What is Molinism?

@jongarvey,

I think you are attempting to foist responsibility on the lyrical and sometimes inscrutable aspect of your writings onto me - - rather than accept the fact that you have crafted a complex aggregate of ideas that are either more “optional” than “logically entailed”… if they arent, in fact, virtually “inconsistent internally”.

Take your view on molinism for example: you specifically propose real alternates to your ‘self’… as part of God’s Middle Knowledge, rather than simply presenting God as THINKING about your decisions under different circumstances.

You’re trying interpretation again, George. Stop telling people what they think, unless they actually do think it.

@jongarvey

You were the one that stated your objections to god giving free will to duplucate persons that dont actually exist.

There is nothing mandatory about such a view anywhere in molinism.

The point is that non-existent persons can’t have free will, or anything else. Any choices the Molinist God might discern they “would” make are irrelevant to the free choices of their actual counterparts.

@jongarvey,

As ive already noted, the features that you object to in your assessment of Molinism are not required features of molinism.

God’s foreknowledge does NOT require “test subjects” that look like you to make his decisions about the future.

EDIT: Typo fixed. “Does not” replaces “does”.

I assume “doesn’t” should be in your statement.

Molinism requires that God knows what “you” would do in all other worlds he might create. That’s not foreknowledge, because all except one will never happen, which is why it’s called “middle knowledge.” If neither the potential world nor the potential “you” actually exist, ever, then in what way is that not analogous to a “test subject”?

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@jongarvey,

(Thanks. I fixed the typo you saw.)

I believe it would be more correct to say that Middle Knowledge is a sub-category of foreknowledge… not a replacement for foreknowkedge.

There is nothing in metaphysics that “logically entails” that foreknowledge of Middle Knowledge" is
impossible without having a trial experiment.

Foreknowledge is the ability to think through the causal chain… without CREATING the causes… to see the end result.

@jongarvey,

In fact, if you required God to create a test model before he could know the answer, yoi are essentially stripping God of his capacity for foreknowledge.

If God has to run simulations in order “to know” things… he is no better than an immortal scientist… rather than a divine transcendent being!

But isn’t the whole point of libertarian free-will that there is no causal chain determining it?

That is one viewpoint, and you seem invested in that view.

But I am invested in the view that God just Knows the Future (if for mo other reason than the Future and the Past are all equal and simultaneous with each other!).

When we ask a known savant whether the coronation of Charlemagne was a saturday or a sunday, he can just say, without consciously thinking: it was a xxxday.

But your position would exclude this kind of knowledge from God… and that He would have to run a spreadsheet to see what the answer is.

No - it’s the reasaon for positing Molinism in the first place. Calvinism has no need for libertarian free-will.

And you are equating “knowledge of the future” with “knowledge of what is not actually in the future.” They are not the same, which is why Molina had to invent an entirely new kind of divine knowledge and call it “middle knowledge”.

Again, @jongarvey, you are attemptung to LIMIT God’s powers. You are happy to develop a structure to what God cannot know.

Which I defeat, in my personal view of such matters, by simply not permitting any structural limit to what God cannot know:

God knows what WILL happen …and he knows what WOULD happen if he changed this or that.

It is immediate knowledge that doesnt require simulation. If asked, God would not even have a way to explain it to you… because you are not God.

Just written an article on that. Watch the Hump - I’ll put it up before bed.

Except they aren’t at all irrelevant, because those actually are the choices those persons would make if God were to create them. Which God knows because he is omniscient.

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The grounding objection is the primary philosophical argument against molinism. The concern is basically what @jongarvey has raised: there’s nothing to make facts about free choices true until those choices are made. William Lane Craig has an article responding to this objection on his website.

@structureoftruth , you wrote to me: “The grounding objection is the primary philosophical argument against molinism, [namely] there’s nothing to make facts about free choices true until those choices are made.”

As I was writing to Jon, this is an attempt to reject Molinism on a technicality, which hasn’t even been established. This is metaphysics at its best and worst: “ghosts can’t harm you because they are spirit and they can’t affect matter and flesh!” Oh yeah? Who says? The Bible is filled with spiritual things ruining matter all the time. The Bible is also full of God knowing what someone will do before they actually make those choices. So, the corollary to the “grounding objection” is that God can have future knowledge of someone’s actions (before they perform them) only because it is the actual outcome of the future. And one will then attempt to say that God can’t know what else a person might do under different circumstances - - because those circumstances are not validated by the future.

