What is Molinism? What is a Molinist? - GotQuestions.org Podcast Episode 18, Part 1

To the God Questions podcast. On today's episode, we're going to be talking with Jeff Laird, who's been on the show with me several times before, about Molinism. Some of you may know what Molinism is, some of you may not.

Calvinism, Arminianism, and the Idea of Molinism

Kind of a part of the whole Calvinism versus Arminianism debate, but from a completely different perspective. Kevin couldn't join us today because God so orchestrated the events in his life that he freely chose to be at his daughter's wedding this week.

Miss Kevin, but he should be back with us again next week. Jeff, thanks for joining me today. Tell me a little bit about both you and how you find Molinism to be helpful in your understanding of God and how He works.

Then give us the brief summary of what Molinism is. Sure. I had the opportunity to start working.

With God Questions as a volunteer back in 2004. I continued answering questions in a volunteer capacity, and then eventually I was able to do some article writing, contract-type work. When the Bible Ref Project came up, you contacted me.

We talked about that, and I actually was able to make a transition from the engineering manufacturing world and to go full-time into ministry. That was good because at the time, ministry was something on my mind and it was something I was looking for an opportunity to do.

I couldn't have picked a better place than God Questions to do that. Right now, I'm working mostly with Bible Ref, our commentary site. I do write articles and answer questions for the other sites, but most of my time is involved with Bible Ref.

When it comes to Molinism, it is something that's sort of in that in-between range when it comes to the Armenian and Calvinist views. The really short version of Molinism is basically that when you read the Bible, you see two things that are very clear, but they seem to oppose each other.

One is that God is totally sovereign, that he's 100 in control of everything that happens in the universe. The other thing that you see is that human beings are given the ability to make choices and that God really does hold them accountable for those choices.

The only way that you can get around saying that either one of those is true basically is just to ignore or explain away some of those verses. There's this idea called middle knowledge and it's one of the many complicated terms that comes up in Molinism.

The nutshell of middle knowledge is that God innately, within himself, without relying on anyone else, he innately knows every possible outcome of every possible arrangement of creation or possible creations and that includes the free decisions that people would make.

Middle knowledge basically says that God is able then to sovereignly choose to create in such a way that people will make free decisions according to his will. In other words, where Calvinism says God is sovereign and Arminianism, for example, would say that human beings have free will, Molinism would say actually it's both, without compromise and without contradiction.

And that stays away from some of the traps that we sometimes get into with these other ideas like double predestination, the idea that God has specifically created some people with the intent of sending them to hell.

It gets away from the question of being responsible for sin because if he's 100 sovereign and he chooses to create a world with sin, doesn't that make him responsible for sin? It also keeps us away from things like open theism, where God isn't really in control or he doesn't really know.

And grappling with those questions is how I came to encounter Molinism. Earlier in my apologetics and spiritual life, I was reading those things in scripture and seeing free will and sovereignty and real responsibility.

And I was seeing God say things like, if I had done this, this would have happened. If you had done that, this would have happened. And I struggled a lot because my upbringing was almost anti-Calvinist in a way.

So the Baptist environment that I was in very strongly contended with the idea of predestination. So I was coming at it from a different perspective, but I could see predestination in scripture. You couldn't deny that that was there.

And one of the things I was looking for was some way to understand both of these sides. And I jokingly tell people that one of the reasons that I appreciate Molinism is because I thought of it. And I don't mean to be silly.

Obviously, it's not my idea per se, but the thought that came through my mind as an engineer was to say, when I'm working with a piece of programming code or a manufacturing process, if I want to change the end result, I don't necessarily go to the end of the process and physically change something.

I change something further upstream. I can alter earlier things because I can see what those effects are going to be. And I thought to myself, well, why can't God do the same thing? But I also recognize that God is not doing trial and error.

He's not creating the universe, watching what happens and going, whoops, don't like that, and then rewinding it to make some other choice, which is exactly what I was doing sometimes as an engineer and doing programming.

As I was looking for ways to better understand that, I came across explanations of what we call Molinism. And it really clicked. It made sense of the idea that you can have a God who is entirely sovereign, that he does elect people to salvation while at the same time people can have truly free will.

