and anybody who suspects he had a point deserves better in reply than a Latin phrase and a confident tone. - So here is the work it does. Suppose you will in fact keep an appointment tomorrow, and God knows it. Ask first what the fatalist needs in order to win. He needs it to be the case that you are unable to stay home. Now ask what he has actually shown, which is that if you stayed home, God would never have believed you were coming. - Those are not the same claim, and only the first of them is fatalism. The second is true and perfectly harmless, and (P3) and (P4) are where it is made good. Therefore, being certainly known by God is not a property that makes an act unavoidable.

(C1) Therefore, God's knowing a choice does not make it unavoidable. + God's knowing that you will do a thing does not make the thing unavoidable. That is what stands once the slide from "certainly known" to "had to happen" has been blocked. (1) The form is a general rule applied to a particular case. - A deductive argument works like a locked chain. If every link holds, the conclusion cannot slip out; you either break a link or take what comes. - The general rule is (P2): being certainly known does not make a thing unavoidable. (P1) puts God's knowledge of your choices under that rule, since if any knowledge anywhere is certain, his is. Apply the rule to the case and the conclusion is simply sitting there. His knowing a choice does not make it unavoidable. - Neither premise has to be certain. Each has to be more believable than its denial, which is the standard a deductive argument is held to, and it is a real standard rather than a lenient one. A premise more likely false than true sinks the whole thing. - The two premises fail in quite different ways, and the difference is worth seeing. Deny (P2) and the conclusion goes with it, and so does every true guess anybody has ever made about the future, each of which turns out to have been a sentence passed on the person guessed about. Deny (P1) and the conclusion survives with less work to do, because a God who does not know what you will say tomorrow was never going to threaten your saying it. That second route costs a doctrine rather than refuting an argument, and it is the road open theism takes. (2) Knowledge is not a force. - In conversation the objection nearly always arrives with a picture attached. Foreknowledge gets imagined as a kind of advance pressure, a rail laid down ahead of the train, so that the knowing does something to the act. - It does nothing to the act, and (P2) is the reason. Nothing travels from the knower to the known. There is no rail. (3) The version philosophers press makes no such mistake. - The serious form of the argument grants every word of (P2). It agrees that God's knowing causes nothing at all, and it agrees that the two necessities are different things. - Then it makes a wholly separate move. God's believing happened in the past, and the past is over. Nobody can arrange for the Battle of Hastings to have been fought in 1067. - That argument is not a fallacy and it is not easily dismissed. It is the real objection, and (P3) and (P4) take it. Therefore, nothing about God's knowing a choice makes the choice unavoidable.

(P3) God knows a choice because it will be made, not the other way round. + Knowledge conforms to what is known. That has been true of every knower there has ever been, and a knower who cannot possibly be wrong is no exception. (1) Knowledge takes its shape from its object. - Your knowing that a friend is left-handed does not make him left-handed. He is left-handed, and that is why the belief you hold about him is a true one rather than a false one. - The same thing runs through every case anyone can think of. A true report depends on the event, and the event does not depend on the report. - The fatalist's picture turns that around. It stands the knowledge upstream of the act and lets the knowledge shape the act the way a mold shapes what is poured into it. Nothing in the idea of knowledge supports that, and everything in ordinary usage cuts against it. Foreknowledge follows an act the way a shadow follows a walker, and nobody has ever suspected the shadow of doing the walking. - Think of it this way: a wedding photograph is accurate because of what happened at the wedding. Nobody has ever supposed that the wedding happened because the photograph came out well. - The dependence being claimed here is not the camera's, and the difference is worth pausing over. Light traveled from the wedding to the film, so there is a physical story to tell about the photograph. Nothing at all travels from Saturday's mowing back to a belief held eighty years earlier. - Two orders are being kept apart in all of this, and the words for them are worth learning. One thing is chronologically prior to another when it comes earlier in time, the way the wedding comes before the print. One thing is logically prior to another when it is the reason the other is as it is, the way the wedding is why the print shows what it shows. God's knowing is chronologically prior to the act and logically posterior to it, and once you have the two words there is nothing strange about that pairing at all. (2) This has been the church's answer since the third century. - Origen gave it against Celsus: a thing does not come about because God knows it; God knows it because it is going to come about (Contra Celsum II.20). - Augustine gave the same answer to Cicero, who had looked at divine foreknowledge and concluded that nothing whatever is in our power (City of God V.9-10). - John of Damascus fixed the formula the Eastern church has used ever since: God foreknows all things, but he does not predetermine all things (Exposition of the Orthodox Faith II.30). - Arminius put it in one sentence that could be carved over the whole dispute: "a thing does not come to pass because it has been foreknown or foretold; but it is foreknown and foretold because it is yet to come to pass." (3) The hardest objection grants every word of this. - Admitting that is not a retreat, and it costs nothing. The serious critic does not claim that God's knowledge causes anything at all, and pretending that he does would be answering a weaker man than the one who is standing there. - What he claims instead is that the knowledge is lodged in the past, eighty years back and out of anybody's reach, and that the past is closed for business. - Answering that takes a further step, and (P4) is the step. Therefore, the direction of dependence runs from the act to the knowledge, and never from the knowledge to the act.

