In Part I, I present two traditional arguments for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge with human freedom; the first of these is clearly fallacious; but the second, the argument from the necessity of the past, is much stronger. In the second section I explain and partly endorse Ockham’s response to the second argument: that only propositions strictly about the past are accidentally necessary, and past propositions about God’s knowledge of the future are not strictly about the past. In the third (...) part I point out some startling implications of Ockham’s way out; and finally in part IV I offer an account of accidental necessity according to which propositions about the past are accidentally necessary if and only if they are strictly about the past. (shrink)

It is the aim of this paper to show that [the theological argument from Divine omniscience] is not more than a needlessly (and confusingly) elaborate version of the argument for fatalism discussed by Aristotle in de Interpretatione 9, which, since its sole premise is the Principle of Bivalence, may conveniently be called the logical argument for fatalism. If this is right, if the theological premisses of the theological argument can be shown to be strictly irrelevant to the fatalist conclusion, then (...) it follows that it is pointless to try to avoid fatalism by modification of those theological premisses. (shrink)

Ted A. Warfield seeks to establish the compatibility in question by getting the incompatibilist to reject an unpersuasive argument from fatalism to the conclusion that a given action is not freely done. He maintains that such a rejection requires the the incompatibilist to hold that there is a possible world in which the fatalist’s premise is true and in which the conclusion is false (and so the given action is freely done). If a foreknowing God exists in that world, then (...) incompatibilism must be rejected. I criticize this reasoning on the ground that one can reject a bad argument from true premises without countenancing a possible world in which the premises are true and yet the conclusion false. (shrink)