Molinism and trials

A standard thing that theists have long said is that some difficult situations are “trials” where you have right and wrong options, and where you have an opportunity to grow closer to God through the right choice.

Suppose Molinism is true. Now suppose Curley the crooked politician has failed a trial by accepting a bribe. On Molinism, God knew that if Curley were to be offered a bribe in these circumstances, Curley would fail the trial. Now, presumably, God could also have tweaked the circumstances of the trial in different ways. For instance, he could have made sure that Curley had a headache at the time, or had noticed the beauty of God’s creation while walking to work through the city park, or had tripped and bruised his knee, etc. All these things would affect the psychological state that Curley was in while being bribed. Now, just as we would expect re-runs of Curley’s choice (with a memory wipe between re-runs) to result sometimes in the acceptance of the bribe and sometimes in its rejection in a way that looks random (as per van Inwagen’s rewind argument), likewise we would expect the results of Curley’s counterfactual choice to vary between the variant circumstances. In particular, we would expect some of the variant circumstances to be such that Curley would have passed the test.

Now, given that, we have a puzzle: Why didn’t God modify the circumstances in such a way? It seems like it would have been easy to do so without interfering in anyone’s freedom.

Of course, this is just a species of the problem of evil. But there is a difference between this and some other problems of evil. If we ask why God might have allowed someone to suffer, we can answer by saying that God might have planned to draw a greater good out of the suffering. But it is problematic to say that God planned to draw a greater good out of Curley’s sin. For to say that appears to imply that God intended Curley’s sin as a means to an end. But it is wrong to intend that someone sin, even as a means to much greater good.

What we need for theodicy here is a significant good achieved not by Curley’s sin, but by something independent of Curley’s sin. Let’s say that Curley would have rejected the bribe if he had a headache. Then God needs a significant reason not to have given Curley a headache, and a reason not dependent on the goods God would draw out of Curley’s sin. Since a headache is a minor bad, the good of avoiding a headache is not enough to do the job, it seems.

One solution is that God has good reason to minimize his interference in nature, even if the interference is really minor.

Another solution, and I both like it and yet feel it’s a bit of a cheat, is for the Molinist to embrace what I called the “Undefined” answer to the question of correlations between conditional of free will. On that answer, we cannot say that it is likely that in one of the variant circumstances Curley would have chosen differently.

Of course, the best answer is to abandon Molinism for mere foreknowledge.