(This is an expansion on me previous article dealing with the problem of feasibility under Molinism - found here.)
MORE PROBLEMS WITH FEASIBILITY
A common statement among Molinists in attempting to defend their system, is that some world may not be “feasible” for God due to the facts of creaturely freedom. Let me first try to explain what they mean and then ask my questions for someone who may want to make such a defense.
For the Molinist, a major benefit of Molinism is their belief that it best handles the supposed problem of evil/suffering in the actual world, and/or that it explains why God did not make a universalist world where all humanity is saved (or never sins to not need saving in the first place). So when someone makes such a challenge to the Christian worldview, the Molinist will jump in and attempt to defend God’s having morally sufficient reasons (MSR) for creating this world because human freedom is of such a high value that God would want to create a world with creatures that possess it. This answer has one assumption and then the major application.
First, the assumption is that human freedom just is Libertarian Freewill (LFW). This limits the kind of answer that the Molinist feels that they can give. For them, that freedom allows for the possibility of people doing things contrary to what God would otherwise desire for them. They support this with certain readings of passages like 1 Timothy 2:4 and 2 Peter 3:9 in which they think the Bible teaches that God desires every person without exception to be saved and not perish. So they need to explain exactly why God could desire none to perish and yet create a world in which vast untold numbers of people do perish. So they think LFW is the explanation for this – people do contrary to the thing that God would actually want to happen.
But this assumption leads to another question. If God is Omnipotent, couldn’t God just create a world where everyone then believes? This question appears to them to violate LFW such that those beings would not actually be free in a non-trivial sense. They think that God doing that would be too deterministic and would remove LFW from humanity. This then leads to the application of their view.
They want to affirm that God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent and that humanity has LFW. So the way they attempt to resolve the tension is to say this this is the best possible world that God could create, given LFW (usually they call it “creaturely freedom” but in concept, they just mean LFW). This should not be confused with Best Possible World semantics. They are not saying that the world is the best quantitatively – there could always be more palm trees, as William Lane Craig likes to point out. They mean that if God wants to have genuinely free creatures (sic. LFW) and if God wants a world where in the final analysis the most numbers of people are saved, then this world may be the best possible world that God could actualize.
Before I get to my critiques and questions, let me also add a feature of many Molinists beliefs as influenced by the world of Craig and Plantinga. That is the idea of Transworld Depravity – that there is the possibility of persons who would not believe in any possible world that God would put them in. Craig uses this to try and explain the problem of the unevangelized – the Mayans for example. There is an objection that God would be unjust in damning these people to hell for their sin if they never had the gospel preached to them in order to be able to repent and believe. Craig says that it may be possible that God stacks the deck and all of these people may be people with Transworld Depravity, such that God knows that even if he did put them in the context where they would hear the gospel that they would never, in any context, believe and be saved.
From here let me move into my critiques and questions. I’ll try to flesh out some of the Molinist views and responses as this goes so as to not engage a strawman.
First, Craig, Stratton, and pretty much every Molinist I have heard address the issue, define Omnipotence as the ability to do any logically possible thing. Why can God not lie, not create a married-bachelor, or not create a rock so heavy that he cannot lift it? Because those are all logically impossible (and thus propositionally meaningless) things. God cannot make a true contradiction without violating his own inviolable nature. Here we are all in agreement. We would all reject (to my knowledge) a kind of Voluntarism which would say that God could do any thing, logical possibility be damned.
Yet here is where I start to have several problems with the Molinistic metaphysic.
Let’s try to use these terms:
(p) = a specific possible world
(n) = number of people who freely believe
O = actualizable for an omnipotent being
(R) = the real world (this world)
G = foreknown by God
A = Actualized
Let me lay out several related arguments and why I think those poses a problem for the Molinistic metaphysic and concept of feasibility.
Symbolic:
1. ◊(p) ⊃ ◊O(p)
2. ◊(p)
3. ◊O(p)
4. A(p) ⊃ (n)
5. (p) ⊃ G(n)
6. A(p) ⊃ G(n)
7. G│A(p) ⊃ (n)
8. A(p)
9. (p) ≡ (R)
10. (R) ⊨ (n)
11. G(n)
Stated:
1. If (p) is possible, then it is possible for an omnipotent being to actualize it.
2. (p) is possible.
3. It is possible for an omnipotent being to actualize (p).
4. If (p) is actualized, then (n) people will freely believe in God.
5. If (n) people will freely believe, then (n) will be foreknown by God.
6. If (p) is actualized, then (n) will be foreknown by God.
7. God knows that if he were to actualize (p) then (n) will freely believe.
8. God actualizes (p).
9. (p) is identical to the actual world.
10. The actual world entails (n) freely believing.
11. God foreknew (n).
So far this argument should be rather trivial to the Molinist. Basically it argues that for any possible world, whatever number of people that will freely believe if God actualizes that world, that God would foreknow that, and that since the actual world is clearly a possible world (or else God couldn’t have actualized it) that given God’s actualization of it, God foreknows the number of people who freely believe in it. None of this is really debatable as far as I can tell. But there are implications of this that I think will plague the Molinist.
Let us now run some various scenarios and see what happens. Prior to God’s actualization of the actual world (R), God foreknows (n). For our purposes let us now set (n) to a specific number of individuals equal to 15% of all humans to ever exist in the actual world and let’s call this number (x). This means:
Symbolic:
12. ◊(R)
13. (R) ⊃ (x)
14. G│A(w) ⊃ (x)
Stated:
12. The actual world is possible.
13. If the actual world exists, then (x) will freely believe.
14. God foreknows that if he actualizes this world, that (x) will freely believe.
This means that God has actualized (R) and therefore (x) number of specific individual people freely believe, and God foreknows who they are. Our human freedom is accounted for as a fact of (R) and thus God’s knowledge of (x) or our creaturely freedom does not alter (x). This means that the logical possibility of (x) given (R) is not altered by a later consideration that human freedom would exist. Human freedom is already a given as a fact of (x) given (R).
This too is a metaphysically trivial for the Molinist. So far I am just describing basic modality and entails of logically possible worlds. But here is where the problem arises. Let us alter the settings a little bit from the previous scenario. Now let us suppose that prior to God’s actualization of a logically possible world (W), God foreknows (n). For our purposes let us now set (n) to a specific number of individuals equal to 100% of all humans to ever exist in the actual world and let’s call this number (x).
This means:
15. ◊(W)
16. (W) ⊃ (x)
17. G│A(w) ⊃ (x)
Or stated as,
15. (W) is possible.
16. If the actual world exists, then (x) will freely believe.
17. God foreknows that if he actualizes this world, that (x) will freely believe.
This means that God has actualized (W) and therefore (x) number of specific individual people freely believe, and God foreknows who they are. Our human freedom is accounted for as a fact of (W) and thus God’s knowledge of (x) or our creaturely freedom does not alter (x). This means that the logical possibility of (x) given (W) is not altered by a later consideration that human freedom would exist. Human freedom is already a given as a fact of (x) given (W).
Notice that nothing in the metaphysics of actualizing (W) has changed from the metaphysics of God’s actualization of (R), specifically in how human freedom is already an accounted for fact in God’s foreknowledge of (x) given (R) or (W).
Why is this important?
