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 6 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, and part 5.) Chapter 6 is a long chapter that arguably should have been split into two parts—at the very… Read More »
This is part 5 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, and part 4.) Chapter 5 is a relatively short chapter that initially focuses on how to understand divine omniscience in relation to… Read More »
A common trope in discussions of fatalism is that arguments for fatalism are invariably guilty of a “modal fallacy”, specifically the fallacy of conflating “necessarily, if p then q” with “if p, then necessarily q“. In fancy academic jargon this is known as conflating the necessity of the consequence (i.e., of the whole conditional, if p then q)… Read More »
My wife and I were recently charged (indirectly and by email) by a well-meaning Christian brother with being part of an heretical, non-Christian cult. In this post I’m going to rebut the “cult” and “heresy” charges, respectively. Along the way, I’ll make some observations about baptism, faith vs. works, and what counts as “salvation”. I.… Read More »
This is part 4 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, part 2 here, and part 3 here. Ch. 3 dealt with will excluded middle (WEM), the thesis that Fp ∨ F~p (i.e., that for… Read More »
This is part 3 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 and part 2 here. Todd’s main focus in chapter 3 is a thesis that he calls “will excluded middle” (WEM). Simply put, WEM says… Read More »
In my previous post on Ch. 2 of Patrick Todd’s book The Open Future (Oxford 2021), I criticized Todd for confusing supervaluationism with the view defended by Elizabeth Barnes and Ross Cameron in two influential papers. In this post I want to look more closely at the view of Barnes and Cameron (hereafter B&C). For ease of… Read More »