I think that Idolator was simply agreeing that God is able to bring things to pass because He has great power and knowledge.
Ah, yeah, now I see that. You're right.
Sorry
@Idolater. Guess my brain wasn't firing on all cylinders from how late it was. In my defence, though, you probably could have worded it a bit better. But it's my bad.
Premise 2 says a past event is now-necessary. OK: a millisecond ago is past. Therefore pastness contributes nothing to the argument.
That doesn't follow.
Whether something happened a millisecond ago or a thousand years ago is irrelevant to whether it has already occurred. The necessity of the past doesn't depend on how much time has elapsed.
The only thing that makes God's past belief true is the act it's supposed to constrain. So the necessity is borrowed from the act, and the transfer at Premise 5 is circular: the act is constrained by a necessity whose only ground is the act itself. That's not a contradiction, but it is an undefended bridge.
You're conflating what makes a belief true with what makes a past fact temporally necessary.
The argument doesn't claim that God's knowledge causes the future action. It argues that if God's past belief is now-necessary, and that belief infallibly entails a particular future action, then that action is likewise now-necessary. ("p → q")
That's the relationship between premises 3, 4, and 5.
You're arguing that God's belief depends upon the future action for its truth. But that doesn't, by itself, establish that His having held that belief is exempt from the necessity of the past.
The argument gerrymanders past events into a class carrying transferable necessity, without an account of why pastness confers that kind of necessity. Shrink the gap to a millisecond, and the borrowedness becomes visible. That's why I don't think "every premise is true" settles it—Premise 5's transfer is precisely what's contested.
What you're describing sounds more like an objection to Premise 2, specifically whether God's past belief about a future event qualifies as a fixed fact about the past.
That's essentially the Ockhamist objection concerning "soft facts" about the past, which is or is remarkably similar to what w2g was trying to push back in October in the "On the Omniscience of God" thread.
In that thread he explicitly acknowledges that a person cannot choose contrary to what God infallibly knows, while simultaneously insisting that the person retains the freedom to choose otherwise.
The proposed solution is that, had the person chosen differently, God would always have known differently.
But that brings us right back to the question of whether God's actual past belief is a fixed fact.
And denying its fixity raises another problem: If a past fact can be exempted from the necessity of the past simply because it depends upon a future choice, what principled distinction prevents that same reasoning from applying to other past facts?
Without such a distinction, you're undermining the very basis for treating history as objectively settled, with potentially far-reaching consequences for our ability to determine what actually happened.
Either way, the question remains: If God infallibly believed yesterday that I would choose A tomorrow, what makes His having held that belief exempt from the necessity of the past?
Simply asserting that the future action determines the truth of His belief doesn't establish that exemption.
And if you're challenging Premise 5 instead, then demonstrate why its inference fails.
In other words, show how something can be now-necessary, necessarily entail something else, and yet that consequence somehow not be now-necessary.
Simply calling the transfer circular doesn't demonstrate that it is.
And even if you successfully challenged the argument, you still wouldn't have established that God possesses exhaustive, infallible foreknowledge of every future human choice.
That's the claim this thread is asking you to demonstrate.
