I find Lady Philosophy’s (LP) assessment of divine foreknowledge and the nature of God to be inconsistent with the concept of full free will; her argument is both insufficient and unsatisfactory iff viewed from a position of theological revelation.
I argue that revelatory theology necessarily requires either a complete and deliberate predetermination of events or a minimum value of immutable events. While LP’s argument does allow for limited agent free will, it does so only if divine knowledge is also limited. In this way, LP’s definition fits well in the pre-Christian mythology of the Mediterranean, where divine entities were thought to have some significant control over the decisions and fate of mankind, but complete foreknowledge was hidden even from the Olympians, and man could, and often did, perturb destiny and fate.1 However, if measured against the tenets of Christianity as we might apply to Boethius, God cannot both know the heart of each man before he is born,2 and also be ignorant of the decision any man will make until he makes it (divine foreknowledge); nor can God execute and conclude a coherent and stable plan for mankind if mankind is free to make decisions contrary to the …show more content…
Said another way, it is not rational to assume that God both planned the content of mankind’s existence (to include the requisite particulars of Christian Revelation), and also did not.5 Divine prophecy and revelation cannot be guaranteed if any individual’s or groups’ decisions can change the character of said prophecy and revelation. While the argument from revelation is not addressed in The Consolation, it cannot be ignored unless we also discount Boethius’ faith as a
I argue that revelatory theology necessarily requires either a complete and deliberate predetermination of events or a minimum value of immutable events. While LP’s argument does allow for limited agent free will, it does so only if divine knowledge is also limited. In this way, LP’s definition fits well in the pre-Christian mythology of the Mediterranean, where divine entities were thought to have some significant control over the decisions and fate of mankind, but complete foreknowledge was hidden even from the Olympians, and man could, and often did, perturb destiny and fate.1 However, if measured against the tenets of Christianity as we might apply to Boethius, God cannot both know the heart of each man before he is born,2 and also be ignorant of the decision any man will make until he makes it (divine foreknowledge); nor can God execute and conclude a coherent and stable plan for mankind if mankind is free to make decisions contrary to the …show more content…
Said another way, it is not rational to assume that God both planned the content of mankind’s existence (to include the requisite particulars of Christian Revelation), and also did not.5 Divine prophecy and revelation cannot be guaranteed if any individual’s or groups’ decisions can change the character of said prophecy and revelation. While the argument from revelation is not addressed in The Consolation, it cannot be ignored unless we also discount Boethius’ faith as a