Could God See Freewill?
The problem of free will becomes especially sharp when placed alongside modern physics and contemporary philosophy of language. If the laws of nature together with the complete state of the universe at some past time fix everything that ever happens, then in what sense could anyone have done otherwise? Yet at the same time, developments in epistemology and metaphysics suggest that our experience of openness may reflect deep features of our epistemic situation rather than metaphysical indeterminacy. To understand this landscape, I propose to bring together four figures whose work illuminates different aspects of the issue: Tim Williamson on epistemic vagueness, Roy Sorensen on blindspot ignorance, Barry Loewer on the Mentaculus and objective chance, and Kit Fine on hyperintensional modality. We can then place their positions within a broader framework inspired by Rudolf Carnap and later refined by David Chalmers, before finally asking what an omnipotent God would know, and whether such a being would “see” free will.
The classical threat to free will is captured by what is often called the Consequence Argument, most prominently associated with Peter van Inwagen. Suppose determinism is true. That means that the laws of nature and the complete state of the world at some time in the distant past together entail every later event. Your present decision, on this picture, is the consequence of facts long before you were born and of laws you did not choose. You cannot change the past, and you cannot change the laws. So it seems you cannot change their consequences. If free will requires that you could have done otherwise in a strong sense, determinism appears to undermine it.
Much of the debate therefore turns on what “could have done otherwise” means. To analyse such claims, philosophers turn to counterfactuals, statements of the form “If I had done X, Y would have happened.” One influential approach to counterfactuals was developed by David Lewis, who suggested that such statements are true when, in the most similar possible worlds where X occurs, Y also occurs. Barry Loewer argues that this similarity-based framework fails once we take the physics of statistical mechanics seriously. He proposes instead the Mentaculus framework.
The Mentaculus consists of three elements: the fundamental dynamical laws of physics, a special low-entropy initial condition known as the Past Hypothesis, and a probability distribution over microstates compatible with that initial condition. The Past Hypothesis explains the arrow of time: why entropy increases, why eggs fry but do not unfry, why memory points toward the past. Given the laws and this special beginning, statistical mechanics yields an objective probability distribution over possible micro-histories of the universe. Even if the underlying laws are deterministic, these probabilities are not merely subjective measures of ignorance. They arise from the structure of the physical theory and the coarse-grained relation between microstates and macrostates.
Loewer uses this framework to reinterpret counterfactuals. Instead of asking which possible world is most similar to the actual world, he asks what the objective probability of Y is given X and the relevant macroscopic state, according to the Mentaculus. At the microscopic level, determinism may fix a single history. But at the macroscopic level, many microstates correspond to the same macrostate, and these can evolve differently. From the perspective of macroscopic agents, the future is structured by objective probabilities. On this view, if you had chosen differently, the microscopic history of the universe would have differed in ways that leave the macroscopic past intact. The Consequence Argument’s appeal to an entirely fixed past is weakened once we distinguish between micro and macro levels.
Against this backdrop, Tim Williamson’s epistemicism introduces a different way of thinking about apparent openness. Williamson argues that vagueness does not reflect indeterminacy in reality but ignorance of sharp boundaries. There is a precise fact about when a heap ceases to be a heap, but we cannot know it. Reality is sharp; our knowledge is limited. Applied to free will, this suggests that even if the future feels open, there may be a precise microphysical fact that fixes what will happen. The branching we experience may be epistemic rather than metaphysical. The world itself may be entirely determinate at its base, and our sense of alternatives may reflect ignorance of that base.
Roy Sorensen’s work on blindspots deepens this epistemic dimension. Sorensen identifies truths that cannot be known, not merely because of limited evidence, but because knowing them would undermine their truth. For example, the statement “There is a truth that I do not know” cannot be known by the person to whom it applies, since knowing it would falsify it. This reveals structural limits on knowledge. When applied to free will, Sorensen’s insight suggests that even in a deterministic universe, agents embedded within the system cannot access the complete microphysical description. There may be truths about their future actions that they cannot know in principle. The openness of the future, from their perspective, may therefore reflect structural features of being situated within the world.