(P4) What God believed long ago about a choice depends on the choice itself. + The strongest version of the objection never says that God's knowledge pushes anybody around. It says that God's belief is lodged in a past nobody can reach, and the answer is that a belief about tomorrow is exactly the kind of past fact that waits on tomorrow. (1) The objection at full strength: Jones and his lawn. - It went into print in 1965 and philosophers have been working on it ever since. Take Jones, a man who mows his lawn on Saturday afternoon. • Eighty years ago, God believed that Jones would mow his lawn on Saturday afternoon. • God is not merely accurate but essentially infallible. Being the God he is, he could not have held that belief and been wrong, and no creature could have made him wrong. • What happened eighty years ago is over and done with. Nobody now has any power over it at all. • So if Jones is genuinely able to refrain on Saturday, he must hold one of three powers: the power to make that eighty-year-old belief a false one, or the power to bring it about that God held some other belief than the one he held, or the power to bring it about that the believer was never there. • The first is ruled out by what God is. The second and the third are powers over the past. Nobody has any of the three, so Jones was never able to refrain, and the mowing was not voluntary. - Nothing in that confuses the necessity of the consequence with the necessity of the consequent. It grants everything (P2) and (P3) establish, and it runs instead on two other things entirely, on what God is and on the fixity of the past. That is why the answer given in (P2) leaves it standing. (2) Facts about the past come in two kinds. - A hard fact about the past is one whose truth is complete in its own time: it was made true by how things stood then, and it waits on nothing still to come. That Socrates drank hemlock is a hard fact. Nothing that happens from here on has any bearing on it. - A soft fact about the past is one whose truth depends on what comes later. Take 1066. It is a fact about 1066 that the Battle of Hastings was fought that year, and that fact is hard as iron. It is also a fact about 1066 that it was the year of the last successful invasion of England, and that one is soft: whether it is true depends on whether another invasion ever succeeds, and if one does, it will turn out never to have been true. - From the outside the two look alike. Both are stated in the past tense and both are perfectly true. What separates them is which way they lean. - The labels are modern. The distinction behind them is not, because Ockham drew it in the fourteenth century, arguing that some past-tense statements are about the past only in their grammar. (3) God's believing something about a free act is a soft fact. - Start with what makes a past fact soft in the first place. It is soft when it depends on what is still to come, and God's ancient belief is exactly that. What he believed is settled by what he knew, and what he knew is settled by what will in fact happen, so the belief leans forward rather than standing there whatever the future does. - There is a second test, and it is the sharper of the two. Picture a barometer on a kitchen wall, falling at noon. Ask what that noon reading guarantees about midnight and the answer is nothing at all: it makes a storm likely, and likely is as far as it goes. A fact shut up inside its own moment behaves exactly like that reading. - Now set God's noon belief beside the barometer. His believing at noon that the storm will come does guarantee midnight, because the believer cannot be wrong. You cannot so much as say what he believed without saying what midnight holds. A fact that carries midnight around inside it was never a fact only about noon. - The objection needs God's ancient belief to be hard, and that is a claim it owes an argument for rather than something it may quietly help itself to. The case usually made is that believing is a state the believer was in at the time, and that how a thing stood at a moment is as settled as the moment. - What that case leaves out is the content of the belief. A temperature can be described completely without mentioning anything outside the moment it was taken in. A belief cannot, because a belief is about something, and this one is about Saturday. "He believed on Monday that Friday's flight would land safely" reports a state of Monday and reaches out to Friday in the same breath, and it is Friday that settles what kind of belief Monday held. - Which past facts are hard and which are soft is not something anyone can tell by looking. "She wore a blue coat that morning" and "she wore the coat she would later lose" are both about the same morning, and only the second of them waits on what happens next. (4) Jones needs no power over the past. - Jones cannot reach back and erase a belief. He cannot make a belief false. He cannot unmake the believer. All three really are impossible, and the objection works only if those three exhaust his options, which is the assumption it never stops to examine. - There is a fourth option, and it is an entirely ordinary one. Jones can do something other than what he will do, and if he were to do it, God would always have believed that instead. - Think of it this way: a woman took a job last year, and she could perfectly well have turned it down. Had she turned it down, God would never have believed she would take it. Nothing about the past has been reached back into. A different past would simply have been the one there