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).

Molinism and correlations

Assume Molinism.

Suppose T is a set of character traits that makes one be equipoised between freely taking and refusing a $5000 bribe for a city contract. Let C₁, C₂, ... be distinct and highly specific possible circumstances of Curley being offered such a bribe, differing in morally unimportant ways that are not very relevant to Curley’s character. Perhaps he is offered the bribe in an Italian restaurant, or in a Thai restaurant, or while walking in the park. Perhaps the bribe is being offered by a man or by a woman. Maybe it’s in the morning or the evening. Etc.

Consider the counterfactual of free will:

• Q_i: Were Curley to have T and be offered a $5000 bribe for a city contract in C_i, he would accept the bribe.

Intuitively, P(Q_i) ≈ 1/2 for any i. Let’s accept that intuition. But now here is an interesting question: What kinds of statistical correlation is there between Q₁, Q₂, ...?

The intuition behind van Inwagen’s re-run thought experiment says that if Curley were offered a sequence of exactly similar bribes, with memory erased in between, then Curley’s acceptance/rejection decisions would behave like an independent sequence of random variables. That intuition suggests that Q₁, Q₂, ... are also statistically independent.

On the other hand, one might have the conflicting intuition that Q_i and Q_j are more correlated when the circumstances C_i and C_j are more similar.

On the third hand, one might think that although each of Q_i has probability around 1/2, the probabilities of conjunctions of the Q_i are undefined, and hence it makes no sense to talk about their correlations.

These seem to me to be the three most plausible views on the correlation question. Call these the Independence, Similarity, and Undefined views.

On Molinism plus Independence, God has a vast amount of providential power. He is nearly certain to be able to get Curley (or any other free agent) to freely do anything he wants, simply by choosing minor and unimportant features of circumstances. Given independence, it is extremely unlikely that all the Q_i have the same truth value. Thus, God can just choose the circumstances to get the truth value he wants—to get Curley to accept or to get Curley to reject the bribe. In particular, on Independence, free will does not do much to help the theist.

On the Similarity view, there are some more serious constraints of God’s providential power. However, I think there is another problem with the Similarity view. On Similarity, there is presumably some complicated function from the degree of similarity between circumstances to the degree of correlation (say, measured by covariance) between the truth values of the corresponding counterfactuals. Where does this function come from? Normally correlations between events are explained by laws of nature. But counterfactuals of free will are prior to laws of nature. I suppose the correlation function would have to be something necessary. But it does seem mysterious.

I think that if I were a Molinist, I would find the Undefined view somewhat appealing. The version of it that seems most plausible would be that P(Q_iQ_j) is not defined as a number, but can be represented as the interval [max(0,P(Q_i)+P(Q_j)−1),min(P(Q_i),P(Q_j))]. But I still find it a bit odd that P(Q_i) and P(Q_j) are defined but P(Q_iQ_j) is not. Nonetheless, this seems possible.

Yet another argument against Molinism

Assume Molinism. Let maximal transworld depravity be the claim that for any circumstances C in which an agent x would be freely choosing between options A₁, A₂, ..., the agent would choose an option than which they could not choose a worse. If Molinism is true, maximal transworld depravity seems possible.

Suppose God finds there to be maximal transworld depravity, and consequently chooses not to create anything. Nonetheless, wouldn’t it be a very bad thing that maximal transworld depravity holds? After all, it prevents God from having all sorts of great possibilities. But how could there be anything bad in a world where only God exists?

So, we have an argument against Molinism. If Molinism is true, it is possible that God alone exists and yet reality has something very bad about it.

Why does God create those he knows will reject him?

Question: Suppose Alice goes to hell, having conclusively rejected God’s grace. Given that God knew that Alice will reject his grace, why did this knowledge not lead him to refrain from creating Alice?

Answer: It is impossible that the following two claims are true:

1. God refrains from creating Alice.

2. God knows that Alice will reject his grace.

For 1 entails:

3. Alice won’t exist

while 2 entails:

4. Alice will reject God’s grace

which in turn entails:

5. Alice will exist.

(Of course, if Molinism is true, one can ask a very similar question to the one I started with. But Molinism is false.)