Kit Fine’s hyperintensional approach complicates matters further. Fine argues that modal and counterfactual claims are more fine-grained than standard possible-worlds semantics allows. Two statements can be true in exactly the same possible worlds yet differ in their content because they differ in grounding or explanatory structure. The phrase “could have done otherwise” may express distinct claims. It might mean that there exists a physically possible world with the same total past and laws in which one acts differently. Or it might mean that, given one’s capacities, reasons, and macroscopic conditions, an alternative was available in the sense relevant to control and responsibility. These notions are not equivalent. If one side in the debate insists on the first reading and the other on the second, the disagreement may be partly verbal or framework-dependent.
At this point, the work of Rudolf Carnap and David Chalmers provides a broader interpretive frame. In The Logical Structure of the World, Carnap sought to show how the world could be constructed from a minimal base via structural relations. He was less concerned with discovering the ultimate furniture of reality than with showing how different levels of description can be systematically organised. David Chalmers, especially in his work on scrutability and metametaphysics, extends this approach. He argues that many metaphysical disputes concern which conceptual framework we adopt. Once a base theory is fixed, higher-level truths can in principle be derived or “scrutable” from it plus appropriate conceptual analysis.
Imagine, then, that we could in theory map out the entire universe. We have the complete microphysical description, the laws, the Past Hypothesis, every particle position and momentum. From a Carnap–Chalmers perspective, this constitutes a base theory. The question is whether free will survives as a higher-level construction from that base.
If the base theory entails that agents deliberate, are responsive to reasons, and satisfy certain counterfactual conditions, then free will may be constructed as a higher-level structural fact. It would not compete with the microdescription but be grounded in it. The fact that the base is deterministic does not automatically eliminate higher-level truths. Thermodynamics survives microphysics; psychology survives neuroscience. On this model, free will survives determinism if it is defined in terms of macro-level control and objective probabilistic structure.
Williamson’s sharpness at the base level does not eliminate this possibility. Sorensen’s blindspots reinforce it by highlighting that agents cannot occupy the God’s-eye perspective of the full base description. Fine’s hyperintensional distinctions caution us against assuming that only one notion of possibility matters. The Carnap–Chalmers framework suggests that the debate may concern which level of construction is metaphysically relevant for freedom.
This brings us to a final, speculative question: what would an omnipotent God or Laplacean demon know, and would such a being “see” free will?
Suppose God or the demon has complete knowledge of the microphysical base, the laws, the Past Hypothesis, and every true proposition. On a deterministic universe, God would know the entire future with certainty. From the divine perspective, there would be no epistemic openness. Every action would be known as a consequence of the total state and laws.
Does that mean God would not “see” free will? Not necessarily. God’s knowledge would include not only the base facts but also all higher-level truths constructed from them. If free will is a higher-level structural feature grounded in macro-level probabilistic relations and rational responsiveness, then God would know that as well. God would know that agents are responsive to reasons, that their actions track their deliberations, that certain counterfactuals are true within the relevant framework.
From the divine perspective, the openness of the future would not be epistemic, but the structure of agency would still be real. God would not see metaphysical indeterminacy at the base, but might see a layered reality in which higher-level structures, including agency and responsibility, are fully grounded.
If, however, free will requires fundamental metaphysical indeterminism at the base level, then a deterministic micro-map would eliminate it, even for God. In that case, God would see only a single fixed history unfolding.
So maybe free will does not require metaphysical openness at the base level. What matters for responsibility and agency is macro-level control, rational responsiveness, and the truth of certain counterfactuals within the Mentaculus framework. A fully mapped universe would fix the base, but it would not erase the layered structures constructed upon it (including our best physics). From the divine perspective, there would be no ignorance, no blindspots, no epistemic openness. Yet the structural features that constitute agency would still be present in the constructed hierarchy of truths.
On this view, free will is neither a mysterious metaphysical gap nor a mere illusion born of ignorance. It is a higher-level structural feature of complex agents in a probabilistically organised macroscopic world. An omnipotent God would not see the future as open, but would still see agents as free in the only sense that matters for moral life: as systems whose actions flow from their reasons, capacities, and character within the layered architecture of reality.