Book Review: Predestination, God's Foreknowledge, and Future Contingents by William Ockham

Predestination, God's Foreknowledge, and Future Contingents by William Ockham, translated with introduction, notes and appendices by Marilyn McCord Adams and Norman Kretzmann

William of Ockham is most famous for his razor but he wrote a lot of other things about a lot of other topics. One interesting problem he dealt with is predestination, the idea that some people are already chosen to go to Heaven even before they have completed their earthly life. Certainty about predestination is fraught with peril and can be approached from more than one angle. 

Ockham comes at the issue from a logical perspective, discussing how future contingent situations, like the final state of one's soul, can be understood. He starts with a short discussion about whether predestination or reprobation (the opposite situation--the person will wind up in Hell) can be a real characteristic inhering in a person. A decisive answer is not forthcoming and the discussion shifts to whether a statement about a future contingent situation can be necessarily true or false. A lot of arguments can be made, for example: if Socrates was sitting yesterday, it is necessarily true that he was sitting yesterday, and thus a contingent situation (like "Socrates is sitting") can be necessarily true. Ockham works out a lot of different nuances from the argument before denying that statements about future situations have the same sort of necessity that can be attributed to statements about past or current contingent situations. 

Ockham also discusses the issue of whether God's knowledge can change. He takes it as given that God knows all truth. If a contingent truth, like "Peter is predestinate," changes to its opposite, like "Peter is reprobate," the amount of truth has not changed, just what is true and what is false. When "Peter is predestinate" becomes false, "Peter is reprobate" becomes true, so there is no more truth than before. To me, this is a lot of philosophical shell game shenanigans that are not satisfying or convincing.

The text is written in medieval style (since Ockham lived in the 1300s), with a proposed question, objections, answers to objections, and a main answer to the question. This format has the advantage of precision but it makes readability much harder for modern lay readers. Again, it was a common style 700 years ago, so he can't really be faulted for writing how everyone else did. Today's readers just need to shift their mindsets when coming to the text.

Mildly recommended--this is more of an academic text than something for a general reader.