Btw, Molinism & Open Theism are False

Molinism as an Attempt to Reconcile Sovereignty and Libertarian Freedom

Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Eli Ayala. And today I am happy to be discussing a very interesting topic, which we'll get into in just a few moments. But I do think that this episode will prove useful for a lot of folks who are interested in both of the topics of Molinism and Open Theism.

For those who know a little bit about my own theological journey, I did some hopscotching between different perspectives. I was never an Open Theist, which we'll define and explain for those who, when they start listening, maybe they don't know what Open Theism is, but I never entertained that view.

But I was a Molinist for some time, a short while, okay? So I grew up in a Pentecostal Arminian context. Then when I became, you know, when I was a little bit older and kind of gotten to some more theology, a little bit more intentionally, I became a Calvinist.

And then when I was a Calvinist for quite some time, I was introduced to the topic of Molinism. And through reading Kenneth Keighley's book, Salvation and Sovereignty, that book really made me question my Calvinism and explore this idea of Molinism.

And what I appreciated about Keighley's book is that he presented a version of Molinism alongside Calvinism. And so this was really something that was important to me. I didn't wanna just learn about Molinism because I was so convinced of Calvinism.

I wanted to see them side by side. Well, how would a Molinist address this concern, that concern, and this concern? And so Dr. Keighley in his book argued quite convincingly, you know, at least to my satisfaction.

And so when I read that book, I kind of converted to Molinism for a little while and argued for it quite convincingly. I was talking to a couple of my Calvinist friends and got them thinking. But through more study conversations with folks, you know, I've had some great conversations with Tim Stratton over there at Free.

I have to get this straight because Tyler's show, Tyler Vela's show sounds very similar to Tim Stratton's show. The Free Thinker, okay. Tim Stratton has the Free Thinking Ministry, okay. I had some great conversations with him while I was a Molinist, and then also when I was a Calvinist.

So I also had a great discussion with Dr. Kirk McGregor, who is a fine Molinist scholar in general and a good defender of Molinism. And so I had a good, you know, a fair share of the Molinist perspective.

And at the end of the day, while I disagree, I do appreciate my Molinist brothers. They're sharp guys and they definitely give us some food for thought. But ultimately I came away with the idea that Molinism doesn't do it for me.

I don't think that it is the position that is best defended scripturally. And so I was drawn to Calvinism, back to Calvinism, and I was quite convinced that it is what the Bible teaches. Now, of course, I know there are gonna be people, obviously, who are gonna disagree and that's okay, but that's where I was, that was my journey.

So I'm really excited to talk a little bit about, you know, Molinism and then of course, open theism, which I think has real problems. And so we'll jump into that in just a moment. All right, well, before I introduce Tyler Vela and invite him on the screen with me, I do want to let folks know, those who have been asking about my online class that I teach on presuppositional apologetics, class starts on June 1st.

So if you still want to sign up for PresuppU, you can go to revealedapologetics .com and click on the menu PresuppU, and it walks you through how you can RSVP a spot in the class, we'll be meeting once a week to discuss the content of the lectures, the PowerPoints and the outline.

So you definitely, you wanna check that out. I'm very happy with how the courses came out and we've already taught it a couple of months ago and it turned out really well. And so I'm looking forward for more people to sign up.

So there's that. Now, for those who are wondering, well, David Palman, who is a Christian Armenian, definitely has lots to say about presuppositional apologetics. Those who are wondering if I will be doing a response to a video that he just put out, well, I've actually invited my friend, Chris Bolt, who is a fellow presuppositionalist to take a look at David Palman's main argumentation against presuppositional apologetics.

And on June 3rd at 9 p .m. Eastern, we will be addressing David Palman's arguments there. And so hopefully that will prove helpful for folks who wanna see how a presuppositionalist perspective might interact with the criticisms that he raises.

Lastly, on June 11th, I will be having Anthony Rogers on. If those of you guys who know who Anthony Rogers is, he's an excellent defender of the Trinity. He offers wonderful critiques of Islam. I'm gonna have Anthony Rogers on my show to discuss presuppositional apologetics applied to Islam.

