In this series of articles, I'm going to give the text version of the episode I did entitled "Metaphsyics and the Failure of Molinism." I will devote one blog post to each of the sections that I provided in that episode and I will then add to these considerations as I develop my thoughts and arguments on the issue of Molinism. Please remember that this was originally a comprehensive whole and that some of this is directly related to other articles that have gone before or will come after it. I recognize that I am disrupting some of the unity of the argumentation here by dividing them this way but I hope that this deficit is overcome by the benefit of having the arguments in more bite sized chunks.
Enjoy!
________
INTRODUCTION - TERMS AND INTRO
Definitions:
1. Natural Knowledge – This is the kind of knowledge that God has of necessary truths that are true independent of God’s will or decree. Examples: 1+1=2, “All bachelors are unmarried,” “no squares are circles,” etc.
2. Free Knowledge – This is the kind of knowledge that God has of contingent truths, that is, propositions that are true given God’s will/decree in the actual world. Examples: “The sky is blue,” “the universe was created by God,” etc.
3. Middle Knowledge (MK) – This is the kind of knowledge that God has of counterfactuals of worlds that he could have created but did not create. These are facts that could have been but are not. Examples, “Had Tyler been born with two X chromosomes, then he would have been born female,” “had Mozart died at birth, we would not have his music,” etc.
4. Counterfactuals of Creaturely Freedom (CCFs) – propositional facts about what free creatures would have done in other possible worlds.
Claimed Benefits of Molinism
5. Preserves some version of Libertarian Free Choice without substantially sacrificing Divine Sovereignty.
6. Due to A, that Molinism preserves substantive human responsibility.
7. Due to A and B, can give the most robust solutions to the problem of evil/suffering without blame shift to God.
8. Preserves God’s unfulfilled yet genuine desire that all humanity should be saved apart from the Reformed scheme of the two wills of God. Here this is God’s only will and is defeated by the free choice of man to freely reject God. Thus God saves the most that he can without violating their will.
9. A better explanation for the “problem of the unevangelized” where God could have arranged all those who would not believe in any possible world to be born in areas and times where the gospel would never be preached in their life time – where the pearls would never be cast before swine so to speak. (This is not universal to all Molinists, especially those prior to the work of Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig (WLC), but is a common view among current Molinists).
My major objections to Molinism seem, to me at least, to be a development in the discussion of Molinism as a potential way to reconcile God’s sovereignty, and creaturely freedom. While I think there is much fruit to be found in attacking the concepts of omniscience via objections like the Grounding Objection (in which God’s aseity is defended against his being contingent in any way on external truth makers) and I will do so here, I think far more progress can be made in a case against Molinism by attacking the metaphysical assumptions of the system. That is, in addition to confronting the Molinistic view of what God knows, how God knows it, if God really knows it, when he knows it, etc., in order to expose several major problems with Molinism we ought also explore other issues such as the nature of the creative process and its causal impacts, the decrees of God and how they relate to the species of knowledge an omniscient being like God would have, the nature of humans before creation, etc.
It should be stated from the onset of this paper, that in the attempted refutation of Molinism to follow, I am assuming a desire on the reader’s part to remain orthodox, that is, specifically to hold to historic conceptions of the nature of God (Omniscient, Omnipotent, Omnibenevolent, Simple, Immutable in his nature, etc.), the ultimate authority of the Scriptures, Chalcedonian views of Christology, etc. Therefore, if it can be shown that some aspect of Molinism is in direct contradiction to Scripture, or if a result of Molinism is that God is made sufficiently not free (or less free than his creation) in some regard, or that when we shake Molinism, something like Open Theism pops out the other side, then it will have been proven that Molinism cannot be an option for the Christian concerned with maintaining historic Biblical orthodoxy.
IS "MERE" MOLINISM A HELPFUL CONCEPT?
In this section, I will argue that what Stratton and others call “Mere Molinism” (MM) is either misleading and demands the Mere Molinist (MMi) to assume numerous unstated positions, or it dies the death of 1000 qualifications to become so vague that it loses anything inherently Molinistic about it.
