Nelson Pike’s article, “Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action,” is one of the most influential pieces in contemporary Philosophy of Religion. Published over forty years ago, it has elicited many different kinds of replies. We shall set forth some of the main lines of reply to Pike’s article, starting with some of the “early” replies. We then explore some issues that arise from relatively recent work in the philosophy of time; it is fascinating to note that views suggested by recent work (...) in this area and related areas of metaphysics have implications for Pike’s argument - implications perhaps not previously noticed. (shrink)

I draw upon Helen Steward's concept of agential settling to argue that freedom requires an ability to change the truth‐value of tenseless future contingents over time from false to true and that this ability requires a metaphysically open future.

I will briefly argue that theological fatalism is not a genuine ‘theological’ problem, for it can be reduced to another alleged incompatibility that arises independently of the existence or non-existence of God. I will conclude that the way of arguing against the existence of God or His omniscience by appealing to theological fatalism is blocked for libertarian atheists.

Two principles regarding agents' specific ability are proposed. The first claims that ordinary agents always lack the ability to do otherwise in the past, while the second principle observes that it is at least possible for some agent to have the ability to perform some action in the past. These two principles further give rise to three desiderata for a true account of ability. Two accounts of ability in the literature—the conditional analysis and the dispositional account—are then examined but they (...) both fail to meet the desiderata simultaneously. A modal principle of ability is motivated at the end. (shrink)

John Fischer has attacked the Ockhamistic solution to the freedom–foreknowledge dilemma by arguing that: (1) God's prior beliefs about the future, though being soft facts about the past, are soft facts of a special sort, what he calls ‘hard-type soft facts’, i.e. soft facts, the constitutive properties of which are ‘hard’, or ‘temporally non-relational properties’; (2) in this respect, such facts are like regular past facts which are subject to the fixity of the past. In this paper, I take issue (...) with this argument by Fischer, claiming that it does not succeed for two reasons: (i) Fischer's account of the notion of a hard property is unsatisfactory; (ii) his notion of a hard-type soft fact is incoherent. Despite this criticism, I agree with Fischer that there is a fundamental difference between God's beliefs about the future and regular soft facts with regard to their fixity-status, but I argue that the reason for this difference is that God's forebeliefs are plain hard facts about the past. (shrink)

Recently, John Fischer has proposed a novel account of the hard/soft distinction which is an entailment account. At its basis is the idea that a fact about a time T as a soft fact about T if it entails a fact about a time later than T; and a fact about a time T as a hard fact about T if it does not do so. Elsewhere, I have expressed serious doubts whether an entailment account of the hard/soft fact distinction (...) can succeed. Thus, it is surprising that Fischer's new account, too, turns out to be inadequate, or so at least I shall argue. (shrink)

The idea that some of God's past beliefs depend on our future actions has a long history, going back to Origen in the third century CE. However, it is not always clear what this idea amounts to, since it is not always clear what kind of dependence is at issue. This paper surveys five different interpretations of dependence and, in each case, considers the implications for the debate over theological fatalism. Along the way, we discuss a number of related issues, (...) including the nature of explanation, the scope of metaphysical grounding, and the possibility of backward causation. (shrink)

The logical fatalist holds that the past truth of future tense propositions is incompatible with libertarian freedom. The theological fatalist holds that the combination of God’s past beliefs with His essential omniscience is incompatible with libertarian freedom. There is an ongoing dispute over the relation between these two kinds of fatalism: some philosophers believe that the problems are equivalent while others believe that the theological problem is more difficult. We offer a diagnosis of this dispute showing that one’s view of (...) the modal status of God’s existence and God’s rdation to free creatures should determine one’s position on the relation between the two fatalisms. (shrink)

David Lewis’s analysis of “can” in “The Paradoxes of Time Travel” has been widely accepted both as a definitive analysis of “can” and as a successful resolution of the Grandfather Paradox for time travel. I argue that the central feature of his analysis puts it on all fours with a fallacy frequently imputed to fatalists such as Richard Taylor. I go on to consider two moves that might be made to avoid the fallacy, arguing that one of them leads to (...) the unavailability of an all-things-considered “can” and the other to a new primitive modality, not analyzable in Lewis’s way. (shrink)

In the literature on free will, fatalism, and determinism, a distinction is commonly made between temporally intrinsic (‘hard’) and temporally relational (‘soft’) facts at times; determinism, for instance, is the thesis that the temporally intrinsic state of the world at some given past time, together with the laws, entails a unique future (relative to that time). Further, it is commonly supposed by incompatibilists that only the ‘hard facts’ about the past are fixed and beyond our control, whereas the ‘soft facts’ (...) about the past needn’t be. A substantial literature arose in connection with this distinction, though no consensus emerged as to the proper way to analyze it. It is time, I believe, to revisit these issues. The central claim of this paper is that the attempts to analyze the hard/soft fact distinction got off on fundamentally the wrong track. The crucial feature of soft facts is that they (in some sense) depend on the future. Following recent work on the notion of dependence, however, I argue that the literature on the soft/hard distinction has failed to capture the sense of dependence at stake. This is because such attempts have tried to capture softness in terms of purely modal notions like entailment and necessitation. As I hope to show, however, such notions cannot capture the sort of asymmetrical dependence relevant to soft facthood. Arguing for this claim is the first goal of this paper. My second goal is to gesture towards what an adequate account of soft facthood will really look like. (shrink)

At least since Aristotle’s famous 'sea-battle' passages in On Interpretation 9, some substantial minority of philosophers has been attracted to the doctrine of the open future--the doctrine that future contingent statements are not true. But, prima facie, such views seem inconsistent with the following intuition: if something has happened, then (looking back) it was the case that it would happen. How can it be that, looking forwards, it isn’t true that there will be a sea battle, while also being true (...) that, looking backwards, it was the case that there would be a sea battle? This tension forms, in large part, what might be called the problem of future contingents. A dominant trend in temporal logic and semantic theorizing about future contingents seeks to validate both intuitions. Theorists in this tradition--including some interpretations of Aristotle, but paradigmatically, Thomason (1970), as well as more recent developments in Belnap, et. al (2001) and MacFarlane (2003, 2014)--have argued that the apparent tension between the intuitions is in fact merely apparent. In short, such theorists seek to maintain both of the following two theses: (i) the open future: Future contingents are not true, and (ii) retro-closure: From the fact that something is true, it follows that it was the case that it would be true. It is well-known that reflection on the problem of future contingents has in many ways been inspired by importantly parallel issues regarding divine foreknowledge and indeterminism. In this paper, we take up this perspective, and ask what accepting both the open future and retro-closure predicts about omniscience. When we theorize about a perfect knower, we are theorizing about what an ideal agent ought to believe. Our contention is that there isn’t an acceptable view of ideally rational belief given the assumptions of the open future and retro-closure, and thus this casts doubt on the conjunction of those assumptions. (shrink)

I begin by briefly mentioning two different logical fatalistic argument types: one from temporal necessity, and one from antecedent truth value. It is commonly thought that the latter of these involves a simple modal fallacy and is easily refuted, and that the former poses the real threat to an open future. I question the conventional wisdom regarding these argument types, and present an analysis of temporal necessity that suggests the anti-fatalist might be better off shifting her argumentative strategy. Specifically, two (...) points of interest emerge from my analysis: first, temporal necessity turns out to be an inappropriate and ineffective tool for the fatalist to make use of; and, second, the dismissal of the argument from antecedent truth value turns out to be an over-hasty one. (shrink)

