Middle Knowledge and the Problem of Evil

Abstract

TF President Kennedy had not been shot, would * he have bombed North Vietnam? God only knows. Or does He? Does even He know what Kennedy would have done ? There is a little known but interesting literature on the general issue exemplified by this question. In the i58o's a fierce controversy erupted between the Jesuits and the Dominicans about the relation between God's grace and human free will. The Jesuits held, among other things, that many human actions are free in the sense that their agents are not logically or causally determined to do them. (Free will always be used in this sense in the present essay.) How then does God maintain control over human history? Not by causally determining human actions, as the Dominicans seemed to believe,1 but by causing circumstances in which He knew that we would freely act in accordance with His plans. This answer was developed with great ingenuity by Luis de Molina, and defended by other Jesuit theologians, notably by Francisco Suarez. Their theory includes the thesis that God knows with certainty what every possible free creature would freely do in every situation in which that creature could possibly find himself. Such was called knowledge by the Jesuits, because they thought it had a middle status between other kinds of know? ledge?between God's of the merely possible and His of the actual; or between His of necessary truths, which all follow from the divine nature, and His know? ledge of His own will and everything that is causally determined by His will.2 This paper is about two questions. The first is whether middle is possible, even for God. I shall argue that it is not, on the ground that conditional propositions of the sort that are sup? posed to be known by middle cannot be true. I will examine (in section II) the attempts of Molina and Suarez to explain how God can have middle knowledge; and then (in section III) the account recently offered by Alvin Plantinga, who has reinvented the theory of middle knowledge. wo objections to my position will be discussed in section IV.