MMi’s such as Stratton have made numerous alterations to what content is the necessary core of Molinism such that if someone affirms that content, they can be confidently considered part of the Molinist camp. In an article in August 2016, my friend Tim Stratton argued that the two pillars of MM are:
A. God eternally possesses Middle Knowledge (MK).
B. Humans possess Libertarian Free Will (LFW).
Without impugning my friend, this list is ostensibly before his interest in trying to gain more Reformed or Calvinistic support for MM, and since that emphasis has changed, so has his view of what the core pillars of Molinism must be. By this original list, no consciously Reformed or Calvinistic Christian could affirm Molinism. Not only are terms such as MK and LFW left undefined and undefended, once they are defined, they would be outright rejected (which we will see below). In addition, Libertarian Free Will is antithetical to Reformed and Calvinistic anthropology.
In January of 2018, there was then an attempt by Terri Hollifield, a contributor to Stratton’s blog, to add a 3rd pillar to MM, and he recommended it publicly here to Stratton. This 3rd pillar was:
C. God is Sovereign.
As if the original list was not problematic enough, throwing in such a vague 3rd pillar comes across to those familiar with the intramural debates between Reformed Christians and Molinists to be just a rhetorical hedging – a kind of, “hey, we believe God is sovereign too!” At this point, given A and B, any Reformed Christian reading this (or really any critic of Molinism, MK, and LFW for there are many objectors from many camps), would argue that C is one of the very things that is abandoned by affirming A or B, let alone both. I’m unaware of any private or public discussion on this point between Hollifield and Stratton, but Stratton never seemed to adopt C in his future publications.
In June 2018, Stratton then, likely in the face of pushback and a desire to widen the MM umbrella (both admirable and reasonable motivations), altered the two pillars of MM. In a conversation I had with him, there were a couple different iterations of them (at one point including something even as broad as God being omniscient), but by the time he went to print on his blog, he had landed on these two propositions as the necessary core of MM:
D. Humans sometimes have Limited Libertarian Free Will (LLF).
E. God has middle knowledge (MK).
We can see here the softening of both premises by Stratton. While the alteration of B to D I think was intentional, I’m not sure what benefit is gained from A to E and surely Stratton still believes that God possessed MK from eternity past as a necessary part of his nature. The simplification of B to D then appears to be a conceptual change, while the move from A to E is likely simply a short hand for convenience, and one that we can grant the sake of expediency.
The objections to both of these pillars will come as we progress through this paper, however, what we can point out here is how much of Molinism is actually missing from these two pillars. Even if we were to grant these two propositions for the sake of argument, this would still not get us to the fully developed Molinism that would be helpful in apologetical issues – the thing that Molinists taut as precisely the benefit of holding to a Molinistic theological position. Absent is the concept of God choosing to actualize from a list of feasible worlds, the one that maximizes human salvation while mitigating the amount of suffering and evil. This kind of Most Salvific World should not be confused with Best Possible World semantics, as WLC and others have ably argued against BPW conceptions. Other features missing are issues surrounding Transworld Depravity and why there is condemnation to the unevangelized, the attempts to ground MK not in prescience or foresight but as immediate knowledge, and even how this would relate to issues like regeneration (for Stratton and others have argued that God could suspend LLF in the case of monergistic salvation). There is much Molinism, as employed by apologists who are the main driving force in the advance of Molinism, that is not subsumed under MM.
This means that we can argue that while the MMi who is making such an MM argument may not be dishonest, the rhetorical strategy is that of a “bait and switch” where the full substance if Molinism and its strategic use in questions of evil and suffering, is smuggled in through the lexical backdoor. It is trying to get the reader to swallow far more than they would be willing to chew.
By analogy, it may be helpful to think of this like we would the difference between Theonomy and theonomy, where Theonomy is a specific and well defined theological position concerning the role of the Mosaic Law in our present church age cultures and political systems. The argument is often made by Theonomists for what we could call, “Mere Theonomy,” wherein anyone who loves God’s law and thinks it should have any role in the thoughtlife of the Christian in the public sphere is thus a Theonomist. Here we can see that while many of us think that the Mosaic law has a role to play (especially Reformed Christians who employ the triplicate use of the law for the church and the Christian in our private and public lives), it does not follow that we hold the Theonomic position that the Mosaic law, including the penology, ought be the law of “Christian” nations today. It would be a massive bait and switch to try and say that anyone who loves God’s law and thinks it should serve some function in the church age, that they are de facto Theonomists merely because the Theonomist can lexically pare down their position to loving God’s law and thinking it should play a role in “Christian” nations. This difference we can represent between the Theonomy and theonomy.
This same can be seen between Molinism and molinism, if we even grant the lexical paring down of the Molinistic concepts that have been proposed.
FOR THE MAIN DIRECTORY OF RESOURCES ON MOLINISM, CLICK HERE.
Enjoy!
________
INTRODUCTION - TERMS AND INTRO
Definitions:
1. Natural Knowledge – This is the kind of knowledge that God has of necessary truths that are true independent of God’s will or decree. Examples: 1+1=2, “All bachelors are unmarried,” “no squares are circles,” etc.
2. Free Knowledge – This is the kind of knowledge that God has of contingent truths, that is, propositions that are true given God’s will/decree in the actual world. Examples: “The sky is blue,” “the universe was created by God,” etc.
3. Middle Knowledge (MK) – This is the kind of knowledge that God has of counterfactuals of worlds that he could have created but did not create. These are facts that could have been but are not. Examples, “Had Tyler been born with two X chromosomes, then he would have been born female,” “had Mozart died at birth, we would not have his music,” etc.
4. Counterfactuals of Creaturely Freedom (CCFs) – propositional facts about what free creatures would have done in other possible worlds.
Claimed Benefits of Molinism
5. Preserves some version of Libertarian Free Choice without substantially sacrificing Divine Sovereignty.
6. Due to A, that Molinism preserves substantive human responsibility.
7. Due to A and B, can give the most robust solutions to the problem of evil/suffering without blame shift to God.
8. Preserves God’s unfulfilled yet genuine desire that all humanity should be saved apart from the Reformed scheme of the two wills of God. Here this is God’s only will and is defeated by the free choice of man to freely reject God. Thus God saves the most that he can without violating their will.
9. A better explanation for the “problem of the unevangelized” where God could have arranged all those who would not believe in any possible world to be born in areas and times where the gospel would never be preached in their life time – where the pearls would never be cast before swine so to speak. (This is not universal to all Molinists, especially those prior to the work of Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig (WLC), but is a common view among current Molinists).
My major objections to Molinism seem, to me at least, to be a development in the discussion of Molinism as a potential way to reconcile God’s sovereignty, and creaturely freedom. While I think there is much fruit to be found in attacking the concepts of omniscience via objections like the Grounding Objection (in which God’s aseity is defended against his being contingent in any way on external truth makers) and I will do so here, I think far more progress can be made in a case against Molinism by attacking the metaphysical assumptions of the system. That is, in addition to confronting the Molinistic view of what God knows, how God knows it, if God really knows it, when he knows it, etc., in order to expose several major problems with Molinism we ought also explore other issues such as the nature of the creative process and its causal impacts, the decrees of God and how they relate to the species of knowledge an omniscient being like God would have, the nature of humans before creation, etc.
It should be stated from the onset of this paper, that in the attempted refutation of Molinism to follow, I am assuming a desire on the reader’s part to remain orthodox, that is, specifically to hold to historic conceptions of the nature of God (Omniscient, Omnipotent, Omnibenevolent, Simple, Immutable in his nature, etc.), the ultimate authority of the Scriptures, Chalcedonian views of Christology, etc. Therefore, if it can be shown that some aspect of Molinism is in direct contradiction to Scripture, or if a result of Molinism is that God is made sufficiently not free (or less free than his creation) in some regard, or that when we shake Molinism, something like Open Theism pops out the other side, then it will have been proven that Molinism cannot be an option for the Christian concerned with maintaining historic Biblical orthodoxy.
IS "MERE" MOLINISM A HELPFUL CONCEPT?
In this section, I will argue that what Stratton and others call “Mere Molinism” (MM) is either misleading and demands the Mere Molinist (MMi) to assume numerous unstated positions, or it dies the death of 1000 qualifications to become so vague that it loses anything inherently Molinistic about it.
MMi’s such as Stratton have made numerous alterations to what content is the necessary core of Molinism such that if someone affirms that content, they can be confidently considered part of the Molinist camp. In an article in August 2016, my friend Tim Stratton argued that the two pillars of MM are:
A. God eternally possesses Middle Knowledge (MK).
B. Humans possess Libertarian Free Will (LFW).
Without impugning my friend, this list is ostensibly before his interest in trying to gain more Reformed or Calvinistic support for MM, and since that emphasis has changed, so has his view of what the core pillars of Molinism must be. By this original list, no consciously Reformed or Calvinistic Christian could affirm Molinism. Not only are terms such as MK and LFW left undefined and undefended, once they are defined, they would be outright rejected (which we will see below). In addition, Libertarian Free Will is antithetical to Reformed and Calvinistic anthropology.
