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Foreknowledge and the Vulnerability of God

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2010

J. R. Lucas
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Extract

Elijah foretold evil for Ahab in the name of the Lord. ‘I will bring evil upon you; I will utterly sweep you away, and will cut off from Ahab every male, bond or free in Israel’ … but when he heard those words, he rent his clothes, and put sackcloth upon his flesh, and fasted and lay in the sackcloth, and went about dejectedly. And the word of the Lord came to Elijah saying ‘Have you seen how Ahab has humbled himself before me? Because he has humbled himself before me, I will not bring the evil in his days, but in his son's days I will bring evil upon his house.’

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 25 , March 1989 , pp. 119 - 128
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1989

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References

1 I Kings 21.17–24, 27–29 (RSV).

2 Cf. Jonah 3.7–9.

3 St Luke, 13.3, and 5.

4 Boethius, Consolations of Philosophy, V, 3,11.6–16; cf. St Augustine, De LiberoArbitrio, III, 2, 4; City of God, Bk. V, Ch. 9.

5 Mellor, H. D., Real Time (Cambridge University Press, 1981) 107–110.Google Scholar

6 For Grosseteste's own example of our being able to alter the truth of statements about the past, see Beitrage, 165, 11.14–19 (main text), and 11.31–32 (alternative text). For an account of Grosseteste's quarrel with the king's courts, see Southern, R. W., Robert Grosseteste (Oxford University Press, 1986), Ch. 10, III, 2, 252–257.Google Scholar

7 See, for example, Kenny, Anthony, The God of the Philosophers (Oxford University Press, 1979), 60–61.Google Scholar

8 Findlay, J. N., ‘Can God's Existence Be Disproved?’, Mind 57 (1948), 108–118Google Scholar; Kenny, op. cit., Blumenfeld, David, ‘On the Compossibility of the Divine Attributes’, Philosophical Studies 34 (1978), 91–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in Morris, Thomas V. (ed.), The Concept of God (Oxford University Press, 1987), 201–215.Google Scholar

9 Compare Flint, Thomas P. and Freddoso, Alfred J., ‘Maximal Power’, in Freddoso, Alfred J. (ed.), Existence and Nature of God, reprinted in Thomas V. Morris (ed.), The Concept of God (Oxford University Press, 1987), 151.Google Scholar ‘Therefore … there will be some state of affairs … which even an omnipotent agent is incapable of actualizing. And since this inability results solely from the logically necessary truth that one being cannot causally determine how another will freely act, it should not be viewed … as a kind of inability which disqualifies an agent from ranking as omnipotent.’

10 I have tried to work out the analogy more fully in Lucas, J. R., Freedom and Grace (London: SPCK, 1976), Chs 4 and 5, esp. p. 39. See also Jacques Maritain, God and the Permission of Evil, cited by Flint and Freddoso, op. cit., 163, n. 30.Google Scholar