A variant of Molinism

The biggest problem with Molinism is the grounding problem: there is nothing in reality wherein the subjunctive conditionals of free will (“middle truths”) could be grounded. As Reuben perceptively noted in a recent comment, the problem is especially big if God is simple, as then the middle truths can’t even be grounded in God.

Anyway, it seems to me that there might be some benefit to Molinists to think about what one might call Individually Grounded Weak Molinism (IGWM). On IGWM, there are no middle truths about the free actions of non-actual persons, but there are middle truths about the free actions of actual persons, which are grounded in properties of these very persons. Thus, “when” (in the explanatory and not temporal sense) God is deciding whether to create Curley, there is no fact of the matter whether Curley would accept a $5000 bribe in circumstances C. But “as soon as” Curley is actual (on eternalism, this will be the case even before Curley temporally exists—maybe as soon as God decides to create Curley), there will be a fact of the matter whether he would accept that bribe in C.

On IGWM, there is an “ontological home” for the middle truths. Moreover, IGWM ameliorates another problem for standard Molinism: the problem of evil. On standard Molinism, God presumably has a vast amount of knowledge that he can use in optimizing the world. E.g., God knows that Adam and Eve would sin, but there is a vast number of couples almost exactly like Adam and Eve, and it seems very unlikely that they would all have sinned in Adam and Eve’s circumstances, so why didn’t God create them? But on IGWM, God only knows that Adam and Eve would sin in the Garden of Even once he decides to create them. One might objet that are presumably a vast number of gardens almost like Eden that God could put Adam and Eve in, and on IGWM God middle-knows how they would behave in each garden, and it would seem surprising if Adam and Eve would have sinned in all of them. Not so. For it might be that there are close correlations between middle-truths about how Eve (say) would act in circumstance C₁ and how she would act in C₂ if C₁ and C₂ are very similar.

But IGWM still has enough bite to yield some of the advantages of Molinism. First, we have the biblical cases. Granted, these could be interpreted in a non-Molinist way, but a Molinist way seems particularly neat. For instance, in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, God tells the rich man that his brothers wouldn’t repent even if someone came back from the dead to talk to them. On IGWM, this conditional makes sense, and is grounded in the rich man’s brothers. (Granted, this is a parable, so it’s not a prooftext for Molinism.) Second, we still have the nice story about how God can work in our lives and achieve his gracious goals without undercutting our freedom: God knows what we would choose in which circumstances, and can control the circumstances we are in. Third, the Molinist account of efficacious grace works on IGWM with no changes. Fourth, and this is the immediate motivation for my post, my Molinist defense of hell works just fine on this story.

IGWM does not solve all the problems with Molinism. The Adams circularity argument continues to be problematic. Suppose I freely choose A in circumstances C, and God put me in C because he middle knew that I would freely choose A in C. It’s surely note a coincidence that both (a) I freely choose A in C and (b) I would freely choose A in C. There needs to be some kind of explanatory connection between (a) and (b). If (b) is explanatorily prior to (a), then it seems that the middle facts about me explain my actions, and that seems to undercut my freedom. But if (a) is explanatorily prior to (b), then we have a circularity. For (b) is prior to C, and C is prior to (a).

And there may be a way in which the freedom worry about Molinism feels bigger on IGWM. If it’s a property of me that I would freely choose A in C, rather than just being an ungrounded truth, then it looks a bit more like that property constrains me and takes away my freedom.

Predictability and epistemic utility

You’re thinking whether to become an assembly-line worker or an artist. Then you reflect on the value of knowledge. And you become a factory worker, on the grounds that if you become an assembly-line worker, you will know what you’ll be doing every working day of your future, but if you’re an artist, your activities will be unpredictable.

Some remarks. First, there is something perverse about using the value of knowledge in this way. The normal way to pursue the value of knowledge is to find out things that are independent of your pursuit. But here you are pursuing knowledge by making there be less to know about the world (or your world). Yet, paradoxically, it sure seems like the line of thought above makes sense.

Second, the my initial story depends on Molinism being false. For if there are comprehensive subjective conditionals of free will, then by becoming an artist you get to know the conditionals about what you would do in the various artistic situations you’re in. But on the assembly line story, you don’t get to know these. So the Molinist doesn’t have the paradox. I suppose that’s a bit of evidence for Molinism.

Causal histories and freedom

Linda Zagzebski proposes the plausible principle that one is able to ϕ only if ϕing is compatible with one’s causal history relevant to ϕing.

Suppose Alice is considering whether to rob a bank. While she is doing so, God loudly announces to her nearby friend Bob that Alice will not rob the bank. God’s announcement is in Swahili, which Bob knows and Alice used to know in childhood but completely forgot. But the sound of the language her loving parents spoke to her as a child leads to Alice putting more emphasis on virtue in her deliberation, and she freely decides not to rob the bank.

Since God cannot lie, and since God’s announcement is a part of Alice’s causal history in her deliberation, Alice’s robbing the bank is incompatible with causal history and by Zagzebski’s principle, Alice cannot rob the bank. Yet it is unclear how God’s announcement removes her freedom to rob. After all, had God announced in Swahili that Alice will have breakfast, that would have influenced her deliberation in the same way, and yet obviously she would still have been free to rob the bank. But since Alice doesn’t know Swahili, the content seems causally irrelevant.

I think there are two ways out of this. First, we might cut events very finely. There is (a) God’s saying something or other in Swahili and there is (b) God’s saying in Swahili that Alice will not rob the bank. To determine the causal history, we pare away from the events all that’s causally irrelevant, and so we include (a) but not (b) in the causal history.

Alternately, we might say this. Whether or not Alice knows Swahili, her decision is affected by the detailed facts about the sounds in God’s announcement. Indeed, by essentiality of origins, her deliberation is a numerically different process because of the difference of sounds. And now we can say that God cannot make the announcement, because doing so would result in a circularity in the explanatory order: God would be making the announcement because Alice is not going to rob and Alice is not going to rob because God is making the announcement because she is not going to rob. So it is not so much that the announcement takes away God’s freedom, but that God cannot produce explanatory circularities.

It’s worth noting that Molinism does not seem to help. Sure, the subjunctive conditional of free will

1. Were God to announce in Swahili that Alice won’t rob, Alice wouldn’t rob

is true. But it is necessarily true independently of Molinism!

A really bad moral dilemma

Here would be a really bad kind of moral dilemma:

• It is certain that unless you murder one innocent person now, you will freely become a mass murderer, but if you do murder that innocent person, you will freely repent of it later and live an exemplary life.

If compatibilism is true, such dilemmas are possible—the world could be so set up that these unfortunate free choices are inevitable. If compatibilism is false, such dilemmas are impossible, absent Molinism.

We might have a strong intuition that such dilemmas are impossible. If so, maybe that gives us another reason to reject compatibilism and Molinism.

The Church-Turing Thesis and generalized Molinism

The physical Church-Turing (PCT) thesis says that anything that can be physically computed can be computed by a Turing machine.

If generalized Molinism—the thesis that for any sufficiently precisely described counterfactual situation, there is a fact of the matter what would happen in that situation—is true, and indeterminism is true, then PCT seems very likely false. For imagine the function f from the natural numbers to {0, 1} such that f(n) is 1 if and only if the coin toss on day n would be heads, were I to live forever and daily toss a fair coin—with whatever other details need to be put in to get the "sufficiently precisely described". But only countably many functions are Turing computable, so with probability one, an infinite sequence of coin tosses would define a Turing non-computable function. But f is physically computable: I could just do the experiment.

But wait: I’m going to die, and even if there is an afterlife, it doesn’t seem right to characterize whatever happens in the afterlife as physical computation. So all I can compute is f(n) for n < 30000 or so.

Fair enough. But if we say this, then the PCT becomes trivial. For given finite life-spans of human beings and of any machinery in an expanding universe with increasing entropy, only finitely many values of any given function can be physically computed. And any function defined on a finite set can, of course, be trivially computed by a Turing machine via a lookup-table.

So, either we trivialize PCT by insisting on the facts of our physical universe that put a finite limit on our computations, or in our notion of “physically computed” we allow for idealizations that make it possible to go on forever. If we do allow for such idealizations, then my argument works: generalized Molinism makes PCT unlikely to be true.

Transworld depravity is false

Plantinga’s transworld depravity thesis holds that in every world that God is contingently capable of actualizing (i.e., every “feasible” world), either there is no significant freedom or there is at least one free wrong choice. I will argue that transworld depravity is in fact false, assuming Molinism.

But consider a possible situation A where the first significantly free choice runs as follows. Eve has a choice whether to eat a delicious apple or not, while knowing that God has forbidden her from eating the apple. Eve comes into the choice with a pretty decent character. In particular, she is so constructed that she is unable to take God’s prohibitions to be anything but reasons against an action and God’s commands to be anything but reasons for an action. Nonetheless, she is free: she can choose to eat the apple on account of its deliciousness, despite God’s prohibiting it.

By Molinism, if enough detail is built into the situation, either:

1. in A, Eve would eat the apple, or

2. in A, Eve would not eat the apple.

If (2) is true, then transworld depravity is false, because God could simply take away freedom after Eve’s first choice, and so we have a feasible world where there is exactly one significantly free choice, and it’s right.

Suppose then (1) is true. Now imagine a situation A^* where just before Eve is deliberating whether to eat the apple, God announces that the prohibition on eating the apple is now changed into a command to eat the apple. If in A, Eve would eat the apple on account of its deliciousness despite its being forbidden, she would a fortiori eat the apple if God were to command her to do so. Thus:

3. in A^*, Eve would eat the apple.

But then transworld depravity is false, because again God could take freedom away after Eve’s first choice.

The argument as it stands does not show that transworld depravity is necessarily false. I try to do that here with a similar but perhaps less compelling argument.

Subjective sameness of choice situations and Molinism

Suppose that Alice on a street corner sells Bob a “Rolex” for $15. Bob goes home and his wife Carla says: “You got scammed!” Bob takes the “Rolex” to a jeweller and finds that it is indeed a Rolex. He goes back to Carla and says: “No, I got a good deal!” But Carla says: “But if it was a fake, you would have bought it, too.”

Here is Carla’s reasoning behind her counterfactual. A typical fake would have looked the same as the real thing to Bob, and so the counterfactual situation where Bob is offered the fake would have been subjectively the same to Bob. And Carla subscribes to this principle:

1. If you were instead in a different situation that was subjectively identical to the one you were in, you would have chosen the same way.

I find (1) pretty plausible, and it seems to nicely come out as true on a Lewis-style account of counterfactuals in terms of similarity of worlds (with approximate match counting as similarity).

But I doubt a Molinist should accept (1). For the Molinist does not think that counterfactuals of free will are grounded in similarity of worlds (except of the trivial sort, where truth values of counterfactuals count as part of the similarity).

A bad argument from hiddenness

Consider the following variant of the argument from hiddenness:

1. If God exists, no mature human is ignorant of God’s existence through no fault of their own.

2. Some mature humans are ignorant of God’s existence through no fault of their own.

3. So, God doesn’t exist.

It’s occurred to me that premises like (3) are either nonsense, or trivially false, or far beyond our capacity to know to be true.

For to evaluate whether some x is ignorant of God’s existence through no fault of their own requires asking something like this:

4. Would x still have been ignorant of God’s existence had x lived a morally perfect life?

But it does not seem likely that there is a sensible positive answer to (4). Here is a quick argument for this. Those who deny Molinism are going to say that either the proposition asked about in (4) has no truth value or that it is trivially false. And even some Molinists will say this about (4), because Molinists are committed to there being conditionals of free will only when the antecedent is maximally specified, while “x lived a morally perfect life” is too unspecified. The question is much like:

5. Had Napoleon been born in South America, would he still have been a great military leader?

There are many ways for Napoleon to have been in South America, and they are apt to result in different answers to the question about whether he was a great military leader.

But even if (4) has a truth value, perhaps because (4) is to be interpreted in some probabilistic way or because we have an expansive version of Molinism that makes (4) make sense, it is far beyond our epistemic powers to know the answer to (4) to be true. Here is why. Our lives are full of wrongdoing. Our lives would likely be unrecognizable had they been morally perfect. To ask what we would have thought and known in the counterfactual scenario where we live a morally perfect life is to ask about a scenario further from actuality than Napoleon’s being born in South America.

