A Thought on Divine Hiddenness

It seems to me that we do something interesting when relaying to each other stories of valor, and that we can apply such things to various strategies undertaken in arguments from Divine Hiddenness. What I have in mind is a story of the following sort. Centuries ago (or long ago or an unspecified amount of time ago) a group of people are terrorized by some cruel, more powerful tribe. (You could tell any story involving valor: a WW2 story or any story about any kind of victim of any kind of oppression.) Suppose we narrow our focus to tribesman X who rebels against his oppressors and leads his people to freedom. I can't tell you how many times something like following conversation happens after such stories like this are told:

Jones: Wow, how brave X was!

Susan: Indeed! Do you think you'd be able to do something like that if you were in X's position back then?

Jones: I'd like to think I would, but until I actually go through something like that, I'm not sure I know myself well enough to say with any degree of confidence what I would or wouldn't (or might or might not) do. 

What's happening here? Jones is doing something that I think is humble and admirable: he's admitting that he hasn't the slightest clue about what he would or wouldn't do in a situation as  inimitable or unknown as that. I think a family resemblance of sorts could be fuzzily built up out of stories like these.

Now, it seems to me that there's an a fortiori argument lurking in here. Consider a typical abstract you might read by a philosopher in an argument against God's existence on the basis of Divine Hiddenness (from The Argument From Divine Hiddenness. Daniel Howard-Snyder - 1996 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 26 (3):433 - 453.):

Do we rightly expect a perfectly loving God to bring it about that, right now, we reasonably believe that He exists? It seems so. For love at its best desires the well-being of the beloved, not from a distance, but up close, explicitly participating in her life in a personal fashion, allowing her to draw from that relationship what she may need to flourish. But why suppose that we would be significantly better off were God to engage in an explicit, personal relationship with us? Well, first, there would be broadly moral benefits. We would be able to draw on the resources of that relationship to overcome seemingly everpresent flaws in our character. And we would be more likely to emulate the self-giving love with which we were loved. So loved, we would be more likely to flourish as human beings. Secondly, there would be experiential benefits. We would be, for example, more likely to experience peace and joy stemming from the strong conviction that we were properly related to our Maker, security in suffering knowing that, ultimately, all shall be well, and there would be the sheer pleasure of God's loving presence. As a consequence of these moral and experiential benefits, our relationships with others would likely improve. Thirdly, to be personally related to God is intrinsically valuable, indeed, according to the Christian tradition, the greatest intrinsic good. In these ways our well-being would be enhanced if God were to relate personally to us. Moreover, the best love does not seek a personal relationship only for the sake of the beloved. As Robert Adams rightly notes, "It is an abuse of the word 'love' to say that one loves a person, or any other object, if one does not care, except instrumentally, about one's relation to that object."1 Thus, God would want a personal relationship with us not only for the benefit we would receive from it but for its own sake as well. So, if a perfectly loving God exists, He wants a personal relationship with us, or more accurately, every capable creature, those cognitively and affectively equipped to relate personally with Him

Notice the confidence that Howard-Snyder has in telling his readers what would or wouldn't follow from God's bringing it about that he believes that God exists. Howard-Snyder isn't speculating like Jones was above, but then my question is this: isn't God's bringing it about that he believes that He exists an event or state of affairs that is just as, if not more, momentous than any experience of the type Jones is talking about? 

(Expanding: God, being who He is, and Howard-Snyder, being who he is - If God were to reveal Himself with just as much unveiled awesomeness as He did, say, to Isaiah and Jeremiah, how does Howard-Snyder know how he would or wouldn't act upon interfacing with such unalloyed holiness for the first time? How does Howard-Snyder - or anyone! - know for sure, or have any degree of high, prior probability about how they would or wouldn't act if such a momentous occasion were to happen? When I think about it, I have no idea how I'd react. I really don't. I'm inclined to say that I'd fall on my face out of sheer terror, and that even after I'm reassured - in some unspecified way - I'm not sure whether I'd even like it. I'm not sure whether an experience like the one I'm doing my best to imagine would be one where I can like it instantaneously, or it could or couldn't be that its pleasurability might depend on factors outside my control or in factors that have to do with my uncleanness that can only be removed gradually, incrementally, and so diachronically. Thus, I find myself at an even further remove, epistemically, to how I'm suppose to know whether I would or wouldn't act in this or that way had God done something, the exact nature of which is presently, and probably permanently, inexplicable, in this present mode of spatiotemporal existence.) 

And if Jones can't speak with confidence about the counterfactual regarding how he would or wouldn't act in the types of experiences noted above, then why do we think that Howard-Snyder should be any more confident about how he thinks he would or wouldn't act or emulate or draw or flourish or experience (even if he's confident about the consequences of what he thinks would or wouldn't happen if those other things were to happen) if God were to bring it about that Howard-Snyder believes he exists - especially if the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom that are true of Howard-Snyder's essence don't, in fact, fall out the way they need to so that God's providential decisions can take those counterfactuals into account in His decision so to reveal himself? 

Contra Tyler Vela's anti-Molinism - Part 1

In preparing to talk with Vela, I suppose it would be pertinent to interact with what he's written on Molinism (since that's bound to come up - along with issues surrounding libertarian free will). You can find what I'm responding to here (which is part of a 27 part series against Molinism you can find here). If there isn't repetition, I'll make the series I'm doing here respond to the other parts of Vela's critique. 

Vela begins with some definitions of the logical moments of God's omniscience (as understood by the Molinist). I'll put direct quotes of Vela in bold for easy reference (the quotation function for blogger.com only indents and I don't find that clear enough). 

1. Natural Knowledge – This is the kind of knowledge that God has of necessary truths that are true independent of God’s will or decree.  Examples: 1+1=2, “All bachelors are unmarried,” “no squares are circles,” etc.

