ABSTRACT
In the sixteenth century, Luis de Molina and other Iberian Jesuits developed a theory of middle knowledge. Molinawas especially concerned with the compatibility of divine predestination, foreknowledge, and providence with the exercise of human free will. He saw the theory of divine middle knowledge as essential to an account of how foreknowledge and providential control over the world could nevertheless allow for free human action. Molina's sixteenth-century opponents objected to middle knowledge on the grounds that the relevant counterfactuals of freedom were not independent of God's will. Their claim was that these propositions were true, all right, but they are dependent upon God; his knowledge of them was thus not truly middle knowledge. For many theists, the Free Will Defense, with its assumption that possibly God has middle knowledge, remains the most plausible response to the logical problem of evil. But the advocate of middle knowledge must confront a range of objections to the doctrine of middle knowledge.
