Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom: The Coherence of Theism: Omniscience

by William Lane Craig

The ancient problem of fatalism, more particularly theological fatalism, has resurfaced with surprising vigour in the second half of the twentieth century. Two questions predominate in the debate: (1) Is divine foreknowledge compatible with human freedom and (2) How can God foreknow future free acts? Having surveyed the historical background of this debate in "The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge" and "Future Contingents from Aristotle to Suarez" (Brill: 1988), William Lane Craig now attempts to address these issues critically. His wide-ranging discussion brings together a thought- provoking array of related topics such as logical fatalism, multivalent logic, backward causation, precognition, time travel, counterfactual logic, temporal necessity, Newcomb's Problem, middle knowledge, and relativity theory. The present work serves both as a useful survey of the extensive literature on theological fatalism and related fields and as a stimulating assessment of the possibility of divine foreknowledge of future free acts.

Genres: Philosophy, Theology

374 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1990

About the author

William Lane Craig is Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California. He and his wife Jan have two grown children.

At the age of sixteen as a junior in high school, he first heard the message of the Christian gospel and yielded his life to Christ. Dr. Craig pursued his undergraduate studies at Wheaton College (B.A. 1971) and graduate studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (M.A. 1974; M.A. 1975), the University of Birmingham (England) (Ph.D. 1977), and the University of Munich (Germany) (D.Theol. 1984). From 1980-86 he taught Philosophy of Religion at Trinity, during which time he and Jan started their family. In 1987 they moved to Brussels, Belgium, where Dr. Craig pursued research at the University of Louvain until assuming his position at Talbot in 1994.

He has authored or edited over thirty books, including The Kalam Cosmological Argument; Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus; Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom; Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology; and God, Time and Eternity, as well as over a hundred articles in professional journals of philosophy and theology, including The Journal of Philosophy, New Testament Studies, Journal for the Study of the New Testament, American Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy, and British Journal for Philosophy of Science.

Reviews

[Miguel Cisneros Saucedo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Excelente. Cumplió con mis expectativas.

[Alejandro Pérez Vera · Rating 2 out of 5]

La verdad es que aunque Criag dice que es de lectura fácil, realmente no lo es, debe leerse de forma muy concentrada y conocer algunos términos para no irse perdiendo entre las líneas de este libro.

[Kingsley Layton · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very thorough and quite brilliant collection of arguments from WLC that particularly help in the Middle Knowledge debate.

There are not many publications which directly address anti-Molinism, but this book does a great job of defending Molinism and goes further by offering a rebuttal to John Feinsberg's anti-Molinism works.

I would love to see/read/hear WLC doing this particular strand of apologetics more regularly.