It's true that natural knowledge is knowledge of necessary truths, but Vela's examples may give the wrong impression. Mathematical truths and analytic truths are necessary, of course. But by S5 (system 5 for short) in modal logic, for any contingent (true and possibly false) and possible truth, those truths are necessarily contingent or necessarily possible. So, if it's possible that there are purple elephants, then it's necessarily possible that there are purple elements - and so it's an element of God's natural knowledge. And if it's contingent that I was born in the USA, then it's necessarily contingent that I was born in the USA - and so also an element of God's natural knowledge. (It goes without saying that if these are examples of necessary truths, then these truths also are independent of God's will or decree.)

Vela's definition of free knowledge is problematic as well - Free Knowledge – This is the kind of knowledge that God has of contingent truths, that is, propositions that are true given God’s will/decree in the actual world. Examples: “The sky is blue,” “the universe was created by God,” etc. I wouldn't make the differentia of free knowledge the kind that is of contingent truths. God's middle knowledge (we'll get to that next) is also knowledge of contingent truths - and yet those truths aren't true given God's will/decree in the actual world. The contingent truths God's middle knowledge grasps are independent of God's will/decree in the actual world. The counterfactuals of creaturely freedom are all contingently true - even though they're independent of God's will/decree. Put the conceptual taxonomy thus: free knowledge is knowledge of contingent truths dependent of decree/God's will; middle knowledge is knowledge of contingent truths independent of decree/God's will; natural knowledge is knowledge of necessary truths independent of decree/God's will. 

There are some further caveats with middle knowledge (I believe), but let's first see what Vela says about it: 3. Middle Knowledge (MK) – This is the kind of knowledge that God has of counterfactuals of worlds that he could have created but did not create. These are facts that could have been but are not. Examples, “Had Tyler been born with two X chromosomes, then he would have been born female,” “had Mozart died at birth, we would not have his music,” etc.

This analysis needs more precision. I've never seen middle knowledge defined in terms of a 'counterfactual of worlds' alone; even in the places I have, it is usually considered and rejected (Zigzabski - she calls them counterfactuals of world actualization). But even if we stay with this locution, Vela's examples don't seem illustrate the concept. Counterfactuals of worlds aren't counterfactuals of isolated subjunctive conditionals - in Vela's examples, the antecedents are merely counterfacts concerning differences in the actual past (what would have happened if those differences were actual). Worlds are maximally consistent sets of propositions. An example of a counterfactual of a world (in the sense I just gave) is a counterfactual involving what states of affairs would obtain if a maximally consistent set of propositions (a world) were actualized (not created). (The actualization/creation distinction is especially important if we're A-theorists: if we're presentists (for example), even though our world has been actualized, the obtainment of tensed states of affairs takes time as temporal becoming creates more and more of Reality - an essential aspect of which is the concrete totality of everything that was, is, and will be the case).  

There is then the ambiguity involved with: These are facts that could have been but are not. This isn't precise enough (the imprecision here gets to the heart of one of Vela's main concerns with feasibility - an issue I'll address when it comes up): there are facts that could have been, but can't be actualized - these are a subset of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom (Vela brings up these next). These facts 'could have been' in the sense that these facts obtain in a possible world (a world that's maximally consistent). Making them obtain in an actualized world is a whole different story - and involves an entirely different sort of modality. The semantics for this involve a set of maximally consistent set of propositions, of course. But it also involves the idea that there would be no indicative counterpart of that maximally consistent set (of subjunctive conditionals with consequents having only broad logical modality) - and so this possible world 'wouldn't' have satisfied truth conditions if it were actualized - thus, its infeasibility. (Caveat: not all metaphysicians identify broad logical modality with metaphysical modality, even though everything that has metaphysical modality also has broad logical modality - motivating the distinction here would take us too far afield, however.)  

It's important to notice that there are two different kinds of modality at play here (contrary to popular belief, it wasn't Craig that invented the feasibility/possibility distinction - it was Thomas Flint): the intrinsic possibility of a world (characterized by that world's maximal consistency) and the possibility of actualization (maximal consistency plus actualizability). We're really quick to read into the concept of 'possible world' the extra modality of actualizability because we're really quick to read into the concept of actualizability the modality of intrinsic possibility. 

In other words, if we're told that a world isn't actualizable, we're really quick to think that it means it is intrinsically impossible. But it is impossible only in a sense! To be precise, unactualizable worlds are impossible in the sense that they can't obtain. But they're not impossible in the sense that they're not maximally consistent. They would be maximally consistent! So, regardless of what we think about the plausibility of this metaphysical distinction, we have to first be clear about the conceptual distinction - for there definitely is one. 

Think about this modality in a finite context with a variable outside of a creature's control (this will be loosely analogous with God having a variable outside of His control: the truth of counterfactuals of freedom if God sovereignly decides to make a world taking this variable into account (He didn't have to do this, of course)). 

Van Inwagen brings up an example somewhere of an accomplished pianist stranded on an island without a piano. Can he play the piano or not? He can in a sense and he can't in a sense. He can in the sense that if there were a piano on the island, he would be able to play it. He can't in the sense that there is no piano on the island. The variable outside of his control is that he is trapped on an island without the instrument required to actualize the state of affairs playing the piano. Now consider counterfactuals of creaturely freedom (CCFs). Consider: 

1. If Jones were in C, then Jones would freely P. 

Suppose 1 is true in the actual world A (and it's true at a time T: which includes A's 'initial world segment' IWS and all the rest of it). Now consider:

2. If Jones were in C, then Jones could freely ~P. 

This is also true in A: Jones has this modal property in A. Now, where is it true that Jones freely ~P? It would be in some other possible world W* (W* is where it possibly obtains; A is where it actually does not obtain). So far, so good. 

Consider:

3. If Jones were in C, then Jones would freely ~P. 

This is different than 2 because the consequent has 'would' not 'could'. But there's a problem. 1 is true (we supposed it to be true in the actual world). This means that 3 is false (1 and 3 are contradictories). It not only means that 3 is false in A; it also means that when God strongly actualizes C, 3 will always turn out false (because 1 is true) in any world whose IWS includes C (again, because 1 is true). 

The problem is that 2's truth is irrelevant to 3's ever being true. It appears that 3 is true because we say that it is true in W*. But it is only an appearance - the semantics for 3's being true in W* just means that 3 is a member of a maximally consistent set of propositions M (which is just to say that 3 is possible in the broad sense: recall the distinction that metaphysicians of modality quarrel about when it comes to the distinction between broad logical modality and metaphysical modality) - and that if M were actualizable, then M would have been feasible (this subjunctive conditional has a metaphysically impossible antecedent - and so does not have actualizable truth conditions for its indicative counterpart). (None of this takes away from 3's being 'true' in W* having a meaning.) 

The next issue is whether or not 3's truth in W* can actually obtain when God strongly actualizes C: it won't because (again) 1 is true and 3 is false (if Jones were left free in C, Jones would freely P). Thus, God's piano (so to speak) is not on His island for actualizing 3 - even though God "actualizes" 3 in W* in the sense that, if W* were actualizable (metaphysically impossible antecedent), and God chose to actualize W*, then God would have actualized 3 (that's the semantics we have for giving it a meaning). But since 1 is true, the antecedent of that conditional is metaphysically impossible - even though it remains a possible world in the sense that it's maximally consistent. 

With these distinctions in mind, let's see Vela's definition of 'Counterfactuals of Creaturely Freedom': Counterfactuals of Creaturely Freedom (CCFs) – propositional facts about what free creatures would have done in other possible worlds. The 'would have done' part of the definition is crucial here - it qualifies 'propositional facts' semantically so that the kind of propositions considered are in the subjunctive mood. It also winnows down the possible worlds to that subset of possible worlds that are able to be actualized (the feasible ones: in other words, CCFs includes propositions like 1, not 3 - for God can't have knowledge of false propositions).  

Vela then moves into the 'claimed benefits' of Molinism:

Preserves some version of Libertarian Free Choice without substantially sacrificing Divine Sovereignty. - If it doesn't substantially sacrifice such sovereignty, I'm wondering how it sacrifices it in any other relevant sense. This is one of the reasons I'm fond of this model: it's implicit that God choose to do things a certain way even though He didn't have to if He didn't want to (He could have chosen a compatibilist world, a hard determinist world, no world at all, a world with a different number of creatures, a world where all are saved (which might involve a different number), etc . . . ). (Update: Vela has recently posted a blog arguing that if incompatibilism is committed to the thesis that free will is, in principle, incompatible with determinism, then that would make it impossible for God to create a world where determinism is true, including compatibilism. This is very confused, it seems to me. Of course, in all the worlds where creatures have libertarian free will, hard determinism and compatibilism will be false. But how in the world does that imply that there aren't worlds where determinism and compatibilism are true, and libertarianism false? That thesis is entirely compossible with the thesis of incompatibilism since in no possible world are they compatible!)

Next: Due to A, that Molinism preserves substantive human responsibility. - Since Vela has numbered these points, 'A' refers to the first point above. If this first point is contested, the dialectic veers into a discussion of those theories of free will that commit themselves to the compatibility of determinism and moral responsibility (one theory of which is John Martin Fischer's semi-compatibilism, if I'm not mistaken). Next: Due to A and B, can give the most robust solutions to the problem of evil/suffering without blame shift to God. (Again, 'A' and 'B' refer to the above 'two' points). This point is closely related to the second point; the second point is about creaturely responsibility, the third, divine responsibility. Next: Preserves God’s unfulfilled yet genuine desire that all humanity should be saved apart from the Reformed scheme of the two wills of God. Here this is God’s only will and is defeated by the free choice of man to freely reject God. Thus God saves the most that he can without violating their will. - I'm not sure I'm fully understanding this point: Molinism has to be committed to the idea of 'two wills' in some sense. God would have a decretive will (the willing into being of a particular order of things, the actualization of a particular world, and so all the events, states of affairs, and creatures obtain/are created in that world) and a sort of salvific will (a will that doesn't desire what such an ordination involves: it's a desire that provides necessary and sufficient grace to the will of a creature, a desire rooted in God being Love, a desire that involves God drenching the multitude of circumstances engulfing every creature (He is not far from each one of us) with oceans of Divine-wrought Meaning and General (if not Special) Revelation in Nature and Conscience, etc.). 

(The meaning of this kind of beauty can probably only be glimpsed in metaphor or poetic diction: but it will have to involve unswerving passion in the face of the implacable, like the violinists on the deck of the sinking Titanic, or (supposing that the Prodigal remained a Prodigal) the endless pacing of the Father on his porch, scanning the horizon for his lost son (even after reports of the son's possible demise), etc.) 

(These images will, no doubt, be distasteful to the Reformed conception of God's efficacious grace - they have their own metaphors to make such a conception attractive: the Prince kissing the sleeping Princess, the caterpillar transforming into a butterfly, etc. My only purpose in bringing up my particular images was to flesh out the meaning of how a particular kind of desire could 'play out' in the face of something implacable.).  

