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).
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