Now, that said, there are times when we can evaluate counterfactuals that involve a massive change to the antecedent on the basis of certain generalities. For instance, while we have no answer to (5), we do have a negative answer to:

6. Had Napoleon suffered a massive head injury rendering him incapable of interpersonal communication, would he still have been a great military leader?

Similarly, if an atheist had suffered a head injury removing the capacity for higher level thought, the shape of their life would have been very different, but at least we can say that they wouldn’t have been an atheist, because they wouldn’t have had the concepts necessary to form the belief that there is no God. So, indeed, sometimes counterfactuals that take us far afield can be evaluated sensibly on general grounds.

But I do not think we have good general grounds for a positive answer to (4), unless we have independent grounds to doubt the truth and rationality of theism:

7. There are no good grounds for reasonably believing in God, and a person who lives a morally innocent life won’t believe things groundlessly, so they won’t believe in God.

8. There are people who grow up in societies where there is no concept of God, and they would not be aware of God no matter what the shape of their lives would have been.

Obviously, (7) requires independent grounds to doubt the rationality of theism. And if God exists, then for all we know, he has a general practice of making those who are morally perfect be aware of him, so (8) is dubious if God exists.

Of course, an atheist might think (7) is true, but this is unlikely to be a helpful move in an argument against the existence of God. After all, similarly, a theist might think the following is true:

9. God will ensure that every morally perfect mature human is aware of him.

Indeed, a typical Christian thinks that there have only ever been one or two people—Jesus and maybe Mary—who have been morally perfect, and both candidates were aware of God.

Molinism and sceptical theism

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.

A pre-established harmony with genuine mind-world causation

Molinists have the ability to give a distinctive pre-established harmony account of how the exceptionless truth of deterministic laws of nature could be made compatible with libertarianism.

Here is the story. God considers possible worlds where dualistic agents have the causal power to miraculously contradict the physical laws in their free choices, but where outside of exercises of free will, there are elegant deterministic mathematical laws governing the world. Call such worlds Candidate Worlds.

God then narrows his consideration to Finalist Worlds, which are Candidate Worlds that are feasible—i.e., compatible with the Molinist conditionals—and where as it happens the agents’ free choices accord with the elegant deterministic mathematical laws that govern the rest of the world.

And then God wisely and prudently chooses one of the Finalist Worlds for actualization.

On this story, there are elegant deterministic mathematical laws of nature which are true even of the agents’ choices, but they are true of the agents’ choices because the agents freely chose as they did. The agents had the causal power to violate, say, the conservation of momentum, but in fact freely did not do so.

There is an ambiguity in the concept of “exceptionless laws”. “Exceptionless laws” could mean: laws that allow no exception (they are pushy laws that are so strong as to make no exception possible) and laws that in fact have no exception. The deterministic laws in this story are exceptionless in the sense of having no exception, which is why I am talking of their exceptionless truth rather than their exceptionless power.

In this story, there is a dual explanation of the agents’ choices. On the one hand, there is a standard libertarian story about the agents’ free causality. On the other hand, the laws have explanatory power, because God chose the Finalist Worlds because they are worlds where the laws have exceptionless truth.

The big difficulty with the above story is Molinism. Also, it is worth noting that it is metaphysically possible that there turn out not to be any (feasible) Finalist Worlds: in that scenario, God wouldn’t be able to create a world where there is freedom and elegant deterministic mathematical laws holding exceptionlessly. But for reasons similar to why many people think Transworld Depravity is unlikely to be true, I think it is unlikely that there would be no Finalist Worlds.

It is also interesting to note that there are two more views that could be plugged into the story that can do the same job: Thomism and compatibilism.

On Thomism, God can use primary causation to make agents freely choose as he desires. Then we can suppose that God surveys the same Candidate Worlds as on the Molinist story. Then he chooses Finalist Worlds as those Candidate Worlds where the agents’ free choices in fact do not contradict the mathematical laws. And then God uses primary causation to actualize one of the Finalist Worlds. Again, the agents have the power to contradict the laws, but freely choose not to exercise it.