Well it means that if there is a logically possible world that God could have propositionally meaningful foreknowledge about, then the freedom of the agents in that world is baked in already, so to speak, regardless of the number of people which are foreknown to believe. If this is true of the world which God chose to actualize, then this will be true of the worlds that God could have actualized. Yet this is a strong refutation of the concept that some worlds are logically possible for God to have actualized but are still yet infeasible for God to have actualized. And appeals to human freedom will no longer do it given the argument above because human freedom is already accounted for in God’s knowledge of the supposedly infeasible worlds. If (W) were actual, then 100% of humanity (equal to the number of people in the actual world) will use their freedom to believe. The Molinist wants to say that given human freedom, it may be that God could not actualize this world because no humans in that configuration would ever freely believe. This means that what they are trying to say is that (W) is not feasible because it may be the case that given (W), ~(x) would believe (or that (x) would not obtain). Yet that just seems a claim to far that merely moves the goal post. We would need good warrant to think that given that definitional to (W) just is that (x) is true given that (x) is just want propositionally demarcates (W) from all other possible worlds. The Molinist is therefore saying that if (W) then ~(W), that is, that (W) is logically impossible. But notice that no warrant is given for that. It is just that maybe people wont freely believe in that volume. But no reason is given and no demonstration of any logical incoherence is ever provided.
Therefore, if God’s omnipotence means that he can actualize any logically possible world, the Molinist must then show that (W) is actually somehow logically impossible and cannot merely state a “what if” or a “maybe” since (W) would follow the same metaphysical entailments with regard to God’s knowledge as there is in (R).
In fact we can push this further. On Molinism, Middle Knowledge (MK) is God’s knowledge of the counterfactuals in creaturely freedom (CCF), or what agents would freely choose in possible worlds that are not the actual world. Let’s consider the following question:
Does God’s MK include the CCF’s of (W)?
I’ve asked countless Molinists this question and always get the same question. Of course it includes the CCF’s of (W). Why? Because they are logically coherent and meaningfully stated propositions of logical possibility – the Molinist needs to defend that God’s MK is exhaustive of all logically possible facts or else they would be biting the bullet and admitting that God’s MK is not exhaustive and does not include all logically coherent and meaningful possibilities. This means that they need to affirm that (W) is logically possible while also arguing that it is logically impossible (and thus infeasible).
Here the response will come that they think I am confusing strict logical possibility and broad possibility or feasibility. But I am not. For without some meaningful metaphysical difference between the two, we have been provided no meaningful reason to think that some strictly logically possible world is not feasible for an omnipotent God to actualize, despite the fact that he foreknows the CCF’s in that world in precisely the way that he does all other logically possible and even feasible worlds.
To sum up, when a Molinist argues that some logically possible world is not a feasible world, I simply ask them, based on what? What makes it infeasible for an omnipotent God to actualize given the metaphysics of freedom and MK would be identical to the actual world and all other feasible worlds?
Going back to Craigs use of Transworld Depraved Persons (TWDP), we could also ask other questions of the Molinist who thinks that this is a meaningful concept and answer to the problem of the unevangelized. There seems to be a potentially infinite number of different and distinct persons that God could have logically actualized. This entails that if TWDP is a meaningful concept, that there is a potentially infinite number of persons with TWDPs. Yet this opens the question to Transworld Righteous Persons (TWRP) who would freely believe in those same worlds, such that if TWDP is meaningful and helpful, then surely TWRP is as well. And yet this would mean that there is a potentially infinite number of TWRPs that God could have populated any world with and thus could rather easily actualize any number of worlds like (W). Yet many Molinists say that the probability of this is extremely low.
Yet, if there is a potentially infinite amount of them (a number incalculably greater than the actual number of humans today) why would a world full of them be "extremely low"? Based on what? A hunch? What is the metaphysically meaningful difference that precludes the possibility of the flip side of the same coin that they want to use.
Now, I'm not trying to be condescending, really. I have great respect for Craig and Stratton and other but I honestly just never hear any actual support for any of the "feasibility" assertions made by Molinists. I not only dont see why any logically possible world is infeasible for an omnipotent God to actualize (infeasible becomes a synonym for impossible at that point) but beyond that, even if the odds are low, can God not actualize states of affairs with low probabilities?
Finally, it seems that this strategy of arbitrarily saying that these other worlds us universal salvation are not feasible, proves far too much and may provide all the rope needed to hang the usefulness of Molinism itself. For a long time I posed this objection and would get vehement opposition from Molinists but recently I have been vindicated as Molinist par excellence Kirk MacGregor has bit the bullet ad admitted my conclusion.
Remember that Molinism is applied as an answer the problem of evil and suffer – that given LFW, a world with as much suffering as ours may be the best God could do given his goals of saving the most amount of people. Well it seems to me that the atheist and skeptic could use their very argument against them for maybe, given LFW, the world with the most saved freely may also have unavoidable gratuitous evil and suffering in it. In the same way that God desires all to be saved but all are not, it could be possible that God secondarily desires that all evil and suffering in the world would be redemptive (part of his plan, purpose, used for an ultimate good, have a MSR for God allowing, etc) and yet, given LFW, maybe such a world is not feasible for God to actualize and so God is dealt a deck of cards where all feasible worlds just are worlds with gratuitous (outside of God’s plan and purpose) evil and suffering. What rejoinder would the Molinist have for this that would not also be a response to their own feasibility argument? MacGregor seems to have accepted this and recently has been defending that there really is gratuitous evil and suffering in the world (despite the Biblical claims to God’s sovereignty over all things and his working of all things for the good of those who love him).
We could even push this envelope further to a kind of grounding problem based on feasibility. Maybe it be possible that the only worlds feasible for God to actualize given LFW, are free actions of humans unknowable to God. Without appealing to simply brute tautological reason (“God knows it in virtue of him knowing all things so that cannot be”), how would the Molinist avoid the Open Theist using Molinism itself as a defense of their view?
Remember, these are only some of the questions and challenges that I raise against Molinists. I have argued elsewhere against the notion that LFW even would suffice as a MSR to allow the victimization of evil and suffering, that it causes problems for a Biblical concept of personhood, of anthropology, that it may entail Open Theism, etc., and so I think before we can even consider Molinism feasible, they must show that it is even logically possible. So far, I just do not see how that could be achieved given these and other objections.
FOR THE MAIN DIRECTORY OF RESOURCES ON MOLINISM, CLICK HERE.
MORE PROBLEMS WITH FEASIBILITY
A common statement among Molinists in attempting to defend their system, is that some world may not be “feasible” for God due to the facts of creaturely freedom. Let me first try to explain what they mean and then ask my questions for someone who may want to make such a defense.
For the Molinist, a major benefit of Molinism is their belief that it best handles the supposed problem of evil/suffering in the actual world, and/or that it explains why God did not make a universalist world where all humanity is saved (or never sins to not need saving in the first place). So when someone makes such a challenge to the Christian worldview, the Molinist will jump in and attempt to defend God’s having morally sufficient reasons (MSR) for creating this world because human freedom is of such a high value that God would want to create a world with creatures that possess it. This answer has one assumption and then the major application.
First, the assumption is that human freedom just is Libertarian Freewill (LFW). This limits the kind of answer that the Molinist feels that they can give. For them, that freedom allows for the possibility of people doing things contrary to what God would otherwise desire for them. They support this with certain readings of passages like 1 Timothy 2:4 and 2 Peter 3:9 in which they think the Bible teaches that God desires every person without exception to be saved and not perish. So they need to explain exactly why God could desire none to perish and yet create a world in which vast untold numbers of people do perish. So they think LFW is the explanation for this – people do contrary to the thing that God would actually want to happen.
But this assumption leads to another question. If God is Omnipotent, couldn’t God just create a world where everyone then believes? This question appears to them to violate LFW such that those beings would not actually be free in a non-trivial sense. They think that God doing that would be too deterministic and would remove LFW from humanity. This then leads to the application of their view.
They want to affirm that God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent and that humanity has LFW. So the way they attempt to resolve the tension is to say this this is the best possible world that God could create, given LFW (usually they call it “creaturely freedom” but in concept, they just mean LFW). This should not be confused with Best Possible World semantics. They are not saying that the world is the best quantitatively – there could always be more palm trees, as William Lane Craig likes to point out. They mean that if God wants to have genuinely free creatures (sic. LFW) and if God wants a world where in the final analysis the most numbers of people are saved, then this world may be the best possible world that God could actualize.
