Interview with James R. White (Calvinism, Molinism, & Free Will)

Introduction to Calvinism, Molinism, and the Interview Setting

For Revealed Apologetics, I'm your host Elias Ayala, and today I have a very special guest with me, a theological hero, Dr. James White, who is the, I believe you're the founder of Alpha and Omega, right?

Oh, co-founder, yeah. Co-founder of Alpha and Omega Ministries, and he is a Reformed Christian along Baptist lines, and he has engaged in over, I believe, over 150 debates, unless you haven't crossed the 200 mark line yet, have you?

174. 174, oh my goodness, okay. So you are no stranger to conflict, let's just say, right? So I'm very, very excited to have the opportunity to nab Dr. White in his very busy schedule. I believe Dr. White is a very valuable apologetics resource, as well as just a theological resource, and I just enjoy and appreciate his consistency with his faithfulness to Scripture, and he definitely does not compromise in those areas.

I think the only caution I would give of Dr. White is his heretical views concerning Star Trek being better than Star Wars, but, you know, nobody's perfect.

Given that the new film is collapsing on issues like homosexuality and stuff like that, you know, it's pretty obvious.

Well, again, so we're really excited to have Dr. White here. We're going to be covering the topic of Calvinism, Molinism, and we'll allow Dr. White to define both of those terms in the most succinct way possible, although these are big topics, and the issue of free will, okay?

And just right off the bat, I used to be a Molinist for quite some time, and it was not until I went on a vacation with my family to this place called Camp of the Woods. It's a Christian camp area. They have speakers like Ravi Zacharias and other people, and when my family went to bed, I went into this little cabin area, and everyone was completely empty, and I was on YouTube.

I wanted to get my theological fix for the weekend, okay? And I have listened to, I think, almost every debate you've ever had, and I've watched them all, many of them multiple times, and so I've learned a great deal.

And I realized that there was one debate that I didn't recognize what you were wearing. You know, when you watch something, you kind of become familiar. I think I've seen that one, and you were wearing some jacket.

I think it was like a green jacket or something. I was like, I don't think I've ever seen this one before. And so I clicked on it, and you were debating a guy I've never heard of, Leighton Flowers, and I listened to that debate.

While not on Molinism, by the end of the debate, I recanted Molinism for the simple statement that you made when you were speaking about consistent exegesis. When you asked Dr. Flowers, can you exegete with the principles that we would use when we're defending the deity of Christ, when we're defending justification by faith alone, by grace alone, and Christ alone?

Would you use the same exegetical tools or principles when defending your position? And as a Molinist, that spoke to me as a Molinist, and all of the things that I was studying and people I was speaking with, that convicted me.

Because when I studied Molinism, what I found was that I began to drown in philosophical waters. And when I listened to Reformed writers and speakers and debaters such as yourself, regardless if people agree with your position or not, I have to admit that I was always drawn back to the Scriptures.

And that is what grounded me, and I still have my questions, even as a Reformed guy. But that's what grounded me back within the Reformed tradition, and I know not everyone's going to agree with that.

But that's one of the reasons why I became a Calvinist again. I was convinced scripturally and very much through your debates and things like that. So thank you very much, all that just to say that.

The Nature of Molinism and Middle Knowledge

Well, it would have been a whole lot simpler if you had tracked down the actually older videos that we did. I did two presentations at Reformed Baptist Church right off campus of Biola. I forget what year it was, but it was probably 2010, something like that.

It was a while back, and it was as close as we get to debating William Lane Craig. He won't debate. We have, of course, offered that, but he says he will not debate Christians. And so it would be extremely helpful, extremely useful to see a debate on these subjects, but we can't find anybody who will really do that that's representative anyways.

I mean, when you talk about William Lane Craig, as soon as you criticize his particular perspective, then you'll have people coming back saying, well, you need to read this person or that person. And there's a million different takes on how to do things.

But he's the one that he's the primary person that is responsible for maintaining the existence of Molinism amongst evangelicals today, in my opinion. I don't think if he was promoting it that the other people who are promoting it would have much of an audience.

And especially amongst those who are involved in apologetics, it's Craig's utilization of this system, even though it's primarily fallen out of favor amongst Roman Catholics where it originated. It's his explanation of it and his broadcasts and all that stuff.

So that's what I've focused upon has been his understanding of it. There may be people who take other perspectives, but especially when it comes to the issue of the role of middle knowledge in determining what God can and cannot do, what possible worlds he could and could not actuate.