Finally we have straightforward compatibilism. A dualist can just as easily be a compatibilist as a materialist. On this story, we skip the Candidate Worlds, and the Finalist Worlds are worlds with compatibilist agents, with a deterministic non-physical mental life, who have the power of contradict the physical laws of the world but who are mentally determined, in a way compatible with freedom, never to exercise such a power. And then God chooses one of the Finalist Worlds. The agents then are as free as any compatibilist agents.

The compatibilist version of this story is close to Leibniz’s pre-established harmony, except that it has real mind-world causation, which is a big improvement.

Of course, the non-theist can’t make any of these moves. And, alas, neither can I, since my mere foreknowledge view denies Molinism, Thomism (about free will) and compatibilism.

Molinism and Thomism and control over others

1. It is not possible for a creature to exercise complete control over another person’s (non-derivatively) free action.

2. If Molinism is true, it is possible for a creature to exercise complete control over another person’s (non-derivatively) free action.

3. So, Molinism is false.

For, if Molinism is true, there will be a possible situation where God reveals to Alice that if she were to make a request of Bob while wearing blue gloves, Bob would acquiesce to the request, but if she were to make the request while wearing red gloves, Bob would turn down the request. In such a case, by controlling which gloves she wears, Alice could exercise complete control over whether Bob acquiesces to the request.

Interestingly the same argument works against Thomism. For on Thomism, God can use primary causation to determine Bob to freely acquiesce in the request and God can use primary causation to determine Bob to freely refuse the request. God could then promise Alice that he would hear her prayers as to whether Bob agrees or refuses, and then with her prayers, Alice would have complete control over Bob's decision.

The argument doesn't work against mere foreknowledge views, open theist views or compatibilist views. On mere foreknowledge and open theism, the analogue of (2) is false, while on compatibilism, (1) is not plausible.

God, probabilities and causal propensities

Suppose a poor and good person is forced to flip a fair and indeterministic coin in circumstances where heads means utter ruin and tails means financial redemption. If either Molinism or Thomism is true, we would expect that, even without taking into account miracles:

1. P(H)<P(T).

After all, God is good, and so he is more likely to try to get the good outcome for the person. (Of course, there are other considerations involved, so the boost in probability in favor of tails may be small.)

The Molinist can give this story. God knows how the coin would come out in various circumstances. He is more likely to ensure the occurrence of circumstances in which the subjunctive conditionals say that tails would comes up. The Thomist, on the other hand, will say that God’s primary causation determines what effect the secondary creaturely causation has, while at the same time ensuring that the secondary causation is genuinely doing its causal job.

But given (1), how can we say that the coin is fair? Here is a possibility. The probabilities in (1) take God’s dispositions into account. But we can also look simply at the causal propensities of the coin. The causal propensities of the coin are equibalanced between heads and tails. In addition to the probabilities in (1), which take everything including God into account, we can talk of coin-grounded causal chances, which are basically determined by the ratios of strength in the causal propensities. And the coin-grounded causal chances are 1/2 for heads and 1/2 for tails. But given Molinism or Thomism, these chances are not wholly determinative of the probabilities and the frequencies in repeat experiments, since the latter need to take into account the skewing due to God’s preference for the good.

So we get two sets of probabilities: The all-things-considered probabilities P that take God into account and that yield (1) and the creatures-only-considered probabilities P_c on which:

2. P_c(H)=P_c(T)=1/2.

Here, however, is something that I think is a little troubling about both the Molinist and Thomist lines. The creatures-only-considered probabilities are obviously close to the observed frequencies. Why? I think the Molinist and Thomist have to say this: They are close because God chooses to act in such ways that the actual frequencies are approximately proportional to the strengths of causal propensities that P_c is based on. But then the frequencies of coin toss outcomes are not directly due to the causal propensities of the coin, but only because God chooses to make the frequencies match. This doesn’t seem right and is a reason why I want to adopt neither Molinism nor Thomism but a version of mere foreknowledge.

Molinism and behavioral dispositions

There is some sort of a link between counterfactuals and dispositions, though there are lots of counterexamples to direct links. Here is a very weak principle affirming such a link:

1. Suppose that x is in state S at time t and that x’s being in S at t grounds x’s being disposed to behavior A after t. Then there is some maximally determinate categorical proposition p describing the world up to time t and logically compatible with x’s being in S at t such that it is false that were p true and x in state S, x would fail to engage in behavior A after t.