The cause of an event must continue over a period at which the effect is not occurring and the whole period at which it is occurring. It follows that simultaneous causation and backward causation are metaphysically impossible. I distinguish among events said to occur at a time, ‘hard’ events which really occur solely at that time and ‘soft’ events which occur partly at another time. God’s beliefs at a time are hard events at that time. It follows that if God (...) is a temporal being, he cannot know infallibly what either we or he will do freely at a future time; and if God is timeless, he cannot know what happens in time. Hence we must define God’s ‘omniscience’ in such a way as to exclude any knowledge of future free actions. I discuss in an Appendix how far this view is compatible with Scripture and Church tradition. (shrink)

I explore several issues raised in John Martin Fischer’s Our Fate: Essays on God and Free Will. First I discuss whether an approach to the problem of freedom and foreknowledge that appeals directly to the claim that God’s beliefs depend on the future is importantly different from Ockhamism. I suggest that this dependence approach has advantages over Ockhamism. I also argue that this approach gives us good reason to reject the claim that the past is fixed. Finally, I discuss Fischer’s (...) proposal regarding God’s knowledge of future contingents. I suggest that it may be able to secure comprehensive foreknowledge. (shrink)

Many philosophers maintain that the ability to do otherwise is compatible with comprehensive divine foreknowledge but incompatible with the truth of causal determinism. But the Fixity of the Past principle underlying the rejection of compatibilism about the ability to do otherwise and determinism appears to generate an argument also for the incompatibility of the ability to do otherwise and divine foreknowledge. By developing an account of ability that appeals to the notion of explanatory dependence, we can replace the Fixity of (...) the Past with a principle that does not generate this difficulty. I develop such an account and defend it from objections. I also explore some of the account's implications, including whether the account is consistent with presentism. (shrink)

The understanding of God’s mode of existence as eternal makes a significant difference to a variety of issues in contemporary philosophy of religion, including, for instance, the apparent incompatibility of divine omniscience with human freedom. But the concept has come under attack in current philosophical discussion as inefficacious to solve the philosophical puzzles for which it seems so promising. Although Boethius in the early 6th century thought that the concept could resolve the apparent incompatibility between divine foreknowledge and human free (...) will, some contemporary philosophers, such as William Hasker, have argued that whatever help the concept of eternity may give with that puzzle is more than vitiated by the religiously pernicious implications of the concept for notions of God’s providence and action in time. In this paper, I will examine and respond to Hasker’s arguments against the doctrine of God’s eternity. (shrink)

A number of philosophers and theologians have argued that if God has knowledge of future human actions then human agents cannot be free. This argument rests on the assumption that, since God is essentially omniscient, God cannot be wrong about what human agents will do. It is this assumption that I challenge in this paper. My aim is to develop an interpretation of God’s essential omniscience according to which God can be wrong even though God never is wrong. If this (...) interpretation of essential omniscience is coherent, as I claim it is, then there is a logically consistent position according to which God is essentially omniscient, God foreknows what human agents will do, and yet it is possible for human agents to do otherwise. Thus, the argument for theological fatalism fails. (shrink)

It is widely believed that presentism is compatible with both a libertarian view of human freedom and an unrestricted principle of bivalence. I argue that, in fact, presentists must choose between bivalence and libertarianism: if presentism is true, then either the future is open or no one is free in the way that libertarians understand freedom.

In each one of the well-known Abrahamic religions, notably Islam, Christianity and Judaism, there are two important doctrines which seem to be inconsistent, but nonetheless some religious philosophers like Plantinga try to show that there is no conflict between them. The first doctrine is that God is Omniscient and He has foreknowledge of all that will happen in the future and thus all human actions are determined in His knowledge. The second doctrine is that human beings have free will and (...) they are responsible for all of their voluntary actions. The problem is that if all future actions of a person are determined in divine knowledge, it is impossible for him to change his future and so he is not free. This article will assess some of the solutions given to the problem and it will focus on Plantinga's solution to the problem and then it will unravel some defects of his solution. At the end of this article, a new solution to the problem will be given, in which the free will of human being is confirmed while the nature of divine knowledge is regarded ambiguous to the extent that its changeability or unchangeability is left unknown. (shrink)

