In this article I will discuss God’s knowledge and how it fits with human freedom. The main point of this article is to examine Molinism’s proposal of how these two fit together and demonstrate that Molinism’s answer is not sufficient to solve this problem of Divine (fore)knowledge and human freedom.
Let me introduce this post by posing a question: does God know everything?
This might be a difficult question to answer. To start, you have to think about what is meant by “God”; what kind of being He is and who He is, but, since I am a Christian writing primarily to a Christian audience, I presuppose (and not blindly) God to be who has revealed Himself to be in the Bible: a self-existent, self-conscious, personal, and absolute Being. While we could dive into the fascinating nature and being of God, for the sake of this post we won’t. We will be assuming this.
To get back to the question, anyone who has this pre-understanding of God must answer “yes”. God, by necessity of His nature, must know all things. But what is the nature of God’s knowledge? What does it mean for God “to know”. Certainly it is different from our experience and ability to know because God is different than us. To begin answering this question, it is common to divide the knowledge which God posses into two parts: necessary and free.
Necessary knowledge pertains to God’s complete knowledge of Himself and thus His power to act and create. This means that God knows everything that He can possibly do. This knowledge is not successive, like ours, bringing one piece of knowledge to the forefront of His mind while letting others pass into the background. Neither is God’s knowledge attained by discovery. He has knowledge in and of Himself. This means God has all of His knowledge consciously before Him at all times and no new knowledge is gained. Pretty incredible, right?
Free knowledge pertains to God’s knowledge of the created order based on His eternal purpose. The entirety of creation operates according to the purpose of His will (Ephesians 1:11). This is an important point we’ll come back to later.
What’s the Problem?
So, now we have an idea of how God’s knowledge works, but one problem is created if we say that God knows all things: how can God know all things while humans still act freely in the world? If God knows everything I will do, then I can’t be acting freely.
The implied proposition is this:
if God knows everything I will do, that means there is an unchangeable course to my future.
If there is an unchangeable course to my future, then in what way do I make meaningfully free decisions.
Also implied in our problem is the idea that if God knows what I will do, He must have some control over what I will do since He is God. He is the one who makes my future unchangeable.
A Possible Solution
Coming now to the main point of this article, I will introduce Molinism and its proposed solution to this problem. Molinism comes from the Spanish Catholic theologian Luis de Molina. He was a Jesuit in particular, which is important because the Jesuit branch of Catholicism was formed in response to the Reformation and was an officially sanctioned arm of the Catholic church in 1540 by Pope John Paul II.
The way in which Molinism seeks to resolve this tension is by introducing a third part to the nature of God’s knowledge that we discussed earlier: middle knowledge. Middle knowledge comes between Natural and Free knowledge. It states that God knows everything that would happen. A helpful way to understand the difference between each of these modes of knowledge comes from William Lane Craig who distinguishes them in this way:
Natural Knowledge: what could be.
Middle Knowledge: what would be.
Free Knowledge: what will be.1
The way this resolves the tension between an all-knowing God and free human action is to say that, in God’s Middle Knowledge, He takes into account free human choices. For example, if God creates Peter in X situation, God knows Peter will make Y choice. So, God can still plan the course of history (and thus know the future) while maintaining Libertarian freedom.
The Failure of Molinism
There are two problems that we face immediately with this view: (1) if humans have genuine, Libertarian freedom, then God cannot know for certain what Peter will do in X situation. He can only know with some amount of probability. Imagine God puts Peter in X situation expecting him to make Y choice. If Peter has genuine, Libertarian freedom, then Peter could reasonably choose Z choice instead. What happens when Peter makes Z choice instead of Y choice in situation X? Does God have to course correct? How can God guarantee any outcome in ordering history in this way?
(2) God’s eternal decrees are now ordered around granting and maintaining Libertarian freedom to human beings instead of “him who works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Eph. 1:11). This is perhaps one of the greatest weaknesses to Arminian theology. It typically begins with some reactionary and emotionally-driven response to God’s meticulous providence. It feels wrong. Consider Tim Stratton in his meticulously written Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism:
“There is inherent in the human psyche a rebellion against any sense that individuals do not control their own destinies, that is, that all of a person’s thoughts and actions are at the mercy of and are being controlled by someone or something else. People intuitively sense that they are – and must be- free in their thinking, decisions, and at least in some of their actions. Perhaps it is this inner intuition that has moved many Christians to argue against determinism…”2
But why is this intuition to be trusted? The Bible teaches that mankind are sinful from birth and not only make sinful and wrong choices, but also have wrongly ordered desires, affections, and thinking. Perhaps this rebellion, as Stratton aptly calls it, is exactly that: a rebellion against God-given realities. Mankind in his naturally sinful state, hates the things of God (Rom. 8:7). Part of sanctification is not just learning to act rightly, but also learning to love the things that God loves and hating the things that God hates. Just because we are Christians does not mean that all our desires are right and holy.
At the end of the day, Molinism proposal does not differ that much from the traditional, Reformed proposal to this tension. God must order the world such that His purposes are accomplished. Let’s take look at the most significant event in history to see how Molinism stands up, namely Christ’s death on the cross.
If God wanted Christ to be crucified on the cross to atone for sins, God must have actualized a reality in which:
(1) Judas was born at the correct time and inclined to betray Jesus.
(2) the Sandhedrin and all Jesus’ enemies would be so disinclined to trust in Jesus that they would want Him killed.
(3) Pontius Pilate would be disinclined from freeing Jesus and inclined to let Him be crucified.
These three necessary events must have occurred for the crucifixion of Jesus. So, God actualizes a world in which all of these people are inclined to make the decisions they did in the situations they were in. How does this differ from simply saying that God ordained all these events to come to pass? It is functionally the same because the end of God’s actions is the same and even the method remains the same.
The only difference is that the Molinist adds one extra step in God’s planning by saying God wanted this to happen, considered the free choices of man, and then made it happen whereas Calvinists simply say that God wanted this to happen and made it happen.
The other difference is that God took a risk (even if it was a low risk) in making His plan according to how people would choose in Y situation.
Follow The “Ancient Path”
It is much simpler and less convoluted to say, with Scripture, that God works all things according to the counsel of His will. The traditional, Reformed perspective has much to say about how these two Biblical truths hold together (i.e., Divine (fore)knowledge and human freedom), but the fact that these two truths exist in Scripture must be maintained. God is wholly in control of the entirety of human history and the universe *AND* human beings have free will.
More can be said about how the Reformed tradition speaks to this tension, but that is not the focus of this article. One thing the Reformed tradition does do is acknowledge the proper place for mystery. Because God does not reveal everything in Scripture and because our minds are finite, there are some aspects of God and His work in this world that we will not have a full or exhaustive understanding of. There will be gaps in our knowledge and it is okay to acknowledge that and offer up those things which we do not know to God Almighty and trust His wisdom in what He has revealed to us.
All this to say, although Molinism seems like a new and interesting view, it fails to offer a Biblically and theologically robust answer to the Biblical data that reveals to us the Divine truth of God’s complete sovereignty and man’s freedom and responsibility.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
1Quoted in Tim Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism, 214.
2Tim Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism, 6.