Molinism and prophecy

Suppose Bob offers a cookie to Alice who is free to accept or reject it. God would like to manifest his omniscience to Alice by announcing to her whether she will accept or reject the cookie. To that end, God uses his middle knowledge to consider the following conditionals:

1. Were God to announce that Alice will accept, Alice would accept.

2. Were God to announce that Alice will reject, Alice would reject.

God then follows the following algorithm:

1. If (i) is true and regardless of (ii), God announces that Alice will accept.

2. If (i) is false but (ii) is true, God announces that Alice will reject.

3. If both (i) and (ii) are false, God refrains from making an announcement.

But there is a problem. Both (i) and (ii) seem to be necessary truths! For God cannot lie and cannot be mistaken. Thus, following the algorithm, God will always announce that Alice will accept, and indeed she will. Hence God can with certainty get Alice to freely accept the cookie—which seems wrong! So there is something wrong with Molinism.

However, I wonder whether the Molinist has to say that (i) and (ii) both have to be true. Granted, their necessity follows from the following plausible rule for subjunctive conditionals:

4. Necessarily: If p is possible, and p entails q, then were p to hold, q would hold,

assuming that the antecedents of (i) and (ii) are possible and given S5. (And one can avoid S5 by assuming that necessarily the antecedents of (i) and (ii) are possible, and that the entailment between God announcing something and its being true is not only necessary but necessarily necessary.)

But perhaps (4) is not as obviously true as it seems. Consider a case where free will is not involved. There is a perfectly reliable sound-activated light. God is debating whether to announce “There will be no miracle and yet the light will not turn on.” It seems that it would be reasonable for God to reason that were he to make that announcement, the light would turn on (since it’s perfectly reliable, it would take a miracle for it not to), and hence the announcement would be false. Yet God’s making the announcement is possible (there is no problem about God making the announcement in a world where the lightbulb is broken).

So perhaps the Molinist can say that there can be subjunctive conditionals of free that are true even though the antecedent entails the negation of the consequent. If so, then (i) and (ii) could still be contingent.

I am still dubious of a logic of subjunctives where the subjunctive can violate an entailment. But perhaps it’s not as bad as I once thought it (compare this old paper of mine).