Molinism: Middle Knowledge, Its Critics, and a Third Way
Molinism: Middle Knowledge, Its Critics, and a Third Way
Molinism is the view, named for the Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina (1535–1600), that God knows what every possible free creature would freely do in every possible circumstance, and uses that middle knowledge to order a world without determining anyone's choices. It is the most carefully built of the classic answers to divine sovereignty and human freedom, and its critics press one question hardest: what makes those truths about free choices true before God decides to create anyone? The Many Beings Framework takes a third route. It holds that the dilemma middle knowledge was built to relieve arises from reading "foreknow," "before" and "decide" in one sense for God and for us.
Key takeaways
- Molinism places a third kind of knowledge in God. Between what could be and what is, God knows what free creatures would do in any circumstance.
- It keeps freedom and providence together. God governs history by choosing circumstances while each free choice stays undetermined. Plantinga revived it; William Lane Craig defends it today.
- Its critics press the grounding objection. They ask what makes a counterfactual of freedom true before God's decree; Dominicans add that God would be determined by creatures.
- Frame-Indexed Classical Theism holds the device is unnecessary. Molinism and Bañezian Thomism place an order of knowing and deciding inside God. That order belongs to our frame; in God's frame they are one eternal act, leaving middle knowledge no work to do.
What is Molinism?
Molinism is the thesis that God possesses middle knowledge (scientia media), which the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines as God's prevolitional knowledge of all true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. "Prevolitional" means the knowledge stands logically prior to God's will: God knows these truths without willing them into being. The doctrine arranges God's knowledge in three logical moments, and the arrangement carries the whole position.
The first moment is natural knowledge, God's knowledge of every necessary truth and every possibility. The second is middle knowledge, God's knowledge of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom, propositions of the form "if person P were in situation S, P would freely do A." These truths are contingent, yet they are settled prior to God's decision.
Then comes the divine decree, His free choice of which circumstances and creatures to make actual. The third moment is free knowledge, God's knowledge of the actual world, which follows the decree. The moments form a logical order, with no time passing between them, and God's knowledge stays complete throughout.
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Take Peter in the high priest's courtyard. Through natural knowledge God knows Peter could deny Christ or confess Him. Through middle knowledge God knows that if Peter were placed in that courtyard on that night, he would freely deny Christ three times. Knowing this, God creates a world containing that courtyard, and the denial becomes part of His free knowledge. Peter was free, and God was never surprised.
Defenders of the view find this kind of knowledge in Scripture. When David asked whether Saul would come to Keilah, the answer concerned events that never happened:
"Will the citizens of Keilah surrender me to him? Will Saul come down, as your servant has heard? Lord, God of Israel, tell your servant." And the Lord said, "He will." Again David asked, "Will the citizens of Keilah surrender me and my men to Saul?" And the Lord said, "They will." So David and his men, about six hundred in number, left Keilah and kept moving from place to place. When Saul was told that David had escaped from Keilah, he did not go there. (1 Samuel 23:11–13, NIV)
Jesus speaks the same way of cities that never saw His miracles: "For if the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes" (Matthew 11:21, NIV). God knows what would have happened, and the Molinist asks where such knowledge sits in God.
Who was Luis de Molina, and what was the controversy?
Luis de Molina was a Spanish Jesuit, born in Cuenca in 1535, who taught philosophy and theology at Coimbra and then at Évora and died in Madrid in 1600. In 1588 he published in Lisbon the book that has carried his name through the debate ever since, the Liberi Arbitrii cum Gratiae Donis, Divina Praescientia, Providentia, Praedestinatione et Reprobatione Concordia, usually called the Concordia. The title states the project: an agreement of free choice with the gifts of grace, divine foreknowledge, providence, predestination and reprobation. His fellow Jesuit Pedro da Fonseca proposed a similar doctrine in the same period.
The Dominicans answered at once, led by Domingo Báñez. Báñez held a doctrine of physical premotion and predetermination: God's decree moves the created will to its act beforehand, and the act follows infallibly. To the Dominicans, Molina had made God wait on the creature. To the Jesuits, Báñez had left no room for a real alternative. Báñez reported Molina to the Spanish Inquisition, and the quarrel grew large enough that Rome took it up.
