Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom PDF Download

Author: William Lane Craig
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004092501
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
The ancient problem of fatalism, more particularly theological fatalism, has resurfaced with surprising vigour in the second half of the twentieth century. Two questions predominate in the debate: (1) Is divine foreknowledge compatible with human freedom and (2) How can God foreknow future free acts? Having surveyed the historical background of this debate in "The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge" and "Future Contingents from Aristotle to Suarez" (Brill: 1988), William Lane Craig now attempts to address these issues critically. His wide-ranging discussion brings together a thought- provoking array of related topics such as logical fatalism, multivalent logic, backward causation, precognition, time travel, counterfactual logic, temporal necessity, Newcomb's Problem, middle knowledge, and relativity theory. The present work serves both as a useful survey of the extensive literature on theological fatalism and related fields and as a stimulating assessment of the possibility of divine foreknowledge of future free acts.

Author: Graham C. Floyd
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781948048118
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
If God foreknows the future, then he also foreknows his own future actions. How then is God a free and responsible agent? Four attempts at resolving the problem of human freedom in light of divine foreknowledge are applied to the problem of God's freedom in light of his foreknowledge.

Author: Ciro De Florio
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303031300X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
This book deals with an old conundrum: if God knows what we will choose tomorrow, how can we be free to choose otherwise? If all our choices are already written, is our freedom simply an illusion? This book provides a precise analysis of this dilemma using the tools of modern metaphysics and logic of time. With a focus on three intertwined concepts - God’s nature, the formal structure of time, and the metaphysics time, including the relationship between temporal entities and a timeless God - the chapters analyse various solutions to the problem of foreknowledge and freedom, revealing the advantages and drawbacks of each. Building on this analysis, the authors advance constructive solutions, showing under what conditions an entity can be omniscient in the presence of free agents, and whether an eternal entity can know the tensed futures of the world. The metaphysics of time, its topology and the semantics of future tensed sentences are shown to be invaluable topics in dealing with this issue. Combining investigations into the metaphysics of time with the discipline of temporal logic this monograph brings about important advancements in the philosophical understanding of an ancient and fascinating problem. The answer, if any, is hidden in the folds of time, in the elusive nature of this feature of reality and in the infinite branching of our lives.

Author: Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195355407
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This original analysis examines the three leading traditional solutions to the dilemma of divine foreknowledge and human free will--those arising from Boethius, from Ockham, and from Molina. Though all three solutions are rejected in their best-known forms, three new solutions are proposed, and Zagzebski concludes that divine foreknowledge is compatible with human freedom. The discussion includes the relation between the foreknowledge dilemma and problems about the nature of time and the causal relation; the logic of counterfactual conditionals; and the differences between divine and human knowing states. An appendix introduces a new foreknowledge dilemma that purports to show that omniscient foreknowledge conflicts with deep intuitions about temporal asymmetry, quite apart from considerations of free will. Zagzebski shows that only a narrow range of solutions can handle this new dilemma. A compelling contribution to the field, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge will appeal to students and scholars of theistic philosophy and the philosophy of religion.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Free will and determinism
Languages : en
Pages : 12

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Book Description

Author: William L. Craig
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498276636
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
Does God know our actions before we do them? And if so, do human beings truly have free will? Dr. Craig contends that both of these notions are compatible, showing how the Bible teaches divine foreknowledge of human free acts, and reveals two ways of "reconciling divine omniscience with human freedom".

Author: T. Ryan Byerly
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1623567882
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
How exactly could God achieve infallible foreknowledge of every future event, including the free actions of human persons? How could God exercise careful providence over these same events? Byerly offers a novel response to these important questions by contending that God exercises providence and achieves foreknowledge by ordering the times. The first part of the book defends the importance of the above questions. After characterizing the contemporary freedom-foreknowledge debate, Byerly argues that it has focused too narrowly on a certain argument for theological fatalism, which attempts to show that the existence of infallible divine foreknowledge poses a unique threat to the existence of creaturely libertarian freedom. Byerly contends, however, that bare existence of infallible divine foreknowledge cannot threaten freedom in this way; at most, the mechanics whereby this foreknowledge is achieved might so threaten human freedom. In the second part of the book, Byerly develops a model for understanding the mechanics whereby infallible foreknowledge is achieved that would not threaten creaturely libertarian freedom. According to the model, God infallibly foreknows every future event because God has placed the times that constitute the history of the world in primitive earlier-than relations to one another. After defending the consistency of this model of the mechanics of divine foreknowledge with creaturely libertarian freedom, the author applies it to divine providence more generally. A novel defense of concurrentism is the result.

