Middle Knowledge: A Reformed Critique -- By: Travis James Campbell

Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 68:1 (Spring 2006)
Article: Middle Knowledge: A Reformed Critique
Author: Travis James Campbell


Middle Knowledge: A Reformed Critique

Travis James Campbell

Travis J. Campbell is a history teacher at Deerfield-Windsor School in Albany, Ga., and adjunct professor of philosophy at Darton College in Albany, Ga.

Luis de Molina’s solution to the freedom/foreknowledge dilemma has had a revival of sorts in the latter half of the twentieth century, most notably through the efforts of William Lane Craig,1 Alfred Freddoso,2 Jonathan Kvanvig,3 Thomas Flint,4 and Alvin Plantinga.5 In short, these thinkers have followed the Jesuit Counter-Reformer in postulating a middle knowledge between God’s natural and free knowledge.

Molina was apparently troubled by the intuition—held by many—that an infallible foreknowledge residing in the mind of God implies a denial of human freedom, at least as it is understood by most libertarians. Indeed, on the libertarian model of human free will, the free agent has contra-causal freedom to choose other than what he in fact chooses at the time of choice. Or, in the words of Molina, “.. . given the same disposition and cognition on the part of the intellect, the will is by its innate freedom able to will or to dissent or to neither will nor dissent.”6 However, if God infallibly knows that, for example, Jay will eat steak

for dinner tomorrow at 7:00 p.m., then Jay will certainly do so. Hence, there is some sense in which Jay is unable to not eat his steak. Indeed, if he were categorically able to not eat the steak, then God’s foreknowledge is not infallible.

Molinists have rightly resisted the move often taken by pagans (e.g., Cicero), heretics (e.g., Socinus), and heterodox theologians (e.g., open theists) to insist that humans possess libertarian freedom to do otherwise and, hence, God does not possess an exhaustive foreknowledge of future contingencies7 - that is, that humans have libertarian freedom and God lacks omniprescience.8 The doctrine of middle knowledge is the Molinist solution to the problem of reconciling the exhaustive foreknowledge of God with the (libertarian) free will of man. Molina and his followers have postulated three logical moments in the life of God, which some9 have diagrammed as follows:

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