Divine Middle Knowledge

Religious world-views tend to make many seemingly contradictory claims. A well-known pair is God’s absolute goodness and the existence of intense evil. We present a simple model to show the compossibility of middle knowledge, grounded truth, libertarian free will, physical laws, deism, theism, predestination, evil, hell, a sin-free heaven, God being perfectly just, free, praiseworthy, and necessarily omni­benevolent, omni­scient, and omni­potent, this world being both replete with injustice and the best of all possible worlds, heinous suffering, no-one unjustly suffering, God’s (...) grace for the godly, the prospering of the godless, original sin, human responsibility, trans-world depravity, irresistible grace, and Arminian human choice. Besides that, the model also features an open future, fully grounded tensed facts, and bivalence, and allows for a kind of universalism and a pervasive principle of sufficient reason. The model is not intended to be realistic, but its possibility argues for the possibility that a realistic model containing such compossibles could exist – and even be actual. (shrink)

In Section 1, we begin by asking what, exactly, it might mean for God to “elect” people and how this relates to their agency and freedom. After getting clearer on what God is supposed to elect people to or for, we argue against the view that a person’s will is not involved in the process by which God elects her, which we identify in part as the person’s coming to have faith. But, in Section 2, we consider several reasons for (...) thinking that a person’s free will is not involved in her coming to have faith, as well as a potential problem facing this view. Then, in the next three sections (3, 4, and 5) we examine three views on which one’s free will is involved in one’s coming to faith, corresponding roughly to three systematic views of divine providence. We discuss certain objections to each of these “models of election,” as well as how each speaks to the possibility of the non-elect. In the sixth and final section, we conclude by addressing the concern that any such philosophizing about God is too anthropomorphic. (shrink)

Molinists offer a tempting bargain: accept divine middle knowledge, and reap solutions to a number of philosophical/theological problems. The prime benefit we are meant to reap from middle knowledge is a solution to the problem of freedom and providence. I argue that they cannot deliver. Even if we make metaphysical and semantic assumptions that have generally been considered friendly to Molinism, Molinism is in danger of undermining divine providence altogether. This “collapse" persists despite fairly uncontroversial assumptions, and plagues the best (...) Molinist theories defended in the literature. (shrink)

Divine grace is the hand of Christ that sustains the Christian in his acts: such is the mystery explored at the end of the 16th century in the profound studies carried out by various Catholic theologians in a debate in Spain known as the “Controversy on divine aids” (de auxiliis). Its problematic covers both the drama of the loving agreement between divine initiative and human response, as well as the subtle questions of causal determinism or freedom of the will. In (...) this book, the participation of one of the main Dominicans involved in this dispute, Pedro de Ledesma, one of the last members of the School of Salamanca, is studied for the first time. For this purpose, his manuscript work is reviewed, contrasting it with the teachings of other Dominicans of the time. This also makes it possible to show that among the theologians of the Order of Preachers, despite their profound coincidences, there were also different approaches to providence, predestination and divine grace. Thus, this book provides a specific introduction to Ledesma, whose understanding of physical premotion is quite original, but it also provides a broad overview of the early years of the controversy on grace in the Iberian Peninsula. (shrink)

Pedro de Ledesma became one of the most important professors in the theological faculty of the University of Salamanca at the beginning of the 17th century. He and Juan Vicente de Astorga were Dominican theologians in substantial agreement with Domingo Báñez about the main points of the disputes on grace. However, they manifest remarkable differences between them. Astorga believes that God could not maintain the infallibility of His predestination of creatures only through His foreknowledge of the acts of the creature, (...) as Luis de Molina defends. He thinks that God disposes by His providence each concrete act of creatures and, by His concurrence, effectively achieves their fulfillment. However, God does not influence created free will by means of a physical premotion, but by a moral one, i.e. by suggestions and inspirations. Ledesma criticizes Astorga’s thesis, although he uses Astorga’s arguments to defend the compatibility of physical premotion with the freedom of the creature. In this article, the thought of both theologians is presented in the light of their unpublished manuscript works. The opposition between these two friars manifests the variety of approaches adopted by Dominicans of the time, who cannot be considered as a uniform group. (shrink)