The Congregatio de Auxiliis, the commission on the "helps" of grace, began its work on 2 January 1598. Clement VIII presided over sixty-eight sessions between 1602 and 1605, and Paul V carried the work on after him. Paul V's decree of 5 September 1607 left the doctrine itself open: each side could keep its teaching, neither could censure the other as heretical, and both were to await a final decision from the Apostolic See. That decision never came, and a decree of 1611 forbade further publication on efficacious grace until Rome acted.
The dispute over Thomism and Molinism begins here. The Dominican school that followed Báñez read Aquinas as teaching premotion, and that reading of grace and providence remains the classic rival to middle knowledge within Catholic thought. The site's article on Thomism sets out the wider system that reading belongs to.
Why do so many philosophers find Molinism persuasive?
Molinism persuades because of the dilemma it relieves. Suppose God's decree determines each free choice. Then providence is secure, but freedom seems to thin into doing what God has settled we will want to do, which is compatibilism. Suppose instead that God simply foresees what we will do. Then freedom is secure, but His foresight seems to come too late: knowing what will happen gives Him nothing to decide with, since what will happen already includes His decision. Middle knowledge offers a way between. God knows in advance of His decree what each creature would freely do, so He can govern history by choosing circumstances, and each choice stays undetermined.
The idea returned to wide attention through analytic philosophy. Alvin Plantinga's work on possible worlds in The Nature of Necessity (1974) and his free-will defense, in the words of Wikipedia's entry on that defense, "unwittingly reinvented the Molinist doctrine of middle knowledge." Alfred Freddoso translated Part IV of the Concordia into English in 1988, Thomas Flint set out a full account in Divine Providence: The Molinist Account (1998), and William Lane Craig has become one of its leading contemporary defenders.
The doctrine also reaches far. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that among the answers to foreknowledge and freedom, Molinism gives an account of how God knows the contingent future "along with a strong doctrine of divine providence." Its defenders apply it to prayer, prophecy, the problem of evil and salvation. The theologian Kenneth Keathley's Salvation and Sovereignty offers ROSES as a Molinist alternative to TULIP: radical depravity, overcoming grace, sovereign election, eternal life and singular redemption.
Set Molinism and Calvinism side by side and the appeal is clear. It keeps the Reformed conviction that God's plan governs all that happens while refusing to make His decree the cause of each choice. Set it beside Arminianism and it keeps libertarian freedom while refusing to leave the future beyond God's direction. Its defenders can say to both camps that they hold what each most wants to keep.
Volume One weighs Calvinism, Arminianism and Molinism side by side; download it free.
What are the strongest objections to Molinism?
The most pressed objection is the grounding objection. A counterfactual of creaturely freedom is supposed to be true logically before God decides to create the creature it concerns. What makes it true? God's will cannot, because then God would be deciding what we freely do, and that is determinism under another name. The creature cannot, because at that logical point the creature does not exist, and in most of the circumstances in question it never will. The creature's character cannot, because libertarian freedom means character leaves the choice open. The IEP entry sums up the difficulty: there appears to be no good answer to the question of what grounds these truths.
Robert Adams gave the objection its sharpest form. In the Stanford Encyclopedia's summary of his 1991 argument, the doctrine is committed to the truth of a counterfactual of freedom being explanatorily prior to God's decision to create me. If it is true that I would do A in circumstance C, then my refraining from A in C is "precluded by something prior in the order of explanation to my act in C." That is inconsistent with my acting freely in C. William Hasker has pressed a long series of related arguments, and Craig has answered them in turn.
The reply has real force. Craig argues, in a 2001 paper in Faith and Philosophy, that the objection assumes an undefended theory of truth-makers, as though something concrete had to cause each true proposition. On his view the counterfactual is true because the person would freely act so, and he adds: "To seek an answer to the question 'Why is F a fact?' or 'What makes F a fact?' is implicitly to deny libertarian freedom." Defenders also point out that simple foreknowledge faces the same demand about future free acts, so the grounding objection would count against far more than middle knowledge.
The IEP entry gathers the other replies into families. One treats these counterfactuals as brute contingent truths that need no further ground. Another locates their truth in the closest possible world where the circumstances obtain, and a third grounds them in creatures as God conceives them in His own mind. Critics answer with a further worry: if the creature is free in the libertarian sense, the counterfactual cannot be true soon enough to guide God's decree.
