The Incoherent Root of Theological Fatalism

Abstract

This paper begins with a standard argument for theological fatalism and unravels deeper dilemmas in stages, arriving at an argument that has nothing to do with divine foreknowledge or free will. I then focus on the problem of the incoherence or at least confusion in the idea of the necessity of the past. In the final section I replace the necessity of the past with the causal closure of the past, and argue that the causal closure principle has the same problem of incoherence as the modal principle.