f1: In 1941 Japan attacks Pearl Harbor.
f2: In 1941 a war begins between Japan and the United States that lasts five years.
Relative to the year 1950, f1 and f2 are both simply about the past, for all the facts they
state are, as it were, over and done with before 1950 occurs. Relative to 1943, however,
while f1 is simply about the past, f2 is not simply about the past. Although f2 is a fact
about the past relative to 1943—for f2 is in part about 1941, and 1941 lies in 1943's
past—f2, unlike f1, implies a certain fact about 1944, a time future to 1943. f2 implies
f3: In 1944 Japan and the United States are at war.
Since f2 implies f3, a fact about the future relative to 1943, relative to 1943 f2 is a fact
about the past, but not simply a fact about the past. And the important point to note is that
in 1943 it may have been in the power of generals and statesmen in the United States and
Japan so to act that f2 would not have been a fact about the past at all. For there may well
have been certain actions that were not but could have been taken by one or both of the
groups in 1943, actions that, had they been taken, would have brought the war to an end
in 1943. If that is so, then it was in the power of one or both of the groups in 1943 to do
something such that had they done it a certain fact about 1941, f2, would not have been a
fact about 1941.
It is important to note that had the generals and statesmen in 1943 exercised their power
to end the war in 1943 they would not have changed the past relative to 1943. It is not as
though prior to their action it was a fact that the war would end in 1945, and what they
would have done was to put a different fact into the past than was there before they acted.
Power over the past is not power to change a fact that the past contains. It is power to
determine what possible facts that are future to the time of one's action are contained in
the past, provided those future-oriented facts depend on what one does in the present.
Thus, if we suppose that it was in your power a moment ago not to read the first sentence
of this para
end p.31
graph, a power you did not exercise, then before you were born God knew that you would
read that sentence a moment ago. But, on Ockham's view, if you had exercised your
freedom not to read it, what God would have known before you were born is that you
would not read that sentence a moment ago. By thus distinguishing facts that, relative to a
certain time, are simply about the past from facts that are not simply about the past,
Ockham sought to harmonize God's temporal foreknowledge with human freedom to
have acted otherwise than we in fact did act.
Maximal Perfection
We've considered the three divine perfections that constitute the core of the classical
concept of God in Western civilization. If God is, as this tradition holds, the greatest
possible being, then he must possess each of these perfections in the highest possible
degree. And for that to be so, these three perfections must be mutually compatible and
each perfection must have a highest possible degree. We've noted that there may be a