I also have social-scientific reasons (from what has come to be called The Context Group) for not understanding spurned grace in terms of a 'defeated' will: optional sources here are David deSilva's Honor, Patronage, Kinship and Purity and Zeba Crook's Reconceptualizing Conversion. I can't get into all the details here, but it'll be sufficient to point out that the concepts of grace and faith should be understood (so argue Crook and deSilva) within the context of a client-patron relationship, where we are God's clients and God is the patron. I'm leaving out a lot but the take-away point in this social-scientific context is that the honor and glory and the so-called success of grace is in the very act of offering it (even if all of it was rejected); all dishonor and shame came on those who spurned the grace (ungrateful clients). So, the negative connotations involved in the adjective 'defeated' (in Vela's wording) are contextually misplaced here. It would be like saying: the face 'defeated' the forward movement of the fist (when the fist knocked the person - with the face - out). 

9. A better explanation for the “problem of the unevangelized” where God could have arranged all those who would not believe in any possible world to be born in areas and times where the gospel would never be preached in their life time – where the pearls would never be cast before swine so to speak. (This is not universal to all Molinists, especially those prior to the work of Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig (WLC), but is a common view among current Molinists). - I don't think that this is Craig and Plantinga's position (I'll have to verify this). The best I can remember is that there are creaturely essences that (because of their world-sets) wouldn't have accepted the Gospel even if it had been given to them. So, God sovereignly uses this implacability as an ingredient in the maximization of salvation on which it will then be counterfactually dependent. 

There's then a transition to Vela's critique of the way Tim Stratton (a Molinist) spells out what it takes - the minimum requirements you have to fulfill - to be what's called a 'mere Molinist'. At first, Stratton lands on Middle Knowledge and Libertarian Free Will; then, Vela tells us that a change occurs with the latter - that we sometimes have Libertarian Free Will. Before that, Stratton also thinks the Sovereignty of God is important, a point that Vela cynically interprets as 'rhetorical hedging' (I don't know Stratton so I don't know his history as Vela might - but I agree with Stratton here and this isn't hedging at all: it's built into the theory, as calculus is built into the movement of a baseball), a point with which I also agree. But Vela objects that, ". . . this would still not get us to the fully developed Molinism that would be helpful in apologetical issues." 

Vela argues that, ". . . Absent is the concept of God choosing to actualize from a list of feasible worlds, the one that maximizes human salvation while mitigating the amount of suffering and evil. This kind of Most Salvific World should not be confused with Best Possible World semantics, as WLC and others have ably argued against BPW conceptions. Other features missing are issues surrounding Transworld Depravity and why there is condemnation to the unevangelized, the attempts to ground MK not in prescience or foresight but as immediate knowledge, and even how this would relate to issues like regeneration (for Stratton and others have argued that God could suspend LLF in the case of monergistic salvation). There is much Molinism, as employed by apologists who are the main driving force in the advance of Molinism, that is not subsumed under MM."

I see all of this as extremely misguided. Let's go through these one at a time. First, the idea of 'feasible worlds' is already built into the concept of it being true that God has middle knowledge and that creatures have libertarian free will, and so to list it alongside the 'minimum requirements' would be needlessly pedantic for such purposes. It would come out later in response to various 'apologetic issues' or when further specifying the modal detail of the theory. The same goes for the idea of a 'Most Salvific World', an idea that's entailed by God's goodness and the idea of feasibility, and so doesn't have to be included in the minimum requirements; it's already conceptually latent in the requirements already listed. (Analogy: it would be like listing the requirement that I be a rational animal for being made in the image of God, but then objecting that I haven't yet fleshed out my imaginative capacities and how they relate to the potential for artistic creation: all of that is already conceptually latent in what's entailed by being rational, and so it's pedantic to list out all the implications of this modal mapping when your only goal is to list the minimum requirements.). 

Second, just a correction. Possible World Semantics and the idea of a Most Salvific World are not in competition and so you don't have to pick one over the other; it would be like saying that I can either choose Calculus or hitting a home-run to win the baseball game. But if you hit the home-run, that's just a phenomena that can be fully described using Calculus. So, you can't be in a position to choose one over the other, because they are in two different domains, and those domains are related to each other in a certain mode of descriptive dependence. In discussing counterfactuals of creaturely freedom (which are conceptually intertwined with a so-called Most Salvific World: God's goodness would actualize a world of free creatures - creatures that have counterfactuals true about what they would or would not freely do - where that world involves the counterfactuals leading to a world with the maximal number of essences freely becoming saved, the greatest good for a creature), Plantinga uses Possible World Semantics to cash out the meaning of (or the truth-conditions for) counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. There is no other semantics that I am aware of that explicates the meaning of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. The idea that such a semantics gives us the truth-conditions for another possible world where everyone is saved and where the population of such a world is sustained is irrelevant because (as I already said above) the modalities of realizability (bring about ability, feasibility) and mere possibility are completely distinct, and so you can't use the latter to make the former play by the latter's modal rules (they are in two modal domains due to their partial non-overlap).   

Third, we can subsume the rest of the 'package' of requirements that Vela takes to be minimum and put them all in the same boat. All of these so-called requirements (transworld depravity, condemnation of the unevangelized 'properly understood') are already latent in the minimum requirements already listed and would become explicit after you fill out the modal detail of what's already entailed by the theory itself. (I'd have to read Stratton's thoughts on God's ability to suspend libertarian freedom to save someone because that would clash with what's entailed by what we would expect to see if that ability were an expression of, or motivated by, God's goodness - why not suspend everyone's? - If God is essentially good, then there's no world where that goodness isn't equally expressed; and if there could be worlds where God suspends libertarian freedom to save all, with the numbered saved are equinumerous, then that's the world we'd expect to be living in!) 

But this leads Vela to say: This means that we can argue that while the MMi who is making such an MM argument may not be dishonest, the rhetorical strategy is that of a “bait and switch” where the full substance if [sic] Molinism and its strategic use in questions of evil and suffering, is smuggled in through the lexical backdoor. It is trying to get the reader to swallow far more than they would be willing to chew.

It might be my lack of imagination, but I don't see a difference between being dishonest and deploying a rhetorical strategy of 'bait and switch'. The bait is no more switched than when, say, a human body is presented in response what the minimum requirement might be to do human biology: just because a human body involves body temperature, a circulatory system, a reproductive system, a skeleton, an endocrine system, an immune system, or a respiratory system doesn't mean my presentation of the 'minimum requirement' switched to all these extremely complicated areas of study (all of these areas of study are entailed by what's involved biologically with the presentation of a human body). If the 'reader' feels like they're swallowing more than what they'd be willing to chew, then they're not chewing what they thought they put in their mouth! Theology is like a box of chocolates . . . 

Vela's Theonomy illustration is opaque to me. He argues that a similar bait and switch happens if a Theonomist were to say that, ". . . anyone who loves God’s law and thinks it should have any role in the thoughtlife of the Christian in the public sphere is thus a Theonomist." 

Vela goes on: "Here we can see that while many of us think that the Mosaic law has a role to play (especially Reformed Christians who employ the triplicate use of the law for the church and the Christian in our private and public lives), it does not follow that we hold the Theonomic position that the Mosaic law, including the penology, ought be the law of “Christian” nations today. It would be a massive bait and switch to try and say that anyone who loves God’s law and thinks it should serve some function in the church age, that they are de facto Theonomists merely because the Theonomist can lexically pare down their position to loving God’s law and thinking it should play a role in “Christian” nations. This difference we can represent between the Theonomy and theonomy." 

So, what's the point of comparison here with so-called 'Mere-Molinism'? The only part of this that would be applicable (so far as I can see) is with the stipulation of God's sovereignty, the meaning and mode of which will be different depending on whether you're a Molinist or a Calvinist. Of course! If a Molinist were to argue like the Theonomist here, they'd be wrong. But that's not how the Molinist is arguing at all, it seems to me. From the way Vela represents the Theonomist above, it appears as though this is a simple case of misplaced verbal essentialism on the Theonomist's part (what Vela calls 'lexically paring down'), and all we need is the simple pointing out that this is a verbal dispute, the making of some relevant semantic distinctions, and then the arguing for or against the positions delineated by the aforesaid distinctions. It's as simple as that, it seems to me. 

Vela makes it sound like the Molinist is doing the same thing when all the Molinist is doing is filling out the modal detail already latent within the minimum requirements of her theory (recall my analogy with the Human Body: wouldn't we think it sounded weird if someone were to say, "I hadn't a clue that when I asked about the minimum requirements for human biology that the simple presentation of a human body would involve all those complex biological systems! That's a bait and switch! I'm swallowing more than I'm willing to chew!"). 

Vela's Theonomist isn't doing this at all. The Theonomist is engaging in lexical imperialism or unwarranted verbal essentialism and colonizing anyone who lays claim to a word to be, de facto, an adherent of their position. That's crazy! And the Theonomist that does this should be called out! But the Molinist isn't doing this at all, so far as I can see. The Molinist is merely filling out the modal detail already latent in the minimum requirements of the theory itself. If there's substantive semantic considerations that need to be taken into account (e.g. with the 'word' Sovereignty), the Molinist (I believe) would be more than willing to 'not' co-opt the very existence of the 'word' (engage in lexical tyranny) and merely point out their particular usage of the word (in accordance with the relevant concept they have in mind). 

Figuring out Zagzebski's take on Molinism

In this blog, I discuss the first couple sections of Zagzebski's chapter on Molinism in her book The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge (1991). 

Zagzebski admits that middle knowledge is a powerful theory (I've never understood objections from the likes of John Martin Fischer that middle knowledge doesn't do anything to explain the foreknowledge/free will issue). And let's be honest. Theological squabbles aside, the theory, the model, taken on its own, looked at conceptually, is amazingly elegant. Even though I realize there's a degree of annoyance critics of a view feel when they're constantly being told that they've misunderstood the view (a charge Calvinists often level against their critics), I believe there's something to this. It's very hard to find a solid criticism of Molinism, on a purely philosophical level, that hasn't (to some degree) misunderstood some element of Molinism itself. (And it goes without saying that I would never take the view that merely understanding a view is sufficient to make that view true - the closest I get to saying something like that is in considering the concept of God in the context of ontological arguments). I attribute it to the idea that the metaphysics of modality is really hard to do and think about oftentimes. 

(Also, as an aside, I'll try to do a blog on Zagzebski's take on Ockhamism - that God's past beliefs aren't accidentally necessary because they're soft facts about the past. There were some parts of the chapter I found a little murky, but it would be worth the effort to try and write out what I think is the takeaway. I will say that there was not a little surprise in how Zagzebski burst my bubble a little. The glib way with which I understood Ockhamism is now something I better understand. Each presentation of an analysis of 'soft fact' was something I was nodding my head in agreement only to have Zagzebski clearly and decisively show me that there was something fundamentally wrong with it. So, I'm grateful for that.)

Zagzebski argues that middle knowledge aims to demonstrate the logical consistency, and the coplausibility, of foreknowledge (with all of Zagzebski's qualifications: Divine, Provident, Essential Infallibility and Omniscience) and libertarian free will, the compatibility of the doctrine with Aquinas's theory of God's mode of knowing, and how God can know what I freely do by knowing His own essence (that last part is the part that often get neglected: there's always some parenthetical remarks about God knowing these things conceptually, as opposed to perceptually, and we're left to our own devices to pin down what that means analytically on our own). Molina explicitly mentions the "knowing His own essence" qualification and Zagzebski is sure to provide that quotation. 