That seems to be what I always hear from people. And I think there's just a lot of Christians who don't want a black and white choice between God's sovereignty and man's sovereignty. And so it seems to be a way to get around that, to be able to say, well, God is still sovereign.

He controls all of the natural stuff. And for some reason, people don't seem to care if God's in charge of tsunamis. But if he is in actual charge of individual salvation, that's a heresy of great proportion.

And I find that very odd. But Molinism allows you to say God's sovereign in the natural realm, but man has the final say. And God may want to save everybody, but he can't because of this magical thing called middle knowledge.

And I've not met a lot of people who really fully understood what Molinism was saying. And the problem is a lot of the people that I have met weren't overly concerned. It was never derived from Scripture.

And William Lane Craig admits that it's not derived from Scripture. He would say that it's consistent with a certain reading of Scripture, but that its origination is not found in Scripture itself. So for a lot of folks, it's just a way out.

I don't want to be involved in the never-ending debates. And so let's just go this direction. And that's it.

Well, for folks who don't know what Molinism is, let's actually start with the definition, and then we'll kind of take it from there.

Well, yeah, the easiest thing to do, really, we don't have time in our time frame to develop a meaningful, orthodox definition of historical parameters. Let's just put it this way. Let's just define what middle knowledge is, because that kind of terminology, most people do not possess the categories to really understand.

Why is that terminology being used? Orthodox theologians up to the time of the Reformation, so early church, into the Middle Ages, had spoken of two kinds of knowledge in God. And it's not that in this instance, again, we're not talking about some type of philosophical categories being forced on Scripture.

This is just sort of if God is who the Bible says He is, then you would have God having natural knowledge. And natural knowledge is the knowledge that He has of Himself, so God knows Himself perfectly and is the only one who knows Himself perfectly.

And of all possible actions, so all real actions that He has undertaken, all possible actions He could undertake, God knows what His capacities, abilities, and so on and so forth are, especially in regards to before creation.

So He knew what possible worlds He could create in the sense of how vast the universe would be, or He could have just made a solar system and not made all the beautiful stars and everything else. It's whatever those possibilities were.

So that's natural knowledge. And then free knowledge, which is what we would sort of call omniscience in the sense of following the decree to create. So once He decided to make this universe, then what He chooses to do within it, what all creatures do, what all free creatures do, what all creatures who do not have freedom of will.

You know, how many times, you know, I'm a cyclist, and I like seeing videos from Australia where these poor Australian cyclists are out riding, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, here comes this kangaroo at incredible speed and just blows the person right off the bike.

We wouldn't say that kangaroo has a will in the sense that man has a will, but certainly that kangaroo can interact with mankind and therefore impact what takes place, especially if God wanted to use that guy to bring revival to Australia, and he just got killed by a kangaroo.

What a bummer. God's got to start all over again. So you've got issues like that. So you've got natural knowledge and free knowledge. And up until that point, Christian theologians had felt that pretty well exhausted the categories in regards to God's knowledge.

So what middle knowledge is, is in between those two categories. So in between natural knowledge, which comes before creation, free knowledge, which comes after the decree to create and includes everything in creation.

So what you want to do is you want to sandwich a category of knowledge in between these two, which is called middle knowledge. And it's, sorry about the sound, but unfortunately, I'm not sure how to turn off the notifications on my thing without turning you off at the same time.

So I suppose we can just, it'll just give you an idea of just how often we are contacted every hour by family and pastoral. These are some of my co-pastors that are talking about things and it just, it goes all day long.

Anyways, this middle knowledge, it partakes of elements of both, but middle knowledge has to do with knowing what free creatures will do in any given... Would do. Well, what they would and what they, and what they not just could do, but would do.

So it's more than just theoretically such a free creature could do this, could do that, could do that. But it actually, and this is where the problem for me is, it actually indicates what a free creature would do, not what they could do, not what their capacities would be.

And no matter what you do with that, no matter how would, could, the Hawaiian Yards, the question when you come to middle knowledge is when you think of free creatures, when free creatures act, how we act is derived from who we are.

And if middle knowledge is before the divine decree to create, then you can see that in the long run it's going to limit what God can and cannot do to get to a certain end. If God wants to, you know, the big question is, you know, William McClain Craig's always asked the question, is this the best of all possible worlds?

Is God saving the most people that he can? Or is, I mean, really there's a lot of ways that question could be asked. I mean, it's one thing to say, is God saving the most people he can? Some people might say, is God saving the best people that he can?

Is there, is there anything to that? I mean, there's all sorts of questions you can ask, but the point is middle knowledge becomes a restrainer. Because in, within the Molinistic system, God having the first kind of knowledge of himself and everything he can do, then having middle knowledge, which does not come from his decree.

It's not an act of his will. Where it's, where it comes from, that was the primary objection to middle knowledge by the Reformed Orthodox thinkers like Francis Turretin. So if you read Turretin's discussion of middle knowledge, the grounding objection is the primary objection.

Where does this knowledge, where does this knowledge come from? What's its origin? What is its source? Because if it's not found in God's will, then it's one thing to say God's natural knowledge of himself is natural to his being.

And so you wouldn't have to look at something outside of God for God's natural knowledge of himself. But middle knowledge isn't about God. It's about God's creatures. And yet it's not found in God's decree.

And so it doesn't come forth from God's will.

So where does it come from? Wouldn't middle knowledge be, for example, we take a look at Molinism as a whole. Wouldn't it be primarily a view of God's omniscience? Right. So it would be, it would be an explanation of the nature of his knowledge.

But, well, it partakes of the two other kinds of knowledge in a sense. But I would have to say no, simply because the object that is being known has not been defined by God's decree as yet. So how can you say what John Brown would do before God decrees to create John Brown as John Brown?

I can fully understand how God would have knowledge once he has decreed to create someone and define them. How he would have knowledge of what they would do in any given circumstance. We confess that.

But what middle knowledge is trying to do is to avoid the creative decree whatsoever. Because if that's the case, then it doesn't solve the problem of an autonomous will.

The Grounding Objection and the Logic of Divine Knowledge

Okay, so let's summarize real quick and then go back to what you're saying here. So Molinism, Molinists tend to understand God's knowledge in three logical moments. Like you said, there's natural knowledge.

There's middle knowledge. And then there's the divine decree. And then God's free knowledge, right? So what helped me when I was a Molinist was to break up the three logical moments of God's knowledge as could, would, and will.

So natural knowledge is everything that could happen within the mind of God, all possibilities. Everything that would happen, knowledge of counterfactuals that are logically prior to God's divine decree.

And then once he decrees a world, you have his free knowledge, his knowledge of what will actually transpire. Now you said something about middle knowledge being... If we were to understand God's middle knowledge as his knowledge of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom that's located logically prior to the decree, you're saying that that places a limitation on what God can choose to actualize amongst the possibilities that are contained in his natural knowledge?

Is that what you're saying? Well, again, until the decree has defined what the free creature is, how can there be middle knowledge of what a as yet uncreated, unchosen to be created, and undefined free creature will do?

And if you assert it, then you get the end result, which to me is the most frightening thing of William Lane Craig's application of this. And that is when he is really pushed on the ultimate purpose of creation, he will say that, yes, I believe that God is saving the maximal number of people.

Of all the possible worlds that God could initiate, this is the one that will bring about the best results, whether that's the most number of people saved or a balance between good and evil. You know, maybe there might have been a world where more people have been saved, but the cost of the greater amount of evil would have been too great or some type of...

But the key issue that determines God's calculations in all of this is the restricting parameters of the would. What would any person that conceivably God could create do in any circumstance in which God might place them in any divinely decreed creation?

And I've never heard anyone offer a meaningful basis for grounding this, not only in Scripture, but in explaining where does this knowledge come from because it assumes the reality of free creatures. It assumes that they're created in such a way that they can have free choice.

So it, in one sense, assumes the prior reality of the decree, but then jumps before the decree and says, this is how someone would act in a given situation. So the result is, for me, the most infamous statement from William Lane Cray, and that is when someone really started pushing him on this, and how do you know this, et cetera, et cetera.

You remember what he said, it's pretty famous, but he said, look, God's done the best He can. He's got to deal with the cards He's been dealt.

Now hold it right there because I want to address that issue, and I think that's a great point. But I think what you touched on before is really important, is that if God's counterfactual knowledge of creaturely...

If God's counterfactual knowledge of His counterfactual actions... It's so hard to talk about. Wait a second, I got this here. God's counterfactual knowledge, if His counterfactual knowledge of creaturely free acts exists logically prior to the divine decree, what you're pointing out is that if they're logically prior to the decree, how can they have any truth values since there is no defined essence and nature of who these people are independent of a decree?

So that... Yeah, you have to have a creature to know what a creature is going to do. The creature has to have a particular set of characteristics. There has to be a context in which choice can even be made.

What if we lived in a different universe that has different physical constants? There's gonna be different choices that can be exercised. There simply isn't any way to just grab this element of knowledge and pull it out of the third moment in the Molinist system, in the classical, the second moment, and push it out of the way for what reason?

There's only one reason. I mean, let's just be honest. The fundamental reason why anyone would even try to do this, and we haven't even talked about any type of scriptural foundation for any of this because there really isn't one, but even the few things that have been suggested, the whole reason is to find a way around the sovereignty of God in relationship to the will of man.

It is a way of seeking to defend the idea of the possibility of an existence of multiple autonomous wills. You've got God's autonomous will. Though I would argue that if he cannot, you know, William Lane Craig would say there was no—God could not create a universe in which all people would be safe, even though it was his desire.

But I think it's important to recognize also that his application of that is not a necessary component of Molinism. That's just a specific application that he makes. Not all Molinists would hold to that specific understanding.

You have a flexibility within various Molinist perspectives where they apply it, in some cases more along lines of like an Arminian view, or some do it more lines of a reformed view if they're doing it consistently or whatever.

But I don't think it's a necessary component. I think this is important when critiquing Molinism. It's difficult because not all Molinists are created equal, so to speak, and so to critique an application of Molinism is not the same as critiquing Molinism and its essential features, if that makes sense.

Well, I think that Molina himself, I think that his motivations were pretty clear. And so if you want to try to take the essence of his system and abandon the purposes that he had and try to make applications someplace else, well, OK.

I don't see that. I think Craig is at least being consistent at that point and is at least owning up to the reality that the fundamental purpose here is, in fact, to make room for an artificial relationship between an ostensibly autonomous will of man and the autonomous will of God.

That's what he's trying to do. And whether he's successful or not, at least he's owning up to the reality that the grounding issue, that the origin of middle knowledge is key and central. He sees that.

He sees that God's got to do what middle knowledge allows him to do.

Now, right there, when you just said that there, and I think a criticism that some people have raised because your card dealer example obviously makes its rounds on the Internet.

Well, it's not my illustration.

Well, I guess it's the illustration that Dr. Craig used, but I think people are familiar with your criticism of that. And I think there are good points to this, and I suppose I've heard some. When you say middle knowledge limits him, to a person who's a Molinist, that might be kind of understood as you're treating this middle knowledge as this impersonal abstraction.

When, in fact, middle knowledge is just a knowledge that God has within His own nature.

Except to say it's in His own nature does not explain how it then can become a restriction on what His decree can actualize. So in other words, in Only Wise God, He says indeed God's decision to create a world is based on His middle knowledge and consists in His electing to become actual one of the possible worlds known to Him in the second moment.

In the second moment, but the content of the second moment does not derive from the will of God.

Right, so if God knows what Dr. White would do if He were to create, on their view, the knowledge of what you would do is not determined by God's decree. What you would do would be, hypothetically true, independent of a decree.

And if it's independent of God's will, if it's independent of the decree, then it's independent of God's will. Right, right, right. And my whole point is all of creation exists because God wills it to exist.

And once you slide open the door to anything that is defined by something other than God's freely choosing to define it that way, you now have a limitation. And that's what He's electing to become actual one of the possible worlds known to Him where?

In the second moment, not the first, and not in the third. So that second moment, a Molinist can say, well, this is just a natural knowledge that God has, but it has inverted the logical relationship between the decree and the will of God.

And it's no longer something that comes from God's will because that's the whole purpose. The whole purpose that Molina had was to be able to hold together, well, in Molina's context, interestingly enough, the Roman Catholic sacramental system.

The reformers are emphasizing the sovereignty of God and the grace of God. And that destroys the power that Rome had over its people because that's why they had to adopt semi-Pelagianism, the Council of Orange and move away from Augustine and stuff like that, because you had to have that power over the people.

And if you have sovereign freedom, the sacramental system is no longer the mechanism to be able to do that. So he is tasked with a way of getting around that. So it is a, there's no question that the, not even Protestant, but the modern evangelical fascination with this has created a hybrid that no longer has the connection that it originally had to Molina's purposes.

But those defending it are on the other side of the Tiber on the issue of the deadness of man's will and sin, total depravity, all the rest of these things. And so it may no longer be a complex sacramental system that is driving this.

But, and that means that the wide variety, the wider variety, barely wider variety of theological perspectives that you'll find amongst Protestant evangelicals, if we can use the term evangelicals there, is going to result in some shading differences as to how you apply Molinism.

But the key issue I think remains the same. And that is the volitional element of God's choice to create as He created, to give gifts as He gives gifts, and to save whom He saves is what is offensive.

And therefore, the whole idea, again, comes down to from whence does that middle knowledge come? You can say it's a natural part of God's being, but given that it assumes the reality of free creatures, it is assuming that God has chosen to create in the first place.

It's, I don't see, if you can explain how Molinist gets around it, I'm willing to hear it.

Yeah, that'd be a good, you know, I have...

Well, you're a Molinist, so how does the Molinist get around the reality that to know what a free creature would do requires that that free creature have sufficient definition to have the qualities of choice?

Yeah, I think what you're asking basically, you're bringing up the grounding objection, what grounds these things? And I think I don't, I'm not aware of the answer that they're giving now. But I remember reading in Keith Lee's book, Salvation and Sovereignty, where, and people can correct me, it's been a while since I actually held this position, but he was almost okay with saying, I don't know, if God is omniscient, you know, his omniscience, I don't see why his omniscience couldn't include him having knowledge of counterfactually...

But see, that's why I stopped reading Keith Lee, I'll be honest with you. You asked me about it when he got, because I wanted to know, this is where the rubber meets the road. This is where the issue is.

This is what I honestly believe is the fatal objection. And when you get to this point, Keith Lee was like, go read the other guys. And I'm like, well, fine. I read the other guys. And there's two problems.

One is the biblical problem, from my perspective. There's no biblical author and no Christians for 1 ,500 years ever thought of anything like this. And what's interesting about that is, as you know, especially in the early, early church, you had a lot of people that were very, very deeply influenced by Greek philosophy.

It's a time period where the canon of Scripture isn't even completed yet. You've got Justin Martyr creating theology with a minimal canon available to him. You've got to give somebody like that credit for being as Orthodox as they were.

How many of us would be even semi-Orthodox if we only had, say, a third or a half of the New Testament canon that we have? And all the people who've come before us to keep us from getting silly in our theology.

So that means that they were really deeply influenced by Greek categories of thought, which would not flow along the lines of the Old Testament's testimony of one God, sovereign creator over all things.

There was a strong element of human autonomy. Even though you had the gods, the gods were under the control of the fates, too, and all the rest of that kind of stuff. So it's not like the natural human tendency for the exaltation of the will of man would have been the primary thing.

And despite that, you still don't have Molinism until Molina. Some people argue some Anabaptists came over. Two things real quick.

I think if we were to ask a Molinist, I think the primary reason why they find this reconciliation helpful is not so much, and obviously it's part of it, not so much to give man autonomy for the sake of autonomy, but they see it as protecting perhaps the goodness of God, right?

Whether they do that effectively or not, that's where we would disagree. It's not even so much effectively. I do hear that.

I do hear... That's an important piece. I do hear that people say that. The problem I have with that is when you say you're protecting the goodness of God, are you really protecting the goodness of God, or are you protecting your mechanisms that you've always used traditionally to understand what you think is God's goodness?

You're basically making an argument that if God is truly sovereign over human affairs, then he can't possibly be good. And there's just so much in Scripture. I mean, how do you apply that to the flood of Noah?

I mean, we don't know the names, but there was a huge human population that God wiped out. We don't know the names of the people in Sodom and Gomorrah. We don't know the names of all the Amorites that were wiped out when the children of Israel came.

It just strikes me that when you talk about defending the goodness of God, it's the same mindset that ends up turning the Old Testament into mythology. You know what's happening right now where there are evangelicals who are basically saying, Yeah, I really don't think all that happened.

I think Noah's flood was a local flood, and I don't really think that this happened. And they didn't really wipe everybody out. And they're finding ways around this stuff because we're defending the goodness of God.

And so when I hear people saying that, I go, well, okay, for some people that might be the case. But in reality, it seems to me that you have an idea of what God must be to be good rather than deriving what the goodness of God should look like from looking at what God did.

And so it seems to me that Jesus, if we want to use him as our go-to here, read the Old Testament text in a pretty straightforward manner. And this idea of the modern Western idea of the goodness of God.

But leaving that aside to say, well, I think they're trying to defend the goodness of God. But they're doing so by removing the key element of volition from God's choice. Because if, again, electing to become...

I'm just using this as a quotation. I've got plenty of others, but it seems... So his decision to create a world is based upon his middle knowledge and consists in his electing to become one of the possible worlds known to him in the second moment.

