## 1. Philosophical Issues Raised by Prophecy



It is often assumed that the primary purpose of prophecy is to
foretell the future, but this is not always the case. In the great
monotheistic religious traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam),
for instance, a prophet is taken to be a person who makes God's
will particularly clear, whether or not this involves making
predictions about the future. As William Hasker says, in these
traditions, prophets are usually involved in "witnessing to the
people concerning God's purposes and requirements and seeking to
recall them to obedience" (Hasker 1989, 194). There are
fascinating debates in these religious traditions, especially in the
medieval period, debates that we will not discuss here (see Kreisel
2001, Shatz 1998, Rahman 2011, Lorch 2016, Lopez-Farjeat 2014,
and the entries in this encyclopedia concerning the key figures
discussed in those sources). Related questions about how a human
person might come to know God's will through some kind of
revelation are also discussed elsewhere in this encyclopedia, for
example in the entries on
 the epistemology of religion
 and
 philosophy and Christian theology.



When philosophers discuss prophecy, they are typically interested in
prophecies concerning the contingent future, so that will be the focus
in the remainder of this article. What special philosophical issues
are raised by this kind of prophecy?



Let's say that a future event is contingent if and only if it is
not determined that it will happen and also not determined that it
will not happen. (For more on the notion of determinism, see the entry
on
 causal determinism.)
 Now suppose that based upon the revelation of an infallible God, a
person prophecies that some future contingent event will occur. Since
God cannot be wrong, does it follow that the future contingent event
must occur? And if it must occur, how can it be a contingent
event?



An especially vivid example of this kind of situation comes from the
Christian tradition. Jesus reportedly prophesied that his disciple
Peter would deny him three times before the cock crowed (see Matthew
26:34). Typically, we would think of Peter's denial as a free
act, and hence it is a future contingent event at the time of
Jesus's prophecy. (For more on this connection, see the entries
on
 compatibilism,
 free will, and
 causal determinism.)
 But since Jesus cannot be mistaken (according to Christian theology),
how are Peter's later denials free? Once Jesus' words
become part of the unalterable past, don't they guarantee a
particular future, whether or not Peter is willing to cooperate?



This problem is an especially interesting instance of the more general
problem of the compatibility of God's complete foreknowledge
with the existence of future contingent events (for more on this
general problem, see the entry on
 divine foreknowledge and human freedom).
 Whereas the more general question about God's foreknowledge
typically involves just God's knowledge and the future
contingent event, the problem of prophecy involves a third element,
namely, the prophecy itself, which becomes a part of the past history
of the world as soon as it is made. This additional element adds an
interesting twist to the general problem, making it more difficult to
solve.


## 2. Denying Contingency



Philosophers have responded to this problem in several different ways.
One obvious way to respond is simply to claim that there are no future
contingent events, despite appearances to the contrary. Different
people have taken this approach for different reasons. Some are
attracted to the idea that every event has a prior sufficient cause
(see the entry on
 causal determinism).
 Others believe that the idea of free choice does not require anything
like real contingency or the possibility of doing or intending
otherwise (see the entries on
 compatibilism
 and
 free will).
 Still others believe that God's providential control over the
world is so thorough and detailed that nothing is left to chance, not
even the apparently free choices of human beings (see Calvin 1536,
Carson 1981, Feinberg 1986, Furlong 2019, and White 2019, along with
the entry on
 divine providence).
 So one possible response to the difficulty here is to give up one
half of the problem by denying that there are any future contingent
events in the first place. To return to our example from the Christian
tradition, when Jesus truly prophecies that Peter will deny him three
times before the cock crows, there is no philosophical puzzle as long
as we do not claim that Peter's denials are contingent
events.



Many philosophers and theologians do not find this approach very
promising, though, because they believe strongly in future contingent
events, especially human free choices. How else might one respond to
the problem posed by prophecies concerning future contingent
events?


## 3. Denying God's Foreknowledge



Another way of trying to solve the puzzle is to deny that God has
knowledge of the contingent future. According to this approach, often
called "open theism", there may be future contingent
events, but God does not know about them. God does not know about them
either because (1) there are no true propositions now that report what
future contingent events will occur, or because (2) it is impossible
for anyone, including God, to know such true propositions, or because
(3) God chooses not to know them in order to preserve our freedom
(see, e.g., Swinburne 1986, chapter 10). Open theists also typically
argue that foreknowledge alone would be providentially useless to God
(see Hasker 1989, for instance; for more on open theism, see Hasker
1989 and 2004, Basinger and Basinger 1986, Basinger 1994, Pinnock
1986, Pinnock et al 1994, Rice 1985, and Davison 1991 and 2003). How
can open theism explain prophecies that appear to make reference to
future contingent events?