Mention is made of Plantinga's now famous, accidental excavation of the doctrine when crafting his response to Mackie's version of the logical problem of evil (which I find puzzling a little: Zagzebski contrasts Ockhamism and Molinism - and they do seem to be conceptually distinct - but I find Plantinga using middle knowledge with the problem of evil and Ockhamism with the problem of foreknowledge and free will: looking forward to reading Christopher J. Kosciuk dissertation blending the two to see some sort of reconciliation here). 

There is new, exciting breakthrough explanations of the possibility/feasibility distinction usually only talked about in the way William Lane Craig has presented the distinction. Craig will often tell his listeners/readers to go to Thomas Flint's book (Divine Providence: The Molinist Account) to get a better, fuller investigation of the distinction, and I wonder how many people actually take Craig's advice. Flint's book is a wonderful philosophical exploration of the doctrine. You'll find very interesting meditations on the concept of feasibility, but also on a concept that Flint calls a "galaxy". I had thought that was a locution that Flint coined, but his book was published in 1998. I'll have to do some further investigation to see if Flint was using this earlier, but my point is that Zagzebski's book was published in 1991 (!) and she begins a discussion of the concept of a "galaxy" alongside what she calls "world-germs" seven years before Flint's book: and this is all in the context of fleshing out the concept of "feasibility" (she doesn't use the word "feasibility": she uses the word "realizable", which harkens back to Robert Adams). (Once again, the point is, if you're willing to dig beneath the surface a bit, you'll see an entire conceptual genealogy, with a family history, and that these concepts don't sprout out of some ahistorical void.)

To understand what a galaxy is we have to first understand what a world germ is. A world germ 

probably contains certain substances and laws and the results of any direct action by God on these substances. We need not settle just how far God's direct action goes in the creation, since the point is that whatever God does, he does not bring about a complete world. His creative activity is compatible with a great number of possible worlds, probably an infinite number of them. What makes the actual world this particular world rather than some other one compatible with what God has created is determined by both God's direct action in the world subsequent to the creation and by the free action of the creatures God has made (p. 129). 

The "results of any direct action by God" on the substances are called counterfactuals of divine freedom (there's concordance with how Plantinga uses the term "counterfactuals of divine freedom" in his Methodological Naturalism essay (1997): "Perhaps the demand for law cannot be met. Perhaps there are regularities, but no laws; perhaps there is nothing like the necessity allegedly attaching to laws. Perhaps the best way to think of these alleged laws is as universally or nearly universally quantified counterfactuals of divine freedom." Then, in footnote 11: "That is, propositions that state how God (freely) treats the things he has made, and how he would have treated them had things been relevantly different. Nearly universally quantified: if we think of them this way, we can think of miracles as going contrary to law without thinking of them (inconsistently) as exceptions to some universal and necessary proposition."). 

There "is a set of possible worlds compatible with that world-germ. Let us call each such set of worlds a galaxy" (129). She then represents this "diagrammatically":

1. world-germ 1: world w1.1, w1.2, w1.3, w1. . . . GALAXY 1
2. world-germ 2: world w2.1, w2.2, w2.3, w2. . . . GALAXY 2
3. world-germ n: world wn.1, wn.2, wn.3, wn. . . . GALAXY n

Zagzebski broaches the question: Why doesn't God actualize a world where everyone chooses the good and no one chooses evil? 

Now suppose that there are possible worlds that contain free creatures who always choose good. Why doesn't God just create those worlds? The short answer is that it is possible that there are true propositions such as the following:

(i) If God created world-germ 1, world w1.2 would be actual, (ii) If God created world-germ 2, world w2.4 would be actual, (iii) If God created world-germ 3, world w3.1 would be actual,

where in each case the world that would have resulted given God's creative activity would have been one containing evil (perhaps very great evil).

So even if, say, worlds w1.1, w2.3, and w3.2 have no evil in them, they would not result even if God did his part in bringing them about. It is not God's fault, then, that there is evil, even if there are possible worlds with free creatures and no evil. Such worlds are unrealizable (p. 130).

This is very interesting and I think critics are on the wrong methodological foot when they leap immediately into a critique here. Let's try to understand the modal point being made. We are to believe in the possibility of these counterfactuals of world actualization. Presumably, individual counterfactuals of creaturely freedom constitute (in some way) these counterfactuals of world actualization. We can incorporate the strong/weak actualization distinction in this context as well. It looks as though God strongly actualizes world-germs, along with that "determined by both God's direct action in the world subsequent to the creation", and that God softly actualizes "the free action of the creatures God has made" (p. 129) - the creature strongly actualizes their own free actions 'once they are made': the 'being made' an additional instance of strong actualization, along with their being continually conserved in existence. 

In section 1.2 (The Middle Knowledge Solution), Zagzebski admits that if Middle Knowledge is true, then it provides a way out of the Foreknowledge/Freedom dilemma, because the accidental necessity of God's infallible beliefs (distinct from logical and causal necessity) doesn't transfer to our choices (which involves denying Transfer of Necessity Principles), and so our choices remain contingent even if implied by, entailed by, or strictly equivalent to, God's infallible, past beliefs. If such necessity doesn't transfer, then saying we have power over whether or not we do something doesn't say anything about whether we have power over the truth of counterfactuals or the truth of God's past beliefs. 

In section 2 (Conditional Excluded Middle and the Asymmetry of Time), Zagzebski argues (against the theory of Middle Knowledge) that it's rational to deny that Conditional Excluded Middle applies to counterfactuals of creaturely freedom (CEM-CCF), but that since Middle Knowledge requires CEM-CCF, Middle Knowledge doesn't explain how God knows the truth of CCFs prevolitionally. If one affirms CEM-CCF, then one denies the asymmetry of past and future time. It's in this section that I completely disagree with Zagzebski here (or, at least, I should say that, based on what I've read, what she says here doesn't do anything to move me). 

