Foreknowledge and Fatalism: Why Divine Timelessness Doesn’t Help

Abstract

The problem of divine foreknowledge and creaturely freedom or, more generally, the problem of divine knowledge of future contingents, has long been a matter of controversy. If someone—say, God—knows that some event—say, a sea battle—occurs tomorrow, can it be undetermined today whether that event occurs tomorrow, and if so, how? Conversely, if some possible future event is not now determined either to occur or not to occur—in other words, if it is a future contingent—then how can it be either known to occur or known not to occur in the future? It seems that, until it actually occurs, a future contingent lacks the definiteness required to be a proper object of knowledge. At any rate, the problem is especially pressing for theists, most of whom believe both that there are future contingents, especially human libertarian free choices,1 and that God has always known which future contingents are going to happen. Despite two millennia of active debate, there is still no consensus about whether the problem can be solved, and, if so, what a philosophically and theologically acceptable solution might look like.2 In this chapter I analyze the problem as a specific instance of the more general problem of fatalism, and I argue that, as with any (valid) argument for fatalism, there are only two possible solutions. One solution is to say that God’s foreknowledge—for purposes of argument I shall assume throughout