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Divine Self-Limitation in Swinburne's Doctrine of Omniscience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Avery Fouts
Avery Fouts
Affiliation:
Department of Religion, Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, California91711
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Extract

In his book, The Coherence of Theism, Richard Swinburne seeks to construct a coherent doctrine of God. As a part of this endeavour he examines the idea of omniscience in chapter 10. One of Swinburne's conclusions is that God as an omniscient being must engage in cognitive self-limitation in order to preserve the freedom of both divine and human future actions. In this paper, I want to look at his argument as it is presented in this chapter. I will conclude that Swinburne's position on divine cognitive self-limitation results in an internal contradiction.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , March 1993 , pp. 21 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

1 Swinburne, Richard, The Coherence of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977; reprinted (as paperback), 1986).Google Scholar

2 For Swinburne, knowing x entails believing x. Moreover, he uses ‘believe’ to refer to ‘both those propositions which we are ordinarily said to believe and also those propositions about the truth of which we are convinced or have no doubt’ (see p. 169 n. 9). Thus, as far as I can tell, God's beliefs, as one who knows all true propositions, are the same as God's knowledge.

3 This seems immediately problematic. True, God is not necessarily influenced by causal factors as humans are, but is not God causally effected by God's own nature and will? And if so, it seems that even if God does not know true future-tensed propositions, justifiable predictions could be made by God about God's own future actions without threatening God's freedom. Moreover, since for Swinburne God acts without influence from non-rational factors (pp. 146–8), it seems all the more likely that, given the nature of God and God's purposes, given a particular state of affairs in the world, and given standard canons of rational behaviour, God's actions could be sometimes justifiably predicted.

4 Thanks are due to Stephen T. Davis, John Hick and Keith Ward for reading drafts of this paper.