actions that are logically impossible. Somewhat surprisingly, the assertion that God lacks
comprehensive knowledge of the future has no effect on our understanding of God's
providential governance of the world. The reason for this is that, absent middle
knowledge, divine knowledge of the actual future would add nothing whatever to God's
ability to govern the world, over and above what God would have with comprehensive
knowledge of the past and present (for argument, see Hasker 1989, 53–63; Sanders 1998,
200–206). Furthermore, the same is true of the knowledge of the future that might be
possessed by a timeless God.
The two themes most characteristic of open theism are, first, the assertion that God is
genuinely and personally interactive with free human persons and,
end p.437
second, the recognition that, in governing the world, God is a risk-taker. In choosing to
create free persons and to respect their freedom, God allows for the very real possibility
that such persons will choose their own ways in contradiction to his loving and gracious
will for them. Because God does not have a complete “blueprint” of the future, divine
governance of the world can be seen in part in terms of general policies or strategies
rather than as divine ordination of each particular event that occurs. (Thus, open theism is
highly congruent with the last of the four responses detailed above to the problem of
gratuitous evil.) God's omnipotence is shown, not in unilaterally decreeing how things
shall be, but in working together with his creatures to achieve the best possible future.
Molinists and Calvinists, on the other hand, claim that open theism unacceptably
compromises God's sovereign control over worldly happenings.
Necessary truth has not been ignored in analytic philosophy of religion. The
developments in modal logic during the 1970s were seized on and exploited by analytic
theists in discussing topics such as essential divine attributes and necessary divine
existence. Alvin Plantinga's The Nature of Necessity (1974) developed an account of
modality and defended it against the modal nihilism of W. V. Quine, who first reduced
necessary truth to analytic truth and then undermined the idea of analyticity. In this book,
Plantinga crafted a structure of modal concepts including essences, essential and
accidental properties, and possible worlds that has served many philosophers ever since.
Ironically, Plantinga never tells us what the nature of necessity is; instead, he says, “The
distinction between necessary and contingent truth is as easy to recognize as it is difficult
to explain to the sceptic's satisfactionWe must give examples and hope for the best”
(1974, 1).
But suppose we do want to know what necessary truth is? Two options are set forth by
Richard Swinburne:
Logical necessities, claims the Platonist, make it inevitable that the world is one sort of
place rather than another—by a hard, inexorable necessity than which there is none
harder. The Platonist's opponent is the logical nominalist, who believes that the only
truths at stake concern nomina, words. There is, claims the nominalist, no timeless realm
of statements and logical necessity, just facts about how humans use languageI shall
argue that the nominalist is basically correct. (1994, 105–6)
Though Plantinga is not fully explicit, it is clear that he comes down on the Platonist side
of this argument. A more explicitly Platonist affirmation comes from Robert Adams: