#Ockham predestination free#

Is there one of the recommended readings to focus on in particular? I have listened to every episode multiple times and read some of the literature recommended, but I may be missing the one that will help me to understand why you feel that a grasp in contingency, in the way that you've described Scotus and Ockham holding it, is a good approach to solving the age old determinism argument. But if God thus decided ahead of time how I was going make every single choice in my life, then he caused those choices without any input from me. (If we're going to make the extreme assumption that God knows the future, then there's no reason not to make the equally extreme assumption that he has such universe-creating ability.) Knowing what all of those potential choices are, he chose to create this particular universe, with all of the specific choices that I make in it. If I can and do change it, then God was misinformed.Īlso, putting the word 'predestination' aside for a moment, foreknowledge still presupposes that God has caused all of my choices, at least if we assume that God's omnipotence includes the capacity to have created any of a number of different universes in which I made any of a number of different choices.

#Ockham predestination free#

Can I now change my choice while there's still time? If I can't, then I don't have free will. Being omnipotent, he also has the power to tell me today what my future choice is going to be. If God has foreknowledge of all of my future choices, then he certainly knows what I'm going to choose to eat for dinner tomorrow (or whether I'll choose to eat dinner at all). If foreknowledge doesn't entail that God predestines my choices, it still entails predestination.

invoking God's timelessness.) By contrast, if God predestines us, then it is more plausible to say that He is the true agent, though of course Bradwardine and others who defend a strong doctrine of predestination would deny that this follows.Ī lot of the same issues come up in Islamic theology too by the way so if you are interested in the topic you could listen back to the episodes on e.g. I agree that foreknowledge by itself doesn't involve the foreknower being the agent - actually all it seems to do is guarantee that there is a present truth about the future, since how God can know what will happen if there is as yet no truth of the matter? (I here ignore possible ways out of this e.g. Right, perhaps I should have made this clearer in the episode, but the distinction you draw here is essentially that between God merely fore knowing what I will do, and pre destining what I will do (by in effect choosing what will happen, because He decides whether to give or withhold grace). In this manner, God's Compassion also becomes meaningful because His compassion would be ADDITIONAL and independent of whether we need such compassion or not. I believe in this manner we are the producer of God's preknowledge of our fate, and He simply actualizes such for us. To me, at least, pre-knowledge of God does not make Him the Agent and us mere tools that are being enacted to actualize what He knows, but we are also the agents who would have performed the way God Knows what we would have performed: here, I mean to say even though God is the Ultimate Cause of our actions, He simply actualizes what we always would have chosen to BE actualized, even though He had preknowledge of such. And such is only possible in terms of God - if it is attributed to Him the capability of Actually Knowing the future, and Him also being the Ultimate Cause who actualizes potencies. It seems to imply that (pre) knowledge entails the necessity of outcomes of such knowledge independent of the will of the agents pertaining to whom such knowledge was foreseen. Schabel, Theology at Paris, 1316-1245: Peter Auriol and the Problem of Divine Foreknowledge and Future Contingents (Aldershot: 2000). Leff, Bradwardine and the Pelagians (Cambridge: 1957). Perler, Predestination, Zeit und Kontingenz (Amsterdam: 1988). Normore, “Peter Aureoli and his Contemporaries on Future Contingents and Excluded Middle,” Synthese 96 (1993), 83-92. Gelber, It Could Have Been Otherwise: Contingency and Necessity in Dominican Theology at Oxford, 1300-1350 (Leiden: 2004). Dolnikowski, Thomas Bradwardine: a View of Time and a Vision of History in Fourteenth-Century Thought (Leiden: 1995). Craig, The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge and Future Contingents from Aristotle to Suarez (Leiden: 1988). Craig, “John Duns Scotus on God’s Foreknowledge and Future Contingents,” Franciscan Studies 47 (1987), 98-122. Kretzmann, trans., William of Ockham: Predestination, God’s Foreknowledge, and Future Contingents (Indianapolis: 1983).