This is a word game. When you look at all the “what ifs” any normal free will scenario creates, you might as well say that God either knows all the options, or all the options are irrelevant because he knows exactly the future that everyone is making for themselves.

Jon turns this model into a physical simulation, which a novel idea, but hardly one that is logically entailed by Molinism at its fundamental level.

@structureoftruth, you wrote to @jongarvey : “Except they aren’t at all irrelevant, because those actually are the choices those persons would make if God were to create them. Which God knows because he is omniscient.”

Absolutely agreed. God knows because He is omniscient… not because he has run a ga-billion simulations of non-existent people. If he had to run simulations, he would be very clever, but hardly omniscient!

But if he needs middle knowledge to create responsible free will and yet determine events, he’s both very clever and very powerful, but neither omnisicent nor omnipotent.

Bottom line for me - Apply Occam’s razor and Molinism is multiplying entities unnecessarily, and admit a little humility and one can accept that God’s word, that we make accountable choices and he disposes events, is sufficient to end speculation.

@jongarvey

I consider “Middle Knowledge” to be an unnecessary category of information… more useful to help explain the scenario than for anything else.

@structureoftruth, if we didnt attempt a distinction to separate Middle Knowledge from any other kind of knowledge… what would Molinism be more like?

Or would it still be distinct and still helpful to use the term Molinism… but maybe Molinism-Lite?

Since Molinism is Reformed Doctrine-Lite already, I’ll probably just stick with the latter and let God be the Creator however he wants.

Consider this - Molinism has an old-fashioned, pre-psychological, concept of us as “given” individual souls, and so Molina’s guiding concept was how “we” would choose in different circumstances God might create around us.

But in fact, “we” are the internal character we produce by the choices we have made in each contingent situation in our life. Sociologically (to think of the external determinants of our personalities) we are the products of our unique social situations in the real world. Then again, Molina knew nothing of the genetic component of our personalities, itself a contingent fact of the particular world that spawns us, and which again interacts uniquely and contingently with the choices we make from the time we make choices at all.

In other words, who we are cannot be disentangled from the world we’re in, because we are not created solely as individuals, but as social beings. That’s why sin, too, is a social as well as an individual thing - and why the race, rather than each individual soul, is “fallen.”

And that’s why, too, the crucial element in salvation is not a right or wrong choice about God by more or less deserving “souls”, but divine grace, which cuts through the contingencies and complexities of our existence and creates us anew, raising us from the dead:

As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, 2 in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. 3 All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh a and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. 4 But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5 made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. 6 And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, 7 in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. 8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast. 10 For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

And hence the idea of God building creation around the individual choices of human souls has things the wrong way round,

…for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.

Now, understanding how that works is probably above all human pay-grades. But it seems to me that it’s only when we say of such passages, “No, that can’t be right,” that we start talking about middle knowledge, Molinism-lite, or any of those attempts to give the human will priority.

Wouldn’t molinism have the same problems associated with Calvinism (that too the most extreme kind. maybe i should say hyper calvinism)?

  1. If God chose this particular world out of an infinite possible worlds, it would mean that God purposefully opted for a world in which Adam/Eve Sin.i.e the fall was determined by God.

  2. Since God chose a particular world out of many options, he chooses who will be saved and who will not. This is especially problematic if every free will choice creates another “possible world” as it would ensure that each persons “free will” decisions are fixed by God through the act of choosing a world in which that choice is as good as made.

If you add the condition, that god chose the world that would glorify him the most, we have calvinism.

The concept of foreknowledge makes far more sense to me. I.e from the point of creation of humanity, many different choices by individuals was possible, however God knew before hand which choice would be made by each individual and how history would unfold. I.e while many worlds are possible in the human perspective, only one sequence of history will actually happen in Gods view. Here the circumstances that lead to free will choices of an individual are themselves shaped by free will choices of those who precede him/her.

Add to this the understanding that God transcends time and we cannot really think of him as embedded in time looking at the future and past. Perhaps in Gods view, all creation from beginning to end comes into being at the moment of creation… and his creatures are travelling through his creation. Of course, tahts just speculation on my part.