Divine foreknowledge, evidence and epistemic responsibility

Abstract In several recent publications, John Martin Fischer proposed a new solution to the problem of divine foreknowledge, which he dubbed the bootstrapping view. On this view, God can have limited knowledge of contingent future based on a combination of (a) God's knowledge of inconclusive evidence about the contingent world available to humans and (b) divine self‐knowledge and more specifically God's knowledge of His essential infallibility. On the basis of the former, God obtains knowledge about contingent future, and by virtue of the latter, God bootstraps this knowledge to certainty. Fischer acknowledges that the mechanism of bootstrapping remains opaque to us, but maintains that his view offers a consistent model of God's limited foreknowledge of contingent future in an indeterministic world. The essay examines the bootstrapping view and some problems it gives rise to, as well as presents a related model of divine foreknowledge that is consistent and simpler and gives God comprehensive foreknowledge.