Our Fate. Essays on God and Free Will

The question of whether God's foreknowledge and human freedom to do otherwise can be reconciled is an ancient one. Reflection on this topic received a boost in recent decades in large part due to Nelson Pike's classic 1965 paper, ‘Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action’, and the many responses to it. Pike argued that given a set of standard divine attributes, in particular omniscience possessed essentially, that God's existence on this conception is incompatible with human freedom to do otherwise (theological incompatibilism). The work of John Martin Fischer in this area, also defending theological incompatibilism and with similar theological assumptions, can be viewed as taking Pike's project forward with increasing refinement and sophistication. Our Fate (OF) assembles eleven of Fischer's previously published papers on theological incompatibilism (four of which are co-authored), including one (written with Patrick Todd and Neal A. Tognazzini) that engages directly with Pike's 1965 paper. Our Fate also contains a substantial introductory essay that gives an overview of Fischer's project of defending theological incompatibilism. Furthermore, the introduction presents a novel argument for the possibility of God's knowledge of future contingents in an indeterministic world and an outline of Fischer's well-known theory of moral responsibility, even though the rest of the volume does not discuss these topics much.

Action (physics) · Argument (complex analysis) · Compatibilism · Epistemology · Foreknowledge · Free will · Incompatibilism · Omniscience · Theism · Theology · Thought experiment · Free Will and Agency · Philosophy · Theology and Philosophy of Evil · War, Ethics, and Justification