Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom: The Coherence of Theism: Omniscience

✍ Scribed by William Lane Craig

• Publisher: Brill
• Year: 1991
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 374
• Series: Brill's Studies in Intellectual History 19
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

Dedication
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
I. Theological Fatalism
II. Reduction of Theological to Logical Fatalism
III. Logical Fatalism
IV. Suggested Escapes from Fatalism
V. “Within One’s Power”
VI. Backward Causation
VII. “Within One’s Power” Once More
VIII. Transition to Theological Fatalism
IX. Temporal Necessity
X. Newcomb’s Paradox
XI. Foreknowledge and Freedom of God
XII. The Basis of Divine Foreknowledge
XIII. Middle Knowledge
Appendix I: Is the Special Theory of Relativity Fatalistic?
NOTES
Bibliography
Index