When we think of God’s reasons for permitting evils, we tend to think of fairly “natural” connections between evils and goods. But given Molinism, there could be some really weird connections. For instance, it could be that if Alice hadn’t been cut off by Bob in traffic today, Carl who witnessed this would have joined a terrorist organization. Not because there is any intrinsic connection between seeing someone get cut off in traffic and joining a terrorist organization, but just because that’s how the conditionals of free will worked out.
Indeed, a Molinist should expect there to be cases where the Molinist conditionals work out the opposite way to the “natural” connections. Thus, we can have cases where becoming more cowardly results in one’s behaving more courageously, just as a Molinist God might know that if the coin loaded in favor of heads would show tails in the next ten tosses while the coin loaded in favor of tails would show heads in the text ten tosses.
So there seems to me to be a very nice affinity between Molinism and sceptical theism.
It’s really too bad that Molinism is false.
9 comments:
Why do you think that Molinism is false?
Daryl
Pruss will be unable to give a "reason"...
He does not understand what a counter-factual is...
Daryl:
For the standard reasons. It violates the supervenience of truth on being and leads to circularity in the order of explanation (God chooses which situations to put you in on the basis of your choices and you choose on the basis of the situations you've been put into).
Molinism violates the supervenience of truth on being.
A counter-factual appeal is employed to undermine a counter-factual system. The reasoning is circular.
Another, interesting approach in demonstrating that the B-theory of time is incorrect.
Skeptical theism is false too.
Walter Van den Acker
Interestingly, Molinism is neither true nor false...
Pruss: I agree that Molinism would fit very well with a skeptical theist approach (William Lane Craig has used it that way in debates). But, I also agree that Molinism is false. Indeed, after hearing Peter van Inwagen's response to it, I'm not sure Molinism makes any sense at all.
Interestingly, Dean Zimmerman has employed the possibility of these kinds of weird counterfactual connections as an argument against Molinism.
https://philpapers.org/rec/ZIMYAA
God could avoid these weird connections by only creating people whose choices wouldn't require them.
In the given example, God could choose not to create Alice, or Bob, or Carl; create some other people in their place, and so on.
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