foreknowledge

In each one of the well-known Abrahamic religions, notably Islam, Christianity and Judaism, there are two important doctrines which seem to be inconsistent, but nonetheless some religious philosophers like Plantinga try to show that there is no conflict between them. The first doctrine is that God is Omniscient and He has foreknowledge of all that will happen in the future and thus all human actions are determined in His knowledge. The second doctrine is that human beings have free will and they are responsible for all of their voluntary actions. The problem is that if all future actions of a person are determined in divine knowledge, it is impossible for him to change his future and so he is not free. This article will assess some of the solutions given to the problem and it will focus on Plantinga's solution to the problem and then it will unravel some defects of his solution. At the end of this article, a new solution to the problem will be given, in which the free will of human being is confirmed while the nature of divine knowledge is regarded ambiguous to the extent that its changeability or unchangeability is left unknown.

According to most Muslim philosophers, the Divine foreknowledge, on the one hand, is so inclusive that encompasses each and every minor and timed action of moral agents, and because of the perfection of God in essence and attributes, any defects in His essence and attributes including any errors in His foreknowledge are impossible. On the other hand, these philosophers, like other defenders of free will, claim that significance of any kind of free will and responsibility of a moral agent depends on their access to alternate possibilities (PAP (and, consequently, their ability to do and not to do an action simultaneously. This paper aims to deal with this highly debated and rooted question that whether these two views are essentially in conflict with each other. To answer this pivotal question briefly based on a modified version of Frankfurt cases and Muslim philosophers’ definition of free will, we attempt to defend their initial approach to eliminating the conflict between Divine foreknowledge and free will or moral responsibility and show that, firstly, this infallible knowledge is contingent on the agent’s voluntary action and, secondly, despite the principle of alternate possibilities, moral responsibility of the agent does not depend on the person’s avoidance of the forthcoming action.

The principle of alternate possibilities ( PAP ) says that you are morally praiseworthy or blameworthy for something you do only if you could have done otherwise. Frankfurt examples are putative counterexamples to PAP. These examples feature a failsafe mechanism that ensures that some agent cannot refrain from doing what she does without intervening in how she conducts herself, thereby supposedly sustaining the upshot that she is responsible for her behavior despite not being able to do otherwise. I introduce a Frankfurt example in which the agent who could not have done otherwise is God. Paying attention to the freedom requirements of moral obligation, the example is commissioned, first, to assess whether various states of affairs that are unavoidable for God can be obligatory for God and for which God can be praiseworthy. The example is, next, used to unearth problems with conventional Frankfurt examples that feature human agents. I argue that conceptual connections between responsibility and obligation cast suspicion on these examples. Pertinent lessons that the divine Frankfurt example helps to reveal motivate the view that divine foreknowledge and determinism, assuming that both preclude freedom to do otherwise, may well imperil obligation and responsibility.