Abstract

My aim is to determine the minimum conceptual basis required to establish the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and human free choice. I begin by assuming a correspondence theory of truth, a linear, i.e., non-circular, conception of time where the past cannot be changed, and an indeterministic notion of free choice. Not until the addition of the supposition that the foreknower is God and hence necessarily omniscient is the assumption set sufficient to imply incompatibilism. Nelson Pike has argued that this assumption set is sufficient only if the supposition of necessary omniscience is interpreted so as to imply that the foreknower is essentially omniscient. However, I introduce a notion of infallibility which does not entail essential omniscience, and argue that this will also suffice to imply incompatibilism. In either case, the argument for incompatibilism is susceptible to objections raised in the contemporary literature based on an Ockhamist distinction between temporally necessary and temporally contingent truths--a distinction which is sometimes expressed as a difference between what are called "hard" and "soft" facts. There are two Ockhamist responses: the existence of God may be a soft fact; and God's holding specific beliefs about the future choices of individuals may be soft facts. If either of these are correct, then divine foreknowledge is compatible with human free choice, for even if God knew in the past what some individual shall in fact choose in the future, that individual may be free to choose other than what she in fact chooses. In the latter part of the dissertation, I defend the incompatibilist argument against these Ockhamist objections