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Divine Omniprescience and Literary Creativity: Has La Croix shown their incompatibility?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Donald R. Gregory
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Philosophy, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale Campus

Extract

It has recently been suggested by Richard R. La Croix that there is a logical incompatibility between the doctrine of divine omniprescience — the notion that God knows what will happen in the future — and the commonly held belief that literary authors are creative with respect to the compositions they produce. This suggestion is, I take it, part of the overall claim that God's omniscience rules out human free choices, since if what one does is known before one does it, then one can hardly be said to have chosen it. I will not, however, be concerned with this general controversy in the present paper, but rather with the specific one regarding literary creativity and divine omniprescience. La Croix defends this claim by defining literary creativity as follows:

literary authorship is creative in the sense that by means of his composing activity an author is an agent who brings about the existence of some thing (e.g. a play, a poem, a novel, etc.) which did not exist prior to the composing activity of that agent and which would not exist without the composing activity of that agent or some similar agent.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

page 77 note 1 Croix, Richard R. La, ‘Divine Omniprescience: Are Literary Works Eternal Entities?’, Religious Studies, xv (September 1979), 281–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 77 note 2 Ibid. p. 281.

page 78 note 1 Ibid. p. 282.

page 78 note 2 Storr, Anthony, The Dynamics of Creation (New York, Atheneum, 1972), p. xi.Google Scholar

page 79 note 1 Hume, David, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. by Hendel, Charles W. (New York, Bobbs-Merrill, 1955), p. 27.Google Scholar