Molinism

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Molinism, named after 16th Century Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina, is a religious doctrine which attempts to reconcile the omniscience of God with human free will. William Lane Craig is probably its best known advocate today.

Under this account, God allows us to choose our actions yet knows in advance what course we will choose. Key is the idea that God possesses total knowledge of how any free agent would act in any given circumstance. Thus, given agent A and circumstances C, God is said to know what action that person would freely choose. Such knowledge is called middle knowledge (or scientia media) because it is the second of three types of knowledge God possesses.

Molinists support their case with Jesus's statement in Matthew 11:23:

And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? You will be brought down to Hades. For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day.

That is, Jesus claims knowledge of how the Sodomites would have responded under a different set of circumstances from those that actually occurred.

This account allows God to arrange for a person to carry out a specific act by arranging the circumstances surrounding the choice so that the act is both freely chosen and providential, thus maintaining the free will of the person.

[edit] Criticism

The Grounding Objection is at present the most debated objection to Molinism. The argument basically entails the idea that there are no grounds for the truth of counterfactuals prior to the existence of the individual to which they refer.

[edit] External links

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