Philosophy - Boethius and Aquinas on the Problem of God's Prescience Essay

Philosophy - Boethius and Aquinas on the Problem of God's Prescience - Essay Example This only serves to pronounces the clash with freewill. The Problem of God’s Prescience The conflict hence forms the basic premise of the Problem. God as the master of all things tangible and intangible is assumed to know incomprehensible details about human life and the course it will take. As such, His knowledge about a particular event precedes the event itself, thereby exemplifying his unique ability of knowing the future. This belief in God’s ubiquitousness forms one of the core foundations of his Divinity across the board of religions, whether the one in question is Christianity, Judaism or Islam. The Bible, Torah, and the Quran all repeatedly assert His pervasiveness carefully contrasting it with His limitless power. The masses of religions preach the notion that God is to be found everywhere at all times and no thought or eventuality escapes His gaze. Superficially, this ideology is readily admissible but when theologians venture to expound their gifts of insigh t onto the subject, striving to explain the Divine Knowledge, the one immediate problem they tend to notice is the apparent conflict with freewill. This is because the concept of freewill indicates that every human is capable of altering the course of his life as he deems fit by exercising discretionary powers of judgment. If God is to possess all knowledge of all time, this discretion may not in actuality exist, since God would already know the direction a particular individual would be expected to take. If the individual’s future is already preconceived in God’s eternal knowledge, the individual’s course of action could simply be labeled predetermined, even though he in his own right may be employing the gift of freewill. This notion forms what has come to be known as the Problem of God’s Prescience. Boethius’s ideologies Boethius in his Consolation of Philosophy sought to answer the very questions that formed the crux of the Problem. Firstly, it must be elucidated that incidents are historically conceived by philosophers to be of two kinds, necessary and contingent. God’s omniscience pertains to all knowledge that exists in the world, including the murkiest of thoughts that originate in a person’s mind. Hence, any thought, if formulated by a conscious course of judgment in a person’s mind, should be deemed contingent. It is contingent because it is not necessary for a person to think a certain thought, as his freewill allows him to develop a unique mindset, but if God already knows what his mindset would be, that contingent thought could become a necessary course of action for the person to take, as not taking that course of action would render God’s knowledge flawed. If it is assumed that God already knows the thought that is about to transpire, its contingency is made redundant. This, in essence, negates freewill and converts seemingly contingent occurrences into necessary occurrences since Go d already knows of their presence. As such, Boethius’ twin-prong ideologies regarding the problem emerge. His first limb identifies that God’s omniscience and perfection go hand in hand and can never be rebutted,