{"id":1059,"date":"2022-12-09T12:19:05","date_gmt":"2022-12-09T17:19:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/?p=1059"},"modified":"2022-12-09T15:54:31","modified_gmt":"2022-12-09T20:54:31","slug":"main-variants-of-open-theism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/2022\/12\/main-variants-of-open-theism\/","title":{"rendered":"The Main Variants of Open Theism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s my current breakdown of what I think are the main variants of Open Theism<\/strong>. Briefly, I take Open Theism to affirm at least<\/em> the following:<\/p>\n

Open Theism<\/strong> =def.<\/sub> there exists a monotheistic God (understood along theistic personalist or ‘neo-classical’ lines) who has created ex nihilo<\/em> a Creation that, by God’s design, has a partly open-ended future because it contains real causal contingency. Further, because and to the extent that Creation contains real causal contingency, the future of Creation is epistemically open-ended for God.<\/p>\n

There are as many variants of Open Theism as there are ways of further specifying the above definition, but not all distinctions are equally salient. To keep this manageable, I’m going to set aside all strictly theological distinctions (e.g., Christian vs Jewish, Trinitarian vs Unitarian, etc.). We then arrive at what I think are the following main variations.<\/p>\n

Regarding God’s knowledge, there are 3 basic types of Open Theism:<\/p>\n

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  1. Essentially Unrestricted Omniscience<\/strong>: God perfectly knows everything about everything in the unrestricted quantifier sense of “everything”. His knowledge of the future is open-ended because the future IS open-ended.<\/li>\n
  2. Maximal Knowledge<\/strong>: God perfectly knows everything that CAN be known, but there are truths, including truths about how the contingent future will unfold, that just CAN’T be known.<\/li>\n
  3. Voluntarily Restricted Omniscience<\/strong>: God CAN know everything about everything but chooses not to. There are truths about how the future will unfold (and perhaps also truths about the past and present) that God declines to access.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Regarding truth-values:<\/p>\n