Let me explain. First, Zagzebski seems to be making the same move that Gregory Boyd makes in interpreting the Counterfactual Square of Opposition (hereafter, just 'Square'). Zagzebski and Boyd seem to be saying that we should construct the Square such that might and might-not counterfactuals are not contraries (contraries are such that they can't both be true, even if they can both be false), and the reason they seem to be saying this is that they're semantically equating 'could' with 'might'. Based on this equation, since it's perfectly sensible to say that something could and could not be the case, they see conjoined might/might-not counterfactuals as perfectly legitimate. But this isn't how the counterfactual square of opposition is understood at all (1. 'might' and 'might-not' counterfactuals are contraries. 2. 'would' and 'would-not' counterfactuals are contraries. 3. 'would' is logically prior to 'might' and contradictory to 'might-not'. 4. 'would-not' is logically prior to 'might-not' and contradictory to 'might'.), and semantically equating 'coulds' and 'mights' just obfuscates things worse. 

Let's take a quick look at William Lane Craig's Question of the Week (#89), Gregory Boyd’s Neo-Molinism., and also some points made in response to Boyd in the book, Four Views on Divine Providence (2011), specifically Craig's rebuttal to Boyd's chapter, God Limits His Control. (I'll only list what I think are the relevant points, not every point)

1. Question of the Week: First, "there is an important difference between what a person can do and what he might do in any given set of circumstances." Second, "on the Molinist view would-counterfactuals logically imply might-counterfactuals, so that both are true and known to God." Third, "on the traditional semantics for counterfactual conditionals, might-counterfactuals are simply defined—contrary to their usage in ordinary language—to be the negations of would not-counterfactuals." 
2. Response to God Limits His Control: First, "Boyd proposes a reform of the English language" (this one is the most important: for the sake of brevity here, I only include this point as a thesis sentence - I'll unpack this more in response to Zagzebski). Second, "one can embrace a tensed theory of time and causal indeterminism without sacrificing the bivalence of future contingent statements". 

By my lights, these five points completely undercut some of Zagzebski's key points in her case. For example, she says: 

the openness of the future means that the totality of states of affairs in the past and present is not sufficient to determine that the future be what it is going to be. So The totality of present and past > actual future is false. That is, it is false that if the past and present were just as it is, the actual future would follow. Alternative futures might follow instead.

Here Zagzebski unjustifiably equates what might follow with what could follow and uses that equation to negate the truth of what will or would follow. That equation is supposed to justify the move that since it's perfectly sensible to say that something 'could and could not' happen, it's perfectly sensible to say that something 'might and might not' happen; and if something 'might and might not' happen, it's false that something 'would or would not' happen (since she - and Boyd, it seems - are making the 'mights' logically prior to the 'woulds', and then making 'might not' contradictory to 'would', and 'might' contradictory to 'would not'. All of this is semantically catastrophic because, while the 'could and could-not' propositions are perfectly compatible (there's nothing wrong with alternative possibilities), 'might and might-not' propositions are contraries! Therefore, they can't be doing what Zagzebski is trying to say they're doing. 

What's baffling to me is that it seems like Zagzebski is aware of all this in discussing her examples of foward-looking counterfactuals (one whose antecedent is about the past/present and the consequent is about the future). She cites Lewis/Pollock as supporting what I've been saying but then disagrees with them on the basis of her semantic equation of 'mights' and 'coulds'. Let me quote her at length here (emphasis in bold is mine): 

To take a particular example, consider the following subjunctive conditional, where the antecedent is about the actual present and past and the consequent is about the future:

(4) If I lived my life the way I have up to now (May 1988), I would be living in Chicago in 1999.

It seems to me that (4) is false. Defining the might-counterfactual in terms of the would- counterfactual, as Lewis and Pollock do, (4) is equivalent to the following.

(5) ~ (If I lived my life the way I have up to now (May 1988), I might not be living in Chicago in 1999).

But (5) is surely false, and it seems false because it seems true instead that the following:

(6) If I lived my life the way I have up to now (May 1988), I might be living in Chicago in 1999.

(7) If I lived my life the way I have up to now (May 1988), I might not be living in Chicago in 1999).

I have not proposed an account of counterfactuals in this book, but it is clear to me that there is a large class of paradigm cases of the might-counterfactual in which the antecedent is about the actual past or present and the consequent about the future. In these cases we think that both A > might B and A > might not B are true. This means that the principle of Conditional Excluded Middle (CEM), (A > B) or (A >-B), is false when A is about the actual past and present and B is about either the actual or possible future. CEM fails in these cases because one mark of the difference between the future and the past is just that the future is such that there is more than one alternative that might be the future, whereas there is only one alternative that (now) might be the past. The ordinary notion of time explained in Chapter 1, then, supports the rejection of CEM for propositions in this category.

End quote. Notice that Lewis and Pollock (and Stalnaker, by the way) support my view of the Square: the 'would' contradictory to the 'might not', and therefore, if it's true that I would do something, it's not true that I might not do something (since 'woulds' logically imply 'mights', not 'might-nots'). But Zagzebski is forced to disagree with this because it 'seems true' that some conjoined might/might-not counterfactual is true. But the only reason (that I can see) why she would think this is because she's semantically equating 'mights' with 'coulds' and 'might-nots' with 'could-nots', an equation that is semantically forbidden. This equation leads her into thinking that there is this 'large class of paradigm cases of might-counterfactuals' that just don't exist! Also, notice why she thinks this in the last bold emphasis: there is more than one alternative that might be the future. This is not true. If something S will/would be, then it's not true that S 'might not' be, even though it will continue to be true that S could and could not be. 

