I've rarely seen this question being raised.
Does 'God knows that P' entail that 'God is certain that P'?
This question occurred to me when I was thinking about God's knowledge of indicative conditionals. According to the Equation (Bennett's term), the probability of P→Q equals the probability of Q given P. But there is the Bombshell (Edgington's term). The Bombshell shows that one cannot at the same time accept the Equation and the claim that indicative conditionals have truth value. This is exactly true...of humans, since it happens so often (or, always?) that we are not 100 percent certain about something. But things might be different with God, as long as we accept the claim that God is always certain about things: i.e. about any proposition p, either God is certain that P or God is certain that not P (I'm assuming that God has exhaustive knowledge about everything). Retaining this claim as an assumption, we can safely accept the claim that indicative conditionals have truth value and the Equation is correct. The reason is simple: the arguments for the so-called Bombshell all assume that one's degree of belief in something can be anywhere within the range [0, 1] (inclusive at both ends). But our assumption is that God's degree of belief can only have two possible values: 0, 1. So the conclusion is that the Bombshell does not apply to God under certain assumption.
This does look great. Is there any problem with this scenario?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment