Here’s my current breakdown of what I think are the main variants of Open Theism. Briefly, I take Open Theism to affirm at least the following: Open Theism =def. there exists a monotheistic God (understood along theistic personalist or ‘neo-classical’ lines) who has created ex nihilo a Creation that, by God’s design, has a partly… Read More »
This is the 9th and final installment of my series on Patrick Todd’s recently published book The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False (Oxford, 2021). (Previous installments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.) In this chapter Todd tackles the “assertion problem” for open futurism. He’s quick to clarify that it’s not… Read More »
This is a reply to a recent critique of open theism by philosopher David Hunt on a YouTube channel called The Analytic Christian. The video interview was mainly focused on an essay Hunt wrote titled “What Does God Know? The Problems of Open Theism”. It was published in 2009 as part of an edited collection,… Read More »
This is part 7 of my ongoing series on Patrick Todd’s recently published book The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False (Oxford, 2021). (Previous installments: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6.) This post continues my discussion of Ch.6, focusing on pp. 129–147, which is concerned with… Read More »
Author analogies for different models of providence (somewhat tongue-in-cheek): Theistic Determinism: God as sole author – God writes the whole story without any outside input. He writes only for His own enjoyment, which He calls “glory” for some reason. Creatures are merely characters in the novel. Molinism: God as sole author, but with outside “inspiration”… Read More »
For Christian open theists it is an inconvenient fact of history that the view seems to have been a small minority report until fairly recently. This fact is the basis for one of the most commonly leveled objections against open theism, namely, that it is “too novel”. If open theism is true and supported by… Read More »
This is part 2 of my ongoing series on Patrick Todd’s recently published book The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False (Oxford, 2021). You can find part 1 here. In chapter 2, Todd compares and contrasts “three models of the undetermined future” and proposes a unified semantics for the future tense. I argue… Read More »
In a previous post I presented the infamous grounding objection to Molinism. The problem stems from the fact that for Molinism God’s middle knowledge (MK) is supposed to be non-natural, i.e., not part of, entailed by, or grounded in God’s nature contingent, i.e., neither necessary nor impossible in the abstract metaphysical sense that I describe… Read More »
In my previous post, I discussed the grounding objection to Molinism and also briefly touched on another problem having to with divine aseity. In this post I want to try to cut to heart of the matter and show as simply and directly as I can that Molinism is necessarily false because it is internally… Read More »
This post has three parts: To begin, I will (§1) explain what Molinism is. I will then (§2) explain the infamous “grounding” objection to Molinism. I will argue that Molinism cannot give a positive answer to the grounding objection. The Molinist simply has to bite the bullet and admit a boatload of ungrounded contingent truths and/or… Read More »