Why God's beliefs are not hard-type soft facts

David Widerker

Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

John Fischer has attacked the Ockhamistic solution to the freedom-foreknowledge dilemma by arguing that: (1) God's prior beliefs about the future, though being soft facts about the past, are soft facts of a special sort, what he calls 'hard-type soft facts', i.e. soft facts, the constitutive properties of which are 'hard', or 'temporally non-relational properties'; (2) in this respect, such facts are like regular past facts which are subject to the fixity of the past. In this paper, I take issue with this argument by Fischer, claiming that it does not succeed for two reasons: (I) Fischer's account of the notion of a hard property Is unsatisfactory; (ii) his notion of a hard-type soft fact is incoherent. Despite this criticism, I agree with Fischer that there is a fundamental difference between God's beliefs about the future and regular soft facts with regard to their fixity-status, but I argue that the reason for this difference is that God's forebeliefs are plain hard facts about the past.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)77-88
Number of pages12
JournalReligious Studies
Volume38
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 2002

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