Star Wars and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy Series) - Kevin Decker [6]
This possibility implies “counter-temporal causality”—that, in this case, a future choice causes past knowledge, whereas we typically think of past events causing future events. But, from the eternal observer’s perspective, Anakin’s choice and the knowledge expressed in the prophecy are both present. So this isn’t a case of counter-temporal causality. Anakin’s choice causes the eternal observer’s knowledge in the same way that my pushing a ball across the floor causes the ball’s movement—both events occur simultaneously.
Augustine compares the eternal observer’s knowledge of the future to our mundane knowledge of the past:
Why cannot [God] justly punish what He does not force to be done, even though He foreknows it? Your recollection of events in the past does not compel them to occur. In the same way, God’s foreknowledge of future events does not compel them to take place. As you remember certain things that you have done and yet have not done all the things that you remember, so God foreknows all the things of which He Himself is the Cause, and yet He is not the Cause of all that He foreknows.8
This is not the only way of responding to the problem of the eternal observer. We’ve been assuming that the eternal observer—personified by the classical theistic notion of God—has infallible knowledge of the future. But maybe there are no such eternal observers and there’s no time beyond the present moment that we linear observers are currently experiencing. When Yoda asserts, “Always in motion is the future,” he may not have been speaking merely from a linear perspective, but reflecting a metaphysical fact: The future isn’t set, because it doesn’t yet exist. When it does, we call it “the present,” so nothing called “the future” really exists.
“Everything Is Proceeding as I Had Foreseen”
Even if the future doesn’t exist until it becomes the present, a powerful person in the present may attempt to determine what the future will be. In The Phantom Menace, Darth Sidious puts into motion a plan to take revenge on the Jedi and gain tyrannical control of the galaxy. In Revenge of the Sith, the plan comes to fruition as Sidious becomes the Galactic Emperor and, in Return of the Jedi, he prepares to sweep away for good the Rebellion that threatens his Empire and convert the last of the Jedi to the Dark Side of the Force. After arriving on the second Death Star and seeing his vast Imperial army and fleet amassed, he boasts to Vader, “Everything is proceeding as I had foreseen” [insert evil cackle]. But in The Empire Strikes Back, he warns Vader that Luke “could destroy us.” Vader shares this prediction with Luke when he first tries to persuade him to the Dark Side, but obviously has slightly different designs, saying, “You could destroy the Emperor. He has foreseen this. It is your destiny.”
We all know how the story goes. Things don’t proceed as the Emperor had “foreseen,” otherwise he would not have laughed in such a gleefully wicked manner after boasting to Vader. The Emperor tries his best to act as the grand “puppet-master” pulling everyone’s strings. But people aren’t marionettes and the Emperor appears truly shocked and chagrined when Luke, striking down his father in rage, then throws away his lightsaber and declares that he’ll never turn to the Dark Side: “You’ve failed, Your Highness. I am a Jedi, like my father before me.” Caught off-guard by this sudden assertion of free choice, the Emperor can only declare solemnly: “So be it, Jedi.”
For some religious believers, God can pull certain strings in the world to make it turn out as he wills. God designed the universe with all the physical causal laws that we live by everyday, such as gravity, inertia, centrifugal