A leading figure in sixteenth-century Iberian scholasticism, Molina was one of the most controversial thinkers in the history of Catholic thought. In keeping with the strongly libertarian account of human free choice that marked the early Jesuit theologians, Molina held that God's causal influence on free human acts does not by its intrinsic nature uniquely determine what those acts will be or whether they will be good or evil. Because of this, Molina asserted against his Dominican rivals that God's comprehensive (...) providential plan for the created world and infallible foreknowledge of future contingents do not derive just from the combination of his antecedent "natural" knowledge of metaphysically necessary truths and his "free" knowledge of the causal influence - both natural (general concurrence) and supernatural (grace) - by which he wills to cooperate with free human acts. Rather, in addition to God's natural knowledge, Molina posited a distinct kind of antecedent divine knowledge, dubbed "middle" knowledge, by which God knows pre-volitionally, i.e., prior to any free decree of his own will regarding contingent beings, how any possible rational creature would in fact freely choose to act in any possible circumstances in which it had the power to act freely. And on this basis Molina proceeded to forge his controversial reconciliation of free choice with the Catholic doctrines of grace, divine foreknowledge, providence, and predestination. In addition to his work in dogmatic theology, Molina was also an accomplished moral and political philosopher who wrote extensive and empirically well-informed tracts on political authority, slavery, war, and economics. (shrink)

R. M. Adams’s essay, “Must God Create the Best?” can be interpreted as offering a theodicy for God’s creating morally less perfect beings than he could have created. By creating these morally less perfect beings, God is bestowing grace upon them, which is an unmerited or undeserved benefit. He does so, however, in advance of the free moral misdeeds that render them undeserving. This requires that God have middle knowledge, pace Adams’s version of the Free Will Theodicy, of what would (...) result from his actualization of possible free persons. It is argued that God’s possession of such middle knowledge negates the freedom of created beings, since God completely determines every action of every created person. And since they are not free, they cannot qualify as morally unmeritorious or undeserving. And, with that, Adams’s theodicy of grace-in-advance collapses. (shrink)

Christian responses to the developing field of evolutionary psychology tend to be defensive, focusing on the task of showing that Christians have not beenpresented with any reason to abandon any central beliefs of the Christian faith. A more positive response would seek to show that evolutionary psychologycan provide some sort of epistemic support for one or more distinctively Christian doctrines. This paper is an attempt to supply such a response by focusing on the distinctively Christian doctrine of original sin, which (...) presents itself as an especially likely candidate for support from evolutionary psychology. I consider five versions of the doctrine in order of increasing content, arguing that all but the last can receive such support. However, in order to argue for the fourth version (which includes the doctrine traditionally described as “original guilt”), I enlist the aid of a Molinist understanding of divine providence. A consequence of this application of Molinism is that God holds us morally accountable, not only for what we actually do, but also for what we would do in any non-actual conditions, and that He acts on His knowledge of what we would do in such conditions. Because many may find this consequence problematic, I also argue that it is both morally acceptableand necessary for the perfection of the relationship between God and human beings. The last version of original sin that I consider insists that it must be thecausal product of the first sin of the first human being(s), but I argue that this is not a reasonable alternative if original sin is to be equated with behavioraltendencies inherited from an evolutionary ancestry. (shrink)

Eleonore Stump develops and defends a theodicy of redemptive suffering. In particular, God's permission of suffering (at least some classes, if not instances, of serious undeserved, involuntary suffering due to natural or free causes) is justified just in case it benefits those who suffer, it is the best possible means in the circumstances for their benefit, and God knows this is the case. The main aim of this paper is to show that for Stump's theodicy to have a good chance (...) of working, it is reasonable to think that it requires the Molinist claim that God has middle knowledge. (shrink)

An important question raised in the Molinist debate is, ‘Given God's access to counterfactual knowledge, could God create a world in which free creatures always refrain from evil?’ An affirmative answer suggests that God cannot possess counterfactual knowledge since such knowledge would allow God to create seemingly more desirable worlds than the actual world. However, Alvin Plantinga has argued that it is at least possible that every possible person is transworld depraved – meaning that each person would perform some wrong (...) actions if any world in which that person is morally free were actualized. I argue that, given an infinite number of possible persons, the probability that everyone is transworld depraved is exceedingly low. In addition, I investigate whether there are enough possible persons vis-à-vis the number of moral choices per person so that God could create worlds like the actual world, except lacking in moral evil. (shrink)

Molinism is an attempt to do equal justice to divine foreknowledge and human freedom. For Molinists, human freedom fits in this universe for the future is open or unsettled. However, God’s middle knowledge — God’s contingent knowledge of what agents would freely do in this or that circumstance — underwrites God’s omniscience in the midst of this openness. In this paper I rehearse Nuel Belnap and Mitchell Green’s argument in “Indeterminism and the Thin Red Line” against the reality of (...) a distinguished single future in the context of branching time [2], and show that it applies applies equally against Molinism + branching time. In the process, we show how contemporary work in the logic of temporal notions in the context of branching time (specifically, Prior–Thomason semantics) can illuminate discussions in the metaphysics of freedom and divine knowledge. (shrink)