And this is kind of an interesting topic. A lot of folks wonder, well, yeah, a presuppositionalist could argue with an atheist and that works fine, but what happens when you come up against another theist?

How does presuppositionalism interact with a view that has an absolute God, an apparent grounding for logical absolutes and morality, things like that. And so I'm really excited to get into that. That's gonna be a June 11th.

So I'll remind you guys as the upcoming shows come, I'll let you guys know about that. All right, well, all that out of the way, I want to invite Tyler Vela on. How's it going, Tyler? Good, how are you?

I'm doing wonderful. I'm so happy that you're here, man. Yeah, happy to be here. I don't have a cool library background. You're coming from Casa de Vela, the kitchen that I have. That's where the magic happens.

My library's in a back storage closet at church, so. That's where the magic happens for a lot of people in the kitchen. So it's all good. Well, why don't you tell folks a little bit about yourself very briefly, and then we'll jump right into this.

I want folks to really get a lot out of this episode and whether you agree or disagree, that's okay, as long as you are thinking about these issues and that's a mission accomplished as I see it. So why don't you tell folks a little bit about yourself?

Sure, I never know how long or what to say on these. I am the host of the FreedThinker podcast, a YouTube channel and blog, which really started as kind of a labor of love coming out of my own background.

I was an atheist until I was about 20 years old when the Lord caught ahold of me and brought me home. And from kind of coming out of that naturalistic atheistic background, I became a Christian only about a year and a half, right about a year before 9 -11, which is what spawned all the new atheists writing.

And so I was kind of like early formative years of growing in the Christian faith and reconciling, I was a philosophy major and reconciling what I was learning in philosophy classes with my new Christian worldview and all that kind of stuff in the melting pot, now you throw in the new atheists and there was a whole lot of stuff to read and talk about.

And so the FreedThinker was born that way. It was actually started as just kind of a, it actually started as logical theism. I think someone has taken that since then, but so it really largely focused on dealing with atheism and naturalism and scientism and things like that.

As I started going through another degree program at Moody and Biblical Studies and now my master's in Biblical Studies, currently at Reform Theological Seminary and some other kind of studies and projects in my life, it has turned into a labor of love in other ways and I've kind of divided off the podcast is now dedicated more towards in-house discussions, biblical theology, systematic theology, kind of questions about like this.

If I did a show like this, this would be on the podcast. We're really dealing with theological things, it's not really evangelistic, that kind of thing. Whereas the YouTube channel, really that's where I'm dedicating all of my episodes to questions about naturalism and burden of proof and burden of justification.

I did have a series on there on my specific interpretation of Genesis 1, but only because that's hugely, I think apologetically valuable to have another position, basically saying like, hey guys, stop having the conversation that way.

So there's some things like that, but that's really what the kind of two-pronged approach of the ministry has been. And then also recently, I'm not, I think you know this, but I'm not sure if you know this, I also admin a page called Sage Stage.

Sage Stage is dedicated, there's the way that the admins, the way that we've set it up is I think very, very interesting. The Calvinistic admins kind of police the Calvinists and the non-Calvinist police the non-Calvinists.

And we kind of, we hold the hammer to our own sides and a lot of times someone will get blocked and they'll be like, oh, the other side's mad. And it's like, no, like I blocked you because you're being a jerk.

So we actually, so that's been going for a while. And one of the admins, Randy Whitman Jr., who I went to Moody with, who's a historic Armenian, he and I actually started, and the other admins will come on, but we started the Sage Stage YouTube channel.

So we've been doing, we're now on, I think we finished episode three now, which is really, the whole point of it is just a discussion about how your theological position and kind of hermeneutical, I wanna say presumptions, but just the hermeneutical principles that you hold when you come to a text, how it actually will determine or color the types of interpretations of passages that you'll bring to it.

So we go to these heavily disputed passages like James 2 and Hebrews 6 and other ones. And we say, okay, well, what are the different views and why do they come to that? And is it, what are the hermeneutical considerations and that lead them to read them that way and all that kind of stuff?

So And that's called Sage Stage? Sage Stage. The purpose is to de-cage-ify people from all sides. Okay, that's awesome. All right, well, very good. Thank you for that. I hope folks check that out.

Why Molinism Raises Problems for Divine Sovereignty

Well, let's provide some context. If those of you were intrigued by the thumbnail that I put out, yes, it was supposed to somewhat mimic Capturing Christianity's color scheme, okay? This episode really is inspired by some comments that were floating around Facebook by Cameron Bertucci of Capturing Christianity, which by the way, I highly recommend his channel.

Yeah, there's some disagreements I have with him, but I consider him a brother in Christ. I've greatly benefited from his content. I'm a subscriber, okay? But for those who have been following his ministry, he has been saying some things that I do find concerning.

And so this episode is not to call him a heretic or to make fun of like, well, he's flirting with this, that, or the other thing. Really, this episode is inspired by the fact that the things that he posts with respect to Roman Catholicism or open theism, being undecided between Molinism and open theism, I think some of the views that he seems to be, I guess, I don't wanna use the word, but I guess flirting with, can I use that word?

I mean, I don't mean to sound pejorative, but the kind of the ideas that he seems to be kind of interacting with and kind of, well, maybe I'll consider this. That seems to be a little concerning to me.

And so I do think that these topics are important to talk about. And I wanna stick not on Cameron, but on the positions that he's talking about and talk about why it's important for us to know what these positions are and why with respect to at least open theism, why we should avoid open theism.

Whereas Molinism, I agree with Guillaume Bignon, the French Calvinist philosopher. He says, Molinism is my favorite of the false views. So definitely not as bad if I can use that word as open theism, but it's got its issues too.

And so we're gonna talk about that here in this episode. So hopefully we are gonna do that with respect, but with focus and content. And for those who are in the comments, try to keep the disagreements respectful.

And if you have any questions, as I always do on my shows, we will go through a bunch of these questions. As long as Tyler is awake and has energy, we'll go through as many as we possibly can. I want this to be kind of like a super duper episode where people can kind of go to this episode and learn a lot.

So hopefully, you know, we can do that here. All right, how does that sound? Does that sound okay? All right. This will be like the hardcore history episode, like the four and a half hour episode. Yeah, that's right.

Well, what I've been doing is I've been taking small snippets of my past interviews. So I would definitely, if this episode goes long, I definitely wanna take some snippets and put them up as separate videos so people can kind of get, you know, right to the specific content that they're interested in.

So we gotta serve the people, man, right? We gotta give the people what they want. We gotta give them what they want. And people want nothing more than five hour long YouTube videos. That's right. Well, you'll be surprised.

Theology is a weird world, right? People are like, eh, five minutes, but theology, I mean, you got, people will listen for a while. So at any rate, let's jump right into the issue. So I'm gonna flip a coin, okay?

What would you like to cover first, Molinism or Open Theism? Well, let's go with Molinism because I think it's the, it's the one that we're gonna be probably, you know, the nicest with. So let, you know, let's kind of get that one out of the way.

Okay, so why don't you define for folks who might be listening for the first time and have no idea what Molinism is, why don't you define what Molinism is and then we'll jump right into the issue as to why do you think it's problematic?

Yeah, so Molinism is hard to distill down into one thing. And it's kind of gotten a running start in the past, you know, a couple of decades and is, you know, a little bit worse for the wear, I think, but we'll get into the reason for that.

Molinism is largely the position that attempts to resolve the perceived conflict between kind of the God of Classical Theism omniscient, omnipotent, you know, it's sovereign, you know, works all things together for the good of those who love him, right?

This kind of, you know, predestinarian type of view. I mean, a lot of people don't realize that Molina had a very actually kind of Calvinistic reading of Romans nine, with at the same time, this concern to uphold human freedom such that people are actually responsible for their actions, right?

