One answer to the perennial question of how to reconcile divine foreknowledge with human freedom is the “Eternity Solution” : God is outside of time, and therefore it is incorrect to say he has foreknowledge. However, in the case of prophecy, God’s knowledge seems to be inserted into the temporal order and thereby transformed into foreknowledge. The eternalist might address this problem in a few ways, but the best answer appears to be that inevitable actions can be free in some (...) sense. At the same time, this answer seems to either ironically lead to the abandonment of the Eternity Solution in favor of other solutions to the foreknowledge/ freedom problem or call for a coherent explanation of the idea that freedom is relatively limited in instances of prophecy and for a revision of Aquinas’s views on human freedom and divine non-passivity. (shrink)

Paul Ramsey and Stanley Hauerwas are arguably the most prominent United Methodist thinkers to date to write extensively on abortion. This article takes up a ripe and illuminating task neglected by the ethicists themselves and the secondary literature: bringing their views on this issue into conversation. More specifically, this article discusses their considerations on the value of unborn human life, the “hard cases,” the church community’s role, and the place of legal reform. The article concludes by placing their remarks in (...) the context of official Catholic teaching, and contending that despite some shortcomings in the two thinkers’ considerations, Christians on different sides of the abortion debate should incorporate these authors’ insights by expressing a “rational account of fetal development”, a charitable approach to hard cases, a “theological idiom”, and an appropriate level of political concern. (shrink)

One answer to the perennial question of how to reconcile divine foreknowledge with human freedom is the “Eternity Solution” (espoused by Thomas Aquinas): God is outside of time, and therefore it is incorrect to say he has foreknowledge. However, in the case of prophecy, God’s knowledge seems to be inserted into the temporal order and thereby transformed into foreknowledge. The eternalist might address this problem in a few ways, but the best answer appears to be that inevitable actions can be (...) free in some sense. At the same time, this answer seems to either (a) ironically lead to the abandonment of the Eternity Solution in favor of other solutions to the foreknowledge/ freedom problem or (b) call for a coherent explanation of the idea that freedom is relatively limited in instances of prophecy and for a revision (or at least clarification) of Aquinas’s views on human freedom and divine non-passivity. (shrink)

The history of Western Thought since the seventeenth Century leaves little doubt as to the practical validity of the method of natural investigation discovered by Galileo, interpreted by Descartes, and variously generalized by Newton and Einstein. The repercussions of its success on every level of human activity, religious, political, commercial, and educational have awakened the most diverse ánd even contradictory speculations as to the nature of this science and the objectives of the scientist. Often enough one gets the impression that (...) these speculations are founded on an arbitrary and unjustifiable conception of the nature of modern science; a conception formulated in terms of what one thinks or wishes to think science is from its effects upon the extra-scientific domain rather than in terms of a patient and critical penetration of its intrinsic structure. (shrink)