Abstract

My dissertation is an essay in both epistemology and the philosophy of religion. It deals with the problem of whether God could know what He and His creatures would freely do, where freedom is understood along incompatibilist lines. In Chapter One, I consider the theory of divine foreknowledge put forward by the 16th century philosopher-theologian Luis de Molina--a theory that raises some of the same questions as Plantinga's work on the problem of evil. At the heart of Molina's theory lies the assumption that God can know conditionals of freedom, propositions asserting that if a certain state of affairs were actual, a certain agent would freely perform a certain action; and I defend this assumption against certain contemporary objections. In Chapter Two, various contemporary causal theories of knowledge are presented, and the question of whether any of them generates a strong argument for the conclusion that foreknowledge of free action is impossible is discussed. I argue that some of the theories are implausible, and that the more plausible theories--ones proposed by Goldman and Swain--do not count out foreknowledge of free action. In Chapter Three, I consider two reliability theories of knowledge--those of Swain and Nozick. I argue against both theories, and argue as well that neither excludes knowledge of future free actions