The Dominican Pedro de Ledesma was a member of the School of Salamanca, professor of Theology in the late 16th and early 17th century. Here we investigate for the first time his contribution to the «de auxiliis» controversy, in which mainly the Dominicans and the Jesuits contended about human free will and God’s influence on it. Among the various theological problems involved, this thesis examines the nature of the divine concurrence in free human action and, in particular, divine concurrence in (...) actual efficacious grace. Ledesma focuses his contribution to this debate on the real (and not only moral) difference between sufficient and efficacious grace. Another original feature of his conception of divine concurrence and efficacious grace are the target of his attacks, since he does not only dispute the theology of the Jesuit Luis de Molina, but also that of several Dominicans, such as Juan Vicente de Astorga; likewise, he opposes Pedro de Herrera and Diego Álvarez with a less sophisticated conception of «physical premotion» than theirs. This thesis updates Ledesma’s intellectual biography and contains the most complete list of his manuscript work to date. Ledesma’s ideas are studied on the basis of three documents: first, his unpublished lectures of 1590 on divine concurrence; second, the report on Molina’s Concordia sent to the Inquisition in 1594 (a manuscript hitherto neglected, and transcribed in the Appendix); third, the book on the dispute completed in 1601 and published in 1611. (shrink)

This book lists the manuscripts related to the 'De Auxiliis' Controversy that are preserved in Rome. This dispute is one of the episodes in Spanish intellectual history with the greatest international resonance, if we take into account the commotion caused in Rome and the secular repercussions it will have within the Catholic and even Protestant sphere. This theological controversy also involves highly topical concepts that attract the interest of contemporary philosophers. This book contains a complete list of the manuscripts preserved (...) in Rome, trying to relate them to each other and to point out which are the most reliable and valuable sources. This involves the description of a considerable number of manuscripts that had not been described in any catalogue until now, and the identification of some unknown works. In addition, several unpublished letters by Domingo Báñez and Luis de Molina are transcribed here. (shrink)

Molinists hold that there are contingently true counterfactuals about what agents would do if put in specific circumstances, that God knows these prior to creation, and that God uses this knowledge in choosing how to create. In this essay we critique Molinism, arguing that if these theses were true, agents would not be free. Consider Eve’s sinning upon being tempted by a serpent. We argue that if Molinism is true, then there is some set of facts that fully explains both (...) Eve’s action and everything else Eve does that influences that action; and that if this is the case, Eve does not act freely. The first premise of this argument follows from the explanatory relations the Molinist is committed to, and the second premise follows from libertarian intuitions about free will. (shrink)

To commemorate the 400th anniversary of the death of St. Robert Bellarmine, this article pays attention to his significant contribution to the De Auxiliis controversy. The main milestones of his intervention are considered: Bellarmine’s internal censure of the Concordia by Molina made for Aquaviva, as well as some details of his relationship with Pope Clement VIII. He composed several opuscules on these topics, most of which have already been published. Here we transcribe an unpublished manuscript from the last years of (...) De Auxiliis Congregations. It is a report written for Pope Paul V on the divine knowledge of conditioned futures. This question provides Bellarmine with another opportunity to criticize the doctrine of physical predetermination. According to the Jesuit cardinal, such a thesis was more dangerous a doctrine than the erroneous affirmations that even he could recognize in the Concordia by Molina. (shrink)

In this article I present the most important works by Domingo Báñez on the so-called De auxiliis controversy, on divine predestination, divine will and divine grace, and human freedom. It is a polemic against Luis de Molina and Francisco Suárez, mainly. I review the works published by Báñez and his unpublished manuscripts, providing new historical data on them.

A short introduction to the controversy for Conimbricenses Encyclopedia.

Pedro de Ledesma is one of the Dominican theologians of the School of Salamanca involved in the De Auxiliis controversy, i.e., the disputes around a famous book by Luis de Molina on the relation between divine foreknowledge and providence and our free will. Studying an unpublished manuscript by Ledesma and his 1611 book on this subject, the article shows that he opposed Molina with a Thomistic position that we call deflationary. According to this interpretation, God, in moving the created will (...) to do good actions, does not bring about an entity distinct from volition itself. Contrary to other Thomists, he does not think that the immediate effect of the divine motion of the will is an intermediary entity used by God to produce, with the will, the created free act. Ledesma defends his thesis by using some elements of Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, in particular, a minimalist interpretation of the relation between action and passion already present in Domingo de Soto and the specific causality of immanent acts. (shrink)

The article explores the modern distrust of God as a threat to human freedom. The teachings on the relationship between freedom and grace sustained by the Spanish theologian Luis de Molina have some features that could be related to this distrust. Divine providence is preserved in his system by a somewhat deterministic conception of the human psyche. Thus, freedom is not completely safeguarded but a certain suspicion about Divine power is introduced nevertheless. As an answer to these difficulties, the author (...) proposes an alternative Thomist consideration to contemplate the relationship between God and man in a harmonious way. (shrink)

Diego de Deza has been designed by Christian Pesch as a premolinist while Friedrich Stegmüller has stressed the alleged disagreement between his version of Thomism and the one professed by later Spanish theologians. This paper aims to revisit this interpretation of Deza’s doctrine of divine foreknowledge by showing its fundamental agreement with Domingo Báñez, especially in placing the divine free will as an ingredient of divine knowledge of created things. Moreover, Deza’s teaching about divine grace brings him quite close to (...) a Bañezian idea of premotion insofar as he supposes a special divine aid for every morally good act. (shrink)

In the years that saw the transition from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, a controversy arose in Spain over the problem of the harmony between created freedom and divine omnipotence. This dispute arose in Salamanca, but it would have important consequences for the conception of man in Europe from then on. In my proposal, I pay attention to Domingo Báñez, an important member of the School of Salamanca, which point of view has been somewhat blurred due to the heat (...) of the polemic. In particular, I would like to emphasise his way of pointing to human dignity as the basis of the relationship between divine and human freedom. Such dignity does not lie in a misunderstood autonomy but in its dependence on God. Thus, according to Báñez, human freedom is an image of divine freedom, so that its dignity is not so much reflected in its independence from the power of God—which only occurs, to a certain extent, in sin—but in the concord between the two freedoms. (shrink)

Edition of the opuscules by D. Báñez on De auxiliis controversy. There is the critical edition of three manuscripts and the first Spanish annotated translation of the opuscules. The Latin text is disposed together with the translation. An introduction situates the opuscules in its systematic and historical context.

This article exposes the concept of "second" Salamanca's School, i.e. the followers of Vitoria in a second generation that teach in Salamanca during the last years of the sixteenth century and the first years of the seventeenth. The author shows that there is an important continuity among the first and the second School and revisits the aspects which have been seen as negative for the School: the developing of metaphysics and the De Auxiliis controversy. The metaphysics as such cannot be (...) considered as a negative aspect and the De Auxiliis controversy has also some positive aspects, although it supposed a fatal tendency which determined the end of the School. (shrink)

Against an interpretation of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s thought that understands the divine motion of the created will only providing a generic impulse to it, in this article is defended that God moves specifically for every good choice. This motion doesn’t prevent at all the contingency of creatures and neither freedom of choice. Is also shown how Báñez’s thought is quite faithful to Saint Thomas in this and doesn’t intend anything else but simply to make it known and defend it from (...) molinists misinterpretations. That’s why is shown that the divine motion of the will doesnt's make God responsible for sin, especially since that would only be possible if divine causality were not the action of the eternal God, who is outside the created causality. (shrink)

One problem for Molinism that critics of the view have pressed, and which Molinists have so far done little to address, is that even if there are true counterfactuals of freedom, it is puzzling how God could possibly know them. I defuse this worry by sketching a plausible model of the mechanics of middle knowledge which draws on William Alston’s direct acquaintance account of divine knowledge.

