Abstract. An argument is presented showing that, on the assumption of Molinism, counterfactuals of free human behavior must be explanatorily prior to God’s sovereign decree to create these humans, or God becomes the author of evil. But, it is claimed, this explanatory order of God’s actions is logically incoherent, since to know what a human would do in any given circumstance requires the full knowledge of their character, and thus the being necessarily exists in the mind of God prior to the knowledge of their counterfactuals and their physical existence, refuting the basis of Molinistic libertarian free will and divine benevolence.
Christian theology has a storied history of debating the coexistence of divine omniscience and omnipotence with divine benevolence and human free will. The basic problem is that if God has perfect knowledge of the future, and decides to materialize the world in his mind, he is the author of evil and humans are unable to deviate from His will. These are conflated issues so we can separate them and briefly look at each independently. The schematic of the origin of evil can be ordered as such:
Various reconciliatory attempts were made in early Christianity to explain the origins of evil, yet many contemporary reformed theologians continue to assert:
Adam and Eve were not created fallen. They had no sin nature. They were good creatures with a free will. Yet they chose to sin. Why? I don’t know. Nor have I found anyone yet who does know. In spite of this excruciating problem we still must affirm that God is not the author of sin...I know that God ordained the Fall, but I do not know how this ordination enabled Adam and his descendants to fall into sin without the Lord himself being the direct, culpable agent for the Fall.[1]
A schematic of the conflict between divine omniscience and free will is related, but more succinctly ordered:
This schematic can be epitomized by Augustine’s distinction between free will and liberty, and was generally accepted until the counter-reformation.[2]
In the sixteenth century, Luis De Molina, attempting to rescue libertarian freedom from reformed theological conceptions of divine providence, devised a schema about the knowledge God possesses prior to creation. In modern terminology, Molina posited that in addition to God’s natural knowledge, knowledge about necessary truths, and free knowledge, His perfect foreknowledge of the future in the materialized world, He also possesses middle knowledge, which is what any creature would freely do in any given circumstances.[3]
Middle knowledge is effectively “a knowledge of all the things that logically could happen”[4] and is comprised of counterfactual statements, “a subjunctive conditional stating what would be done freely by a certain possible creature (or by more than one) under certain possible circumstances.”[5]
Knowledge of counterfactuals enables God to create a world in which he foreordains His will through the use of libertarian free humans who are placed in circumstances where He knows they will freely choose His desired outcome. Beyond salvaging liberty, proponents claim it also solves the problem of the origin of evil, since humans are still the agents that freely bring evil into existence.
The structured contemporary argument for Molinism is such[6]:
It is absolutely necessary to the Molinist that counterfactuals are true prior to the divine decree and not
true only logically posterior to the divine decree because that makes God the author of evil. In that case, God is the one who determines how creatures would act in any of these circumstances and therefore, by the very nature of the case, these counterfactuals of creaturely freedom must be true if they are true logically prior to the divine decree.[7]
Most critics of this formulation attack the apparent lack of grounding of the truth of these counterfactuals.[8] This critique generally goes:
One can see how if the Molinist case was proper, the grounding objection would be a sufficient refutation, for claiming that God must be good is not philosophical justification for why counterfactuals must be true prior to creation.[10]
Though the grounding objection is appealing, upon closer examination it is flawed in composition, yet generally correct in deduction, and Molinism is compositionally accurate, yet flawed in deduction.
he true error of Molinism rests primarily in the nature of counterfactuals. The Molinist schema is sound because it is true that God does know counterfactuals prior to physical creation. It is unsound because it is not possible to know counterfactuals prior to the conception of the identical entity. Think of the counterfactual: “If Jenna was in love with Anthony, she would agree to marry him.” In order for something to be said about Jenna, there must be a Jenna.
This is to say that regardless of the truth origins of counterfactuals, God’s knowledge of them are always explanatorily posterior to God’s mental creation of the agents, which is fatal to the Molinist argument.
In addition to the middle knowledge proposed by Molinists, there must be a sub middle knowledge, which is the knowledge of the entities God desires to create. Think again to Jenna; there are a multitude of circumstances outside Jenna’s control which invariably determine the libertarian counterfactuals of her love. If Jenna was born to an aboriginal tribe in the Republic of the Congo, she would never meet Anthony. If she was 7 feet tall, and she prefers taller men, she would not love Anthony. If she were born with a desire for blonde haired men, she would not love Anthony. From these examples it can be seen that counterfactuals depend on the characteristics of the individual that God creates.
For a counterfactual to have meaning, God first must conceive of an individual, with all of their characteristics and dispositions in tact. God then can decide how to place this individual in circumstances along with other pre-conceived individuals. This means that God’s mental creation would necessarily have to be identical to His physical creation; God thinks of a person, evaluates the feasibility of their integration into His plan, and would either change the individual’s characteristics, not integrate them, or use that exact conception. There is no coherent formulation where God logically knows counterfactuals of a non-conceived being. Is libertarian freedom maintained? Most likely not, and at the cost of God’s authorship of evil, making Molinism an untenable position for any conventional Christian. Interestingly, contemporary Molinists acknowledge this conceptional stage of God’s creation, but do not explain how mental creation is qualitatively different from physical creation in God’s culpability of evil.[11]
The reworking of the Molinist schema with its refutation is as follows: