Paul Helm

In thinking about God's relation to the world philosophical theologians have taken two lines of thought. In some cases these two views have been held side by side, in others separately. The first has been to conceive of God as existing timelessly, or outside time, and as contemplating the world in one timeless creative gaze. 1 As has often been pointed out, this view is subject to the difficulty of making sense of a temporal order of events in a tenseless mode. God may know that e is earlier than f . But A. N. Prior has forcefully argued that if God's knowledge is outside time this restricts what God knows to those truths that are themselves timeless. The idea of something's being over , or going to happen , or happening now cannot fall within the knowledge of God if he exists timelessly. To replace the indexical words such as ‘now’ and ‘then’ with dates and definite descriptions of places will not suffice because what we know when we know that e is over but f is not is not simply that e is before f. 2

In “Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom” [6] Anthony Kenny returns to a ‘very old difficulty’ stated by Aquinas at Summa Theologiae Ia, 14, 3, 3. Kenny rejects the Thomistic strategy of treating God as an atemporal knower, Who grasps all events of history simultaneously in a timeless present. He takes this notion to be neither Biblical nor coherent. He hopes instead to reconcile a temporal God's literal foreknowledge with free action among men. I shall follow Kenny in treating the concept of God as a temporal being. But I shall argue against the attempts of Kenny and some other recent writers to provide a reconciliation.

Peter Byrne has presented arguments against the effectiveness of two 'defensive strategies' deployed in my books Eternal God and The Providence of God respectively. These strategies were originally presented to support the cogency of 'theological compatibilism' by arguing against the claims that it is inconsistent with human responsibility, and that it entails that God is the author of sin. In this present article the author offers a number of clarifications to his original thesis and argues that Byrne's arguments do not succeed in their aim of undermining the two strategies

Professor Holt's comments fall into two parts. He begins by raising some objections to the tentative rejection, in my paper, of the distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ facts. He then goes on to offer an argument to show that my defence of the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom fails, or is at least seriously questionable. For brevity I shall concentrate on his remarks on foreknowledge as I do not think that his interesting discussion of the distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ facts vitally affects the question about divine foreknowledge, the main point at issue.So I shall deal with Holt's claim that one can have the power to undo the fact of foreknowledge retroactively and argue that one can no more retroactively bring it about that God did not know than one can retroactively bring it about that he did know.

It is argued that Calvin does not veer between two incompatible accounts of grace, freedom and necessity in "Institutes II". 2, but presents a consistent position. The consistency is evident once it is seen that Calvin carefully distinguished between necessity and compulsion. For him not all necessitated acts are compelled, but all human acts which are the outcome of efficacious divine grace are necessitated by that grace. Because Calvin is consistent, there is no need to suppose that he has mistaken the causal sufficiency of divine saving grace for its causal importance.