To put it very roughly, this messy principle says that if a disposition to a behavior is grounded in a state, then it’s not the case that no matter what one adds to the state, the behavior would not occur. Suppose that (1) is a necessary truth.

Add this:

2. It is possible for a human being to have an unactualized indeterministic disposition with respect to non-derivatively free behavior.

For instance, there is presumably a shade R of red that Jean Vanier has never met someone wearing, and yet he is disposed to behave non-derivatively freely kindly to persons wearing R.

What I have said so far does not, however, cohere with Molinism. For on Molinism, the conditionals of free will logically float free from the indeterministic dispositions of things. There is, for instance, a possible world where Jean Vanier still has the same kindly dispositions that he does in the actual world, but where the Molinist conditionals say that in the case of any of the appropriate maximally deterministic categorical strengthenings of the claim that he meets a person wearing R, if that strengthening were actual, he would behave unkindly to that person. This would violate (1).

[Note added later: This was, of course, written before the revelations about Jean Vanier's abusiveness. I would certainly have chosen a different example if I were writing this post now.]

Hiddenness and Molinism

Schellenberg claims that God cannot coexist with a non-resistant non-believer, since God being love would ensure that everyone who is non-resistant would be given the conditions necessary for a personal relationship with God.

It seems to me that a Molinist has a nice answer to this. A loving God would not want to compel people to have a particular kind of relationship with him, and would hence leave them free. But now imagine a particular non-resistant non-believer, Alice. God could know of Alice that if she believed in God and were free with respect to a relationship with God, she would freely choose a bad relationship with God. Then here are God’s main options with respect to Alice:

1. Not create Alice

2. Ensure Alice believes in God but make it impossible for her to have a bad relationship with God

3. Ensure Alice does not believe in God

4. Ensure Alice believes in God and allow her to have a bad relationship with God.

For Schellenberg’s case to work, (3) has to be an unacceptable option for a loving God. But (3) seems better than (1) and (4), and (2) seems contrary to the way that love requires respect for the freedom of the beloved. So while (3) is not ideal, it seems better than the alternatives.

And it could be—this is parallel to Trans-World Depravity—that in every feasible world there is someone like Alice.

I think the main response would be that a person who would have a bad relationship with God counts as resistant—i.e., a disposition to a bad relationship with God counts as resistance. However, this misses the Molinist point. Molinist conditionals of free will are not grounded in present character. One can be such that one would have a bad relationship with God if one believed in God, without having a disposition to such a relationship. One’s present character might, for instance, be neutral or even favoring of a good relationship with God, but given Molinism, it could be that were one to come to the decision point, one would decide against the relationship.

One could redefine non-resistance as being such that were one to believe, one would be in a good relationship with God. But because Molinist conditionals are ungrounded, we wouldn’t know whether a particular non-believer is resistant or not.

It's a pity that Molinism is false.

Molinism and prophecy

Here’s a curious puzzle. Every theist—including the Molinist and the Open Theist—will presumably agree that this conditional is true:

1. If God were to announce that Trump will freely refrain from tweeting tomorrow, then Trump would freely refrain from tweeting tomorrow.

After all, both presumably accept that God wouldn’t affirm what he didn’t know to be the case.

However, plainly, the truth of (1) isn’t enough to justify God in announcing that Trump will freely refrain from tweeting tomorrow. For, plainly, something like Molinist middle knowledge or mere foreknowledge or theistic compatibilism would be needed for God to be justified in issuing the prophecy. Something like (1) that holds independently of theories of divine foreknowledge is not going to do the trick.

Suppose now Molinism is true. It seems to be one of the advantages of Molinism that it can explain prophecy. But what relevant proposition beyond (1) does God know in the Molinist case that justifies his announcement?

Here is one possibility:

2. Trump will freely refrain from tweeting tomorrow.

But God’s knowing (2) is insufficient to justify God’s announcement. For imagine that the reason why Trump will refrain from tweeting tomorrow is that Trump likes to surprise people and nobody predicted that he wouldn’t tweet tomorrow. Then (2) can still be true—but if that’s the reason why (2) is true, then the truth of (2) won’t justify God in announcing that Trump won’t tweet.

