The beautiful mind: A reaffirmation and reconstruction of the classical Reformed doctrines of the divine omniscience, prescience, and human freedom.

摘要

This dissertation explores the various conceptions of divine omniscience and their relationship to human freedom. Chapters 1--3 explore the various biblical, theological, and philosophical arguments offered by so-called open theists to show that the biblical God lacks an exhaustive foreknowledge of future contingencies. Each argument analyzed in these chapters is shown to be fallacious. Chapters 4--5 offer biblical, theological, and philosophical arguments suggesting that the God of biblical theism does, in fact, possess an exhaustive knowledge of the future. In chapter 6, biblical and theological arguments are given to support the contention that God has foreordained everything that comes to pass. Chapters 7--8 explore the nature of human freedom. These chapters contend that compatibilism is the only view of human freedom that (a) preserves the notion of human responsibility and (b) can be reconciled with exhaustive divine foreknowledge/foreordination. Chapters 9--10 explore the various ways philosophical theologians have tried to overcome the conclusions reached by the end of chapter 8. Special attention is given to Molinism and the doctrine of middle knowledge, which not only fails to reconcile libertarian freedom with divine foreknowledge but compromises the divine aseity.; This thesis makes its most important contributions to current discussions involving divine foreknowledge and human freedom in the following ways: (a) the reader is given a full analysis of the most important biblical texts used to support the doctrine of limited foreknowledge; (b) the reader is exposed to both biblical and philosophico-theological arguments for unlimited foreknowledge-in particular, this writer produces a transcendental argument for divine omniscience; (c) while the famous grounding objection to middle knowledge is repeated and defended against its detractors, the thesis moves on to offer theological criticisms of Molina's scientia media that are rarely, if ever, found in the current literature on the topic.