In this paper I attempt to capture the essence of Nelson Pike’s contribution to the philosophy of religion. My summary of his insights will revolve around three general topics: omniscience (and in particular its relation to human freedom), omnipotence (and in particular its relation to the existence of human suffering), and mysticism (with a focus on the question of whether and in what sense mystic visions can be sources of knowledge). Although the details vary in interesting ways, his work on (...) these topics largely consists of recognizing an important challenge to the viability of the relevant doctrine or framework, sharpening that challenge by presenting it in a more forceful way, and then offering and assessing potential responses. Pike’s writings are characterized by exemplary rigor and relentless clarity, and together they constitute a rich (and under-appreciated) source of insight. (shrink)

There is often said to be something peculiar about the history of modal theory up until the turn of the fourteenth century, when John Duns Scotus decisively reframed the issues. I wish to argue that this impression of dramatic discontinuity is almost entirely a misimpression. Premodern philosophers prescind from the wide-open modal space of all possible worlds because they seek to adapt their modal discourse to the explanatory and linguistic demands of their context.

This essay examines the case for relativism about future contingents in light of a distinction between two ways of interpreting the ‘branching time’ framework. Focussing on MacFarlane (2014), we break the argument for relativism down into two steps. The first step is an argument for something MacFarlane calls the "Non-Determination Thesis", which is essentially the view that there is no unique actual future. The second step is an argument from the Non-Determination Thesis to relativism. I first argue that first step (...) of this argument fails. But despite that result, the second step is still of interest, since many philosophers have maintained something like the Non-Determination Thesis on alternative grounds. I then argue that whether the second step of the argument suc- ceeds depends on how the Non-Determination Thesis is motivated, and how the ‘branching time’ framework is interpreted in light of that moti- vation. If the branches in an intended branching time model are ersatz possible worlds, then the argument for relativism might go through; but if, instead, the branches are concrete parts of a ‘branching multiverse’, then the argument for relativism turns out to make implausible assumptions about the nature of personal identity over time. That argument can thus be rejected by rejecting those assumptions. One upshot of this is that the case for relativism about future contingents is much weaker than has been appreciated; a broader lesson is that philosophers who invoke the branching time framework need to pay close attention to different ways of interpreting it. (shrink)

Suppose that time t is just a few moments from now. And suppose that the proposition that Jones sits at t was true a thousand years ago. Does the thousand-years-ago truth of that proposition imply that Jones's upcoming sitting at t will not be free? This article argues that it does not. It also argues that Jones even now has a choice about the thousand-years-ago truth of that Jones sits at t . Those arguments do not require the complex machinery (...) of Ockhamism, with its distinction between hard facts and soft facts; indeed, those arguments do not require any complex machinery at all. Instead, those arguments are built on an uncontroversial understanding of the idea that truth depends on the world. In the final section of the article, those arguments are extended to show that foreknowledge of an action does not threaten that action's freedom. (shrink)

I argue that Open Theism leads to a retreat from ascribing to God ‘complete omniscience’. Having surrendered this ground, the Open Theist cannot but retreat from ascribing to God complete omnipotence; the Open Theist must admit that God might perform actions which He reasonably expected would meet certain descriptions but which nevertheless do not do so. This then makes whatever goodness (in the sense of beneficence, not just benevolence) God has a matter of luck. Open Theism is committed to a (...) partially ignorant God, one who is subject to the vagaries of luck for the efficacy of at least some of His actions and for His goodness. (shrink)