William Hasker, perhaps the most prominent advocate of open theism,
addresses this problem explicitly, and suggests a three-fold response.
First, he points out that the main function of prophecy is not to
foretell the future, but to reveal God's will (Hasker 1989,
194). Many prophecies, in fact, have a conditional character, such as
"If a nation does not do such and such, then it will be
destroyed" (see Jeremiah 18:7-10, for example). Second,
many prophetic predictions are based upon existing trends and
tendencies, which provide God with enough evidence to foresee the
future (Hasker 1989, 195). (Hasker places Jesus' prediction
about Peter in this category, by the way.) Finally, some prophecies
simply reveal what God has already decided to bring about in the
future (Hasker 1989, 195). Since God's own actions in the future
are up to God, it is possible for God to know about them even though
they are contingent, so it is possible for prophecies to reveal
them.



Thomas P. Flint argues that Hasker's attempt to solve the
problem of prophecy from within the constraints imposed by open theism
is inadequate. Flint argues that if people are truly free in a sense
that implies future contingency, then not even God could know very
much about the future based upon present trends and tendencies alone.
This is because the probability of a particular future contingent
event is very low (when it is identified in some detail), so low that
God would not have much justification for believing that it would
occur specifically (see Flint 1998, 102-5). As an example, Flint
points to John 6:64, which seems to imply that Jesus knew that Judas
would betray him. How could this be, Flint wonders, when the
probability that Judas would betray Jesus was so low? He also points
out that Hasker faces a dilemma here that other open theists share,
namely, that if they insist that the probabilities of future
contingent events are high enough to justify God in making predictions
about the future, then God actually doesn't take much of a risk
in creating the world. This is problematic for some open theists, who
claim that their view has the virtue that God takes certain risks in
creating the world; see Flint 1998, 104-6.)



We will not try to adjudicate the dispute between Flint and Hasker
here, since that would take us beyond the scope of this article.
Instead, let's consider other possible solutions to the problem
of prophecy. In order to classify them, it will be helpful to describe
briefly the different ways that philosophers and theologians have
tried to explain God's knowledge of the contingent future.


## 4. Ockhamism and the Past



William Ockham
 (c.1285-1347), a highly influential Christian philosopher and
theologian from the medieval period, suggested an interesting way of
accounting for God's knowledge of the contingent future and
resolving the problem of prophecy. (For more detailed presentations of
Ockham's views, see the introduction to Ockham 1983 by Adams and
the introduction to Molina 1988 by Freddoso.) Ockham claims that what
a prophet has truly revealed about the contingent future "could
have been and can be false" (Ockham *Predestination*,
44), even though the existence of the prophecy in the past is
"ever afterwards necessary" (Ockham
*Predestination*, 44). As Calvin Normore puts it, "After
God has revealed a future contingency it is necessary that the
physical or mental things he used to reveal it have existed, but what
is revealed is not necessary" (Normore 1982, 373). In terms of
our example involving Jesus' prophecy concerning Peter's
denial, Ockham's idea is that were Peter to choose freely not to
deny Jesus instead, then Jesus would never have prophesied that Peter
would deny him. (Some philosophers like to call this kind of
proposition a "back-tracking counterfactual", because it
is a subjunctive conditional statement whose consequent refers to an
earlier time than its antecedent.) In other words, if a person were
about to choose freely to do something, then God would have known
about it from eternity, and hence would have acted accordingly. 



If this is right, then Ockham's idea seems to imply that we have
the ability to do something now such that if we were to do it, then
the past would have been different (because God would known what we
would do differently and hence would have acted differently in the
past). Some philosophers refer to this kind of ability as
"counterfactual power over the past." Alvin Plantinga has
this idea in mind in his defense of Ockham's account of
God's foreknowledge of the contingent future when he says that
"it is possible that there is an action such that it is within
your power to perform it and such that if you were to perform it, then
God would not have created Abraham" (Plantinga 1986, 257). Along
the same lines, Edward Wierenga suggests that according to Ockham,
Peter has the power to do something such that if he were to do it,
then Jesus would not have intended what he said about Peter's
future denials as a prophecy (Wierenga 1991, 440). In other words,
Jesus uttered words that actually did constitute a prophecy, but those
same words would not have been a prophecy had Peter chosen otherwise
(Wierenga 1991, 440). 