And it explained a lot of things that I saw in scripture without being convoluted, without feeling like I had to explain things away or make compromises. It explained a lot of things I was seeing in the real world.

And as I said, I'm not at this point and even going forward, I'm not going to claim any especially original thinking on my part. In my understanding of Molinism, there are a lot of very good names and people out there who are looking at it.

So if anybody is looking for some sort of possibly better understanding, it's good to look into the actual writings of guys like Luis Molina or modern folks, Alvin Plantinga, Kenneth Keithley, William Lane Craig, who talk about it.

I'm pretty sure that some self-identified Molinist somewhere will hear something I'm going to say and have a nit to pick with it. But that's sort of the nature of these conversations anyway.

Oh, for sure. I wanted to jokingly tease you that knowing a Molinist is kind of like finding Bigfoot and that you hear that they're out there and some, but to actually meet one in person like, wow, and it's really not that rare.

I find it fascinating. I don't know that I was really exposed to or ever maybe understood it as a better way of describing it until more recently. It may have been you that kind of finally put the pieces together.

Okay, I get it now. But before, I mean, all I'd really been exposed to was Calvinism with strong emphasis on God's sovereignty or Arminianism with strong emphasis on freewill or human responsibility. And then we got questions trying to find what we think the biblical balance is.

And we were talking before we started recording that we get people who attack us because we're too Calvinist and then we get Calvinists who attack us because we're too Arminian. And we're just really trying to find what does the Bible say?

And what is the best explanation that makes sense based on what the Bible says? So regarding Molinism, what is a counterfactual and how does that another piece of the puzzle?

Counterfactuals in Scripture

Yeah, probably the two terms that are really required for a person to understand Molinism. And there are a lot, there are quite a few philosophical phrases and ideas that you can get into. But one of them is something called a counterfactual.

And that's just a million-dollar word for an if-then type of statement. So if you are watching a sporting event and somebody catches a touchdown pass or they catch a fly ball in baseball to get the last out in a game, somebody would say something like, if he had missed that catch, my team would have lost the game.

Well, that's a counterfactual. That's something that didn't actually happen. But you know what the outcome would have been had that occurred. So a counterfactual is just something like that. We would say something like, if I had known you were listening, I wouldn't have said that about you.

You know, that's also a counterfactual where somebody just says, if I had had different circumstances, something else would have happened. You could say something like, if the miracles that had been done in front of you had been done in front of these people, they would have repented.

Now that's directly from scripture. That's something that Jesus says in Matthew 11. So there's where we have an example of God actually using a counterfactual. We have Deuteronomy where he says, I'm setting a choice before you.

If you obey, this will happen. If you disobey, that will happen. In the Old Testament, there's a moment where David is running from Saul and he asks God, are the people in this town going to hand me over to Saul and is he going to capture me?

And God says, yes, the people are going to hand you over. Yes, he's going to capture you. So David leaves and he's not captured. Well, that's not God lying. That's God expressing a counterfactual. If you stay, yes, they're going to turn you over and you're going to be captured.

So what we see in scripture is God has the ability to know what would have happened, even though that isn't what did happen. And that's what opens up the idea of middle knowledge. And middle knowledge is that more controversial aspect.

Very few people worry about counterfactuals because we see them and we understand them. Middle knowledge is a little more.

Middle Knowledge and God's Sovereign Ordering of Events

Tricky. And you touched on it briefly before, but give us the elevator pitch on what is middle knowledge and how does it factor into this discussion?

Right. Now, an elevator version of middle knowledge is like telling somebody, can you explain the history of the world while we're here on the escalator? Well, we can make an effort for it to set this up.

Again, speaking from an engineering standpoint, when we look at the order things happen in, we don't always necessarily mean that it happens in time order. So for example, if I take an equation like one times two times three in my brain, because I'm a limited person, I have to multiply one times two and then two times three.

But from a logical standpoint, those things don't happen at a different time from each other. They just all happen. But depending on how you align an equation from a logical standpoint, some of those operations happen in certain orders.

So in middle knowledge, we look at this idea of saying, okay, God has three moments of his knowledge. Now that's moments with quotes again, because this is not time-based. The first is God's natural knowledge, which is God's absolutely perfect knowledge of every combination that could ever be.

