Question Are historical facts always true, throughout time? Consider the fact that Barack Obama is the forty-fourth president of the United States of America. Was it true two hundred years ago? If someone in the nineteenth century had said "Barack Obama is the forty-fourth president of the United States of America", would it have been true?

Accepted:
August 4, 2011

Comments

This is an excellent question and one that is much debated historically and today. It has implications about freedom and determinism, logic, and the philosophy of God, good and evil. It seems that classical logic requires that propositions are either true or false. "Barack Obama is the forty-fourth president of the USA" appears to be a proposition. And we have found it to be true. But in that case, it seems that Obama could not have failed to have won the election against McCain. It has seemed to some (but certainly not all) philosophers that this would mean Obama's election was fixed in some sense, perhaps determined. Some who worry about this problem are theists who think that if God knows from eternity that in August of 2011 you would ask your question, then there is no possibility that you would not have typed in and submitted your question to Askphilosophers. For many theists, it is vital to affirm that creatures / human beings have free agency, otherwise it would seem that God has determined humans to be evil. The other worry about what is called future free contingents (the fancy term for propositions that refer to future events that appear to involve freedom and contingency) has to do with whether there even could be such future propositions. It seems that for a proposition to be true there must be SOMETHING in virtue of which the proposition is true. But in the 19th century, Obama did not exist; he did not exist then, nor was he existing in the 21st century. From this line of reasoning (which was probably Aristotle's), we should hold that propositions involving future free contingents are neither true nor false. Theists who take this position (like Richard Swinburne) contend that even an omniscient God does not know about future free continents. According to Swinburne, God knows all possible truths and because propositions about future free contingents is neither true nor false and thus cannot (by definition) be known by any being of any kind, such propositions about the future are not the sort of thing that even God knows.