More recently, Trenton Merricks (2009) has defended the idea that
God's past beliefs depend upon our future free choices (although
he distinguishes his proposal from Ockham's: see Fischer and
Todd 2011 and the reply in Merricks 2011a).



But doesn't this attribute to Peter a rather odd power over the
past? Once Jesus says certain words with a certain intention, is it
coherent to say that Peter still has a choice about whether or not to
betray Jesus? Some philosophers have expressed doubts along these
lines about whether or not Ockham's approach is ultimately
successful. Alfred J. Freddoso, for instance, claims that
"Ockhamism commits one to having to choose between the Scylla of
claiming that God can undo the causal history of the world and the
Charybdis of claiming that divine prophecies might be deceptive or
mistaken" (Freddoso 1988, 61; see also Warfield 2009). Finch and
Rea (2008) have also argued that a commitment to Ockham's
solution is incompatible with a belief in presentism, the view that
only the present moment is real. Whether or not these things are so,
one might wonder about the prospects for another solution. 


## 5. Atemporal Eternity



A very different approach to explaining God's knowledge of the
contingent future involves suggesting that God exists outside of time
altogether. This would mean that God does not foreknow the future,
strictly speaking, since foreknowledge is knowledge of an event that
is possessed at a moment in time that occurs earlier than the moment
in time at which the foreknown event occurs. Instead, the idea is that
God knows all events from the perspective of timeless eternity. (For
further elaboration and defense of this view, see Stump and Kretzmann
1987, Helm 1988, and Leftow 1991.) Many theists have adopted this view
throughout the centuries, including the highly influential medieval
theologian
 St. Thomas Aquinas
 (1225-1274). One of the earliest Christian theologians to
defend this approach was Boethius (480-524 C.E.), who wrote in
*The Consolation of Philosophy* that "[Since] God has a
condition of ever-present eternity, His knowledge, which passes over
every change of time, embracing infinite lengths of past and future,
views in its own direct comprehension everything as though it were
taking place in the present" (Boethius *Consolation*,
117).



Some philosophers have objected to this way of explaining God's
knowledge because they think that it represents non-biblical picture
of God derived largely from Greek philosophical influences (see
Wolterstorff 1982, for example). But it does suggest an interesting
approach to the problem of prophecy. In terms of our example, the
defender of God's atemporal eternity would say that God knows
from the perspective of eternity that Peter will deny Jesus at a
certain time, and on this basis, Jesus prophecies in time that the
event in question will occur. 



One worry about this approach is that once Jesus prophecies at a
particular time that Peter will deny him, God's atemporally
eternal knowledge seems to be "introduced" into the past
(as David Widerker says in Widerker 1991), and the advantages of the
atemporal eternity view seem to disappear. For we are still left with
trying to explain how Peter's denial could be contingent, given
that the prophecy has already occurred. It seems that either
Peter's denial is not free or the past can be changed somehow.




Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, probably the most prominent
advocates of the atemporal eternity view, have defended the atemporal
eternity approach to prophecy against Widerker's objection (see
Stump and Kretzmann 1991). They point out that most prophecies are
conditional or vague, so that they leave "room" for
different ways in which they might be fulfilled (400-401). If a
prophecy were to be very specific, then it might actually render the
action in question inevitable, they admit, but they also insist that
rendering an action inevitable is not the same as making it unfree.
This is because they distinguish freedom of action from freedom of
will, and argue that "it is possible for an action to be
inevitable and yet a free action" (403), as (for instance) when
"the agent himself has a powerful desire to do the action, his
will is not causally determined by anything external to him or by
pathological factors within him, and the inaccessible alternatives to
his inevitable action are alternatives the agent has no desire to do
or even some desire not to do" (403). Trying to resolve the
dispute between Widerker and Stump and Kretzmann would go beyond the
scope of this article, though, so instead we will turn to the final
remaining solution that has been proposed for the problem of prophecy.



## 6. Middle Knowledge



This last approach to explaining how God knows the contingent future
starts with an observation concerning foreknowledge and providence
that advocates of open theism have made very clearly and forcefully.
Why would knowledge of the future be useful to God? Well, presumably
knowledge of the future enables God to make decisions about how to
exercise divine power in order to accomplish the purposes behind
creation. But there is a problem here: knowledge of the future is just
knowledge of what will happen (since the future is by definition
whatever will happen), and once God knows that something definitely
will happen, then it's too late to do anything about it. (This
may sound like a limit on God's power, but probably it is not:
not even God can make something false while that same thing is known
to be true.) As William Hasker says, "In the logical order of
dependence of events, one might say, by the 'time' God
knows something will happen, it is 'too late' either to
bring about its happening or to prevent it from happening"
(Hasker 1989, 58). So what God needs, for the purposes of providence,
is not just knowledge about what will happen, but also knowledge about
what could happen and what would happen in certain circumstances. 



