Divine foreknowledge, time and tense

Abstract

If God’s omniscience entails knowing all things, including those that did not occur yet, how is it possible that humans act freely? This very much discussed old question had a sudden revival with Nelson Pike’s paper fifty years ago. In this paper we provide an analysis of the argument for “theological fatalism” under the light of some assumptions about the structure of time and the semantics of tensed sentences. Wepresent, in particular, Prior-Thomason semantics for indeterminist time (second section). This semantics motivates the distinction between time of evaluation and perspective which, we argue, is required for an appropriate definition a truth-predicate in the context Prior-Thomason semantics. Third section shows how the previous language and semantics can be used to formalize the argument for theological fatalism. The argument thus formalized is quite robust and we argue that the only way to scape its conclusion makes essential use of the distinction between time of evaluation and perspective which was independently motivated in the previous section. We intend to show that this solution to the argument is a precise way to implement the God as timeless solution, making this a live option in this debate.