“Even if things are foreseen because they are about to happen, and they do not in fact happen because they are foreseen, nevertheless necessity lies either in that future events are foreseen by God or that things foreseen happen because they are foreseen. This alone is sufficient to eliminate the freedom of the will ….

God ponders all things as if they were enacted in the present. Hence you judgement will be more correct should you seek to envisage the foresight by which God discerns all things not as a sort of foreknowledge of the future, but as knowledge of the unceasing present moment ….

So the future events which God foreknows will all undoubtedly come to pass, but some of them will proceed by free choice.”

Extracts from Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, Book 5.

Background

Boethius has suddenly become popular again. OCR’s decision to include him in the new and widely used A2 Religious Studies: Philosophy of Religion Specification caused something of a minor panic. Very few teachers knew of him; fewer had read him; virtually none had considered teaching about him. Publishers responded quickly and included some material in the latest iteration of their standard textbooks, the most notable being those works by Ahluwalia (Folens, 2008), Taylor (Routledge 2009) and briefly in Tyler and Reid (Philip Allen, 2008). A more thorough recent treatment of Boethius is that in the admirable Philosophy of Religion for A2 level by Wilkinson and Campbell (Continuum, 2009).

The material here is designed to go beyond the above and engage a little more fully with questions that have fascinated those working on the dialogue between science and religion. John Polkinghorne’s work is particularly interesting and accessible in this regard. The material presented here is also designed to be immediately useful in the classroom and includes an extended essay for students and teachers that has assessment material to accompany it in terms of a comprehension exercise and a crossword. Both come with answers supplied!

The particular issues arising from Boethius’s discussion of the nature and attributes of God concern the philosophical problems arising from the belief that God is eternal, omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent. Boethius discusses eternity and the foreknowledge of God in Book 5 of his work The Consolations of Philosophy and considers whether a good God should reward or punish his creatures. Boethius’s discussion is not comprehensive or complete, but it has been highly influential in shaping subsequent reflection.

The discussion is predicated on a necessary consideration of what is meant by human free choice and the relationship between our supposed free will and the supposed foreknowledge of God. This in turn raises questions of the relationship between what God knows and what such knowledge might or might not have to say about known choices made by others. Are these really free choices, or does foreknowledge of them in some way determine the result of apparent choice? Embedded in all of this is the question of how we understand time. How does God relate to our experience of time? Should we speak of God, in a distinction made clear by Wolterstorff, as eternal or everlasting? What precisely is the distinction between these terms? Is the claim that God is ‘beyond’ our time, which most theology asserts in some way and links to the idea that God created and sustains spacetime, something that entails the claim that God is ‘timeless’ in His own being? Furthermore, is there mileage in suggesting that God experiences some kind of temporality within Godself? How might we speak of this? Do we need to postulate, and neologisms are very tempting here, some kind of ‘Supertime’, ‘Godtime’ or ‘Trinitime’ to begin to describe, by analogy, the dynamic inner life of God. This is important if we take seriously the Christian Trinity that the Biblical text seems to suggest and which is arguably the best available and historically the most developed model of God we have. This Trinitarian God is clearly more that the Deistic deity beloved of many philosophers. The God of the philosophers is arguably unrecognizable and unknown in the experience of the religious believer. This raises and underlines the perennial question of the relationship between the God of the Philosophers and the God of Scripture, often carelessly conflated in discussions at A-level but resisted by many subtle thinkers from Pascal to Moore (1) in our own day. In all of this, the question of the limitations of our religious language is clearly to the fore.

The nature of the long essay in this unit on Boethius is to stimulate students and teachers to think theologically and philosophically about the issues thrown up by Boethius’s discussion. It is deliberately provocative in places and should not be seen as a simple textbook article to be regurgitated. One of the endemic problems with so many basic introductions to the philosophy of religion is that they do not invite the reader to do very much thinking! In a world where regurgitation of standard material seems often sufficient to gain marks in examinations this is rather sad. The enduring worth of studying this kind of material ought to be more than mark gathering. Philosophy is not meant to be easy and it is in the nature of the discipline that not inconsiderable conceptual ground clearing is essential. The truth may be out there, even if it seems inaccessible to us at present. There are certainly no answers until the questions have first been understood! It is salutary to reflect on the eschatological caution implicit in Hick’s famous discussion of verification and enjoy the questions for now even if some of the answers remain elusive as we peer through the frosted glass of our present reflective life.

(1) Blaise Pascal, The Pensées, Tr. J.M. Cohen, Penguin Classics, 1961, 287pp; Andrew Moore, Realism and Christian Faith: God, Grammar and Meaning, Cambridge, 2003, 269pp, 0-521-52415-6

Aims of the topic

At the end of the topic the most able students will have understood that:

• The language used about the attributes of God has implications for other questions concerning human beings and the nature of reality.
• There are a number of ways of looking at the relationship between theological understandings of God, spacetime, causation and human free choice.
• Religious language is not always transparent in the terminology it uses and there are subtle and important distinctions to be made between say, eternal and everlasting, which are often overlooked.
• Religious language is embedded in larger frameworks of understanding and there is an ongoing dispute as to how we should best talk about God and how He does or does not relate to the cosmos in general and sentient beings in particular.
• Time is not a clear concept. Current uses of time in physics raise questions that Boethius was obviously not in a position to engage with and which may modify this historically significant approach to God and our understanding of time and eternity.

Some will not have progressed this far but should have a basic grasp of the central issues presented in the material. At the very least they ought to be able to recall basic factual material. As always there will be differentiation based on the degree to which some go beyond this and show an ability not only to understand the material but to make an informed and nuanced evaluation of the same.

Key Questions

• How do we speak about the nature and attributes of God?
• How do we best understand talk about human freedom?
• How can we relate our understanding of God, time, eternity, cause and freedom?
• What is meant by foreknowledge and is this helpful language to use?
• Does modern science illuminate these theological and philosophical debates and if so, how?

Learning Outcomes: Students will understand:

• Something of the range of answers to the above key questions
• That having understood the nature of the questions being asked in this area, that there is a lively debate still underway as to the best way to conceptualise the problems and answers attempted by Boethius and others.

Resources

Resource 2 – Essay - Boethius Guide [PDF 3.3MB] - download

Resource 3 – Boethius Comprehension [PDF 64kb] - download

Resource 4 – Comprehension Answers [PDF 64kb] - download

Resource 5 – Boethius Crossword [PDF 68kb] - download

Resource 6 – Boethius Crossword Answers [JPEG 156KB] - download