Luis de Molina, an influential Spanish Jesuit theologian
(1535-1600 C.E.), thought that this was a serious problem. In
order to develop a view that would explain the relationships between
all of these things, he drew a distinction between three kinds of
knowledge in God, a distinction that suggests another response to the
problem of prophecy. (For more complete and detailed presentations of
this view, see Freddoso's introduction to Molina 1988, Craig
1987, Flint 1988 and Flint 1998.)



According to Molina, the first kind of knowledge that God possesses is
called natural knowledge. A true proposition is part of God's
natural knowledge if and only if it is a necessary truth (a truth
which could not be false under any circumstances whatever) which is
beyond God's control (nobody, including God, could make them
false). Examples of such true propositions would include "2 + 2
= 4", "Nothing is both red all over and green all over at
once", and "Every triangle has three sides."



The second kind of knowledge that God possesses is called free
knowledge because it is subject to God's free decision.
According to Molina, a true proposition is part of God's free
knowledge if and only if it is a contingent truth (an actual truth
which could have been false under different circumstances) that is
within God's control. Examples of such true propositions would
include "The same side of the moon always faces the
Earth", "Human beings exist" and "There are
iguanas in South America", since God could have brought it about
that these true propositions were false instead.



The third kind of knowledge that God possesses, according to Molina,
is called middle knowledge (because it is "in between"
God's natural knowledge and free knowledge). A true proposition
is part of God's middle knowledge if and only if it is a
contingent truth (like items of God's free knowledge) but beyond
God's control (like items of God's natural knowledge). The
most frequently discussed items of middle knowledge are often called
"subjunctive conditionals of freedom" by philosophers,
since they describe what people would freely do if placed in various
possible situations.



Molina claims that God's providential control over the world
involves middle knowledge in a crucial way. Very briefly, here is how
it is supposed to work: through natural knowledge, God knows what is
necessary and what is possible. Through middle knowledge, God knows
what every possible person would do freely in every possible
situation, among other things. So God decides which kind of world to
create, including those situations in which free human persons should
be placed, knowing how they would respond, and this results in
God's free knowledge (contingent truths which are up to God),
including foreknowledge of the actual future.



In the case of Jesus' prophecy that Peter would deny him,
Molinists would say that God knew (through middle knowledge) that if
Peter were placed in certain circumstances, then he would deny Jesus.
And for reasons not known to us, God decided to create those
circumstances, place Peter in them, and prophecy through Jesus what
Peter was going to do. (For a much more detailed explanation, see
Flint 1998, chapter 9.) Molina's theory of middle knowledge
generates a theory of providence designed to combine a strong notion
of God's control with a robust account of the contingency
involved in human freedom. (It also appears to have some biblical
support, because there are verses which seem to attribute middle
knowledge to God, although this is disputed: see I Samuel
23:6-13 and Matthew 11:20-24, for example.) 



However, philosophers have expressed several doubts about whether or
not it is possible for God to possess middle knowledge, doubts that
parallel those expressed above in connection with the possibility of
God's foreknowledge of the contingent future. For one thing,
they wonder about subjunctive conditionals of freedom: can we really
assume that these are either true or false? How can they be true if
(for example) the person in question is never in the situation and
never actually makes a choice? What "grounds" them or
makes them true? A second worry about Molina's picture has to do
with the nature of knowledge. Even if a given counterfactual of
freedom is true, knowing a proposition requires that a person be able
to distinguish what is true from what is false. The worry here is that
perhaps not even God could distinguish true counterfactuals of freedom
from false ones. (For more detailed discussions of these objections,
see Adams 1977, Freddoso's introduction to Molina 1988, Craig
1987, Flint 1988, Flint 1998, Hasker 1989, Davison 1991, and Perszyk
2011, and Oppy and Saward 2014; for a clever attempt to explain
prophecy without middle knowledge, see Pruss 2007 and the response
from Corabi and Germino 2013.) 


## 7. Conclusion



There are several ways to try to resolve the problem of prophecy that
is the focus of most philosophical debate, which arises in cases where
a future contingent event is predicted. The approaches discussed here
possess various strengths and weaknesses. The question of prophecy has
been receiving increased attention as the debate over the extent of
God's knowledge has become more widely discussed in recent work
in the philosophy of religion. As a result, one could reasonably
predict (prophesy?) that philosophical arguments concerning these
matters will continue indefinitely into the future.