If God is omniscient and exhaustive knowledge of the future is possible, then God knows (and in fact knew a long time ago) what we will do in the future. But is this compatible with our future actions being free? I address this question by responding to an argument that claims that these things are incompatible. At the heart of this incompatibility argument is the idea that God’s past beliefs about our future actions are “accidentally necessary”—can’t be changed—and that this (...) necessity transfers to our actions. I consider four main responses to the argument: Brian Davies’ claim that God’s past beliefs about our future actions are properly characterised as beliefs about what we will freely do; Alvin Plantinga’s view—stemming from the work of William of Ockham—that God’s past beliefs about our future actions aren’t wholly about the past and so aren’t accidentally necessary; Trenton Merricks’ idea that our having a choice about God’s past beliefs doesn’t require us to be able to change the past; and Alfred Freddoso’s claim that the accidental necessity of God’s beliefs doesn’t transfer to our actions. My response, like that of Merricks, focuses on the idea that God’s past beliefs are dependent on, and to be explained in terms of, our future actions; rather than vice versa. I support this view by appealing to the idea that God’s foreknowledge is simple (an idea I defend against several William Hasker—inspired objections). I argue that neither God’s beliefs, nor their accidental necessity, should be thought of as a threat to our freedom; and that in any event, the accidental necessity of God’s beliefs isn’t something that can coherently be thought to transfer to our actions. I conclude that God’s past beliefs about our future actions are perfectly compatible with our freedom. (shrink)

God, by definition, is all-powerful, all-good, all-wise, and all-knowing. Therein lies a problem for the theist, of course, for every one of these attributes has been the subject of fierce debate. In this paper I want to return to the debate by introducing a new problem for the idea that anyone could have the kind of perfect knowledge God is supposed to have. What distinguishes my problem from others is that the sort of knowledge it focuses on is self-knowledge, hence (...) knowledge of a particularly intimate kind. My claim is that God cannot have infallible knowledge of at least some of his own perfections, in particular his being all-wise or ideally rational. Such ignorance is not only inconsistent with the usual conception of God's omniscience, given that whatever knowledge God possesses is traditionally thought to be be a priori and infallible, but, more importantly, is inconsistent with the fundamental idea that God at least knows infallibly or incorrigibly that he has what it takes to be God: qualities such as omnibenevolence, omnipotence, and supreme wisdom. In short, my claim is that God must have a deep “blindspot” about his own nature, something which is inconsistent with a traditional picture of that nature. (shrink)

This paper seeks to rehabilitate St. Augustine’s widely dismissed response to the alleged incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and free will. This requires taking a fresh look at his analysis in On Free Choice of the Will, and arguing its relevance to the current debate. Along the way, mistaken interpretations of Augustine are rebutted, his real solution is developed and defended, a reason for his not anticipating Boethius’s a temporalist solution is suggested, a favorable comparison with Ockham is made, rival solutions (...) are rejected, and the aporetic nature of the problem is explained. (shrink)

David Hunt has recently developed a new strategy, called the “dispositional omniscience scenario,” or (OOS), which is designed to defeat theological fatalism by showing the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human (libertarian) free agency. But I argue that Hunt fails to establish his compatibility claim because (DOS) is based on a defective analysis of dispositional belief that is too weak to sustain any divine foreknowledge of future free actions.

This paper is a critical discussion of A.N. Prior’s contribution to the modern understanding of indeterminism and human freedom of choice. Prior suggested that these ideas should be conceived in terms of his tense logic. It can be demonstrated that his approach provides an attractive formalization that makes it possible to discuss indeterminism and human freedom of choice in a very precise manner and in a broader metaphysical context. It is also argued that Prior’s development of this approach was closely (...) linked to his very personal struggles with fundamental religious and metaphysical questions. In his opinion, holding the doctrine of divine foreknowledge together with the doctrine of human freewill gives rise to difficult logical and philosophical problems. It appears that Prior, rather early on, decided to support what was later known as the Peircean solution, although he also analysed what he considered to be the most important alternative solution—the Ockhamist solution. This paper offers a discussion of some of Prior’s published books and papers as well as some of the papers in his Nachlass. (shrink)

