Foundations Ch 28 Summary

  • Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview Overview

  • Authors: J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig

  • Focuses on the coherence of theism within the Judeo-Christian tradition.

  • Theism and Fundamental Beliefs

  • Objective of worship: God as the ultimate reality behind existence.

  • Anselm’s conception of God aligns with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

  • Omniscience

  • Definition: Omniscience entails knowing every true proposition and believing no false ones.

  • Implications: If true future tense sentences exist, God, being omniscient, must know them.

  • Challenges:

    • Question of Fatalism: If God knows all true future events, do they not happen out of necessity?
    • Understood as fatalism, suggesting that all events are destined to occur.

  • Reactions to Fatalism

  • Ancient Greek fatalism suggests if an event will happen, it must happen. The church resisted this notion.

  • Responses by theologians varied; major figures like Martin Luther endorsed fatalism while others, like Origen, defended human freedom.

  • Counterarguments to Fatalism

  • Affirmation of human freedom suggests that while God knows future events, this does not necessitate they happen.

  • Errors in logical interpretations can lead to the conclusion that foreknowledge implies necessity.

  • Divine Foreknowledge Models

  • Perceptualist Model: Knowledge based on perceiving future events, raises issues as future events do not exist to perceive.

  • Conceptualist Model: God’s knowledge is innate, not based on perception, thereby allowing God to know future contingents.

  • Molinism

  • Introduction of middle knowledge: God knows all true counterfactuals about possible actions of free beings before creating the world.

  • Grounding Counterfactual Truths:

    • Middle knowledge raises questions about how these truths exist and are accessed by God.

  • Divine Simplicity

  • Doctrine suggests God’s nature is undivided and lacks complexity. Criticisms include:

    • Distinction of attributes (e.g., omnipotence vs. goodness).
    • The implications of God being identical with his essence and essence being pure existence, leading to a problematic understanding.

  • Immutability

  • Definition: God is unchanging in essence or character.

  • Biblical context focuses more on the stability of character than radical changelessness.

  • Acceptable changes can exist due to real relations with creation, affirming temporal existence post-creation while maintaining transcendent attributes.

  • Omnipotence

  • Understanding omnipotence not as ability to do anything, including logically contradictory tasks, but as the power to actualize possible states of affairs.

  • Distinction: God cannot change the past (backward causation) and retains empowerment within logical possibilities that do not contradict previous states.

  • Divine Goodness

  • Noted as the source of all kinds of goodness, raising the Euthyphro Dilemma regarding whether good is defined by God’s will or is independent of him.

  • Divine command morality defined: moral duties stem from God’s nature and commands, requiring a just and loving foundation for moral understanding.

  • Importance of God's nature in grounding objective moral values, dismissal of arbitrary moral actions.

  • Conclusion

  • Theological coherence achieved when divine attributes (omniscience, simplicity, immutability, omnipotence, goodness) are understood and reconciled within philosophical and biblical frameworks.