The Grounding Objection to Molinism, Explained

The grounding objection is the argument that counterfactuals of creaturely freedom, truths of the form "if Peter were in this situation, he would freely do that," have no ground of truth logically prior to God's decree to create, so God cannot know them in advance and Molinism's middle knowledge has no object. Robert Adams gave it its classic form in 1977, William Hasker sharpened it, and Alvin Plantinga, Thomas Flint and William Lane Craig have answered it. What follows adds the providence problem it leaves behind and the answer of Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT), set beside Molinism and open theism.

Key takeaways

• The grounding objection asks what makes a counterfactual of freedom true. On Molinism such truths hold before God decides to create, and critics find no ground there to make them true.
• Adams raised it in 1977 and Hasker sharpened it in 1986. Plantinga and Craig reply that the objection rests on a disputed theory of truthmakers.
• The objection carries a cost for its own side. Hasker argues that timeless or simple foreknowledge gives God no providential help unless supplemented by middle knowledge or theological determinism.
• Frame-Indexed Classical Theism answers both sides. Molinism and open theism alike assume that a providence without risk would need knowledge of what creatures would do, standing prior to the decree. FICT holds that a decree waiting on such knowledge is a picture drawn from our frame, so God needs neither middle knowledge nor luck.

What is the grounding objection to Molinism?

The grounding objection asks what makes a counterfactual of creaturely freedom true at the point where Molinism needs it: logically before God decides to create. A counterfactual of creaturely freedom is a proposition of the form, in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy's wording, "If person, P, were in situation, S, then P would freely perform action, A." Middle knowledge is God's prevolitional knowledge of all such truths: He knows them logically before His decree and uses them to choose which world to create.

Adams took his test case from Scripture, where God answered David about events that did not take place:

"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." (1 Samuel 23:11–12, NIV)

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In "Middle Knowledge and the Problem of Evil" (American Philosophical Quarterly, 1977), Adams denied that such knowledge is possible, "even for God," "on the ground that conditional propositions of the sort that are supposed to be known by middle knowledge cannot be true." A true prediction corresponds to the event it predicts. Here "there never was nor will be an actual besieging of Keilah by Saul, nor an actual betrayal of David to Saul by the men of Keilah, to which those propositions might correspond."

On Adams's reckoning, the candidates for a ground each fail. God's will cannot make the counterfactual true without deciding the free act, and the act itself does not happen. The agent's character cannot settle it either, since libertarian freedom leaves the choice open.

The middle-knowledge picture this objection targets is set out in full on the Molinism page.

Who raised the grounding objection, and how do Molinists reply?

The objection belongs to Robert Adams and William Hasker, and the leading Molinist reply, from Plantinga and Craig, is that it rests on a disputed theory of truthmakers. Adams restated it in 1985: counterfactuals of freedom "are supposed to be contingent truths that are not caused to be true by God. Who or what does cause them to be true?" Hasker, in "A Refutation of Middle Knowledge" (Noûs, 1986), asked the same thing: "Who or what is it (if anything) that brings it about that these propositions are true?" He developed the case in God, Time, and Knowledge (1989), and the Stanford Encyclopedia records a long run of exchanges between Hasker and Craig.

The Molinists took the objection seriously. Among the problems with Molinism, Thomas Flint, in Divine Providence: The Molinist Account (1998), noted that many philosophers consider it "the principal obstacle" to accepting middle knowledge, one that "is as easy to state as it is difficult fully to resolve."

Plantinga's reply to Adams was short: "It seems to me much clearer that some counterfactuals of freedom are at least possibly true than that the truth of propositions must, in general, be grounded in this way." Craig built that reply into a paper, "Middle Knowledge, Truth-Makers, and the 'Grounding Objection'" (Faith and Philosophy, 2001).

Craig argues that the objection presupposes "the theory of truth-makers," a particular account of how truth relates to reality, and that its defenders owe that theory a defense. On his view, "what makes it true that 'If I were rich, I would buy a Mercedes,' is the fact that if I were rich I would buy a Mercedes." He adds that future-tense truths about free acts face the same demand, and that pressing for a deeper ground misreads freedom itself: "To seek an answer to the question 'Why is F a fact?' or 'What makes F a fact?' is implicitly to deny libertarian freedom."

The critics answer in Adams's terms: a true conditional about free acts needs something to correspond to, and at Keilah no siege and no betrayal took place. Nearly five decades on, the exchange stands close to where Flint described it.

Volume One weighs Molinism beside Calvinism and Arminianism, and it is free to download.

If middle knowledge fails, is providence a gamble?

The objection has a price for those who press it. Adams saw it in 1977: "without middle knowledge God must take real risks if He makes free creatures." If God cannot know what free creatures would do, He cannot choose a world on that basis.

Hasker then argued that foreknowledge of the actual future does not repair the loss. In "Why Simple Foreknowledge Is Still Useless" (JETS, 2009) he states the test: "Simple foreknowledge is providentially useful if and only if God can determine, on the basis of his simple foreknowledge, how he shall act providentially in the world." A God who sees the whole future at once already sees His own actions in it, so "there is no 'determining' left to be done!"

In a footnote he extends the point to "divine timeless knowledge of the future, so long as this is not supplemented by either theological determinism or middle knowledge." On his reckoning the debate narrows to "a three-way discussion between Calvinists, Molinists, and open theists." David Hunt replied that simple foreknowledge is still useful.

The same challenge has been pressed against the Many Beings books themselves. Volume Three holds that God knows every free act in one timeless act, the content of that knowledge fixed by the free act it knows. It borrows a principle it calls the Bridge Law to say that what God's frame grounds is realized in ours. That principle guarantees the realization. It seems to leave out the selection: how does God decree this world over another when the wills in it are undetermined? The objector sees two exits. Either God knows in advance what those wills would do, which is middle knowledge under another name, or providence rests on luck.

For how the major views define providence, see divine providence.

How does Frame-Indexed Classical Theism answer the grounding objection?

Frame-Indexed Classical Theism is a research program in analytic theology that resolves classical theological dilemmas by diagnosing them as artifacts of a single formal error. It answers the objection by rejecting a premise that Molinism, the grounding objectors and open theism share: that a providence without risk would need knowledge of what creatures would do, standing prior to the decree and guiding it.

God's frame is atemporal, simple and a se; ours is sequential, composite and contingent, and God's frame is the ground of ours, containing and sustaining it. Predicates whose content involves time, modality, agency or value are said of God and of us analogically, and treating one of them as meaning the same thing on both sides is the Many Beings Fallacy.

Molinism places God's knowledge of counterfactuals before His decree, and the grounding objection asks what fixes a truth before the decree. Hasker and the open theists argue that simple foreknowledge, knowledge of the actual world, comes too late to guide the decree. Each side pictures a knowing in God that informs a deciding, so that the decree waits on what creatures would do. Volume One rejects that picture: God "does not look ahead, learn, or consult independent conditionals," and "in one eternal act he knows and wills the whole of reality." The book allows a logical order within that one act, but not a decree that depends on creaturely "woulds."

Volume Three sets out how God and the creature each stand to a free act. God grounds that the event is: in the book's words, "nothing exists, Peter and his freedom included, except as God holds it in being." The free creature determines which way the act goes. God's knowledge reflects the free act without causing it, and it is no effect of the world either, since God is a se, "dependent on nothing." The two relations run over different aspects of one reality, so they do not compete.

Volume Three borrows the Bridge Law by anticipation, and Volume Four derives it, generalizing the sustaining relation Volume One establishes: what is true in God's frame is realized in ours, and the grounding "transfers no modal force." The creature's act stays contingent in its own frame. Volume One's Anti-Collapse Lemma secures that conclusion: God's certainty about an act does not make the act necessary for the one who does it.

The result for the grounding objection is a partial concession. FICT posits no counterfactual of freedom standing true before the decree and consulted to guide it, because on its account the decree does not wait on creaturely "woulds." It does not follow Adams in denying that God knows what would have happened: Volume One grants that counterfactuals are "knowable to God if they indeed exist" and treats them as unnecessary to the decree. What it does not claim is a finished theory of how counterfactuals get their truth; that debate stays open.

The position these sections argue from is stated in one place on the FICT page.

Does God need middle knowledge to choose which world to create?

No, on Volume Four's account, because the question asks for a step the one act does not contain. Flint's Molinism answers the selection problem with middle knowledge, and open theism answers it by letting God take risks. The objector presses the same problem against Volume Four's claim that God "sustains a created order in which the extraordinary event is eternally willed and, at its appointed coordinate, unfolds."

Volume Four answers that the question "dissolves on two sides at once." On the first side, selection means a moment of deliberation at which God surveys options and picks. A step requires a before and an after, and the one act has neither: "To demand that the divine will deliberate in sequence is the Many Beings Fallacy applied to the will itself."

On the second side, the question treats the creature's free choice as a fixed fact God must work around, a rival power limiting what He may decree. Volumes One and Two hold that finite free will is real and libertarian within the human frame, though it falls short of the absolute freedom that belongs to God alone, and that finite evil is real and privative. Neither has standing in God's frame to constrain Him.

The paragraph closes: God "wills, in one act, to sustain a world of genuinely undetermined choices, He permits what He does not author, He knows the whole as He sustains it, and His purposes are secured not by screening the creature's outputs beforehand but by encompassing every one of them. Nothing is left to luck, because nothing falls outside the act; and nothing is determined by it." Volume One's Anti-Collapse Lemma gives the reason: God's eternal certainty leaves the creature's act contingent. Volume One states this for God's ordinary providence, and it leaves open that God may, in extraordinary providence, determine a particular act for a sufficient reason, as with Pharaoh's hardening (Exodus 9:12).

Hasker is right that there is no determining left to do on the basis of foreknowledge. FICT agrees, and adds that providence was not a determining on the basis of foreknowledge to begin with. Paul describes a God "who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will" (Ephesians 1:11, NIV), and the working out is the one act. A Molinist may call this relocated mystery. FICT names in advance which terms carry a frame index, and it states what would overturn it, including any resolution shown to need an auxiliary device, such as middle knowledge, introduced for that case alone.

How God permits what He does not author is the subject of the permissive will of God.

Doesn't "what He would will under every circumstance" concede middle knowledge?

No. What Volume Four affirms is "God's knowledge of His own one act, which carries its conditions within itself." What it declines, as Volume Four describes the middle-knowledge picture, is "a survey of what free creatures would do in worlds God has not made, consulted before He wills and constraining what He may will."

The objection turns Volume Four's own words against it: God "eternally knows all that He wills and all that He would will under every circumstance," and that at Nineveh "the eternal decree comprehended that counterfactual as genuinely as it comprehended the actual outcome." Critics take that for the Molinist premise, inside a book that lists Molinism among the devices it does not need.

Jonah began by going a day's journey into the city, proclaiming, "Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown." The Ninevites believed God. A fast was proclaimed, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth. (Jonah 3:4–5, NIV)

"When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened" (Jonah 3:10, NIV). On Volume Four's reading, the warning and the mercy are one conditional decree: destruction if unrepentant, mercy upon repentance, the proclamation as the summons. The free response fixes which content His knowledge holds; in Volume Four's words, His knowledge that Nineveh turns "is correspondence to what the summons freely produced, not the ground of the sending." The relenting texts are treated in does God change His mind?

Volume Four's chapters on prayer and relenting are listed on the volume's page.

How the positions compare

Frequently asked questions

What is the grounding objection in simple terms?

The grounding objection says that "what a free person would do" in a situation that does not arise has no ground to make it true. Molinism needs such truths to be settled before God creates, so if they lack a ground, God cannot know them and middle knowledge fails.

Who first raised the grounding objection?

Robert Adams set it out in "Middle Knowledge and the Problem of Evil" (1977), using David at Keilah as the test case. William Hasker developed it from 1986 onward, and Plantinga, Flint and Craig are its leading Molinist respondents.

Does the grounding objection also refute simple foreknowledge?

Craig argues that future-tense truths about free acts face the same grounding demand, so the objection would count against simple foreknowledge too. Hasker grants simple foreknowledge but argues it is useless for providence. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism answers the usefulness charge by denying the deliberative order in God that Molinism and open theism both assume.

Is the grounding objection question-begging?

Craig holds that it assumes a disputed theory of truthmakers, and that asking what makes a free act a fact denies libertarian freedom. Adams answers that a true proposition corresponds to what happens, and the Keilah conditionals have no actual event to correspond to. The dispute remains open.

Can God know what would have happened without middle knowledge?

On Frame-Indexed Classical Theism, God knows His own one act with its conditions inside it, as at Nineveh. Volume One holds that counterfactuals are "knowable to God if they indeed exist" and unnecessary to His knowing the whole in one eternal act, and it treats middle knowledge as "a human-frame approximation of divine omniscience." That differs from Molinism's prevolitional knowledge of what free creatures would do in any circumstance, and from open theism, which denies exhaustive foreknowledge.

Where to go from here

The grounding objection and the providence objection pull in opposite directions, and each side shares the same conditional premise about knowledge prior to the decree. Take away the decree's dependence on prior knowledge and both objections lose their target. The objectors keep their point about priority, and the Molinists keep a God who runs no risks. Molinism sets out the doctrine these critics address. Volume Three carries the grounding order into future contingents, and Volume Four answers the selection question.

Two neighbouring questions follow. Whether God's foreknowledge makes free acts necessary is the question of theological fatalism, and whether the saints keep their freedom once glorified is free will in heaven. The one act at the center of this answer is the doctrine of divine simplicity, and its reach over every truth is God's omniscience. Volume One's case for creaturely freedom, and against the need for middle knowledge, is on its book page.

The series begins with Volume One, and your copy is free.