Bootstrapping Divine Foreknowledge? Comments on Fischer

Agents with Exact Foreknowledge

Computational experiments are reported involving the concept of foreknowledge, an agent’s direct, unmediated and accurate, but possibly incomplete, awareness of its future including states and events involving the agent itself. Foreknowledge is used here as a conceptual tool with which to explore certain issues around time and rationality. We first explain how foreknowledge in this sense may be...

Foreknowledge and Freedom

The bulk of my essay “Truth and Freedom” opposes fatalism, which is the claim that if there is a true proposition to the effect that an action A will occur, then A will not be free. But that essay also offers a new way to reconcile divine foreknowledge and human freedom. John Martin Fischer and Patrick Todd (2011) raise a number of objections to “Truth and Freedom,” most of which are objections...

The foreknowledge of extinction.

We are, so far as we know, the first species that has foreseen its own extinction. In the distant past, this foreknowledge took the form of myths, including visions of Armageddon. In the last couple of centuries, however, we have been able to give precise scientific shape to such forebodings. Modern astronomy and physics have proved that the solar system, galaxies and the universe itself have a...

Time, foreknowledge, and alternative possibilities

In this article we respond to arguments from William Hasker and David Kyle Johnson that free will is incompatible with both divine foreknowledge and eternalism (what we refer to as isotemporalism). In particular, we sketch an Anselmian account of time and freedom, briefly defend the view against Hasker’s critique, and then respond in more depth to Johnson’s claim that Anselmian freedom is incom...

Divine Eros and Divine Providence in Proclus’ Educational System