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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
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    God can achieve infallible knowledge of future contingent... — Carmelics
    Home/Free Will & Foreknowledge
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    God can achieve infallible knowledge of future contingents through a 'bootstrapping' process.

    Free Will & Foreknowledge
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    2 reasons against

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    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Human beings are sometimes in a knowledge-conferring situation (KCS) with respect to the contingent future.
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    • 2.God would be aware of all the evidence and other knowledge-conferring factors that human beings are aware of in such situations, so God is also in a position to know some future contingents by being in the appropriate KCS.
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    • 3.God can combine his fallibilist beliefs about the contingent future with self-knowledge of his own infallibility to 'bootstrap' his way to certainty.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Self-referential belief formation is epistemically circular: a belief cannot gain justification by appealing to the reliability of the very cognitive process producing that belief.
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    • 2.God's 'bootstrapping' from fallibilist belief to certainty via self-knowledge of infallibility presupposes the infallibility it purports to establish, committing the same circularity Alston identified in epistemic self-trust.
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    • 3.A genuinely contingent future state of affairs cannot be made epistemically determinate by any knower's self-assessment of their own reliability, since reliability tracks facts, not constitutes them.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.William Hasker's 'no-freeze' objection establishes that for knowledge of free future actions, the knowing relation must be grounded in the action itself, not in any prior epistemic state of the knower.
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    • 2.If God's certainty derives from self-knowledge of infallibility rather than direct acquaintance with the future act, the act's freedom is undermined because its occurrence is explanatorily posterior to God's certain belief.
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    • 3.Bootstrapping thus either fails to yield genuine foreknowledge of free acts or covertly reintroduces the incompatibilist threat it was designed to circumvent.
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    Topics

    Free Will & Foreknowledge

    Key Terms

    knowledge(Distinguished from mere true belief, which may be the product of indoctrination and need not exercise deliberative capacities.)
    Justified true belief — true belief that has been arrived at through the exercise of deliberative capacities, including comparison of and deliberation among alternatives.

    Related

    A genuinely contingent future state of affairs cannot be made epistemically dete...Bootstrapping thus either fails to yield genuine foreknowledge of free acts or c...God can combine his fallibilist beliefs about the contingent future with self-kn...God would be aware of all the evidence and other knowledge-conferring factors th...
    +5 moreShow less
    God's 'bootstrapping' from fallibilist belief to certainty via self-knowledge of...Human beings are sometimes in a knowledge-conferring situation (KCS) with respec...If God's certainty derives from self-knowledge of infallibility rather than dire...Self-referential belief formation is epistemically circular: a belief cannot gai...William Hasker's 'no-freeze' objection establishes that for knowledge of free fu...

    Similar

    God can combine his fallibilist beliefs about the contingent future wi...83%Impossibility of knowing future contingent propositions applies univer...80%God would be aware of all the evidence and other knowledge-conferring ...79%Human beings are sometimes in a knowledge-conferring situation (KCS) w...78%

    Source

    AI-extracted
    SEP: free-will-foreknowledge
    View source passageHide passage
    Fatalism is the thesis that human acts occur by necessity and hence are unfree. Theological fatalism is the thesis that infallible foreknowledge of a human act makes the act necessary and hence unfree. If there is a being who knows the entire future infallibly, then no human act is free.

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit