The following is a guest blog post by Roger Turner, a Philosophy Ph.D. candidate at the University of Tennessee.
If you’re a Molinist—at any rate, if you believe that God has middle knowledge—you believe that God knows whether or not any given counterfactual, or subjunctive conditional is true. What’s more, you probably believe this because you think it helps make clear how it is possible that humans can act freely even though God knows, before they act, how they’ll act. And you probably want to have some grasp on how all that works because you’re a libertarian with respect to freedom. That is, you think that determinism and free will are incompatible, but you believe that divine foreknowledge and free will are compatible. If you are a libertarian, you think that indeterminism is true. In other words, you think that the theses ‘the conjunction of the past and laws of nature entails a unique future’ and ‘nobody has a choice about the future because nobody has a choice about what God foreknows’ are false. So, the idea of middle knowledge seems to be the best way to duck and dodge the relevant snares. But there’s a puzzle here. There appears to be a significant tension between one’s being a libertarian about freedom, and one’s being a Molinist. In what follows, I hope to illuminate the problem.
Take your friend, Jones. If you believe God has middle knowledge, you probably believe that, if you were to ask God what Jones would do in such and such a circumstance, God would know the answer to your question. God would respond, so you think, with something like the following: “If Jones were in C, he would freely A.” And you’d feel pretty confident that God’s having answered this way fails to undermine Jones’s freedom because you think that God’s belief about whether or not Jones A’s in C depends on Jones and whether or not Jones A’s in C and not the other way around (i.e. Jones’s Aing in C doesn’t depend on God’s knowing that, if Jones were in C, he would A).
Quick question, though: what is the truth value of a subjunctive conditional if indeterminism is true? Here’s why I ask. If a particular event is an indeterminate event (that is, the event is undetermined) the odds of that event’s happening are something like 50/50. So, take Jones again and his being in C and whether or not he A’s. If Jones’s Aing is undertermined, then he’s just as likely to A as he is to not-A given his being in C and an identical past up to the point of his being in C. This is what indeterminism implies. Given Jones’s past from t0 to the present moment, the moment just before he acts, Jones is supposed to be just as free to refrain from Aing as he is to A. It can’t be the case, for example, that, if Jones is libertarianly free, he’d be more likely to A, given his past (or other conditions beyond his control), than he would be to refrain from Aing. Because if that’s the case, then he’s got factors that are out of his control which bear on whether or not he A’s. And this would absolve Jones of (at least part of) his responsibility for Aing (or refraining from A). If we’re libertarians (and we usually are if we believe God has middle knowledge), then we think Jones has just as much chance of Aing, given that he’s in C, as he does refraining from A.
Okay, back to the question about the truth value of a subjunctive conditional given the truth of indeterminism. The subjunctive conditional (this thing: ®) expresses what would happen in the closest-by, relevant possible worlds. So, take Jones again. And express the proposition ‘if Jones were in C, he would freely A’ as follows:
JC nec. → A
The way this is typically read is something like this: in all the closest-by C worlds (i.e. the worlds in which Jones is in C), Jones A’s. But this implies that it’s not indeterminate what Jones would do in C. It’s not indeterminate because we can “zoom-out” and see which C worlds are the closest to the actual world. And, just by doing that, we can see that in any C world that is most closely related to the actual world, Jones A’s. The odds aren’t 50/50 given the truth of the subjunctive conditional; the closest-by C worlds are such that Jones A’s. So, if Jones is in C, though it’s not necessary that he A—there are, after all, possible worlds where he’s in C but doesn’t A; they’re just further off—he’ll A. He’ll A because there is a group of possible C worlds—those closest-by to the actual world—where he A’s. And whether or not Jones is in a closest-by C world has nothing to do with Jones! It’s beyond Jones’s control as to whether or not he’s in one of the closest-by C worlds.
But, wait. On the libertarian view, indeterminism is true; that is, determinism is false. Jones must, to be libertarianly free, be just as likely to A, in C, as he is to refrain from A. That is, Jones must be equally likely to refrain from Aing as he is to A in all C worlds. It can’t be the case that the proximity of the C world to the actual world determines whether or not Jones A’s. But, if the subjunctive conditional (this bit: JC nec. →A) is true, then it can’t be that Jones was just as likely to refrain from Aing in C as he was to A in C.
So, if indeterminism is true, the subjunctive conditional must be false. The answer, then, to the above question ‘what is the truth value of the subjunctive conditional if indeterminism is true?’: the truth value of the subjunctive conditional, if indeterminism is true, is False. But this means that it’s false that if Jones were in C, then he would freely A. And what’s more, it’s false that if Jones were in C, then he would freely refrain from Aing. And since God can’t have any false beliefs, he can’t believe that if Jones were in C, then he would freely A is true, nor can he believe that if Jones were in C, then he would freely refrain from Aing. He can’t believe this because it’s false that if Jones were in C he would freely A and it’s false that if Jones were in C he would freely refrain from Aing. It’s false because there is no would to it; indeterminism implies that the proximity of the worlds in which Jones is in C has no bearing on whether or not Jones A’s. It has no bearing because, in all C worlds, Jones is just as likely to refrain from Aing as he is to A.
