God in Check: The Problem with Geach's Grand Master

A parable I have found useful is this: a chess master, without looking at the board, plays a score of opponents simultaneously; his knowledge of chess is so vastly superior to theirs that he can deal with any moves they are going to make, and he has no need to improvise or deliberate.  There is no evident contradiction in supposing that God's changeless knowledge thus governs the whole course of the world, whatever men may choose to do.  [Peter Geach, "God in Relation to the World," in Logic Matters, (Berkeley: University of California, 1972), 325.]

God is the supreme Grand Master who has everything under his control.  Some of the players are consciously helping his plan, others are trying to hinder it; whatever the finite players do, God's plan will be executed; though various lines of God's play will answer to various moves of the finite players.  God cannot be surprised or thwarted or cheated or disappointed.  God, like some grand master of chess, can carry out his plan even if he has announced it beforehand.  "On that square," says the Grand Master, "I will promote my pawn to Queen and deliver checkmate to my adversary": and it is even so.  No line of play that finite players may think of can force God to improvise: his knowledge of the game already embraces all the possible variant lines of play, theirs does not.  [Peter Geach, Providence and Evil, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 58.]

Geach's Grand Master of chess analogy is meant to convey his point that God's providential ends can be established purely on God's exhaustive knowledge of all possibilities, his 'natural knowledge.'  My interpretation and critique of Geach's analogy is based on Richard Creel's discussion of it (cf. Divine Impassibility: An Essay in Philosophical Theology, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 17f.).  Creel explains: "[A]nyone who holds the classical position that God knows eternally all possibilities should also hold that God can be loving in nature yet impassible in will because he can know independently of all actual situations all that he needs to know in order to make appropriate decisions relevant to every possible situation.  Hence, there is never any good reason for God to wait until after an event (or even until it is occurring) in order to decide a response to it and to will accordingly... even if he does not know eternally the choices of free agents.  His will can be indexed to possibilities rather than actualities" (pp.20-21).

What should we make of this position?  To put it in different words, we might say that Creel's position tries to offer an alternative to Molinism by not requiring middle knowledge, to open theism by not subjecting God to surprise or learning from actualities, to ET(eternal-temporal)-simultaneity or the perceptualist model of divine cognition put forward by some divine atemporalists, and even to simple foreknowledge (SFK) which rejects the atemporalist view of God and simply asserts that God knows all absolute future contingents pre-volitionally (including God's own free choice).  Creel may not have had the last position in mind, but certainly the others.

However, the Grand Master view cannot support Creel's claims--in particular, his claim that "[God] can know independently of all actual situations all that he needs to know in order to make appropriate decisions relevant to every possible situation."  Let us suppose that God knows all the different possible strategies a player could conceive of for chess.  Does this entail that God would have sufficient information to know which would be "appropriate decisions" for "every possible situation"?  It seems not.  For suppose we conceive of an actual game in play 5 moves into the game.  At this point, God would have eliminated many of the possible strategies his opponent could have been employing and thereby is narrowing in on which specific strategy he is in fact using.  Suppose now based on the opponent's fifth move God has to decide how to respond 'appropriately.'  What should God do for his sixth move?  If there are multiple strategies left that he knows the opponent could be using based on his moves so far, then how would God know what he should do in response if he doesn't yet know which specific strategy (say of 5 possible remaining strategies) the opponent is using?  Based on possibilities alone there is no way for God to know what the appropriate response should be (or put differently, which strategy God should employ in the actual situation).  It then seems at least possible that God could make some wrong move(s) by not knowing which strategy his opponent is using and thereby find himself checkmated.

I would suggest Creel should admit middle knowledge.  If God had middle knowledge in addition to natural knowledge, he would always be able to defeat his opponent because God would know the specific strategy his opponent would use and so wouldn't need to narrow it down turn by turn.  Apart from admitting middle knowledge, Creel's use of Geach's Grand Master analogy reduces to the problem of the 'cosmic gambler' of open theism.