Unrestricted Actualization and Divine Providence

Chapter 10 critiques Michael Almeida’s case for God’s having providential options involving unrestricted actualization. Almeida holds that as well as strong actualization and weak actualization, there are two other approaches to world-actualization open to God: restricted actualization and unrestricted actualization. The latter consists in God’s bringing about a finite person’s freely performing an undetermined action merely by God’s predicting it. The alleged availability of unrestricted actualization yields a novel libertarian account of divine providence, incorporating, for example, the thesis that necessarily God can actualize every morally perfect world, i.e., every world in which there are significantly free beings, each of whom performs morally significant actions and “goes right” with respect to each of them.