In a previous issue of Philosophia Christi, Kirk MacGregor responded to an essay of mine in which I argued for a neo-Molinist account of open theism. The argument demonstrated how, given standard counterfactual semantics, one could derive an “open future square of opposition,” that is, a depiction of the logical relations that hold between future-tense statements from an open theistic standpoint. Conceding the validity of the argument, MacGregor nevertheless sought to deny its soundness by criticizing both its conclusion and the (...) Stalnaker-Lewis semantics on which the argument was based. In this paper, I argue that MacGregor’s reasons for rejecting the open future square, as well as his Molinist alternative to the Stalnaker-Lewis semantics, are uncompelling. (shrink)

John Martin Fischer has argued that Molinism does not constitute a response to the argument that divine foreknowledge is incompatible with human freedom. I argue that T. Ryan Byerly’s recent work on the mechanics of foreknowledge sheds light on this issue. It shows that Fischer’s claim is ambiguous, and that it may turn out to be false on at least one reading, but only if the Molinist can explain how God knows true counterfactuals of freedom.

Peter van Inwagen famously offers a version of the luck objection to libertarianism called the ‘Rollback Argument.’ It involves a thought experiment in which God repeatedly rolls time backward to provide an agent with many opportunities to act in the same circumstance. Because the agent has the kind of freedom that affords her alternative possibilities at the moment of choice, she performs different actions in some of these opportunities. The upshot is that whichever action she performs in the actual-sequence is (...) intuitively a matter of mere chance. I explore a new response to the Rollback Argument. If there are true counterfactuals of libertarian freedom, then the agent performs the same action each time she is placed in the same circumstance, because that is what she would freely do in that circumstance. This response appears to negate the chancy intuition. Ultimately, however, I argue that this new response is unsuccessful, because there is a variant of the Rollback Argument that presents the same basic challenge to the libertarian on the assumption that there are true counterfactuals of libertarian freedom. Thus, true counterfactuals of libertarian freedom do not provide the libertarian with a solution to the Rollback Argument. (shrink)

Contrary to the commonly held position of Luis de Molina, Thomas Flint and others, I argue that counterfactuals of divine freedom are pre-volitional for God within the Molinist framework. That is, CDFs are not true even partly in virtue of some act of God’s will. As a result, I argue that the Molinist God fails to satisfy an epistemic openness requirement for rational deliberation, and thus she cannot rationally deliberate about which world to actualize.

Perszyk has argued that Molinists cannot consistently endorse the consequence argument because of a structurally similar argument for the incompatibility of true Molinist counterfactuals of freedom and the ability to do otherwise. Wierenga has argued that on the proper understanding of CCFs, there is a relevant difference between the consequence argument and the anti-Molinist argument. I argue that, even on Wierenga’s understanding of CCFs, there is in fact no relevant difference between the two arguments. Moreover, I strengthen Perszyk’s challenge by (...) highlighting further relevant similarities between CCFs and facts about the laws. (shrink)

Over the past four decades, the issue of the relationship between divine omniscience and human freedom has been the subject of a great debate in the context of Analytic Philosophy of Religion. Many authors have contributed to the debate by formulating some ‘solutions’, taking inspiration from the thought of classical authors (e.g. Boethius, Aquinas, Ockham). One of these, is inspired by Luis de Molina’s thought. The Author, therefore, aims to present the main theoretical thesis of this solution, following the development (...) in the various publications about this question. The Author also tries to show how the thought of Molina has beeen “translated” in contemporary discourse, the limits of the solution, and make understandable the transition occurred within the debate, which led to the Molinist solution and then to the Open Theism. (shrink)

