Supervaluationism and the timeless solution to the foreknowledge problem

Abstract

If God knew I were going to write this paper, was I able to refrain from writing it this morning? One possible response to this question is that God's knowledge does not take place in time and therefore He does not properly fore-know. According to this response, God knows absolutely everything, it's just that He knows everything outside of time. The so-called timeless solution was one of the influential responses to the foreknowledge problem in classical Christian Theology. This solution, however, seemed to lose support in the recent debate. For example, Pike claims that "the doctrine of God's timelessness entered Christian Theology (only) because Platonic thought was stylish at the time" (Pike, 1970, 190) and Hasker (2001) catalogues this as one of the minor solutions to the problem. One possible source for this general attitude towards timelessness is the thought that the very idea of timelessness is incoherent. In this paper I argue that that the timeless solution to the foreknowledge problem is congenial with the supervaluationist theory of branching time and that this formal framework provides, in fact, a precise characterization of the timeless solution to the foreknowledge problem. The views presented in this paper are in line with those of Kretzmann and Stump (1981), Leftow (1991) and De Florio and Frigerio (2015).