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Summary: Twenty-five years of dialogue in one volume
Review: In 1965 Nelson Pike published his paper "Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action," in which he attempted to show that these two things were ultimately incompatible: if God has complete foreknowledge of everything we will do, our actions aren't really "voluntary" since we weren't free to do otherwise.That set off some dialogue that took place in scattered journals over the next twenty-five years. John Martin Fischer has here collected the major rounds of this dialogue into a single volume and added a helpful introduction. The contents include Fischer's introduction and Pike's 1965 paper, together with the following: Marilyn McCord Adams, "Is the Existence of God a 'Hard' Fact?" John Martin Fischer, "Freedom and Foreknowledge" David Widerker, "Two Forms of Fatalism" Eddy Zemach and David Widerker, "Facts, Freedom, and Foreknowledge" Joshua Hoffman and Gary Rosenkrantz, "Hard and Soft Facts" Alfred J. Freddoso, "Accidental Necessity and Logical Determinism" William Hasker, "Hard Facts and Theological Fatalism" Alvin Plantinga, "On Ockham's Way Out" William Hasker, "Foreknowledge and Necessity" William P. Alston, "Divine Foreknowledge and Alternative Conceptions of Human Freedom" Martin Davies, "Boethius and Others on Divine Foreknowledge" I shall not try to summarize the arguments of these various papers. The reader should be aware, however, that the papers collected in this volume address Pike's claim, and argument, that God's _foreknowledge_ is not compatible with human freedom. The scope of this work does not extend to the question whether God's _causation_ of all events is thus compatible. If you buy this book, be prepared for a lot of technical argumentation and modal analysis and that sort of thing. These essays are highly readable -- their authors are all able writers -- but they will probably not be terribly accessible to a reader with no background in philosophy.
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