Peter Graham has recently given a dilemma purportedly showing the compatibility of libertarianism about free will and the anti-skeptical epistemology of testimony. In the first part of this paper I criticize his dilemma: the first horn either involves a false premise or makes the dilemma invalid. The second horn relies without argument on an implausible assumption about testimonial knowledge, and even if granted, nothing on this horn shows libertarianism does not entail skepticism about testimonial justification. I then argue for the (...) incompatibility of (i) a view entailed by Open Theism, viz., that there are no true counterfactuals of freedom, (ii) a popular form of process reliabilism about justification and knowledge, and (iii) a weak anti-skepticism about testimonial justification and knowledge. I conclude that there is a costly tension between certain views about testimony and about free will. (shrink)

The problem of moral luck is that a general fact about luck and an intuitive moral principle jointly imply the following skeptical conclusion: human beings are morally responsible for at most a tiny fraction of each action. This skeptical conclusion threatens to undermine the claim that human beings deserve their respective eternal reward and punishment. But even if this restriction on moral responsibility is compatible with the doctrine of the final judgment, the quality of one’s afterlife within heaven or hell (...) still appears to be lucky. Utilizing recent responses to the problem of moral luck, I explore several Molinist accounts of the final judgment that resolve both theological problems of moral luck. Some of these accounts entirely eliminate moral luck while others ensure that the moral luck involved in the judgment is overall good luck. (DOWNLOAD the published version at the external link below.). (shrink)

In a series of recent papers John Martin Fischer argues that the Molinist solution to the problem of reconciling divine omniscience with human freedom does not offer such a solution at all. Instead, he maintains, Molina simply presupposes theological compatibilism. However, Fischer construes the problem in terms of sempiternalist omniscience, whereas classical Molinism adopts atemporalism. I argue that, moreover, an atemporalist reformulation of Fischer’s argument designed to show that Molinism is not even consistent is unsuccessful as well, since it employs (...) a transfer principle about causal inaccessibility that Molina rightfully rejects. (shrink)

Granting that there could be true subjunctive conditionals of libertarian freedom (SCLs), I argue (roughly) that there could be such conditionals only in connection with individual "possible creatures" (in contrast to types). This implies that Molinism depends on the view that, prior to creation, God grasps possible creatures in their individuality. In making my case, I explore the notions of counterfactual implication (that relationship between antecedent and consequent of an SCL which consists in its truth) and counterfactual relevance (that feature (...) of an antecedent in virtue of which it counterfactually implies something or other). (shrink)

Wenn Präsident Kennedy nicht erschossen worden wäre, hätte er dann Nordvietnam bombardiert? Das weiß Gott allein. Oder doch nicht? Weiß wenigstens Er, was Kennedy getan hätte? ... Die Jesuiten behaupteten unter anderem, daß viele menschliche Handlungen in dem Sinne frei seien, daß die Ausführenden nicht logisch oder kausal gezwungen seien, sie auszuführen. („Frei“ wird im vorliegenden Aufsatz stets in diesem Sinne verwendet werden.) Wie behält Gott dann die Kontrolle über die menschliche Geschichte? Nicht dadurch, daß Er menschliche Handlungen kausal determiniert, (...) wie die Dominikaner geglaubt zu haben scheinen , sondern indem Er Umstände herbeiführt, von denen Er weiß, daß wir in ihnen freiwillig Seinen Plänen entsprechend handeln werden. (shrink)

According to the thesis of divine ‘middle knowledge’, first propounded by the Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina in the sixteenth century, subjunctive conditionals stating how free agents would freely respond under counter-factual conditions may be straightforwardly true, and thus serve as the objects of divine knowledge. This thesis has provoked considerable controversy, and the recent revival of interest in middle knowledge, initiated by Anthony Kenny, Robert Adams and Alvin Plantinga in the 1970s, has led to two ongoing debates. One is (...) a theoretical debate over the very intelligibility of middle knowledge;1 the other is a practical debate over its philosophical and theological utility.2. (shrink)

Richard M.Gale reviewed my book in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews in May 2009. The overall conclusion of my reply is that although Gale repeatedly claims that the book is defective, his review has not identified any genuine defects.