Ending his work on a high note, Boethius had some wisdom left to impart in his fifth chapter. Far from what prompted the original discussion with a corporeal version of Philosophy, this chapter dealt with fate vs. free will and how free will can be reconciled with divine providence.
The first major argument was that chance is meaningless. Every occurrence in the present proceeds directly from the past. The future would be predictable if only we had divine intelligence. I personally think this is an extremely pressing issue in modern philosophy. With increasing scientific understanding of psychology and biology, often at the molecular level, more and more behavior can be causally explained. Are we trending towards a future of accurate prediction of human behavior? Or is chaos theory accurate in labeling some activity as inherently unpredictable, even to an infinite intellect? To some extent these are no longer philosophical questions, but mathematical. Regardless, I think Boethius was on the right track in exploring determinism. Notable in his argument's faults, however, he seems to define chance not only externally, but also from a personal viewpoint. From that latter standpoint, of course, chance does exist. A human intellect is of course faulty, and so we cannot predict future events from past experiences; the future inherently contains the unexpected for us, and hence chance is a part of the human condition.
The second major argument was that divine providence does not interfere with free will. God knows what will happen, transcendent of time, much the same way a statement is inherently true or false. A statement about the future may be true or false to our knowledge, not necessitating the future to follow any particular path. God, however, must always know the true statement about the future, still independent of the future actually ending up that way. And so the future is not constrained in any way, at least not by God, yet He still has knowledge of what happened, is happening, and will happen. It is much like human knowledge of the past - true, but without requiring it to have happened.
How divine providence can be reconciled with chaos theory, if it turns out that parts of the universe are truly unknowable, is certainly an interesting question for modern philosophy as well.
The first major argument was that chance is meaningless. Every occurrence in the present proceeds directly from the past. The future would be predictable if only we had divine intelligence. I personally think this is an extremely pressing issue in modern philosophy. With increasing scientific understanding of psychology and biology, often at the molecular level, more and more behavior can be causally explained. Are we trending towards a future of accurate prediction of human behavior? Or is chaos theory accurate in labeling some activity as inherently unpredictable, even to an infinite intellect? To some extent these are no longer philosophical questions, but mathematical. Regardless, I think Boethius was on the right track in exploring determinism. Notable in his argument's faults, however, he seems to define chance not only externally, but also from a personal viewpoint. From that latter standpoint, of course, chance does exist. A human intellect is of course faulty, and so we cannot predict future events from past experiences; the future inherently contains the unexpected for us, and hence chance is a part of the human condition.
The second major argument was that divine providence does not interfere with free will. God knows what will happen, transcendent of time, much the same way a statement is inherently true or false. A statement about the future may be true or false to our knowledge, not necessitating the future to follow any particular path. God, however, must always know the true statement about the future, still independent of the future actually ending up that way. And so the future is not constrained in any way, at least not by God, yet He still has knowledge of what happened, is happening, and will happen. It is much like human knowledge of the past - true, but without requiring it to have happened.
How divine providence can be reconciled with chaos theory, if it turns out that parts of the universe are truly unknowable, is certainly an interesting question for modern philosophy as well.
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