Supervaluationism and the timeless solution to the foreknowledge problem

Abstract

If God knew I were going to write this paper, was I able to refrain from writing it this morning? One possible response to this question is that God's knowledge does not take place in and therefore He does not properly fore -know. According to this response, God knows absolutely everything, it's just that He knows everything outside of . The so-called timeless solution was one of influential responses to foreknowledge problem in classical Christian Theology. This solution, however, seemed to lose support in recent debate. For example, Pike claims that the doctrine of God's timelessness entered Christian Theology (only) because Platonic thought was stylish at time (Pike, 1970, 190) and Hasker (2001) catalogues this as one of minor solutions to problem. One possible source for this general attitude towards timelessness is thought that very idea of timelessness is incoherent. In this paper I argue that that timeless solution to foreknowledge problem is congenial with supervaluationist theory of branching and that this formal framework provides, in fact, a precise characterization of timeless solution to foreknowledge problem. The views presented in this paper are in line with those of Kretzmann and Stump (1981), Leftow (1991) and De Florio and Frigerio (2015).