This book examines the three leading traditional solutions to the dilemma of divine foreknowledge and human free will—those arising from Boethius, William of Ockham, and Luis de Molina. Though all three solutions are rejected in their best-known forms, three new solutions are proposed, and the book concludes that divine foreknowledge is compatible with human freedom. The discussion includes the relation between the foreknowledge dilemma and problems about the nature of time and the causal relation; the logic of counterfactual conditionals; and the differences between divine and human knowing s ... More

This book examines the three leading traditional solutions to the dilemma of divine foreknowledge and human free will—those arising from Boethius, William of Ockham, and Luis de Molina. Though all three solutions are rejected in their best-known forms, three new solutions are proposed, and the book concludes that divine foreknowledge is compatible with human freedom. The discussion includes the relation between the foreknowledge dilemma and problems about the nature of time and the causal relation; the logic of counterfactual conditionals; and the differences between divine and human knowing states. An appendix introduces a new foreknowledge dilemma that purports to show that omniscient foreknowledge conflicts with deep intuitions about temporal asymmetry, quite apart from considerations of free will. This book shows that only a narrow range of solutions can handle this new dilemma.