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JET
Registered Member
Date Joined Jun 2002
Total Posts : 397
| Posted 8/22/2003 1:12 PM (GMT -6) |   | Earlier I started a thread on Arthur N. Prior http://www.gregboyd.org/gbfront/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2134 the “father of modern tense logic”, and more recently I noticed some interest in Prior on another thread. Here’s another interesting article on Prior: http://imv.aau.dk/forskning/prior-studies/index2.htm
(EDIT: I just discovered the link does not open the article. To find the article: Click on the link, click on Navigation Chart, then click on "Hasle 1997b" next to "Secondary literature")
The article includes the following quote from Prior’s Some Free Thinking About Time:
quote:
I believe that what we see as a progress of events is a progress of events, a coming to pass of one thing after another, and not just a timeless tapestry with everything stuck there for good and all...
This belief of mine... is bound up with a belief in real freedom. One of the big differences between the past and the future is that once something has become past, it is, as it were, out of our reach - once a thing has happened, nothing we can do can make it not to have happened. But the future is to some extent, even though it is only to a very small extent, something we can make for ourselves.... if something is the work of a free agent, then it wasn't going to be the case until that agent decided that it was.
I would go further than Duns Scotus and say that there are things about the future that God doesn't yet know because they're not yet to be known, and to talk about knowing them is like saying that we can know falsehoods.
Free thinking indeed for a Presbyterian.
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JET
Registered Member
Date Joined Jun 2002
Total Posts : 397
| Posted 8/22/2003 1:15 PM (GMT -6) | | The referenced article http://imv.aau.dk/forskning/prior-studies/index2.htm chronicles Prior’s progression from Calvinist to Open Theist (see quote from orig. post) to agnostic. A Calvinist might say this progression illustrates the danger of Open Theism. However, it does not appear that Prior’s agnosticism resulted from his embracing the idea of an open future (which is where his work in temporal logic led him) as much as it seems Prior’s agnosticism resulted from the fact that he equated Christianity with Calvinism. Prior ultimately doubted Christianity because he doubted Calvinism.
Prior attempted to deal with the “objectionable” features of Calvinism by turning to the “revisionist” Calvinist theology of Karl Barth. However, while Prior seemed content (at least for a while) to reinterpret the Calvinist interpretation of the doctrine of predestination, Prior still worried about the related doctrine of foreknowledge.
With respect to the doctrine of foreknowledge, we see Prior struggling with the same issues of semantics and definitions that we see open theists and their critics struggling with today. Prior seems to assume that his denial of EDF is equivalent to a denial of omniscience. He says God knows “whatever is knowable”. However, he realizes that this is not the same as omniscience. He realizes that “whatever is knowable” is not necessarily “co-extensive with what is true”. (Recall Doc’s critique of Pinnock, as well as TGB’s often repeated definition of omniscience in this forum, i.e., God knows every true proposition as true, etc., rather than “whatever is knowable”.) Too bad the “father of modern tense logic” did not have the benefit of reading TGB.
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Matthew Timothy Short
Huh?
Date Joined Apr 2002
Total Posts : 635
| Posted 8/23/2003 3:43 AM (GMT -6) | | Time is the movement of objects in space; measured by their revolution about one another. The Earth rotates on its axis completely and that is one day; the same revolves about the Sun once and such is a year.
Past, Present, and Future represented as ‘time’ is somewhat of a misnomer, it is the ‘Present Always’ through all measurements of movement. The Past is the remembrance of movement having already taken place within the Present, and the Future is movement yet to happen in the Present, though undoubtedly it will . . .
What significance does this add to anything, in my mind . . . nothing, I am just rambling through the sequence of events, pay me no mind, and if you do mind, well then, never-mind, thank you, thank you very much!
Though in regards to God’s knowledge . . . I would just like to say, "He is a, know it all!"
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Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 8/24/2003 3:40 PM (GMT -6) | | Hi JET-
I've wandered around that Prior Studies website. Nice. I have a couple of Prior's books on order too and should pick them up in a couple of months. Looking forward to reading them.
Thanks for pointing us to the article though. I hadn't previously seen that.
Tom | | Back to Top | | |
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