Two ancient (and modern) motivations forascribing exhaustively definite foreknowledgeto God: a historic overview andcritical assessment

The traditional Christian view that God foreknows the future exclusivelyin terms of what will and will not come to pass is partially rooted in two ancientHellenistic philosophical assumptions. Hellenistic philosophers universally assumedthat propositions asserting ‘x will occur’ contradict propositions asserting ‘x will notoccur’ and generally assumed that the gods lose significant providential advantageif they know the future partly as a domain of possibilities rather than exclusively interms of what will and will not occur. Both assumptions continue to influencepeople in the direction of the traditional understanding of God’s knowledge of thefuture. In this essay I argue that the first assumption is unnecessary and the secondlargely misguided