A second objection comes from the Dominicans. If God's knowledge of what I would do is fixed independently of His will, then God's knowledge receives something from the creature, and a God of pure act receives nothing. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange put the Thomist verdict in the title of an appendix: "God Determining or Being Determined; there is no middle course." Reformed critics add a third line. Paul Helm, writing for Ligonier, treats middle knowledge as speculative and unnecessary for a God who knows the future because He decrees it.
The Stanford Encyclopedia gives a fair summary of where this leaves the debate. The Molinist story "replaces one mystery (how God acquires his knowledge of future contingents) with another mystery (how God acquires his knowledge of counterfactuals of freedom)." That is a serious charge, and it remains open after more than four centuries of argument.
How does Frame-Indexed Classical Theism dissolve the dilemma?
Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) is a research program in analytic theology that resolves classical theological dilemmas by diagnosing them as artifacts of a single formal error. It is the Many Beings Framework's position. Where Molinism adds middle knowledge, Bañezian Thomism adds physical premotion, open theism gives up exhaustive foreknowledge, and simple foreknowledge struggles to explain providence, Frame-Indexed Classical Theism argues that the dilemma all four respond to has been misstated from the start.
Look first at what each side assumes. Molinism places God's knowledge of counterfactuals before His decree. Báñez places the decree before God's knowledge of free acts. The grounding objection asks what fixes a truth before the decree. The providence objection says knowledge of the actual world comes too late to guide the decree. The moves share one family of words: before, prior, then, foreknow, decide. These words carry sequence, and in this debate they are read as describing an order inside God.
The framework holds that there is one reality and two frames in which it is known. God's frame is atemporal, simple and self-existent: He knows and wills without succession. The human frame is sequential, composite and contingent: we know in parts and choose in order. Terms whose content involves time, possibility, agency or freedom are said of God and of us analogically, with a real likeness and a real difference. The error the framework names is the Many Beings Fallacy, treating such a term as though it meant the same thing in both frames.
Apply that to the sequence of moments. In God's frame, knowing and willing the whole of creaturely history, every free act and every circumstance included, is one eternal act. Scripture reports that act truly from our side, in the order we receive it:
"Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen." (Acts 4:27–28, NIV)
"Beforehand" is true in the frame where the apostles prayed. Read as an order within God, it becomes the premise both horns of the debate share.
The defender of middle knowledge will reply that the moments are logical, an order of explanation only. The framework grants that and presses the point. Explanatory priority is still an order between two items in God: a knowledge that constrains and a decree that is constrained. Adams's objection runs on exactly that order. A simple act is one act, and the language of priority belongs to how finite minds must lay that act out.
Molinism's real insight survives. God does know what would happen, and Keilah shows it. The framework reads that knowledge as God's knowledge of His own one act, which carries its conditions within itself: David's question, the Lord's answer, the flight from Keilah and Saul's staying away belong to a single decree, which David received as a sequence. Volume Four develops the same reading for the texts where God relents.
Freedom and sovereignty then stand together on their own, where Molinism needs middle knowledge to hold them together and Bañezian Thomism needs physical premotion. In our frame, choices are open and they are ours. God sustains that each act exists at all, and His knowledge answers perfectly to which way the act goes, while He depends on nothing. The grounding objection loses its target, because it asks what fixes a truth prior to a decree that has no prior. The full statement of Frame-Indexed Classical Theism sets out the position in one place.
Volume One makes this argument in full, step by step; get your free copy.
Where would Molinists push back?
A Molinist has three strong replies, and each should be heard at full strength.
The strongest is the providence objection. Hasker has argued that simple foreknowledge is "still useless" for providence, and a Molinist will say the framework is timeless foreknowledge under a new name. The framework answers that the objection pictures God first knowing the actual world and then trying to use the knowledge to decide, which is a sequence inside God. In one eternal act, providence is the act itself. A Molinist may still find this thin, and the exchange is where the two views most need testing.
A second worry is relocated mystery. Indexing a word to a frame could be a polite way of saying we cannot explain. The reply is that the framework states in advance which terms carry their frame and which mean the same in both, such as identity, non-contradiction and arithmetic, so a misuse can be caught and the claim can fail. Volume One sets out that case with each step shown.
