At least since Aristotle’s famous 'sea-battle' passages in On Interpretation 9, some substantial minority of philosophers has been attracted to the doctrine of the open future--the doctrine that future contingent statements are not true. But, prima facie, such views seem inconsistent with the following intuition: if something has happened, then (looking back) it was the case that it would happen. How can it be that, looking forwards, it isn’t true that there will be a sea battle, while also being true (...) that, looking backwards, it was the case that there would be a sea battle? This tension forms, in large part, what might be called the problem of future contingents. A dominant trend in temporal logic and semantic theorizing about future contingents seeks to validate both intuitions. Theorists in this tradition--including some interpretations of Aristotle, but paradigmatically, Thomason (1970), as well as more recent developments in Belnap, et. al (2001) and MacFarlane (2003, 2014)--have argued that the apparent tension between the intuitions is in fact merely apparent. In short, such theorists seek to maintain both of the following two theses: (i) the open future: Future contingents are not true, and (ii) retro-closure: From the fact that something is true, it follows that it was the case that it would be true. It is well-known that reflection on the problem of future contingents has in many ways been inspired by importantly parallel issues regarding divine foreknowledge and indeterminism. In this paper, we take up this perspective, and ask what accepting both the open future and retro-closure predicts about omniscience. When we theorize about a perfect knower, we are theorizing about what an ideal agent ought to believe. Our contention is that there isn’t an acceptable view of ideally rational belief given the assumptions of the open future and retro-closure, and thus this casts doubt on the conjunction of those assumptions. (shrink)

Focusing on God's essential attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, being eternal and omnipresent, being a creator and sustainer, and being a person, I examine how far recent discussion has been able to provide for each of these divine attributes a consistent interpretation. I also consider briefly whether the attributes are compatible with each other.

Starting from a recent discussion in the Netherlands about the application of the Pontifical Council for Social Communication for the Internet extension ‘.catholic,’ the author inquires into the meaning of confessing the catholicity of the church. He shows that ‘catholic’ is a title phrase, a descriptive term that often functions as a proper name. It is important to distinguish between both functions ; in the PCSC application ‘catholic’ functions, contrary to what its critics assume, as a proper name. In ecumenical (...) discussions, the main problem with catholicity is the Roman Catholic Church's alleged all-or-nothing approach to catholicity, in which it asserts its own catholicity while rejecting the claim that other churches are catholic. This approach, however, has been abandoned for a degrees of catholicity approach which allows the Roman Catholic Church to recognise the catholicity of Protestant churches. Finally, the author argues that confessing the catholicity of the church is rather like pledging ourselves to furthering this catholicity than like asserting that this catholicity has been achieved. (shrink)

If God knew I were going to write this paper, was I able to refrain from writing it this morning? One possible response to this question is that God's knowledge does not take place in time and therefore He does not properly fore-know. According to this response, God knows absolutely everything, it's just that He knows everything outside of time. The so-called timeless solution was one of the influential responses to the foreknowledge problem in classical Christian Theology. This solution, however, (...) seemed to lose support in the recent debate. For example, Pike claims that "the doctrine of God's timelessness entered Christian Theology because Platonic thought was stylish at the time" and Hasker catalogues this as one of the minor solutions to the problem. One possible source for this general attitude towards timelessness is the thought that the very idea of timelessness is incoherent. In this paper I argue that that the timeless solution to the foreknowledge problem is congenial with the supervaluationist theory of branching time and that this formal framework provides, in fact, a precise characterization of the timeless solution to the foreknowledge problem. The views presented in this paper are in line with those of Kretzmann and Stump, Leftow and De Florio and Frigerio. (shrink)