ABSTRACT
Canonical Molinism identifi es God’s providential control over the world in three logical stages. Stage one involves God’s knowledge of necessary truths, and is termed by Luis de Molina God’s “natural knowledge.” The fi nal stage at which God knows as a result of what he crafts is termed “free knowledge,” and in between is where counterfactuals of freedom are found, which is called “middle knowledge.”1 The second stage bridges the gap between knowledge of necessities and knowledge of created contingencies, that knowledge that covers everything resulting from the exercise of God’s will. The bridge involves knowledge of counterfactuals of indeterminacy, including those about what would happen were God to choose to create in one way rather than another. When these three stages are combined with God’s knowledge about his own actions, all resources are in place for complete knowledge of the actual world, including knowledge of whatever future contingents there might be.