Author: In-Kyu Song
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
The omniscience of God poses problems for the concept of free will that has occupied philosophers for centuries. Song (systematic theology, Hapdong Theological Seminary, South Korea) presents an argument for the presence of free will based on the distinction between hard and soft facts proposed by 14th century theologian and philosopher William of Ockham. He suggests that God's knowledge of any particular act is a soft fact that is dependent on the performance of that act itself. God's knowledge of an act only becomes true if that act is performed. This characteristic of God's knowledge as Ockhamist soft fact is what allows for human freedom of action. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Author: William Hasker
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501702904
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
"This outstanding book... is a genuinely pivotal contribution to the lively current debate over divine foreknowledge and human freedom.... Hasker's book has three commendable features worthy of immediate note. First, it contains a carefully crafted overview of the recent literature on foreknowledge and freedom and so can serve as an excellent introduction to that literature. Second, it is tightly reasoned and brimming with brisk arguments, many of them highly original. Third, it correctly situates the philosophical dispute over foreknowledge and freedom within its proper theological context and in so doing highlights the intimate connection between the doctrines of divine omniscience and divine providence."—Faith and Philosophy"[God, Time, and Knowledge] is an elegantly written, forcefully argued challenge to traditional views, and a major contribution to the discussion of divine foreknowledge."—Philosophical Review"This is a very competent, thorough analysis of the conflict between free will and divine foreknowledge (or, on some acounts, timeless divine knowledge of our future). It is exceptionally clear."—Theological Book Review

Author: Tina Talsma
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Metaphysics
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
ABSTRACT: A traditionally difficult problem in the Philosophy of Religion is the one that divine omniscience, particularly divine foreknowledge, poses for free will. If God knows in advance how we will act, it looks as if we cannot act freely because we cannot act other than in accordance with God's foreknowledge. Thus, it looks like God's full omniscience and free will are incompatible. But this is problematic precisely because both God's full omniscience and human and divine free will are very important in Christian theology. In this dissertation, I discuss this dilemma and attempt to find the best solution available to the Christian theist. In Chapter 1, I introduce and discuss the problem, which I refer to as "the foreknowledge dilemma." I then consider and ultimately reject three of the most commonly offered solutions. These solutions are the Boethian solution, which attempts to solve the foreknowledge dilemma by arguing that God does not exist within the temporal order and so cannot have knowledge prior to our actions, the Ockhamist solution, which argues that God's past beliefs are soft facts about the past and so rely upon the future in a way that many past facts do not, and the Molinist solution, which posits middle knowledge to explain the way God can know facts about human free actions. I conclude the first chapter by arguing that God's omniscience and free will, as traditionally defined, are incompatible and so the best solution will be to redefine (though not give up entirely) one of these two concepts. In the next three chapters, I discuss the suggestion made by source incompatibilists that we redefine free will in such a way that it does not require alternative possibilities (though still remains incompatible with causal determinism). In Chapter 2, I discuss the reasons (independent of the foreknowledge dilemma) that have driven some in the secular free will debate to adopt this understanding of free will. In Chapter 3, I point out that in order to be a successful solution to the foreknowledge dilemma, the source incompatibilist's version of free will cannot rely at all on the presence of alternative possibilities, for God's foreknowledge rules out any and all alternatives. I then reject such a characterization of human free will. And in Chapter 4, I ask if source incompatibilism is required to save God's freedom in light of His essentially perfect nature. I conclude that it is not. Finally, in Chapter 5 I gesture in the direction I take to be the most promising for the Christian theist. The best solution, I argue, is not to redefine free will but to redefine God's omniscience such that it does not include exhaustive foreknowledge. This Open Theist solution argues that it is logically impossible for God to know in advance how a free agent will act and so this lack of knowledge is not a diminishment of God's perfection.