In January of 2018, there was then an attempt by Terri Hollifield, a contributor to Stratton’s blog, to add a 3rd pillar to MM, and he recommended it publicly here to Stratton. This 3rd pillar was:
C. God is Sovereign.
As if the original list was not problematic enough, throwing in such a vague 3rd pillar comes across to those familiar with the intramural debates between Reformed Christians and Molinists to be just a rhetorical hedging – a kind of, “hey, we believe God is sovereign too!” At this point, given A and B, any Reformed Christian reading this (or really any critic of Molinism, MK, and LFW for there are many objectors from many camps), would argue that C is one of the very things that is abandoned by affirming A or B, let alone both. I’m unaware of any private or public discussion on this point between Hollifield and Stratton, but Stratton never seemed to adopt C in his future publications.
In June 2018, Stratton then, likely in the face of pushback and a desire to widen the MM umbrella (both admirable and reasonable motivations), altered the two pillars of MM. In a conversation I had with him, there were a couple different iterations of them (at one point including something even as broad as God being omniscient), but by the time he went to print on his blog, he had landed on these two propositions as the necessary core of MM:
D. Humans sometimes have Limited Libertarian Free Will (LLF).
E. God has middle knowledge (MK).
We can see here the softening of both premises by Stratton. While the alteration of B to D I think was intentional, I’m not sure what benefit is gained from A to E and surely Stratton still believes that God possessed MK from eternity past as a necessary part of his nature. The simplification of B to D then appears to be a conceptual change, while the move from A to E is likely simply a short hand for convenience, and one that we can grant the sake of expediency.
The objections to both of these pillars will come as we progress through this paper, however, what we can point out here is how much of Molinism is actually missing from these two pillars. Even if we were to grant these two propositions for the sake of argument, this would still not get us to the fully developed Molinism that would be helpful in apologetical issues – the thing that Molinists taut as precisely the benefit of holding to a Molinistic theological position. Absent is the concept of God choosing to actualize from a list of feasible worlds, the one that maximizes human salvation while mitigating the amount of suffering and evil. This kind of Most Salvific World should not be confused with Best Possible World semantics, as WLC and others have ably argued against BPW conceptions. Other features missing are issues surrounding Transworld Depravity and why there is condemnation to the unevangelized, the attempts to ground MK not in prescience or foresight but as immediate knowledge, and even how this would relate to issues like regeneration (for Stratton and others have argued that God could suspend LLF in the case of monergistic salvation). There is much Molinism, as employed by apologists who are the main driving force in the advance of Molinism, that is not subsumed under MM.
This means that we can argue that while the MMi who is making such an MM argument may not be dishonest, the rhetorical strategy is that of a “bait and switch” where the full substance if Molinism and its strategic use in questions of evil and suffering, is smuggled in through the lexical backdoor. It is trying to get the reader to swallow far more than they would be willing to chew.
By analogy, it may be helpful to think of this like we would the difference between Theonomy and theonomy, where Theonomy is a specific and well defined theological position concerning the role of the Mosaic Law in our present church age cultures and political systems. The argument is often made by Theonomists for what we could call, “Mere Theonomy,” wherein anyone who loves God’s law and thinks it should have any role in the thoughtlife of the Christian in the public sphere is thus a Theonomist. Here we can see that while many of us think that the Mosaic law has a role to play (especially Reformed Christians who employ the triplicate use of the law for the church and the Christian in our private and public lives), it does not follow that we hold the Theonomic position that the Mosaic law, including the penology, ought be the law of “Christian” nations today. It would be a massive bait and switch to try and say that anyone who loves God’s law and thinks it should serve some function in the church age, that they are de facto Theonomists merely because the Theonomist can lexically pare down their position to loving God’s law and thinking it should play a role in “Christian” nations. This difference we can represent between the Theonomy and theonomy.
This same can be seen between Molinism and molinism, if we even grant the lexical paring down of the Molinistic concepts that have been proposed.
FOR THE MAIN DIRECTORY OF RESOURCES ON MOLINISM, CLICK HERE.
No comments:
Post a Comment