Peter van Inwagen’s original formulation of the Consequence Argument employed an inference rule that was shown to be invalid given van Inwagen’s interpretation of the modal operators in the Consequence Argument. In response, van Inwagen recently suggested a revised interpretation of his modal operators. Following up on a debate between Blum and Schnieder, I analyze van Inwagen’s revised interpretation in terms of explanatory notions and I argue that van Inwagen faces a dilemma: he either has to admit that beta entails (...) fatalism, or he has to admit that a new counterexample invalidates beta. Either way, it seems reasonable to reject beta and to conclude that the Consequence Argument fails. Further, I argue that Widerker’s well-known substitute for rule beta is faced with a similar dilemma and, therefore, is bound to fail as well. I conclude that, if the modal operators are interpreted in terms of explanatory notions, neither van Inwagen’s nor Widerker’s rule of inference turns out to be valid. (shrink)

The advent of Frankfurt-style counterexamples in the early 1970s posed a problem not merely for incompatibilists, but for compatibilists also. At that time compatibilists too were concerned to hold that the presence of alternative possibilities was necessary for moral responsibility. Such a classical compatibilism, I argue in this paper, should not have been left behind. I propose that we can use a Kratzer-style semantics of ‘can’ to model ‘could have done otherwise’ statements in such a way that the truth of (...) such expressions is both (i) evidently consistent with determinism, and (ii) clearly such that Frankfurt-style counterexamples do not count as cases where the agent could not have done otherwise. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The Frankfurt-style Counterexamples to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities have been controversial. I sketch some of the major moves in the debates surrounding the FSCs, and I seek to provide an answer to a big challenge: the indeterministic horn of the ‘dilemma defense’. Given indeterminism, it is unclear how Black can know with certainty what Jones will choose and do in the future; this leaves at least some open alternatives for Jones. I adopt the strategy of positing God in (...) Black’s place. The challenge now is to explain how God can have knowledge with certainty of future free human behavior in an indeterministic context, insofar as there is no entailing evidence in available in advance in such a situation. I present the Bootstrapping View of God’s knowledge to solve this problem. If we replace Black with God, we have an indeterministic case in which an agent acts freely, and yet cannot do otherwise. My account of God’s knowledge provides an interpretation of Luis de Molina’s notoriously obscure notion of Supercomprehension. (shrink)

Several theorists (Merricks, Westphal, and McCall) have recently claimed to offer a novel way to respond to the dilemma of freedom and foreknowledge, rooted in Molina's insight that God's beliefs depend on what we do, rather than the other way around. In this paper we argue that these responses either beg the question, or else are dressed-up versions of Ockhamism.

I seek to clarify the notion of the fixity of the past appropriate to Pike’s regimentation of the argument for the incompatibility of God’s foreknowledge and human freedom. Also, I discuss Alvin Plantinga’s famous example of Paul and the Ant Colony in light of Pike’s argument.

Christopher Taylor has greatly clarified my thinking on this topic and shown me how to launch a deeper and more radical campaign in support of my earlier claims to this effect, and our coauthored paper (Taylor and Dennett 2001) provides more technical detail than is needed here. Here I will attempt a gentler version of our argument, highlighting the main points so that non-philosophers can at least see what the points of contention are, and how we propose to settle them, (...) while leaving out almost all the logical formulae. Philosophers should consult the full-dress version, of course, to see if we have actually tied off the loose ends, and closed the loopholes that are passed by without mention in this telling. (Dennett. (shrink)

The consequence argument for the incompatibility of free action and determinism has long been under attack, but two important objections have only recently emerged: Warfield’s modal fallacy objection and Campbell’s no past objection. In this paper, I explain the significance of these objections and defend the consequence argument against them. First, I present a novel formulation of the argument that withstands their force. Next, I argue for the one controversial claim on which this formulation relies: the trans-temporality thesis. This thesis (...) implies that an agent acts freely only if there is one time at which she is able to perform an action and a distinct time at which she actually performs it. I then point out that determinism, too, is a thesis about trans-temporal relations. I conclude that it is precisely because my formulation of the consequence argument emphasizes trans-temporality that it prevails against the modal fallacy and no past objections. (shrink)