But the second moment's fundamental essence is the wood of free creatures that the system is saying he is not responsible for, right? Would a Molinist say, and we'll let you be the Molinist here. I am not a recovering Molinist, so you are.

Well, I wasn't an expert in Molinism, but...

I don't know that there are almost any who are. That's the problem. They're in their own version, but then they'll say it's different than somebody else's. And Molin has been long dead.

Okay, okay. I know a couple who are experts, but...

Would the Molinist say that the wood knowledge of middle knowledge is based upon God's volitional choice as to how he is going to create to glorify himself? I'm sorry, I don't... Even if someone said yes, I'd go, how?

How does that work? Because logically, as far as I can understand it, if middle knowledge is to function as it does in Molinism, it has to have an origination outside of the will of God to create you in such a way that you would have certain characteristics so that you will act in a certain way.

Because once you get to the idea that God makes you so that you'll act in a certain way, now you've just got puppets and the whole idea of middle knowledge flows out the window and it doesn't accomplish anything.

So where does it come from?

So is it your position that God can't have middle knowledge? Do you think the idea of middle knowledge is a logically incoherent concept? Or do you think it's a coherent concept that just happens to be false?

It posits a realm of knowledge that fundamentally does not need to exist because the two realms already mentioned are sufficient. So A, it is unnecessary. And B, I would say it is an incoherent concept because of the grounding objection.

So even to those Reformed people who, for some reason, and I've never fully understood why, embrace the idea of middle knowledge, I just have to ask them what their doctrine of the decree actually encompasses.

So you would think that it's a logically incoherent concept?

Given divine revelation and the existence of natural and free knowledge, yes.

Okay, so it's logically incompatible with what we have in Scripture. Not just that it's unbiblical in the sense that the Bible doesn't teach it. But you would see it's unbiblical in the sense that it's just logically incompatible, not just biblically.

I'm not sure that I would use that term. Again, my primary objection is that it assumes a reality from the third moment and imports it back into the definition of the second. Okay, okay. So if it's going to be middle, it really needs to be middle.

And at least Craig is consistent there. Because the card dealer, there has to be some origin and source of the substance of middle knowledge. The substance of middle knowledge requires the decree. If you disconnect it from the decree, there has to be some other source for it, hence the card dealer.

So your biggest criticism of Molinism in general, and then we're going to do a shifting now after this last point here. So your biggest criticism of Molinism is,. A, you don't think it reflects the teaching of Scripture, the clear teaching of Scripture.

And philosophically, you think the grounding objection is kind of a nail in the coffin of the concept in general.

Until someone can explain how you can know what a free creature would do before God decrees the universe in which he exists, his own character, his own capacities, what his physical nature is going to be, what his mental nature is going to be, what his gifting...

I'm sorry. It makes human volition something that is utterly separated from the human being itself. Because if you're going to say that God decreed that you get to have hair and I don't, okay? If you're going to say that the decisions that we make is somehow some completely separate thing from how we've been made, the context in which we're going to live, it separates it out in a way that really is sort of a Greek philosophical thing.

It's not the Hebrew way of thinking of man. Man is a body, soul, spirit, unity. It's all connected together. When we're born, where we're born, everything else is a part of who we are. And Middle Knowledge treats all of that as if it's just something that can exist out there someplace.

And then it's almost like the Mormon concept of intelligences. All of a sudden, one of these intelligences out there gets zoomed down into a preexistent spirit and then into the mortal probation, all the rest of the stuff.

No. Aside from just going, I really think this would have confused... Can you see Peter going, Middle Knowledge, could you explain that again? Could we try that one more time? What? I don't see any of the early church fathers.

No, I don't see any.

Calvinism as God-Centered Theology

All right. Well, okay, good. Thank you for sharing that. That's helpful. I think that helps clarify, kind of just narrows in. Because as you know, these discussions get very, very convoluted with philosophical terminology that can lose the average person.

Even as a Molinist myself, when I'm asked about the grounding objection, and there are Molinists who say, yeah, we have a response to the grounding objection. But to be perfectly honest, as a Molinist myself, I never understood the answers given.

I remember asking certain questions, and I get these responses with these logical, symbolic, P implies this, implies that. I'm like, okay, I don't know what that means. Now, I'm sure there's an easier way to explain it, but I've never heard one that...

And that just might be my own limited knowledge.

And it may be mine too, but if this is going to have any meaningful application in our lives, and if it's going to... Look, again, I keep going back to Dr. Craig, but that's because he's the most popular Molinist that I know as far as somebody who's actually answering questions about, other than go to a philosophical program someplace.