William Hasker

William Hasker (b. 1935) is an American analytic philosopher of religion and emeritus professor at Huntington University, where he taught philosophy for several decades. He served for many years as editor of the journal Faith and Philosophy, the flagship publication of the Society of Christian Philosophers. Hasker is best known as a leading proponent of open theism, the view that God knows all that can be known but does not have exhaustive foreknowledge of free creaturely actions, because the future is partly open. He developed this position most fully in God, Time, and Knowledge (1989) and contributed to the controversial collaborative volume The Openness of God (1994), which provoked sustained debate within evangelical theology and analytic philosophy of religion. Critics including William Lane Craig, Paul Helm, and Bruce Ware have challenged open theism's compatibility with classical theism and biblical orthodoxy. In philosophy of mind, Hasker defends emergent dualism, articulated in The Emergent Self (1999), arguing that the conscious self emerges from but is not reducible to physical processes—a position critiqued by both physicalists and substance dualists. He has also published extensively on the problem of evil (The Triumph of God over Evil, 2008) and on the Trinity (Metaphysics and the Tri-Personal God, 2013). His work stands within the Plantinga–Wolterstorff tradition of Christian analytic philosophy.