I think what we want to say is that on Molinism what justifies God’s announcement is something like this:

3. Claim (1) holds not just because God’s announcements are always true.

But now here is the problem. If claim (1) holds not just because God’s announcements are always true, there must be some further explanation for why claim (1) is true other than just because God’s announcements are always true. But what is that explanation? Presumably it lies in the truth of some Molinist conditional. But it seems that the most relevant Molinist conditional is (1) itself, and that just won’t do.

Here’s another way of putting the point. The Molinist’s best response to the grounding objection is to say that Molinist conditionals are true but ungrounded. Such a Molinist has to say that the only reason (1) is ever true is that God doesn’t make untrue announcements. But, plausibly, if the only reason (1) is true is that God doesn’t make untrue announcements, then God isn’t justified in issuing the announcement. So God is never justified in issuing the announcement.

If I were a Molinist, I would say that God cannot make prophecies that end up being explanatorily prior to the prophesied actions. But if one makes that restriction, one might as well accept mere foreknowledge.

Deontology and future hypothetical wrongs

Molinism makes possible a curious kind of moral dilemma. God could reveal to Alice that if Alice doesn’t kill Bob today, she will kill Carl and David tomorrow (all these being innocents), and if she does kill Bob today, she won’t kill anyone tomorrow. Should she, thus, kill Bob today in order to prevent herself from murdering Carl and David tomorrow?

One might think that the possibility that Molinism allows for such a moral dilemma is a count against Molinism. But even without Molinism, one could have a probabilistic version of the dilemma where God reveals to Alice that if she doesn’t kill Bob today, she is very likely to kill both Carl and David tomorrow, and if she does kill Bob today, she is very unlikely to kill anyone tomorrow.

One way to make consequentialism fit with deontological intuitions is to set a high, perhaps infinite, disvalue on wrong action. That would imply that in the dilemma Alice should kill Bob in order to prevent the two murders tomorrow.

I think this is a mistake. Just as on deontological grounds it would be wrong for Alice to murder Bob to keep Eva from murdering Carl and David, so too it’s wrong for her to murder Bob to keep herself from murdering them. A eudaimonist may disagree here, holding that we should be promoting our own flourishing, so that when the choice is between committing two murders tomorrow and one today, we should go for the one today, but when the choice is between oneself committing one murder and another party committing two, we should let the other party commit the two. So much the worse, I say, for that kind of eudaimonist.

What makes it wrong for Alice to murder Bob is that the we shouldn’t perform bad acts. It’s not that we should minimize the number of bad acts performed, by others or oneself, but that we shouldn’t perform them. Of course, all other things being equal we should minimize the number of bad acts performed, by others and oneself, but a bad act is an act not to be done. And the lesson of deontology is that certain acts, such as intentionally killing without proper authority, are bad acts in virtue of their nature.

But isn’t killing Bob today the lesser evil?

Yet imagine Alice is debating whether she should eat ice cream, with its having been revealed to her that if she eats ice cream today, tomorrow she will kill Bob, and if she does not, then tomorrow she will kill Carl and David. In that case, it is clear: she should eat the ice cream. For the eating of ice cream isn’t the sort of act that is bad in virtue of its nature (unless a very strong form of moral veganism is true). Note, however, that if she eats the ice cream today, then her killing of Bob tomorrow is still wrong. (If you disagree, it may be simply because you disagree with Molinism, and you hold that the inevitability of her killing Bob takes away her freedom; if you think that, then go for a probabilistic version of the story.) This is true even though it is a lesser evil than her killing Carl and David.

In the original case, we can look at Alice doing two things when killing Bob:

1. Killing Bob

2. Bringing it about that she doesn’t kill Carl and David.

Her action is bad qua (1) and good qua (2). But we learn from Aquinas that for an action to be right, it must be right in every respect. So her action is wrong simpliciter.

On the other hand, in the ice cream version, in consuming the ice cream, Alice is doing two things:

3. Eating ice cream

4. Bringing it about that she doesn’t kill Carl and David.

Now her action is good or neutral qua (3) and good qua (4). In fact, it’s right in every respect. But her later killing of Bob is still wrong.