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Abstract
This dissertation is founded on the premise that a useful way of relating divine omniscience and human freedom has been lost and that its recovery holds promise for understanding past theological disputes about this issue and also the largely irreconcilable nature of the current debate in contemporary philosophical accounts. What sets this treatment apart from others is its concentration on human free agency, for it behooves us to give the fullest account of human liberty we can if we wish to address its relation to divine omniscience.
But this is exactly what is lacking both in contemporary philosophical discussions (for example, Alvin Plantinga's) and in most of the relevant classical sources. Thomas Aquinas, however, presents a more satisfactory exposition. Refusing to identify freedom with autonomous choice, Aquinas portrays it instead as situated amidst particular surroundings and actualized not by following just any one of all possible options but by acting in accord with the goals or loves one already possesses as a living inheritance of the community of which one is a part. In light of its communal setting, freedom does not preclude but rather presupposes a certain degree of influence from others.
For Aquinas, divine practical (or causal) knowledge complements situated human freedom by providing the very external influence needed to make one free. The rest of the dissertation narrates the fate of these ideas after Aquinas. The reasons that led to their abandonment produced an unavoidable conflict in the tradition of divine omniscience. From that point on, positions would alternate between divine determinism or a creaturely freedom incompatible with God's foreknowledge.
I follow this through by examining Duns Scotus, William Ockham, Thomas Bradwardine, Martin Luther, and Luis de Molina. Though some embraced it while others reacted against it, what these all had in common was a view of human freedom as autonomy, as independence from external influence. If indeed depicting this freedom as autonomy is behind disputes both past and present about divine omniscience, then something crucial to this tradition's intelligibility was lost with Aquinas's account of situated human freedom.
