instantaneous creature and divine foreknowledge

What would happen to the problem of divine foreknowledge if the whole universe existed for only one instant?

Well, God could be said to foreknow the condition of creation inasmuch as the atemporal eternal is prior to the temporal. But this foreknowledge is not the sort that we have when we know, at 5pm we know or think we know what will happen at 5:05pm on the same day.

The firsts sort of priority (of the eternal over the temporal) is more basic than the second (of one time over another time).

A well-directed attempt to deal with the problem of divine foreknowledge must recognize this distinction, direct its efforts at understanding the implications of the first sort of foreknowledge while recognizing that the second sort of foreknowledge is a pseudoproblem in the case of God's knowledge.

Comments

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

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what is an organism?

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P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson. He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal. My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this. I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true. Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist. In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...

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