That's all within God. He's not depending on anyone else for that knowledge or that information. He just knows every possible combination of what he could do or could not do, or how he could create or could not create.

Two earths, people who are 20 feet tall, universe made of pure helium, any of those things. Then there's what we call God's middle knowledge. Middle knowledge is where God has that same level of understanding, but this involves his understanding of what free creatures would do in certain circumstances.

So it's just like natural knowledge, except it's more specific. This is God knowing understanding. If I put Shay in this circumstance, this is what he will do. If I put Shay in a different circumstance, he will do something different.

It can also include God knowing it doesn't matter what circumstance I would put Shay in. He will never freely choose to do this or do that. Those are all the free will choices people could make. In between the second and third moment is when God actually creates.

This is when God says, now I'm creating the universe. I'm going to select sovereignly, 100 freely and from my own will, I'm going to select one of these infinite number of combinations. That's the one I'm going to create.

And then after that comes this third moment, which is called free knowledge. That's God's perfect innate understanding of everything that actually is, that exists. So three moments, God knows everything that could happen.

God knows what free people would do in any circumstance he creates. And then he knows everything that's there. Middle knowledge is what allows the Molinus perspective to connect God's predestination with human free will without a contradiction.

Because God is not saying, I'm going to make this person think this. God is not saying, I'm going to wait to see if that person chooses to decide whether or not I'm going to elect them. God sovereignly creates and at the same time, he creates knowing in advance what we are going to freely choose and creates accordingly.

So that's the basic idea of how middle knowledge is meant to operate. It's free will in a legitimate sense, perfect free will, but it's also God's perfect sovereignty because every single detail of creation is still subject to his decision and his choice.

So middle knowledge allows us to say that, yes, God decides when the sparrows fall, how many hairs are on your head, exactly how many drops of water. Yes, that's all part of God's sovereign decree. And at the same time, it allows us to say, you are still held responsible for all of your decisions because you really were free in the decision that you made.

And the only reason it's called middle knowledge is just because it, from a logical standpoint, comes between everything God knows and what God actually creates. So there's the very quick and down and dirty understanding of middle knowledge.

I hope that works for people.

An Illustration of Middle Knowledge in Everyday Life

So I remember one time I was trying to explain to my wife, who is really smart, knows the Bible extremely well, but she's not a philosopher at all. Every time I try to talk about anything philosophy related, I could see her eyes glaze over rapidly.

It's amazing how quickly it happened. But trying to explain, so what actually is this? Because we were talking about this in a philosophy class I was taking. And it's like, we were actually in a drive-through line and she'd say, hey, Che, why don't we pay for the person behind us in line?

And so I was like, okay, let's try to do this as an illustration. So let's say the person behind us in line is having a particularly bad day, but God knows that if she gets a free lunch, the person in front of her in the drive-through pays for her lunch, that will be the encouragement that she needs in order to make different decisions later in the day that could result in her being tremendously blessed.

So God so, in a sense, orchestrated the events so that she ended up immediately behind us rather than the person two cars back. And she did that by maybe she, a stoplight stayed green a second longer, or she was particularly aggressive and went through that stoplight rather than waiting.

So God is not forcing anyone to do anything, but rather God is setting up the situation so that Melissa and I freely choose to pay for the person behind us in line and she ends up to be at the right place at the right time.

So is that a fairly good illustration of what we're talking about with middle knowledge?

I think so. And you can add a layer to it also by saying that part of God's creative decision would be to say, if the car in front of Che and Melissa in the drive-through is belching out smoke, they're not going to be thinking about those things and they won't make that decision.

But if the car that's in front of them is a little hybrid and it's quiet and it's not bothering them, then they will do that. That's not God saying, I'm just going to reach down there and grab Che by the brain and mandate that he does this.

It's God saying, I want him to choose this freely. So I'm going to put him in the circumstance that I know that he will choose to do that thing that I want him to do. So yeah, I think that's a decent analogy and all these analogies are rough.

We're trying to understand God's perspective and God's will. And anything that we do to try to understand his mind is always just going to come down to parable and analogy and the closest thing we can get, but that's not a bad one to drive through.