From the Reformed side comes the opposite complaint: libertarian freedom in the human frame concedes too much. The framework holds exhaustive sovereignty in God's frame and real freedom in ours. Every free act falls within God's one act and is held in being by Him, so sovereignty loses nothing; what the Calvinist fears losing is a decree that stands before the act and causes it, and "before" is again the word in question. The sovereignty of God article sets out how the major views define the term.
The framework also names what would overturn it here. If God's permissive decree were shown to require middle knowledge after all, Molinism would be vindicated and this part of the argument would fall. A reader who thinks that case can be made has found the place to press.
Molinism vs Calvinism, Thomism and open theism
The table sets the six main positions side by side, with the strength and the open question of each. Fuller treatments of Calvinism and open theism sit in their own articles.
| Position | How God knows free choices | What it gets right | What it leaves open |
|---|---|---|---|
| Molinism | By middle knowledge, prior to His decree | Libertarian freedom with meticulous providence | What grounds counterfactuals of freedom |
| Bañezian Thomism | By His decree and physical premotion | God receives nothing from creatures | How the moved will could have done otherwise |
| Calvinism | By His eternal decree | Nothing falls outside God's plan | Whether freedom reduces to compatibilism |
| Open theism | As open possibilities, the future undetermined | Choices are really open | Exhaustive foreknowledge given up |
| Simple foreknowledge | By foreseeing actual choices | Knowledge without causing | What the knowledge does for providence |
| Frame-Indexed Classical Theism | In one eternal act, received by us in sequence | Full freedom in our frame, full sovereignty in God's | Fails if the permissive decree requires middle knowledge |
Frequently asked questions
Is Molinism biblical?
Molinists point to texts where God knows what would happen: Saul and the citizens of Keilah in 1 Samuel 23, and Tyre, Sidon and Sodom in Matthew 11. Their critics, Bañezian Thomists and Reformed theologians alike, agree that God knows such conditionals and deny that Scripture places that knowledge logically before His decree. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism accepts the texts as they stand and reads them as God's knowledge of His own act, with its conditions within it, so the biblical data is kept without the added moment.
Can a Calvinist be a Molinist?
A Calvinist can hold that God knows what free creatures would do. Middle knowledge as Molina defined it asks for more: the counterfactuals must be true independently of God's decree, and the freedom they describe must be libertarian. Reformed critics such as Paul Helm hold that God knows the future because He decrees it, which places any knowledge of conditionals after His will, where it is free knowledge. The debate over Molinism and Calvinism turns on exactly this placement.
What is the difference between Molinism and open theism?
Both affirm libertarian freedom. They differ on the future. Molinism holds that God knows exhaustively what every free creature will do and would do. Open theism holds that future free choices are not yet there to be known, so God knows them as possibilities. Open theists press the argument that foreknowledge without middle knowledge is useless for providence, and William Hasker has argued against both Molinism and simple foreknowledge.
Does Molinism explain why some are saved and others are not?
A Molinist holds that God knew how every possible person would respond to grace in every possible circumstance, and chose to create a world in which His purposes are fulfilled through those free responses. Keathley's ROSES sets this against the Reformed petals of TULIP. The hard question of why God chose this world over another remains.
Does Molinism help with the problem of evil?
Plantinga's free-will defense uses the same possible-worlds reasoning to argue that God may be unable to create a world of free creatures who never do wrong, since what creatures would freely do is outside His control. Plantinga offered it as a reply to the logical problem of evil, the charge that God and evil cannot both exist. Volume Two takes up the problem of evil directly with the frame distinction.
Where to go from here
Molina asked the right question: how can God govern free creatures without taking their freedom from them? His answer placed an order inside God, knowledge first and decree second, and the critics have spent four centuries asking what that first moment rests on. Restore the frame index and the order belongs to us, while the knowledge Molina wanted to protect belongs to God's one act.
Volume One sets out the framework and carries it through Calvinism, Arminianism and Molinism, and it is free to download. Volume Three takes the same reading into future contingents and Peter's denial, and Volume Four carries it into the texts where God relents and appears to change His mind. The rest of the series follows the index through evil, time and providence.
