Divine Omniscience and Human Free Will

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ciro De Florio ◽  
Aldo Frigerio
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Divine Omniscience

Fischer’s Fate with Fatalism

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 25-38
Author(s):  
Christoph Jäger
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Divine Omniscience ◽  
Hard Kernel ◽  
The Times ◽  
Core Project

John Martin Fischer’s core project in Our Fate (2016) is to develop and defend Pike-style arguments for theological incompatibilism, i. e., for the view that divine omniscience is incompatible with human free will. Against Ockhamist attacks on such arguments, Fischer maintains that divine forebeliefs constitute so-called hard facts about the times at which they occur, or at least facts with hard ‘kernel elements’. I reconstruct Fischer’s argument and outline its structural analogies with an argument for logical fatalism. I then point out some of the costs of Fischer’s reasoning that come into focus once we notice that the set of hard facts is closed under entailment.

A New Disproof of the Compatibility of Foreknowledge and Free Choice

1974 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-318
Author(s):  
Douglas P. Lackey
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Free Choice ◽  
Focus Attention ◽  
Present Discussion ◽  
Divine Omniscience

Old philosophical problems never die, but they can be reinterpreted. In this paper, I offer a reinterpretation of the problem of reconciling divine omniscience and human free will. Classical discussions of this problem concentrate on the nature of God and the concept of free will. The present discussion will focus attention on the concept of knowledge, drawing on developments in epistemology that resulted from the posing of a certain problem by Edmund Gettier in 1963.

scholarly journals CONCEPTS OF “POSSIBLE” AND “NECESSARY” IN H. CRESCAS' SECOND BOOK OF “LIGHT OF THE LORD”

2020 ◽  
pp. 62-68
Author(s):  
VALERIYA V. SLEPTSOVA ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Russian Philosophy ◽  
Russian History ◽  
Divine Omniscience ◽  
Main Work ◽  
History Of

This paper analyzes the concepts of “possible” and “necessary” in the philosophy of the medieval Jewish-Catalan philosopher and theologian Hasdai Crescas. The main work of Crescas is named “Light of the Lord” (“Or-ha-Shem”). It is still not translated into Russian. The ideas of Crescas are not spread widely in the Russian philosophy of religion and in the Russian history of philosophy. Meanwhile, Crescas is one of the most original Jewish thinkers of the Middle Ages, who proposed, in particular, his own concept of combining divine omniscience and human free will. He developed this concept in the fifth section of the second book of “Or-a-Shem”. It is obvious, that this concept cannot be understood without a detailed analysis of Crescas’ understanding of the categories of “possible” and “necessary”. As a result of the analysis, it is concluded that within the framework of the concept proposed by Crescas both categories are coexisting. Crescas demonstrated this proposition by both philosophical and exegetical arguments...

scholarly journals Semantical Interpretations of the Temporal Logic Systems CL and Kb with the Gaps of Traditional Truth-values

Problemos ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 97 ◽  
pp. 132-149
Author(s):  
Živilė Pabijutaitė
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Temporal Logic ◽  
Retrospective Evaluation ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Truth Values ◽  
The Past ◽  
Divine Omniscience ◽  
Future Contingent ◽  
Logic Systems ◽  
Excluded Middle

Over the past several decades, in the field of temporal logic there have been created a great number of semantical theories that provide different truth conditions for tensed propositions. In this article we deal with five non-bivalent semantical interpretations of the temporal logic systems CL (Cocchiarella Linear) and Kb (Kripke Branching): 1) Ł3 by J. Łukasiewicz; 2) K3 by S. C. Kleene; 3) Ockhamism by A. Prior; 4) supervaluationism by R. Thomason; 5) relativism by J. MacFarlane. The aim of this article is to present a detailed typology of the five semantical theories based on these criteria: a) the ability to deal with the problem of retrospective evaluation of future contingent propositions; b) the ability to deal with the problem of divine omniscience and free will; c) their relation to the law of excluded middle; d) their relation to other formulas that are intuitively acceptable in an intederministic context. It is argued that the only theory that satisfies all four criteria is the relativism of J. MacFarlane; however, it faces some serious challenges when dealing with the problem of retrospective evaluation of future contingent propositions in the theological context.

