Was there anything that made theologians' brains ache? Well, either those
theologians and philosophers had lobes on their brains that I just don't have,
or they had about as much difficulty puzzling out the relation between
God's foreknowledge and human free will (for example) as I do in figuring out
their puzzlings. For example, Aquinas introduced a distinction between
necessity consequentis and necessity consequentiae, which correspondsx
to the difference between absolute and suppositional necessity. But when
you say that God knows of suppositional necessity that X will occur at
Time N, does this mean that God knows that X at Time N because of some
sort of factor outside of God's knowledge, or that God knows X at Time N
because of something ELSE that God knows, apart from X at Time N? At the
moment I'm reading Bradwardine's treatment of this issue, which is
confusing, and requires a glacial pace of reading. Were I to try to explain
this to a member of my parish, I doubt I'd do justice to the complexity of
the issue, and I'm guessing most listeners would lose patience fairly
quickly. Medieval modality doesn't have the mathematical complexity of
contemporary quantum physics (unless you use contemporary statistics to
parse out the modal notions), but it's still vexing.
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