Supervaluationism and the timeless solution to the foreknowledge problem
Journal Title: Scientia et Fides - Year 2016, Vol 4, Issue 1
Abstract
If God knew I were going to write this paper, was I able to refrain from writing it this morning? One possible response to this question is that God's knowledge does not take place in time and therefore He does not properly fore-know. According to this response, God knows absolutely everything, it's just that He knows everything outside of time. The so-called timeless solution was one of the influential responses to the foreknowledge problem in classical Christian Theology. This solution, however, seemed to lose support in the recent debate. For example, Pike claims that "the doctrine of God's timelessness entered Christian Theology (only) because Platonic thought was stylish at the time" (Pike, 1970, 190) and Hasker (2001) catalogues this as one of the minor solutions to the problem. One possible source for this general attitude towards timelessness is the thought that the very idea of timelessness is incoherent. In this paper I argue that that the timeless solution to the foreknowledge problem is congenial with the supervaluationist theory of branching time and that this formal framework provides, in fact, a precise characterization of the timeless solution to the foreknowledge problem. The views presented in this paper are in line with those of Kretzmann and Stump (1981), Leftow (1991) and De Florio and Frigerio (2015).
Authors and Affiliations
Pablo Cobreros
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP195110
- DOI 10.12775/SetF.2016.015
- Views 99
- Downloads 0
Nieskończoności Maxa Tegmarka
Max Tegmark’s Infinities
La física cuántica y el diálogo con la religión
Quantum physics and the dialogue with religion The present paper has two main purposes. On the one hand, to introduce Pascual Jordan (1902-1980), an author little known in philosophy academic circles and better known in...
Review of the Autobiography of Josef Svoboda, Canadian Arctic Climate Scientist
Recenzja książki
After Suárez: Physical and Intentional Causality in the 17th-18th Centuries Scholasticism
The article investigates the distinction between the physical and the intentional causality that appeared in the 17th century scholasticism in the course of polemics with the traditional Aristotelian classification of ca...
La dimensión ética de la ciencia según Mariano Artigas
The Ethical Dimension of Science According to Mariano Artigas Many authors have written, from different approaches, about the relationships between ethics and science. In this work, we analyze how Mariano Artigas (a phy...