Journal: Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal
Volume: DBSJ 15:1 (NA 2010)
Article: God And Counterfactuals
Author: Matthew A. Postiff

DBSJ 15 (2010) p. 23

God And Counterfactuals

Matthew A. Postiff1

Introduction

There is a wide disparity of belief today within evangelicalism concerning the extent of God’s knowledge. Some believe God knows all things exhaustively while others say that the future is open, that is, that God does not know some things about the future, particularly the free choices of his creatures.2 In this essay, the former view is presupposed, namely that what God knows about the world includes everything: the past, present, future, and all true contingents.

Another question is how God knows all of this information. Some evangelicals maintain that God “just knows” the way things are (or were or will be) by virtue of simple, intuitive foreknowledge.3 Others consider God’s decree to be the logical prerequisite to his knowledge.4 An in-between view advances the notion that God intuitively knows the free choices of creatures in every possible circumstance, in advance of creating those creatures, and that he uses that knowledge to decide how to create the world; then he knows everything by virtue of his decision. This view is called middle knowledge (hereafter abbreviated MK) and it is hybrid in that God’s knowledge of things is partly intuitive, and partly decree-based.5

DBSJ 15 (2010) p. 24

Even more challenging is the related question of how God knows outcomes that “could” or “would” be different if slightly different circumstances prevailed. Such hypotheticals are called counterfactuals, and how God knows them is the subject of this essay. There are several explanations offered by evangelicals as to how God knows them. He may intuitively just know counterfactuals (an extension of the simple foreknowledge view). He may know them in his natural knowledge of himself and all possibilities, logically before his decree.6 Or, he may know them logically after his decree as part of his free knowledge.7 The MK view also has an explanation for this question. MK is based on two major tenets: first, this type of God’s knowledge comes logically before his decree (it is pre-volitional); and second, this knowledge assumes libertarian human freedom. The two supporting tenets make the view untenable for many Bible believers. So some theologians answer the “how” question about counterfactuals with a modified version of MK called Calvinistic ...