Programme
John Marenbon
Trinity College, Cambridge
Timeless Eternity as a Defence of Contingency. Aquinas and His Critics
If God knows everything, as Christian doctrine requires, how can anything be contingent, even the future, since they it turn out otherwise from how God knows it will be? According to many historians, a way of answering this problem of prescience championed by Boethius and Aquinas is to claim that God, by his very nature as existing timelessly in eternity, is simultaneous with everything, past, present and future. God does not, therefore, know the future (or the past). Rather, for him everything is present, and so the problemof prescience does not arise. I shall argue (briefly, because I have done so elsewhere) that neither Boethius nor Aquinas held this view. I shall then show how the view came to be attributed to Aquinas, in the course of the controversy between Franciscans and his Dominican defenders over the orthodoxy of his ideas.