Before I get to my critiques and questions, let me also add a feature of many Molinists beliefs as influenced by the world of Craig and Plantinga. That is the idea of Transworld Depravity – that there is the possibility of persons who would not believe in any possible world that God would put them in. Craig uses this to try and explain the problem of the unevangelized – the Mayans for example. There is an objection that God would be unjust in damning these people to hell for their sin if they never had the gospel preached to them in order to be able to repent and believe. Craig says that it may be possible that God stacks the deck and all of these people may be people with Transworld Depravity, such that God knows that even if he did put them in the context where they would hear the gospel that they would never, in any context, believe and be saved.
From here let me move into my critiques and questions. I’ll try to flesh out some of the Molinist views and responses as this goes so as to not engage a strawman.
First, Craig, Stratton, and pretty much every Molinist I have heard address the issue, define Omnipotence as the ability to do any logically possible thing. Why can God not lie, not create a married-bachelor, or not create a rock so heavy that he cannot lift it? Because those are all logically impossible (and thus propositionally meaningless) things. God cannot make a true contradiction without violating his own inviolable nature. Here we are all in agreement. We would all reject (to my knowledge) a kind of Voluntarism which would say that God could do any thing, logical possibility be damned.
Yet here is where I start to have several problems with the Molinistic metaphysic.
Let’s try to use these terms:
(p) = a specific possible world
(n) = number of people who freely believe
O = actualizable for an omnipotent being
(R) = the real world (this world)
G = foreknown by God
A = Actualized
Let me lay out several related arguments and why I think those poses a problem for the Molinistic metaphysic and concept of feasibility.
Symbolic:
1. ◊(p) ⊃ ◊O(p)
2. ◊(p)
3. ◊O(p)
4. A(p) ⊃ (n)
5. (p) ⊃ G(n)
6. A(p) ⊃ G(n)
7. G│A(p) ⊃ (n)
8. A(p)
9. (p) ≡ (R)
10. (R) ⊨ (n)
11. G(n)
Stated:
1. If (p) is possible, then it is possible for an omnipotent being to actualize it.
2. (p) is possible.
3. It is possible for an omnipotent being to actualize (p).
4. If (p) is actualized, then (n) people will freely believe in God.
5. If (n) people will freely believe, then (n) will be foreknown by God.
6. If (p) is actualized, then (n) will be foreknown by God.
7. God knows that if he were to actualize (p) then (n) will freely believe.
8. God actualizes (p).
9. (p) is identical to the actual world.
10. The actual world entails (n) freely believing.
11. God foreknew (n).
So far this argument should be rather trivial to the Molinist. Basically it argues that for any possible world, whatever number of people that will freely believe if God actualizes that world, that God would foreknow that, and that since the actual world is clearly a possible world (or else God couldn’t have actualized it) that given God’s actualization of it, God foreknows the number of people who freely believe in it. None of this is really debatable as far as I can tell. But there are implications of this that I think will plague the Molinist.
Let us now run some various scenarios and see what happens. Prior to God’s actualization of the actual world (R), God foreknows (n). For our purposes let us now set (n) to a specific number of individuals equal to 15% of all humans to ever exist in the actual world and let’s call this number (x). This means:
Symbolic:
12. ◊(R)
13. (R) ⊃ (x)
14. G│A(w) ⊃ (x)
Stated:
12. The actual world is possible.
13. If the actual world exists, then (x) will freely believe.
14. God foreknows that if he actualizes this world, that (x) will freely believe.
This means that God has actualized (R) and therefore (x) number of specific individual people freely believe, and God foreknows who they are. Our human freedom is accounted for as a fact of (R) and thus God’s knowledge of (x) or our creaturely freedom does not alter (x). This means that the logical possibility of (x) given (R) is not altered by a later consideration that human freedom would exist. Human freedom is already a given as a fact of (x) given (R).