In addressing the problem of the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom, philosophers of religion encounter problems regarding the metaphysics and structure of time. Some models of temporal logic developed for completely independent reasons have proved especially appropriate for representing the temporal structure of the world as Molinism conceives it. In particular, some models of the Thin Red Line ) seem to imply that conditionals of freedom are true or false, as Molinists maintain. Noting the resemblance between Molinism and (...) \ models, Restall Molinism: the contemporary debate, pp 227–239, 2011) has advanced some criticisms of Molinism that have also been leveled against \ models. In particular, Restall believes that the implication \ is not true in \ models. Because Molinists must also accept that this implication is not true, this is a problem for them. We will show that Restall’s criticism is wide of the mark. Firstly, it will be demonstrated that in many open future models ) the implication \ is invalid. Secondly, while it is possible to account for this implication, some modifications are required in respect of the branching time semantics. In proposing one such modification, we show that this new semantics can be adopted by advocates of the \ and, as a consequence, by Molinists as well. We conclude that the principle stated by Restall is either a problem for many open future models or can be accounted for by these models and so is not a problem for Molinists either. (shrink)

This paper has a twofold aim. The first is to offer a precise definition of soft fact. Without such definition it is impossible to assess the Ockhamist solution to the problem of divine foreknowledge and human freedom in an accurate way. The second purpose is to identify the costs of such a solution, distinguishing them from some of the other costs usually ascribed to Ockhamism, which Ockhamism does not actually need to pay. In particular, it is argued that Ockhamism is (...) committed to the view that a true future exists and to a form of backward causation. (shrink)

The concept of soft facts is crucial for the Ockhamistic analysis of the divine knowledge of future contingents; moreover, this notion is important in itself because it concerns the structure of the facts that depend—in some sense—on other future facts. However, the debate on soft facts is often flawed by the unaware use of two different notions of soft facts. The facts of the first kind are supervenient on temporal facts: By bringing about a temporal fact, the agent can bring (...) about these facts. However, on the one hand, the determination of the existence of these facts does not affect the past; on the other hand, assimilating divine knowledge into this kind of facts does not help the Ockhamist. The authors will argue that, to vindicate Ockhamism, another definition of “soft fact” is necessary, which turns out to be much more demanding from a metaphysical point of view. (shrink)

In this paper, we will defend a particular version of the timeless solution to the problem of divine foreknowledge and human freedom. Our strategy is grounded on a particular temporal framework, which models the flow of time and a libertarian understanding of freedom. The propositions describing a certain act by an agent have an indeterminate truth value until the agent makes her choice; therefore, they become true or false when a decision is made. In order to account for this change (...) of truth value, a multiple frame structure is introduced in which every frame presents a privileged time, with its past and the possible alternative futures, which are still open. God atemporally knows all the frames and the truth values of propositions with respect to each one. Since divine knowledge of what an agent decides in a certain temporal frame depends on the agent’s act itself, divine knowledge does not conflict with the agent’s free will. (shrink)

Recently, several authors have utilized the notion of dependence to respond to the traditional argument for the incompatibility of freedom and divine foreknowledge. However, proponents of this response have not always been so clear in specifying where the incompatibility argument goes wrong, which has led to some unfounded objections to the response. We remedy this dialectical confusion by clarifying both the dependence response itself and its interaction with the standard incompatibility argument. Once these clarifications are made, it becomes clear both (...) (1.) that the dependence response does not beg the question against the proponent of the incompatibility argument and (2.) that the dependence response advances the dialectic whether it is developed as a version of Ockhamism or as a version of multiple-pasts compatibilism. (shrink)