B
Blade_Edge
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The following is the Aristotelian position as explained by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It is used as an explanation to reconcile how humans can be free even with God’s omniscience.
The debate ended with both sides being permitted to advocate for their own philosophical position and forbidden from condemning the other.
My question is whether we can take the Aristotelian position I outlined above and if not, what Church teachings say that we cannot.
At the Congregatio de Auxiliis (Catholic Encyclopedia Link, Wikipedia Link), the Jesuits and the Dominicans fiercely debated the nature of Grace and Free Will: the Jesuits advocated for Molinism, the Dominicans for their own position.One response to the dilemma of infallible foreknowledge and free will is to deny that the proposition T has a truth value because no proposition about the contingent future has a truth value. This response rejects the terms in which the problem is set up. The idea behind this response is usually that propositions about the contingent future become true when and only when the event occurs that the proposition is about. If the event does not occur at that time, then the proposition becomes false. This seems to have been the position of Aristotle in the famous Sea Battle argument of De Interpretatione IX, where Aristotle is concerned with the implications of the truth of a proposition about the future, not the problem of infallible knowledge of the future. But some philosophers have used Aristotle’s move to solve the dilemma we are addressing here. In the recent literature this position has been defended by J.R. Lucas (1989), Richard Purtill (1988), and Joseph Runzo (1981). More recently D.K. Johnson (2009) has taken up this solution to both logical and theological fatalism, relating this solution to presentism, the position that only the present exists.
The debate ended with both sides being permitted to advocate for their own philosophical position and forbidden from condemning the other.
My question is whether we can take the Aristotelian position I outlined above and if not, what Church teachings say that we cannot.