Kevin Timpe, “Truth-making and Divine Eternity” (A Defense of the Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Libertarian Human Freedom)

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Please click on the link to view Kevin Timpe, “Truth-making and Divine Eternity,” Religious Studies 43 (2007) 299–315.

Here is the author’s abstract of the article:

According to a widespread tradition in philosophical theology, God is
necessarily simple and eternal. One objection to this view of God’s nature is that it
would rule out God having foreknowledge of non-determined, free human actions
insofar as simplicity and eternity are incompatible with God’s knowledge being
causally dependent on those actions. According to this view, either (a) God must
causally determine the free actions of human agents, thus leading to a theological
version of compatibilism, or (b) God cannot know, and thus cannot respond to, the
free actions of human agents. In the present paper, I argue that one can consistently
maintain that God is not causally dependent on anything, even for His knowledge,
without being committed to either (a) or (b). In other words, an eternal God can
know the free actions of agents even if libertarianism is true.