This too is a metaphysically trivial for the Molinist. So far I am just describing basic modality and entails of logically possible worlds. But here is where the problem arises. Let us alter the settings a little bit from the previous scenario. Now let us suppose that prior to God’s actualization of a logically possible world (W), God foreknows (n). For our purposes let us now set (n) to a specific number of individuals equal to 100% of all humans to ever exist in the actual world and let’s call this number (x).
This means:
15. ◊(W)
16. (W) ⊃ (x)
17. G│A(w) ⊃ (x)
Or stated as,
15. (W) is possible.
16. If the actual world exists, then (x) will freely believe.
17. God foreknows that if he actualizes this world, that (x) will freely believe.
This means that God has actualized (W) and therefore (x) number of specific individual people freely believe, and God foreknows who they are. Our human freedom is accounted for as a fact of (W) and thus God’s knowledge of (x) or our creaturely freedom does not alter (x). This means that the logical possibility of (x) given (W) is not altered by a later consideration that human freedom would exist. Human freedom is already a given as a fact of (x) given (W).
Notice that nothing in the metaphysics of actualizing (W) has changed from the metaphysics of God’s actualization of (R), specifically in how human freedom is already an accounted for fact in God’s foreknowledge of (x) given (R) or (W).
Why is this important?
Well it means that if there is a logically possible world that God could have propositionally meaningful foreknowledge about, then the freedom of the agents in that world is baked in already, so to speak, regardless of the number of people which are foreknown to believe. If this is true of the world which God chose to actualize, then this will be true of the worlds that God could have actualized. Yet this is a strong refutation of the concept that some worlds are logically possible for God to have actualized but are still yet infeasible for God to have actualized. And appeals to human freedom will no longer do it given the argument above because human freedom is already accounted for in God’s knowledge of the supposedly infeasible worlds. If (W) were actual, then 100% of humanity (equal to the number of people in the actual world) will use their freedom to believe. The Molinist wants to say that given human freedom, it may be that God could not actualize this world because no humans in that configuration would ever freely believe. This means that what they are trying to say is that (W) is not feasible because it may be the case that given (W), ~(x) would believe (or that (x) would not obtain). Yet that just seems a claim to far that merely moves the goal post. We would need good warrant to think that given that definitional to (W) just is that (x) is true given that (x) is just want propositionally demarcates (W) from all other possible worlds. The Molinist is therefore saying that if (W) then ~(W), that is, that (W) is logically impossible. But notice that no warrant is given for that. It is just that maybe people wont freely believe in that volume. But no reason is given and no demonstration of any logical incoherence is ever provided.
Therefore, if God’s omnipotence means that he can actualize any logically possible world, the Molinist must then show that (W) is actually somehow logically impossible and cannot merely state a “what if” or a “maybe” since (W) would follow the same metaphysical entailments with regard to God’s knowledge as there is in (R).
In fact we can push this further. On Molinism, Middle Knowledge (MK) is God’s knowledge of the counterfactuals in creaturely freedom (CCF), or what agents would freely choose in possible worlds that are not the actual world. Let’s consider the following question:
Does God’s MK include the CCF’s of (W)?
I’ve asked countless Molinists this question and always get the same question. Of course it includes the CCF’s of (W). Why? Because they are logically coherent and meaningfully stated propositions of logical possibility – the Molinist needs to defend that God’s MK is exhaustive of all logically possible facts or else they would be biting the bullet and admitting that God’s MK is not exhaustive and does not include all logically coherent and meaningful possibilities. This means that they need to affirm that (W) is logically possible while also arguing that it is logically impossible (and thus infeasible).
Here the response will come that they think I am confusing strict logical possibility and broad possibility or feasibility. But I am not. For without some meaningful metaphysical difference between the two, we have been provided no meaningful reason to think that some strictly logically possible world is not feasible for an omnipotent God to actualize, despite the fact that he foreknows the CCF’s in that world in precisely the way that he does all other logically possible and even feasible worlds.
To sum up, when a Molinist argues that some logically possible world is not a feasible world, I simply ask them, based on what? What makes it infeasible for an omnipotent God to actualize given the metaphysics of freedom and MK would be identical to the actual world and all other feasible worlds?
Going back to Craigs use of Transworld Depraved Persons (TWDP), we could also ask other questions of the Molinist who thinks that this is a meaningful concept and answer to the problem of the unevangelized. There seems to be a potentially infinite number of different and distinct persons that God could have logically actualized. This entails that if TWDP is a meaningful concept, that there is a potentially infinite number of persons with TWDPs. Yet this opens the question to Transworld Righteous Persons (TWRP) who would freely believe in those same worlds, such that if TWDP is meaningful and helpful, then surely TWRP is as well. And yet this would mean that there is a potentially infinite number of TWRPs that God could have populated any world with and thus could rather easily actualize any number of worlds like (W). Yet many Molinists say that the probability of this is extremely low.
Yet, if there is a potentially infinite amount of them (a number incalculably greater than the actual number of humans today) why would a world full of them be "extremely low"? Based on what? A hunch? What is the metaphysically meaningful difference that precludes the possibility of the flip side of the same coin that they want to use.
Now, I'm not trying to be condescending, really. I have great respect for Craig and Stratton and other but I honestly just never hear any actual support for any of the "feasibility" assertions made by Molinists. I not only dont see why any logically possible world is infeasible for an omnipotent God to actualize (infeasible becomes a synonym for impossible at that point) but beyond that, even if the odds are low, can God not actualize states of affairs with low probabilities?
Finally, it seems that this strategy of arbitrarily saying that these other worlds us universal salvation are not feasible, proves far too much and may provide all the rope needed to hang the usefulness of Molinism itself. For a long time I posed this objection and would get vehement opposition from Molinists but recently I have been vindicated as Molinist par excellence Kirk MacGregor has bit the bullet ad admitted my conclusion.
Remember that Molinism is applied as an answer the problem of evil and suffer – that given LFW, a world with as much suffering as ours may be the best God could do given his goals of saving the most amount of people. Well it seems to me that the atheist and skeptic could use their very argument against them for maybe, given LFW, the world with the most saved freely may also have unavoidable gratuitous evil and suffering in it. In the same way that God desires all to be saved but all are not, it could be possible that God secondarily desires that all evil and suffering in the world would be redemptive (part of his plan, purpose, used for an ultimate good, have a MSR for God allowing, etc) and yet, given LFW, maybe such a world is not feasible for God to actualize and so God is dealt a deck of cards where all feasible worlds just are worlds with gratuitous (outside of God’s plan and purpose) evil and suffering. What rejoinder would the Molinist have for this that would not also be a response to their own feasibility argument? MacGregor seems to have accepted this and recently has been defending that there really is gratuitous evil and suffering in the world (despite the Biblical claims to God’s sovereignty over all things and his working of all things for the good of those who love him).
We could even push this envelope further to a kind of grounding problem based on feasibility. Maybe it be possible that the only worlds feasible for God to actualize given LFW, are free actions of humans unknowable to God. Without appealing to simply brute tautological reason (“God knows it in virtue of him knowing all things so that cannot be”), how would the Molinist avoid the Open Theist using Molinism itself as a defense of their view?
Remember, these are only some of the questions and challenges that I raise against Molinists. I have argued elsewhere against the notion that LFW even would suffice as a MSR to allow the victimization of evil and suffering, that it causes problems for a Biblical concept of personhood, of anthropology, that it may entail Open Theism, etc., and so I think before we can even consider Molinism feasible, they must show that it is even logically possible. So far, I just do not see how that could be achieved given these and other objections.
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