¹ See Bruce A. Ware God's Lesser Glory: The Diminished God of Open Theism (Wheaton IL: Crossway Books, 2000), esp. ch. 4. See also John Sanders The God Who Risks (Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 198. Sanders refers here to ‘presentism’, which, in his usage, is an alternate name for open theism (ibid., 12).

² See Paul Helm Eternal God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 125, 195. See also Richard Swinburne The Coherence of Theism, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 180.

³ See Clark H. Pinnock et al. The Openness of God (Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994), 156. See also John B. Cobb and Clark H. Pinnock (eds) Searching for an Adequate God: A Dialogue Between Process and Free Will Theists (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 2000).

⁴ See Pinnock et al. Openness of God, esp. chs 2–4.

⁵ The precise nature of God's necessity is a matter of some debate among theists. Some think that God is necessary in the broadly logical sense of existing in all possible worlds. Others think that God is ‘metaphysically’ necessary in the sense of existing in all non-empty possible worlds, such that if anything exists, then God does too. For present purposes it is not necessary to take a stand on this debate, so let us say that ‘God exists necessarily’ means that God is at least metaphysically necessary.

⁶ By creation ‘ex nihilo’ I simply mean that God did not fashion creation out of any pre-existing matter or stuff à la Plato's Demiurge.

⁷ The phrase ‘the future’ should not be understood as implying a unique, linear sequence of events. Most open theists, when they speak of ‘the future’, have in mind a non-linear, branching structure consisting partly of determinate ‘will-bes’ and partly of indeterminate ‘might and might-nots’. For elaboration, see Rhoda, Alan R., Boyd, Gregory A., and Belt, Thomas G. ‘Open theism, omniscience, and the nature of the future’, Faith and Philosophy, 23 (2006), 432–459CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ The dialectical situation among these three camps parallels the ongoing free-will debate between hard determinists, soft determinists, and libertarians. The open-theist position parallels libertarianism by affirming both contingency and incompatibilism. The non-open-free-will-theist position parallels soft determinism's ‘have your cake and eat it’ approach. And the theological-determinist position parallels hard determinism by giving up contingency on account of incompatibility.

⁹ For a contrasting view, see Pinnock et al. Openness of God, 156.

¹⁰ William Lane Craig Time and Eternity: Exploring God's Relationship to Time (Wheaton IL: Crossway Books, 2001).

¹¹ Richard Creel Divine Impassibility (Eugene OR: Wipf and Stock, 2005 [1986]), 9–12.

¹² This seems to be John Sanders's view. He clearly wants to go further than Creel does in the extent to which he attributes passibility to God. See Sanders God Who Risks, 196–197 and n. 117.

¹³ In my opinion, open theists would do well to endorse Creel's position that God is passible in knowledge, but impassible in nature, will, and feeling. Creel's case against passibility in feeling is impressive. As for passibility in will, there seems to be no good reason for a God who knows all possibilities in advance not to form conditional resolutions on how he would respond in every possible situation.

¹⁴ In previous work (Rhoda, Boyd, and Belt ‘Open theism, omniscience, and the nature of the future’) I used the phrase ‘semantic openness’ to refer to what I now call ‘alethic openness’. Since the issue is primarily one of truth and not meaning, ‘alethic’ is more accurate.

¹⁵ The terms ‘non-bivalentist omniscience’ and ‘bivalentist omniscience’ were suggested to me by Thomas G. Belt.

¹⁶ Proponents of this view usually define ‘omniscience’ in terms of what it is logically possible to know, in parallel with the common practice of defining ‘omnipotence’ in terms of what it is logically possible to do (see, e.g. Swinburne, Coherence of Theism, 180). The key issue, though, is whether there are any truths that it is not logically possible to know.

¹⁷ William Hasker God, Time, and Knowledge (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 187; idem ‘The foreknowledge conundrum’, International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, 50 (2001), 97–114, esp. 110–111.

¹⁸ William Lane Craig ‘What does God know?’, in Douglas F. Huffman & Eric L. Johnson (eds) God Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents God (Grand Rapids MI: Zondervan, 2002), 147–148.

¹⁹ Sanders God Who Risks, 198.

²⁰ A parallel problem confronts proponents of Ockhamism who affirm the nonexistence of future events. For the Ockhamist, the future is alethically settled and what is now true about the future depends entirely on what happens in the future. But if future events do not exist, then there is nothing (yet) in reality to ground the present truth of propositions about the future. It appears, then, that Ockhamists of this sort must deny that truth supervenes on being and admit that God's knowledge as of time t can outstrip what is real as of time t.

²¹ See Tuggy, Dale ‘Three roads to open theism’, Faith and Philosophy, 23 (2006), 28–51Google Scholar.

²² Presentism is the view that only what exists now has any reality.

²³ Thanks to an anonymous referee for this journal for bringing this issue to my attention.

²⁴ To become convinced of this all one has to do is reflect on what open theists typically say about prophecy. Nearly all open theists have been quite explicit that there are truths about the future that God knows, such as God's own unilateral decisions and the inevitable consequences of present causes. See, e.g. Pinnock et al. Openness of God, 51.

²⁵ Prior develops the ‘Ockhamist’/‘Peircean’ tense logic distinction in Arthur Prior ‘The formalities of omniscience’, in Per Hasle et al. (eds) Papers on Time and Tense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 39–58.

²⁶ Ibid., 52: ‘nothing can be truly said to be “going-to-happen” … until it is so “present in its causes” as to be beyond stopping.’ In a similar fashion, many presentists will say that what can be truly said to have happened is ‘present in its effects’. I apply Peircean semantics to truths about the future in Rhoda, Boyd, and Belt ‘Open theism, omniscience, and the nature of the future’. I apply it to truths about the past in Alan Rhoda, ‘Presentism, truthmakers, and God’ (currently unpublished).

²⁷ J. R. Lucas The Future: An Essay on God, Temporality, and Truth (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).

²⁸ A good overview of the controversies surrounding multi-valued logics can be found in Susan Haack Deviant Logic, Fuzzy Logic: Beyond the Formalism, 2nd edn (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

²⁹ Thomason, Richmond ‘Indeterminist time and truth-value gaps’, Theoria, 36 (1970), 265–281Google Scholar.

³⁰ Boyd's most explicit endorsement of this view occurs in Rhoda, Boyd, and Belt ‘Open theism, omniscience, and the nature of the future’.

³¹ For a clear presentation of this challenge, see Alfred J. Freddoso ‘Introduction’, in Luis de Molina On Divine Foreknowledge: Part IV of the Concordia, tr. Alfred J. Freddoso (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 71–72.

³² See Rhoda, Boyd, and Belt ‘Open theism, omniscience, and the nature of the future’ for a development and defence of two independent arguments for the thesis that pairs of corresponding ‘will’ and ‘will-not’ propositions are contraries. Both arguments stem from Prior's rejection of ‘Ockhamist’ tense logic in Prior ‘The formalities of omniscience’, 49.

³³ Special thanks are due to Thomas G. Belt and an anonymous referee for this journal for constructive feedback on an earlier version of this paper.