Molinism
[2]: 20 Prominent contemporary Molinists include William Lane Craig, Alfred Freddoso, Alvin Plantinga, Michael Bergmann, Thomas Flint, Kenneth Keathley,[2] Dave Armstrong, John D. Laing, Timothy A. Stratton,[3][4] Kirk R. MacGregor, and J.P. Moreland.
[2] Molinists, following Luis de Molina himself, present God's knowledge in a sequence of three logical moments.
Examples include such statements as "All bachelors are unmarried" or "X cannot be A and non-A at the same time, in the same way, at the same place" or "It is possible that X obtain."
"[5] Molinists have supported their case scripturally with Christ's statement in Matthew 11:23:[6] The Molinist claims that in this example, God knows what His free creatures would choose under hypothetical circumstances, namely that the Sodomites would have responded to Jesus' miracles and ministry in a way that Sodom would still have been in existence in Jesus' day, given that hypothetical situation.
That is, when Christ describes the response of the Sodomites in the aforementioned example, God was going to actively bring it about that they would remain until today.
[citation needed] It may simply be the fact that Christ's human nature made a rational prediction of the said actions, as he once experienced beforehand from Peter, to which he replied, "Get thee behind me Satan".
The Molinist believes that God, using his middle knowledge and foreknowledge, surveyed all possible worlds and then actualized a particular one.
[citation needed] God's middle knowledge of counterfactuals would play an integral part in this "choosing" of a particular world.
Molinists say the logical ordering of events for creation would be as follows: Hence, God's middle knowledge plays an important role in the actualization of the world.
But by placing middle knowledge (and thereby counterfactuals) before the creation decree God allows for freedom in the libertarian sense.
Second, it is plausible that the Law of Conditional Excluded Middle (LCEM) holds for counterfactuals of a certain special form, usually called 'counterfactuals of creaturely freedom'.
In contrast to the Calvinist acrostic TULIP and the Arminian Five Articles of Remonstrance, Timothy George has devised an acrostic summary for Molinism called ROSES:[14][2] Molinism differs from Calvinism by affirming that God grants salvation, but a person has the choice to freely accept it or reject it (but God knows that if the person were put in a particular situation he or she would not reject it).
Alfred Freddoso explains: “Some Molinists, including Bellarmine and Suárez, agree with the Bañezians that God antecedently elects certain people to eternal glory and only then consults His middle knowledge to discover which graces will guarantee their salvation.
In 1581, a heated argument erupted between the Jesuits, who advocated Molinism, and the Dominicans, who had a different understanding of God's foreknowledge and the nature of predestination.
In 1597, Pope Clement VIII established the Congregatio de Auxiliis, a committee whose purpose was to settle this controversy.
In 1607, Pope Paul V ended the quarrel by forbidding each side to accuse the other of heresy, allowing both views to exist side-by-side in the Catholic Church.
Thomas Flint has developed what he considers other implications of Molinism, including papal infallibility, prophecy, and prayer.
[18] Craig has also used middle knowledge to explain a wide range of theological issues, such as divine providence[19] and predestination,[20] biblical inspiration,[21] perseverance of the saints,[18] and Christian particularism.
[22] Molinists have often argued that their position is the biblical one by indicating passages they understand to teach God's middle knowledge.
William Lane Craig has argued at length that many of Christ's statements seem to indicate middle knowledge.
The Dominican Order which espoused strict Thomism criticized that novel doctrine and found fault with the scientia media, which they think implies passivity, which is repugnant to Pure Act.
The Thomists disputed it before the Popes, as bordering on semi-Pelagianism, and afterwards there were ten years of debate in the Congregation de Auxiliis.
(Molinists naturally accept this, but deny that this entails that counterfactuals of creaturely freedom lack truth values.)
Yet, as Edward Wierenga has pointed out, probable counterfactuals are also contingent truths and fall victim to the same grounding objection.
It makes a bold and positive assertion and therefore requires warrant in excess of that which attends the Molinist assumption that there are true counterfactuals about creaturely free actions" and that "Anti–Molinists have not even begun the task of showing that counterfactuals of creaturely freedom are members of the set of propositions or statements which require truth–makers if they are to be true.
