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Here ends our discussion of the logical fatalist’s argument for the incompatibility of “prior truths” and free will. Before moving on, we wish to note that most think (for good reasons or not) that the fatalist’s argument is a failure. But here we must be very careful in stating our conclusion. ” But this would be a dangerous addition, and indeed a gratuitous and unjustified leap from the failure of the fatalist’s argument. From the fact that the logical fatalist does not succeed in showing that prior truths are incompatible with free will, it does not follow that they indeed are compatible with free will.

36 On this latter score, one strategy for a theological fatalist would be to maintain that though God’s foreknowledge shows (via the argument considered above) that you lack the ability to do otherwise, such foreknowledge is not itself what makes you unable to do otherwise. Rather, what makes you unable to do otherwise are the causal conditions that would have to be in place in order for God to have such infallible foreknowledge in the first place. 37 On this sort of picture, God’s foreknowledge and one’s own actions are both (though in different ways) effects of a common cause: it is the presence of the relevant causal factors that explain both God’s foreknowledge of your actions and your actions themselves.

Someone could easily—and with no shred of implausibility, we think—maintain the following. The logical fatalist’s argument is an unconvincing failure. However, prior truths about what you do are nevertheless inconsistent with your ability to do otherwise, since God necessarily exists and is necessarily omniscient, and the theological fatalist’s argument (to be discussed shortly) is not a failure. That is, one might maintain that “adding in” a divine prior belief to the argument makes the argument importantly different—and importantly better—in virtue of introducing a genuinely hard, temporally intrinsic fact about the past that entails what you do.