ABSTRACT
L. Molina employed the doctrine of Scientia media to explain how freedom fits in with divine foreknowledge. In the Theodicy he remarks that ‘in order to account for the foreknowledge of God, one may dispense with both the mediate knowledge of the Molinists and the predetermination which have taught’. Both the Molinists and the Thomists are dispensable because they fail to distinguish the necessary from the certain. G. W. Leibniz sees the mistake as lying in the implicit assumption that divine foreknowledge necessitates the human action. Contingent futurities, for Leibniz, are determined but not necessitated. Leibniz seems to maintain that the distinction between hypothetical and absolute necessity is a sufficient condition for the reconciliation of freedom with divine foreknowledge. The point of importance to Leibniz is that God’s foreknowledge of contingent futurities takes place only within the domain of the pure possibles, that is within God’s intellect.
