After God has revealed a future contingency, it is necessary that the physical or mental things God used to reveal it have existed, but the content revealed is not itself necessary.
William Ockham (c.1285–1347), a highly influential Christian philosopher and theologian from the medieval period, suggested an interesting way of accounting for God’s knowledge of the contingent future and resolving the problem of prophecy. (For more detailed presentations of Ockham’s views, see the introduction to Ockham 1983 by Adams and the introduction to Molina 1988 by Freddoso.) Ockham claims that what a prophet has truly revealed about the contingent future “could have been and can be fa