was. - The grammar carries the whole difference. Not "he can change what God believed," but "were he to act otherwise, God would have believed otherwise." The first claims a power over the past. The second is a counterfactual, the philosopher's word for a statement about what would have been the case had things gone differently. - Counterfactuals point backward all the time and nobody reaches back into anything. If the letter had arrived on Tuesday, it would have been posted on Monday. Nobody imagines that Tuesday's arrival went back and posted it. (5) The distinction was not invented to rescue foreknowledge. - It would be a fair complaint if the soft fact were a device built for this one job, and suspicion on that score is exactly the right instinct. - It is not such a device, and the reason is that the sorting is needed by everybody, whatever they think about God. It was already true eighty years ago that you would get out of bed this morning at the hour you got out of bed, and that is a past-tense truth like any other. If every past-tense truth were closed in the way the fatalist's argument needs, that plain fact about 1946 would have abolished your freedom at the alarm clock with God left out of the story altogether. He has to say why his principle does not reach that far, and the only answer available to him is that some truths about the past wait on the future. - The distinction earns its keep in places where God never comes up at all. Historians say that 1066 was the year of the last successful invasion of England. Commentators say that a match was a player's last. Nobody finds either remark mysterious, and nobody suspects it of having been invented for the occasion. Soft facts are ordinary furniture. Therefore, God's ancient belief about a free act is one of the facts that wait on the act, and not one of the facts that close it off.

(C2) Therefore, God's foreknowledge leaves every choice up to the one who makes it. + God foreknows what you will do, and the doing stays yours. A fact can make an act unavoidable in two ways and no more, and God's knowing a choice manages neither of them. (1) There are two roads from a fact to an unavoidable act. - Suppose some fact makes an act unavoidable. There are only two ways it could manage the trick. Either it is among the things that bring the act about, or it is itself beyond everybody's reach and guarantees the act, so that the act inherits that same fixity. - The first road is closed. Knowledge conforms to its object, so the knowing stands downstream of the act and is not among the things that bring it about (P3). - The second road is closed too. God's ancient belief is among the facts that depend on what will be done, so it is not beyond everybody's reach, and its pastness has no fixity to pass along (P4). - Think of the two roads as the only two ways a photograph could be blamed for a wedding. Either the camera arranged the marriage, or the picture was fixed in advance and the couple had to match it. Nobody believes either one, and the picture's being perfectly accurate does not supply a third. - Anybody who wants a third road has to name it. There is one serious candidate, and it travels in the opposite direction from the fatalist's. Rather than arguing from God's knowledge forward to the act's necessity, it argues that a genuinely open choice is not the sort of thing anyone could know in advance, so something must have settled the act before there was anything for God to know. That is a question about where foreknowledge comes from, not about what foreknowledge does. (2) Nothing makes Jones mow the lawn. - From God's knowing that Jones will mow the lawn, it follows with certainty that Jones will mow the lawn. It does not follow that he must. - He can put the mower back in the shed and go golfing. He merely will not. And if he were to go golfing, God would have known that from eternity, and there would never have been a belief about mowing for anybody to worry over. (3) The answer holds whichever way the open questions go. - How God knows a free act, given that it has not happened yet, is a different objection with a different answer, and it is a good objection. - Whether God is timeless or everlasting in time is a question for the doctrine of God, and (P3) and (P4) run on either view. - Whether God knows what you will do because he decreed it, fixing from eternity that you would do exactly that, is the largest question in the neighborhood, and nothing from (P1) through (P4) settles it. Nor does it have to. A Christian who holds that God decrees every act and a Christian who holds that he decrees none can both say that foreknowledge as such takes nothing away, and an answer that needs no verdict there is available to more people rather than fewer. (4) Freedom does not stand or fall on alternatives. - Suppose a fatalist somehow managed to show that a foreknown act could not have gone otherwise. He would still have to show that the man who acted was not the source of the act, and nothing in the argument from foreknowledge so much as touches that question. - This matters more than it looks at first glance. God cannot sin, and he is praised for his goodness. The saints in glory, the redeemed who are already home with him, cannot sin either, and they are freer than they have ever been. Any principle that made a missing alternative fatal to freedom would strip the freedom from both, and that is a price no Christian should be willing to pay. Therefore, God knows what you will do, and nothing in his knowing it takes the doing out of your hands.