ABSTRACT
When thinking about potential threats to free will, people tend to think big. If there is an essentially omniscient and everlasting God, for example, then what God believed millions of years ago about the future entails every true proposition about what we’re up to now, and since it’s not up to any of us what God believed millions of years ago, what we’re up to now isn’t up to any of us, either (Pike 1965). Alternatively, if causal determinism is true, then the laws that govern our world, together with facts about how the world was millions of years ago, entail every true proposition about what we’re up to now, and since it’s not up to any of us what the laws are like or what the world was like millions of years ago, what we’re up to now isn’t up to any of us, either (van Inwagen 1983). Finally-and I mention one last example here because we’ll return to it latereven if there is no God, presumably there were, millions of years ago, true future-tensed statements about what we would be up to millions of years later, and those true futuretensed statements entail(ed) all the present-tense propositions about what we’re up to now. Again, since it’s not up to us what was true millions of years ago, what we’re up to now isn’t up to us, either (Taylor 1963).
