Friday Files: Picirilli’s Foreknowledge, Freedom, and the Future

In Robert E. Picirilli’s article Foreknowledge, Freedom, and the Future, he explains that Reformation Arminians hold that God knows what we will freely choose in the future, whereas Neo-Arminians (a.k.a. Open Theists) disagree. With a little help from Arminius and Richard Watson, Pircirilli carefully defends his thesis that “there is nothing about the certainty of the future that is in conflict with the ability of human beings to make free, moral decisions” by defining certainty, necessity and contingency and demonstrating how contingency and certainty don’t conflict. Picirilli explains that the difference between Calvinists and Arminians is foreordination, not foreknowledge. For the Reformation Arminian, then, the final set of facts to hold is: (1) the future is certain and foreknown certainly by God; (2) this is in full harmony with the fact that human beings make free, moral choices for which they are held justly responsible. (link)

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hello Dan,

Nice to see you making mention of this excellent article. Picirilli deals with a common calvinist argument/misunderstanding (i.e., that if God foreknows a future event then since the event will happen with certainty it must [according to them] happen by necessity). More people should be made aware of this article and the thinking in it.

Robert

PS - I just noticed that you got into a discussion at Pyromaniacs on this very issue. Do you think they should be informed about Picirilli's article there? It directly answers Phil Johnson's attempted "silver bullet" argument against Arminianism? Or should we just leave him in his ignorance and delusion that he has finally found the clincher argument against Arminianism? :-)
December 29, 2008 at 6:26 PM
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