Facts, Freedom and Foreknowledge

Abstract

Is God's foreknowledge compatible with human freedom? One of the most attractive attempts to reconcile the two is the Ockhamistic view, which subscribes not only to human freedom and divine omniscience, but retains our most fundamental intuitions concerning God and time: that the past is immutable, that God exists and acts in time, and that there is no backward causation. In order to achieve all that, Ockhamists (I) distinguish ‘hard facts’ about the past which cannot possibly be altered from ‘soft facts’ about the past which are alterable, and (2) argue that God's prior beliefs about human actions are soft facts about the past.