The Problem of Dialogue

This chapter takes as its starting point William P. Alston’s view that there is a dialogue when two people are in conversation and there is mutual openness, with one important necessary condition of mutual openness being that one partner to the dialogue must not have programmed the other’s responses.

The chapter then goes on to examine three challenges to this view of dialogue as applied to God and human beings: from divine omniscience, from omnidetermination, and from timelessness. According to Alston, while omnidetermination does preclude genuine dialogue, divine omniscience does not if it is allied with divine timelessness.

The chapter then considers three proposed solutions to the problem of dialogue. The first, Alston’s, argues that what is responded to must be independent of the utterer’s will. It follows from this, maintains Alston, that dialogue is incompatible with omnidetermination. Nevertheless, Alston insists that dialogue is compatible with omniscience, since the divine response to a free human action could be simultaneous with that action. It is responded that if omnidetermination rules out dialogue then a timeless, omniscient, but not omnidetermining God rules this out as well.

The chapter next considers Richard Swinburne’s solution, according to which God does not know the truth about those future states not physically necessitated by anything in the past. It is admitted that this is a satisfactory solution, provided that one is prepared to pay the price of God’s being omniscient in only an attenuated sense of divine omniscience.

The chapter concludes by proposing a novel solution to the problem, that it is sufficient for genuine human dialogue with God if God is an omniscient omnideterminer, provided such omnidetermination leaves intact a range of epistemic possibilities for the human partner sufficient for free participation in the dialogue. Ignorance of what one’s dialogue partner will do, even if what he will do is fixed, together with a strong interest in knowing what he will do, is also sufficient for dialogue.