Did you get to read Jon Garvey’s recent posts on molinism. He seemed to equate it to the Many Worlds view of the Universe. But i would think that is a rare interpretation.
Yes, definitely not a mainstream interpretation of Molinism (if your reading of @jongarvey is right; I haven’t seen the blog post in question). Molinism does not require anything like Lewisian modal realism or many worlds - though explanations of it are often couched in the language of “possible worlds” to make it easier to grasp the modal concepts involved.
Molinism has been described briefly already in this thread but here is another description of it, if it helps anyone. Molinism makes the following postulates:
- Human beings have libertarian free will (they have some measure of control over their own choices and are not determined in what choices they make).
- There are true counterfactuals of freedom: facts of the form if it were the case that C, then S would freely perform action A; where C is some sufficiently specified circumstance such that it is possible for a free agent, S, to find him or herself in C. The idea is that these facts depend simply on what the free creatures would choose to do in a given circumstance; the power over these facts is in the hands of the creatures (even though those creatures may never in fact exist!).
- God knows these true counterfactuals of freedom by virtue of his omniscience. (This is called “middle knowledge”.) He has this knowledge logically prior to his decision of what world to create, and he does not determine what these facts are.
- By knowing what every possible creature he could create would do in any possible circumstance in which he could place them, God providentially decides what world to create, and from that knows the entire history of the world.
These concepts can be a little difficult to wrap your mind around, but I think they do make the most sense of all the biblical data that is marshaled in favour of different positions on omniscience, providence, and human freedom.
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So, the way I see it:
Molinism is a belief that God knows (obviously) every possible world (what would happen if a person makes one choice and what would happen if a person makes another choice), but difference between Molinism and open theism is that God directly puts a person in a situation where he will make one choice over another?
The (vast) difference between Molinism and Open Theism is that, in Open Theism, God does not have middle knowledge. Often, in the Open Theist position it is believed that the counterfactuals of freedom do not actually exist: they are neither true nor false until S is actually in C and chooses to do A.
On Open Theism, God decides to place a person in a circumstance, and does not know (or at least, does not know with complete certainty) what that person will do until he or she does it. Open Theism implies that God is subject to risk and can only know the future probabilistically at best.
On Molinism, when God decides to place someone in a circumstance, he already knows what they will do, even though that person acts freely and could have chosen to do otherwise. (It is simply that, if they had chosen to do otherwise, God would have known that instead - and may or may not have chosen to put that person in that circumstance in the first place!)
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Yes, of course, didn’t mean to imply that Molinism is same or similar to Open Theism. It’s simply that all the talk about God knowing every possible reality brought it to mind.
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I liked the treatment of item (1).
It can be horribly difficult to explain to a novice that he can choose something and , conceivably, not be free at all!
That paragraph is just about perfect. Im a solid molinist…
The other formats seems so half-hearted…
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This sounds more like what I critiqued than George’s version!
My problem remains in conceiving creatures who have never existed at all having free will… whilst the ones who do exist, in practice, have to live by the consequences of the one real set of choices.
It’s just enough, but no more so than less convoluted schemes.
And i struggle with you getting balled up over non-existant beings. These non-existant beings are merely mental representatives in the mind of God. They arent real, nor are they supposed to be.
@structureoftruth offers his opinion of this approach:
In your case, using this context is distracting to our analysis.
It isn’t really correct to say that things that do not exist nevertheless have free will. Rather, they would have free will if they were to exist, and God simply knows what they would do with that free will.
But those choices are their own. It is within their power to choose differently - and if they were to do so, those counterfactuals that God knew from before creation would have been different. (This isn’t backwards causation, since the truth values and propositions are abstractions that don’t participate in cause and effect relationships. It is just a full picture of God’s foreknowledge.)
But I’m guessing you’ve read about the grounding objection, and Molinist responses to it, and just haven’t been convinced that the responses work?
Exactly right. After all, Molinism remains a minority position amongst those who study divine causation.
I’m not a fan of the Many Worlds version of Molinism. Molinism as a school of thought was created BEFORE the rise of Many Worlds as a physics idea… and thus was created without any need to resort to a Many Worlds version.
Ive confirmed that there is no other mentiong of “grounding” in this thread. What is the nature of this objection ?
I initially skimmed his post and then got distracted. I’ve wanted to read it more thoroughly. That said, as to equating Molinism with the Many Worlds viewpoint, I honestly don’t know how common that is among theologians today. I say that in part because I’ve heard people define “many worlds” in different ways. Personally, I like to think in terms of “all possible reality paths”—because “worlds” has potentially misleading implications that we are talking about different kinds of planets or solar systems. (e.g., “What if planet earth had been created in such a way that it fostered boron-based life instead of carbon-based organisms.”) I would prefer that people at least speak in terms of “all possible universes”, not worlds.
You definitely raise a good point and an excellent question. I’d love to hear from other participants as to their experiences with Molinism—whether by personal viewpoint or by being familiar with Molinist authors and perhaps even their pastors.
Sometime I need to read up much more on where Molinism stands today. Many of my impressions are still as they were before my retirement, when I was still regularly interacting with evangelical scholars. (William Lane Craig and I have some shared background and just enough interaction to [barely] be on a first name basis, but that was a long time ago. Our careers took us in different directions and we haven’t conversed in years. I really appreciate what Craig has done to promote consideration of Molinist thought, but I don’t think we ever happened to discuss that topic.)
I think George, in coining “many worlds Molinism,” may simply be confsuing “many worlds” with philosophical “possible worlds.” But I’ve given up trying to clarify things for him.
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Perhaps so. This is another topic where I often ask for clarification (or should ask for clarification) before responding so that I’m not misconstruing their meaning.
Please note that the “He seemed to equate it…” quotation was from George’s post, not mine. This misattribution is due to a defect in the forum software. When there is a quote within a quote, the software fails to apply the correct author to that embedded quotation.
To solve such misattributions by the forum software, simply edit the tag and change it to reflect the correct author.
@swamidass, perhaps Peaceful Science should have a periodic bulletin (perhaps every two weeks) to all users which reminds them of helpful-to-know procedural-tips like this one. Some conversations get confusing when the wrong author is attributed to an excerpted quotation.
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Apologies - should have found George’s original and quoted that. But sadly, that’s the world God created, so I had no choice.
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Software bugs did not exist until after the Fall.
(Sorry. Couldn’t resist that one.)
[I wonder if all algorithms were no less efficient than O(log(n)) prior to the Fall.]
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According to ID theory there are no such thing as accidental bugs, just Designed in features we don’t know the purpose of yet. 
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Damn - missed those out of the book. One for the second edition.