scholarly journals God, Evil, and Alvin Plantinga on the Free-Will Defense

2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 75-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ciro De Florio ◽  
Aldo Frigerio
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Moral Evil ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Alvin Plantinga ◽  
Divine Omniscience ◽  
Divine Knowledge ◽  
Critical Account ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Free Will Defense

In this paper we will give a critical account of Plantinga’s well-known argument to the effect that the existence of an omnipotent and morally perfect God is consistent with the actual presence of evil. After presenting Plantinga’s view, we critically discuss both the idea of divine knowledge of conditionals of freedom and the concept of transworld depravity. Then, we will sketch our own version of the Free-Will Defence, which maintains that moral evil depends on the misuse of human freedom. However, our argument does not hinge on problematic metaphysical assumptions, but depends only on a certain definition of a free act and a particular interpretation of divine omniscience.

Does God have Beliefs?

1986 ◽  
Vol 22 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 287-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
William P. Alston
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Voluntary Action ◽  
Divine Foreknowledge ◽  
Justified Belief ◽  
Divine Omniscience ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Fourth Component ◽  
Classic Argument

Beliefs are freely attributed to God nowadays in Anglo–American philosophical theology. This practice undoubtedly reflects the twentieth–century popularity of the view that knowledge consists of true justified belief (perhaps with some needed fourth component). (After all no one supposes that God has beliefs in addition to, or instead of knowledge.) The connection is frequently made explicit. If knowledge is true justified belief then whatever God knows He believes. It would seem that much recent talk of divine beliefs stems from Nelson Pike's widely discussed article, ‘Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action’. In this essay Pike develops a version of the classic argument for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and free will in terms of divine forebelief. He introduces this shift by premising that ‘A knows X’ entails ‘A believes X’. As a result of all this, philosophers have increasingly been using the concept of belief in defining ‘omniscience’.

Divine Omniscience, Immutability, Aseity and Human Free Will

1991 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert F. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Strict Sense ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Internal Factors ◽  
Classical Theism ◽  
Divine Omniscience ◽  
External Influences

If classical Western theism is correct that God's timeless omniscience is compatible with human free will, then it is incoherent to hold that this God can in any strict sense be immutable and a se as well as omniscient. That is my thesis. ‘Classical theism’ shall refer here to the tradition of philosophical theology centring on such mainstream authors as Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. ‘Divine omniscience’ shall mean that the eternal God knows all events as a timeless observer of them. ‘Human free will’ shall mean that human beings are, at least sometimes, self-determining agents who make choices not decisively caused to be what they are by external or internal factors other than the free willing itself – choices that these agents have the capacity and the freedom to make differently than they do. Except where stipulated otherwise, ‘divine immutability’ shall ‘mean that God is neither subject to, nor capable of, change in being, knowing, or willing, since God is immune to external influences, and without internal needs, of the sorts that might give rise to such change. Finally, ‘aseity’ shall be used to underline the divine immunity to external influences, since a being that is wholly a se or self-caused (is ‘pure act’ in the Thomistic sense), cannot be open to such influences, cannot be made to be what or how it is by anything other than itself.

When Mother Earth Rises Up

2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 271-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simona Sacchi ◽  
Paolo Riva ◽  
Marco Brambilla
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Natural Disaster ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Disaster Victims ◽  
Willingness To Help ◽  
Mother Earth

Anthropomorphization is the tendency to ascribe humanlike features and mental states, such as free will and consciousness, to nonhuman beings or inanimate agents. Two studies investigated the consequences of the anthropomorphization of nature on people’s willingness to help victims of natural disasters. Study 1 (N = 96) showed that the humanization of nature correlated negatively with willingness to help natural disaster victims. Study 2 (N = 52) tested for causality, showing that the anthropomorphization of nature reduced participants’ intentions to help the victims. Overall, our findings suggest that humanizing nature undermines the tendency to support victims of natural disasters.

Free will and agency.

1994 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. A. Sappington
Keyword(s):  
Free Will

The Pity of Evil: Assumptions of Free Will and Responsibility in Psychology

PsycCRITIQUES ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 51 (47) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer E. Hettema
Keyword(s):  
Free Will
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