The upshot of all this is that if it’s true that if Jones were in C, he would freely A, then Jones was not libertarianly free to A. Some factor that wasn’t up to Jones made it the case that his particular C world was closer to the actual world than some other C world, some other C world where he refrains from Aing. And this implies that, if it’s true that if Jones were in C, then he would freely A, then libertarianism is false. At any rate, it implies that if the subjunctive conditional is true, then God’s middle knowledge rules out our acting in a libertarianly free way.
So, either you are a Molinist—at any rate, you believe that God has middle knowledge—or you are a libertarian. But you can’t be both. So the argument goes, anyway.
In Exodus 3:20 it reads: “So I will stretch out My hand and strike Egypt with all My miracles which I shall do in the midst of it; and after that he will let you go.” One theological implication of this text is divine justice. Moses was just commissioned to go before Pharaoh by YHWH and demand the release of his people. This is the promise YHWH gives Moses as a sign that Moses is not alone in this deliverance. Israel is being delivered and redeemed back into the land they are supposed to dwell in as was authorized by the Lord back in the Genesis account. YHWH is going to strike the Egyptian nation with His wonders and miracles and as the Exodus account continues it becomes clear that His wonders are divine judgments that go against the 10 major gods of the Egyptians as well as play a part in showing the glory of His power and His name to the nation of Egypt and use this as an example for other nations to see. His wrath on the Egyptians was divine deliverance for His people the Israelites.
But let’s say you don’t want to actually enroll in a program and dish out the money for a degree. (Maybe you already have another degree, or are in the workforce, or ministry). Can you still get a theological education for free? You sure can: many Christian colleges and seminaries have posted classes to download for free on iTunes U. So much so, you can build your own curriculum rivaling the amount of classroom time it would take to actually go to school. At the end of your studies you won’t get a piece of paper to hang on the wall and show your friends, but you will learn a lot that God will be able to use for your ministry.
Let’s consider a non-Molinist perspective. If God causes all things (no weak actualizations) then there are tremendous problems with the problem of evil. I’ve discusses this issue in previous posts so I’m not going to elaborate too much here. Suppose the Molinist concept of providence is true and that God has every detailed moment and aspect of your life planned. What about those who don’t have a “good life”? What about the unemployed, starving, diseased, and homeless? Is it God’s will for them to be like this? Surely, God’s providential means is not that of the Molinist’s concept right? This may sound harsh but I do believe it is the will of God for the starving to starve, the diseased to be diseased and the homeless to be homeless. Let me qualify this. There are different orders to God’s will. It is not God’s will, antecedently, for the starving to starve, the diseased to be diseased, and the homeless to be homeless. It is, however, God’s will, consequently, because of the decisions made by free agents, the good that will come of it, the factor it plays into the grand scheme of things (or the counterfactual role it plays in the feasible world God chose to actualize). Now consider that this is not true, that God doesn’t will every detail in history. Does God directly cause all these things to come to pass? If that’s the case then God antecedently wills the starving to starve and the diseased to be diseased. The Molinist denies that, it is consequently (because of factor X, Y, and/or Z) that God wills circumstances like those mentioned.
This was something Einstein could not live with. Einstein, as a determinist, felt that the world is a structured and rigid web where effects follows cause and all things should be predictable, given the right information. Einstein acknowledged that quantum theory works but he did not like the philosophy behind it. If whether or not, for example, Niels Bohr, Einstein’s quantum physics counterpart, were to throw a book across the room Einstein would be able to predict the outcome of Bohr’s “choice.” Einstein would of course say that choice is the wrong word to use; rather, the brain is a complex machine with cogs whirring round to produce a predictable action. The basis of Einstein’s view was a philosophical conviction that the world did not include random events: an objection summed up in Einstein’s widely quoted saying, “God does not play dice.”
As a result of Hubble’s discovery and Einstein’s own equations the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedman and the Belgian priest and physicist Georges Édouard Lemaître suggested that the universe had a finite past and was not static and eternal. There was now a problem with the cosmological constant; it cannot simply be deleted from Einstein’s equations. The cosmological constant could balance the equation from describing the geometric curvature (left hand side of the equation) to describing the energy momentum (right hand side of the equation). If this expansion is extrapolated the equations of motion then (and even now) can only go but so far—until the universe comes to a singularity. With reluctance Einstein conceded the steady state model in the late 1920’s, though many scientists would not accept the implications of an expanding universe (its finitude). One critic, Fred Hoyle, dubbed such an event the “Big Bang” in mockery and the name stuck.
One misunderstanding is the theory’s use of the Cosmological Principle. It wrongly assumes that the long-time-scale implications of Big Bang cosmology are crucially dependent on the global validity of the principle and that the relaxation of this assumption, through the introduction of a boundary to the matter of the universe, produces dramatic differences in the gravitational properties of the universe.
The key historical context that is needed is to understand is the Jewish thought and priority to the parents. Parents were to always be shown favor. In light of parents being due honor in the Ten Commandments, it was esteemed with more honor than many other commandments (Letter of Aristeas 228). Tobit [4.3-4; 6.14-5] gives further historical background on the priority and respect given to parents in the context of the death of a parent.