The Objection That Middle Knowledge Overrides Free Will

So there's so much we can talk about and the letter listeners know we're actually going to break this into two different episodes so we can try to cover the issues adequately. But one of the objections I frequently hear to Molinism is that if God is placing people or orchestrating events or however you want to describe it in a situation where he knows they will choose, make a certain decision, and they almost could not not make that decision, how is that not him overriding our free will?

If he's putting us in a situation where he knows exactly.

What we're going to choose. I think there's two ways to look at that objection. One way is to just remind people that God knowing something does not mean that he's causing it or he's forcing it. Again, as a super, super rough analogy, you and I can go back and watch this podcast once it's on and we can watch each other's facial expressions and listen to the words that we're saying.

I can replay the podcast and I can know infallibly, again, in air quotes, infallibly, exactly what you're going to say and when you're going to say it. That doesn't mean that you did not actually choose to do that.

Now, granted, that's incredibly coarse analogy for how God would understand something. But the mere fact that I know what's going to happen does not mean that I am deliberately interfering with somebody's free will.

We're just used to thinking of things in a determinist sense. We're used to thinking of the atheist kind of view of saying, if you set up A, B, and C, then D happens because A, B, and C forced it to happen.

And it is not logically necessary to say that just because God knows that God is forcing that thing to happen. Now, that is a difficult thing, again, for us to fully grasp. But one of the things that I talk to people about through GotQuestions, when we're answering questions on certain topics, is reminding people that there are some questions where it's okay to say, I don't know, because I can't know.

And we do the same thing with a lot of things. We do this in science, for example. Strictly speaking, when we ask a scientist, what's happening in the center of a black hole? The answer is going to be, there's really no way for us to know.

And that's not a cop-out. It's just because the very nature of that means information can't get out. By definition, we can't know anything beyond the event horizon of that. And there's sort of an event horizon around some aspects of God and reality.

Once we get outside of this universe and we start asking questions like, how can God really know what I'm going to freely choose? That is the second way to look at this, which is what some people call the grounding objection, which is basically their way of saying, in response to Molinism, how is it possible for God to infallibly know what free decision somebody is going to make?

And what possible grounding, what grounds, what could make God have the ability to know omnisciently what a free decision is going to be? And that is where mystery in Molinism comes in. I find that that's an acceptable place for mystery to come in, because again, that's outside the universe.

That's beyond that event horizon, because now we're just asking a question about what exactly does it mean for God to be omniscient? It's not like I'm saying God designed me to do something, forced me to do it, gave me no choice, and now he's punishing me for it.

That's not a mystery. That's a contradiction in saying I was forced to do it, but I'm free. Once we start to talk about what does it mean for God to really understand, at some point in time, we have to say, I don't know.

I don't know how it's possible for God to know what I'm freely understanding, but that's a mystery that's rooted in his attributes, not the universe. So it is very, very much logically, philosophically possible through the Molinist perspective for somebody to argue that God can be totally sovereign and he can know what we're going to choose, but he's not actually forcing that choice because he's not interfering.

With our free will. Does that make sense? It does. No, that really makes sense. With all these issues, with Calvinism versus Arminianism, this came to conclusion several years ago, look, I'm never going to perfectly understand how these things work, how exactly divine sovereignty works with human responsibility, and I'm okay with that.

I'm able to trust God even when I don't understand this. I mean, there's other issues like the Trinity or the hypostatic union, how Jesus can be fully God and fully man at the same time, where theologians for millennia now have accepted, I am not able to fully explain how this works, yet they're able to accept it.

And to me, far more Christians need to do the same thing with this issue, with embracing the mystery of it, that I'm never going to be able to perfectly understand how this works, therefore I need to stop dwelling on it so much, and instead, let's do what the Bible actually tells us.

Let's be faithful in sharing the gospel and allow God to do the work of drawing, of opening people's hearts and minds to the truth of the gospel, etc. And I think Molinism is an exceedingly interesting explanation of these things.

So, we're at about the breaking point for part one of our discussion on Molinism, so please join us for part two, which should come out probably a few days after this one releases. So, got questions? The Bible has answers.

We'll help you find them.