On the other hand, Zagzebski thinks that Molinist are correct to say that some CCFs are true. But she believes that citing examples of true CCFs isn't sufficient for demonstrating the truth/plausibility of the theory of Middle Knowledge. If "many free choices are not counterfactually implied by even the totality of the past up to the time of the choice", then "God cannot know these choices by knowing counterfactuals and his own will" (pg. 141). But the problem is that Zagzebski's entire case for thinking that many free choices are not counterfactually implied by the past up to the time of the choice is based on inferences drawn from semantic conflations. If the semantics, properly understood, forbid those conflations, then there's no such obstacle to the truth/plausibility of the theory of Middle Knowledge. Therefore, if you accept Middle Knowledge, and Middle Knowledge implies CEM, that's perfectly okay, since CEM doesn't have the consequences that Zagzebski seems to think it has. 

Conceptual Loomings

Currently drafting a response to Tyler Vela's take on Molinism. He's got a series here for anyone interested. Either I am being a pedantic rube or Vela and I have read completely different material on the subject. I'm finding myself offering (what I think are substantive) correction after correction and I'm beginning to wonder if I've misunderstood what I thought I had a pretty good handle on. Perhaps this is the nature of engaging in a controversy where each party has brought to that controversy two different, non-overlapping sets of books and essays they've read. 

Just read through the SEP article on Divine Foreknowledge and Free Will. Very good! Learned a lot. There's a rigid, logical space in this debate, and it's very interesting slowly finding its contours. I used to think I had this figured out to some extent, but (as with anything, I suppose) I have a lot to learn. I'm still undecided about whether theological fatalism reduces to logical fatalism and I'm not sure whether or not accidental necessity applies to the truth of past tense propositions or the obtainment of past events or states of affairs (a debate I didn't realize existed): the past event or state of affairs of having a belief, or (more specifically) God's having a belief. I did learn that there's a distinction between Okhamism and Molinism in terms of how they handle the foreknowledge/free-will dilemma: Okhamism thinks that the relevant accidental necessities are 'soft' facts and so counterfactually dependent on future, free will decisions; Molinism thinks that accidental necessity isn't closed under entailment. I had thought that these could go together, and, lo and behold, I found a dissertation that goes to show just that: Human Freedom in a World Full of Providence: An Ockhamist- Molinist Account of the Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Creaturely Free Will by Christopher J. Kosciuk. (I've started it today.) It has been tortuous trying to understand the semantics of counterfactuals, with David Lewis, Robert Stalnaker, and others, giving different twists (I don't pretend to fully understand them yet); also, some of the concepts are still too murky for me, so murky that I can't satisfactorily explain them yet: concepts like, forward-looking and backward-looking (sometimes called back-tracking) counterfactuals, the special and standard resolutions for vagueness for determining which worlds are more similar to the actual world than other worlds, how this plays out when you have the same past and a different present, or different pasts with the same present: there's so many knots to disentangle. The nature of the knot might be due to mistaken of interpretation on my part, which comes with the territory of reading without the presence of the author. I'll find that I think I have a handle on a concept, and then I'm met a paragraph later with a sentence that contradicts the helpful principle I conjured for myself, but which still makes sense relative to the original context in which it was conjured! I don't know. I press on. 

Started to get into the Great Courses. These are great resources. Going through one on Classical Mythology, The Peloponnesian War, The Divine Comedy, Becoming a Great Essayist, Classics of American Literature, and Philosophy of Science. 

Working my through Anna Karenina, Moby Dick, Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Princess and the Goblin, Bleak House, 1984, Brave New World, and the Collected Essays of C.S. Lewis. I'll be working my way through the chapter on Ockham in The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge by Linda Zagzebski tomorrow morning. I find this a most satisfying alternative to binge watching TV shows on Netflix. There's a parallel, of course, but this alternative is so much more imaginatively enriching. You whisk back and forth, from this chapter in that world to another chapter in another world, from the foggy, sublimely haunted world of Transylvania (Dracula has been the most surprising to me as to how gripping the story is and how well Stoker's descriptions are crafted) to riding on board the Pequod, the foam of the sea spraying in my face, the smell of the salty ocean, with a crazed, monomaniacal Captain on his quest for revenge against the iconic, white whale. Each experience is illimitable; each transition is thrilling. I remember thinking how my imaginative experience would be spoiled if I had already seen the movie based on the books. How wrong I was! Ahab is neither Peck nor Stewart in my imagination; he is someone with qualities I've never met in the world of extra-imaginary experience. I thought this would have been especially true of Mr. Hyde, but no! His grotesqueness isn't terrifying, though I understand why it is for those in that world; it is, on the other hand, eerie, anchored as it is in a perennial existential condition that can be described with a certain degree of dread. I'm having the most trouble with Bleak House, but I think it will be good exercise to push through - the literary guides summarizing each chapter are lots of help. I'll be sure to blog my impressions as I (without rushing!) go through the books. (As an aside, I've finished Is Theology Poetry? and The Funeral of a Great Myth so far in Lewis' collected essays.) 

I've been trying to get to chapter 2 in Bright Shadow of Reality by Corbin Scott Carnell, but I've been getting interrupted. I got through a page of it but had to attend to other things. He made a claim I found peculiar though. He called Lewis' critique of 'The Personal Heresy' an 'overstated corrective' and something along the lines of Lewis not abiding by that corrective in writing his autobiography. I think Carnell completely missed the point of the corrective. It's not supposed to make it impossible to talk about oneself. It's that in 'talking about oneself', you're supposed to attend to what is being said, the Reality that the uttered propositions are about, rather than analyzing the subject behind the utterances (especially when reading those utterances in a specific, written, or spoken context). It's a delightful book so far and I can't wait to see where Carnell's exploration takes me.