So it's an attempt to resolve how that can be, how those two things can be reconciled, right? How can you have a God who is absolutely sovereign, who knows everything about the future, and yet when that future comes providentially in time, we still are making free decisions that are not, you know, mechanistically determined where we're robots and so therefore we're still free.

So basically it tries to reconcile human freedom and a very strong sense of divine sovereignty while preserving kind of a libertarian free will perspective. Yeah, there's a very strong kind of Calvinistic misunderstanding of Molinism, really of historic Arminianism and other views too, that they're somehow like dismissive of sovereignty.

Molinists are actually keenly aware and want to maintain a rather high view of sovereignty actually. So, which I commend them for, I think they just get it wrong. Which is one of the reasons why, Tyler, some Calvinist who flirt with Molinism are attracted to Molinism.

Yeah. It really does, I think it really does a good job, right? A good job doing justice to a high view of divine sovereignty but in our estimation, I guess not high enough and not in a way that we think is reflective of how the Bible presents the sovereignty of God.

Go ahead. Yeah, so one of the ways that, not one of the ways, kind of initial starting point that it works out is it wants to say, okay, well, it bases its kind of interaction between God and creation on this thing called middle knowledge.

And to understand what middle knowledge is, you have to understand what free knowledge and natural knowledge are. I guess I should say natural knowledge and free knowledge because that's the direction it goes.

Natural knowledge is God's knowledge of himself, right? It is his kind of necessary knowledge, right? Knowledge of himself and knowledge of necessary truths. It's his knowledge that could not be any other way than it possibly could be.

So it's his knowledge of his own omnipotence, his own omniscience, the father's love for the son, right? All of those types of things, that's part of his natural knowledge. God's free knowledge is his knowledge of what is actually true in the real world, right?

So it is his kind of, I don't wanna say contingent knowledge, but it is his knowledge about contingent facts is what I should say, right? So it's his knowledge that the sky is blue, right? He could have made creation and light refract in such a way through a moisturized atmosphere that the sky would appear to us to be red, right?

That could have been the case, but he knows that in his creation on the planet earth, the sky appears blue under normal conditions, right? So that's a piece of his free knowledge. Okay. Yeah. Well, I like how when I was learning Molinism and I was confused as to how Molinists kind of understand the moments of God's knowledge in kind of these three ways, I liked how Kenneth Keithley phrased it, whereas God's natural knowledge is his could knowledge.

He knows everything that could be God's middle knowledge. He knows everything that would be. And then there's his divine decree and then God has his free knowledge, his knowledge of what will in fact be in light of his decree.

Right. So you've got that could, the would and the will knowledge of God. I think that's kind of a helpful way of framing the It's helpful. It's not exactly right. Sure. Because again, his knowledge of himself is part of that necessary knowledge.

And so it doesn't quite fall under the could category. See folks, what Tyler did there, he disagreed with me and expressed that disagreement very respectfully and nicely. He was like You heretic, I'm hanging up.

He's like, not quite Eli, but Not quite. All right man, I'm just Keep going, go ahead. So middle knowledge, it's called middle knowledge, not because it's like from middle earth or something, but because it's the knowledge that's sandwiched between those two things.

It is actually that would knowledge. It's his knowledge of the way the world... See, this is where I like actually could or would, it doesn't really matter for middle knowledge. It's what could have been or would have been if conditions had been different and if he had created a different world.

Right, some people would say God's middle knowledge is his counterfactual knowledge, but even that needs to be very qualified because even Calvinists believe, for example, you do not demonstrate middle knowledge in scripture by simply pointing to counterfactual statements in scripture because Calvinists can affirm counterfactuals.

It gets more technical than that, but go ahead. Why don't you continue where you left off? So that's where I was gonna actually, I was gonna get there, right? Because middle knowledge is not specifically, and I was actually gonna make the exact point you just made and give an example of why, it's not identical with counterfactual knowledge.

The reason is because on Calvinism, on a reformed kind of a report, one kind of reformed epistemology, there's a few of them. This is the one that I hold too, so I'm just gonna present it because if anyone wants to attack it, they can actually attack my view then.

And that is that God's decrees ground his knowledge, right? And so he has that natural knowledge about himself, right? So God has this natural knowledge that whatever I decree to be true in the actual world will be true, right?

So he has this knowledge of, had I decreed, let's say the sky to be red, right? Then the sky would be red. God has that counterfactual knowledge, but it's not the case that it's middle knowledge because middle knowledge is specifically knowledge that's based on what libertarianly free creatures would do in different circumstances, right?

So it's not merely counterfactual knowledge. It's a very specific kind of counterfactual knowledge that really has to do with the type of free decisions that libertarian, and this is gonna be important, that libertarianly free agents would do in different circumstances than what's in the actual world, right?

So it's not correct. This is one of the rejoinders. Molinists will always be like, oh, well Calvinists deny counterfactuals. No, we don't. Or they'll be like, oh, well, if you affirm counterfactuals, you affirm middle knowledge.

No, we don't. So those two things, there is not a direct equivocation. Those are not kind of synthetically identical concepts. So they are different. So Molinism then says, okay, God kind of has, he knows what all of these libertarianly free creatures would do given any circumstances.

And he, this is also gonna be bizarre. He weakly actualizes a specific world, right? Which means God is not the kind of the tinkering God where he's strongly actualizing and making every single thing in that world come to pass, right?

He's actualizing this set such that, and I think Would you say, Tyler, that weak actualization is God actualizing something passively? Because he, in other words, he sets up the circumstances and allows them to play out.

And so it actualizes it. So that's weak actualization, whereas a strong actualization is when God actually exerts power to bring something about. Correct. Okay. And I actually, I go back and forth on this.

I think there's some sense in which God strongly actualizes the world because he speaks and it comes into being. But I think in other ways, we can, as Calvinists can say, that I understand what they mean when they say he weakly actualizes also, because it's not the case, I think, that God is the direct efficient cause of every single thing that comes to pass as a true fact in the actual world either.

So he strongly actualizes the set, but he can kind of weakly actualize what true propositions are within that set, right? So I understand both ways. Ideas have consequences. Some people can press me on that a little bit, but I understand kind of how it could be different.

Okay. So Molanism is a view of God's omniscience that seeks to also reconcile this idea of a strong sense of divine sovereignty and human freedom and responsibility. It tries to do that while preserving kind of a libertarian free will perspective, okay?

And here's a question then, so we can kind of get to a critique of it. So, okay, so Molanism simply defined is a view of God's omniscience where they understand God having kind of these three moments in his knowledge, God's natural knowledge, God's middle knowledge, and God's free knowledge.

And that what you have sandwiched between God's natural knowledge and free knowledge, you have his middle knowledge, but what you have sandwiched in between his middle knowledge and his free knowledge is that divine decree.

Now the purpose of Molanism is to solve a, what people have understood as a theological and philosophical conundrum. How do you reconcile this idea of freedom and sovereignty in your estimation? And here's what we get into the critique, for example, why don't you think Molina and all other versions that were birthed out of Molina's Molanism, why do you think it doesn't do the job?

And why is the view actually more concerning, not simply false and unsuccessful, but why is it concerning in terms of, why Christians should be aware of this perspective? Yeah, yeah. So one of the things, and we're gonna, a bunch of Molanists are gonna start throwing like lettuce and tomatoes at us very quickly for this.

One of the things that I found is that in order to avoid a ton of objections to Molanism, right? Molanism gets objections, like it's not like I had someone say, tell me that, well, Molanism is true because Calvinism is false.

And it's like, well, that doesn't follow at all. There are critiques of Molanism from other libertarian incompatibilist, right? There are critiques of Molanism from sourcehood incompatibilist like Kevin Tempe, right?

There are so many objections to Molanism. There are ones that are objections purely for philosophical, right? The grounding objection that has to do with God's omniscience and how he even knows these libertarian, like what's the truth maker of these things?

How is it that God knows these kind of, these counterfactuals of libertarianly free creatures if they're not even real, like if they're not actual choices and God hasn't decreed them and nothing exists outside of God, like what is there for God to even know at that point, right?

So there's this, that's a very simplistic version of the grounding objection, but there's all of these problems and they have nothing to do with Calvinism, right? So there are so many, and actually most of my objections to Molanism, I could give some that are Calvinistic.

Most of my objection to Molanism have nothing to do with my Calvinism. I just have fundamental, I mean, actually most of my objections have to do with really problematic views of omniscience and from my commitment to classical theism where I think there's lots of problems, right?

So let me give a couple examples. I can run what's called a reductio ad absurdum. A reductio ad absurdum is a type of objection. It's an internal critique where I say, okay, let's assume this position is true.

Let's push it to its logical ends and see what happens. There's kind of a hard reductio ad absurdum, which is that when you push it to its logical ends, a contradiction pops out. And if a contradiction pops out, it has to be false, right?

If something entails a logical contradiction, it's false. And that's kind of a weaker version of a reductio. And William Lane Craig does this all the time. He's like, look, let's push it to a point where it entails something that nobody wants to be true.

Maybe it's not a contradiction, but nobody who affirms the view ever wants to affirm that that's true, right? There's a really funny story I told you I was gonna tell. When I was in college at Sonoma State and I was a philosophy major and I had a really good friend of mine named Ben.

I'm not gonna call him out now because he actually is like a professional philosopher. He teaches philosophy now. But we were in this debate and I don't even remember what it was about. But it got to a certain point where he had made so many ad hoc adjustments to avoid criticisms and avoid just admitting he's wrong that I finally was like, okay, look, you either have to admit that your position is wrong or you have to accept pantheism because that was the logical entailment.

And he looks at me and he goes, well, I guess pantheism is looking pretty good right about now. He was joking. He actually ended up going back and kind of reworking. But that's an example of kind of a weak reductio where it's like, okay, but the consequence, the price tag, William and Craig says, the price tag is too high, right?

You're not gonna be willing to shoulder that price to maintain the original thesis, right? So I can do a bunch of those for Molinism, right? So one of them is that Molinism ostensibly starts with this presumption of libertarian freedom.

Now it's gone through a bunch of iterations. Okay, I'm gonna stop you right there. Now I've heard a knowledgeable Molinist say, let's just back up. Okay, well, I mean, I know a couple of knowledgeable Molinists but they would say, yes, they hold to libertarian freedom but really Molinism is just a particular view of God's omniscience.

So the reason at that point, I'm just gonna, maybe I would have to hear them out but my skeptical meter just like goes off the rail because in order, the meaningful difference, right? Is specifically, remember when we talked about middle knowledge, it's specifically knowledge of the counterfactuals of libertarian freedom, right?

Because imagine I say, okay, well, my reformed epistemology, my reformed view, not epistemology of myself but my reformed view of how omniscience is grounded is that God, remember that he has his natural knowledge.

He knows whatever he decrees would be the case. He knows what he's going to decree. And so therefore he just knows by elimination had I decreed this, then it would be the case. That solves all the problems of Molinism.

Why don't Molinism take that much more parsimonious position because that's not libertarian freedom, right? So in order for them to have this middle knowledge in a way that they think is meaningful, it requires some type of libertarian freedom.

So would you say that the twin pillars of Molinism is middle knowledge and libertarian free will? Those are the two pillars. Yeah, so, and really, I don't even like, I know like mere Molinism, I don't even like calling those two pillars because one of them is just entailed by the other, right?

So if you have middle knowledge, it's just entailed that you have It's just one pillar. Yeah, so The middle knowledge and libertarian free will is the one unified pillar of Molinism. It's the substance dualist single pillar.

How about that? There's two streams, I don't know. So, okay, so let's deal with that. So let's jump right in then. If middle knowledge and libertarian free will are essential features of Molinism, then a way to demonstrate that Molinism is false is you need to attack various aspects of either middle knowledge, or at least an attack that deals with both of them and shows them to be false.

How would you do that? That's one strategy. So the strategy, that's one that I take, and actually I'll show some objections to libertarian. If libertarianism is false, Molinism can't be true, right? That's one tactic.

The other one though is, I would say, okay, well, let's imagine that's the case. That's the starting point. But let's push the entire Molinistic metaphysic, right? Let's push it to its logical conclusion.

What pops out? Well, it turns out that compatibilism pops out at the other end, right? So what it means is that if Molinism starts, if my argument is successful, right? You're gonna have a bunch of people be like, oh, you need to demonstrate that's the case.

I know, I know I have the burden to demonstrate that claim, I understand. But I'm saying the structure of the argument, right? I don't know if we're gonna get in that, and we do wanna leave most of the time for open theism.

So That's why I wanted to get straight to the, if I have Molinism is false on the thumbnail, we need to address why Molinism is false. So go to my channel. If anyone wants a link, I can go to a link.

I have a whole bunch of stuff on kind of these metaphysical problems of Molinism, right? If the argument, and it's not even, I mean, I have a version of it, but I'm not the only one that makes these types of arguments, right?

So again, one of my favorite arguments against Molinism is from an incompatibilist, anyways. So, but if the argument goes through and shows that compatibilism is entailed, well, that means that Molinism starts by the assumption of incompatibilism and entails the truth of compatibilism, which means that affirms incompatibilism and compatibilism, which is a contradiction, right?

So I don't even need to go through and prove that libertarianism is false. I don't need to prove that Molinism is, or that middle knowledge is false. I just need to show that the conjunction of those two things, held as the Molinist holds it, entails it affirming contradictory positions, right?

And very quickly, the thumbnail version of that argument is this, right? And I give lots of different kinds of examples of this. And that is, when we talk about possible worlds, your audience needs to understand that we're not talking about some type of like sci-fi parallel universe type thing.

We're talking about ways that the world could be there. They are sets of true propositions, right? So if in W1, in world one, all, let's just, for sake of argument, all propositions, A1, A2, A3, A4, all the way down to A, all the A propositions are true, right?

In world two, all the B propositions are true. World three, all the C propositions are true, right? You can mix and match them all, but like no world has an identical set of true propositions, right? Okay, the question is, even if it's by God's middle knowledge, right?

Does the Christian understanding, whether weak actualization or strong actualization, does God determine by his creative decree? Again, I don't even need to be reformed to run this. Every Orthodox Christian has an understanding of God's creative decree, right?

God chose to create this world and not some other world. Okay. So you can imagine a world, two worlds that are identical in every single proposition, except for one proposition at T1, at time T1, in world one is X and in world two is not X, and they have no causal implications prior or after, they're identical in every other way, right?

Let's say one of those is the actual world. If God decreed, I am going to create that world, that set of true propositions, right? God is causally determining the truth value in the actual world of that proposition at that time, right?

Which means, which entails that God is determining the truth value of all the proposals. He's not, you know, strongly actualizing, he's not tinkering, he's not efficiently causing and making every single thing to be true, right?

It's not hard determinism, but God is determining the truth value of all those, even if it's a free choice, right? I almost said libertarian free choice, because the problem is the Molinus is gonna wanna say, oh, well, that's determined based on his middle knowledge of libertarianly free choices.

Okay, but once God has actualized the world, God's determined the truth value. So now the truth value of my choice at T1 is a determined fact in that set of propositions. God has determined that to be true, but it's determined based on my, was it my libertarian free choice?

But in the moment, I don't have libertarian freedom because it's determined, right? It's not incompatible anymore. So you get this kind of negative feedback loop of my free choice in the actual world is dependent on my non-existent libertarian choice, such that in the actual world, it's not a libertarian choice.

So the causal condition that made it true, that made God declare it to determine it to be true actually isn't the choice that I made, because the choice that I made in the actual world is a compatibilistic choice, right?