ABSTRACT
In disputation 52 of part IV of his Concordia,1 Luis de Molina reconstructs, and rejects, seven arguments against the compatibility of divine omniscience with human freedom. Let us call the position ofMolina’s opponent ‘theological incompatibilism’ and its negation ‘theological compatibilism’.e second argumentMolina considers is widely regarded as one of themost powerful objections to theological compatibilism. Molina closely follows Aquinas’s exposition of the problem (S I, q. 14, a. 8) but ošers his own, original solution. is solution, I believe, contains one of the most insightful and systematically promising ideas developed in the Concordia. In fact, it anticipates an argument about causal determination andmoral responsibility that has recently reentered the philosophical stage and is hotly debated in the contemporary free will literature. Molina’s reconstruction of his opponent’s reasoning is couched in terms of ‘absolute necessity’:
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Since all human actions and decisions are among the “future things” in question, this argument would demonstrate that unrestricted divine omniscience entails that no human action (or decision) is contingent. From this the critic concludes that no human action (or decision) is free. is argument has a certain surface clarity. However, on closer inspection,
some perplexing questions arise, both with respect to what exactly it states and to what Molina responds. A key question is whether the argument should be understood as maintaining that for every human action and decision God knew at any given prior point in time that it was going to occur; or that He enjoys eternal knowledge about all human actions and decisions, where ‘eternal’ is construed in an extratemporal sense. As we shall see, whether Molina ošers a viable solution to the problem depends essentially on whether we opt for an intratemporal or an extratemporal reading. According to what I shall call the ‘standard interpretation’, Molina adopts a temporal reading and rejects his opponent’s argument because he rejects a modal closure principle about some temporal kind of necessity. us, Alfred Freddoso,3 and following him Linda Zagzebski,4 John Martin Fischer,5 and others, suggest that Molina rejects the above argument because he dismisses the view that so-called ‘accidental necessity’ is closed under entailment.6 Roughly, accidental necessity is a time-relative kind of necessity that pertains to states of ašairs that are already past and thus “over and done with”. If a state of ašairs is accidentally necessary, no one can ašect it anymore. However, under that interpretation, I shall argue,Molina’s attempt to refute the argument presented in quoteA fails. Moreover, Molina shares the omistic view that God’s mode of existence is timeless eternity. In this respect, he is strongly committed to the Augustine-Boethius-Aquinas tradition.7 Strictly speaking, Molina’s o›cial position thus does not allow God to be described as having knowledge at certain times. Instead, the sentence ‘God
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knew that this was going to be’ should be taken as saying that, as Molina oŸen puts it, only ‘in our way of understanding’ (nostro intelligendi modo) God may be said to have known things as coming to be. Talk about divine ‘foreknowledge’ or about the fact that God’s knowledge of certain events is now past should in the Concordia be understood as referring to the fact thatGodhas extratemporal knowledge ofmatters that only from an intratemporal point of view can be described as past, present, or still coming to be. However, in that case the ‘absolute necessity’ Molina talks about in quote A is not some kind of temporal necessity. Instead, I suggest, what is at issue is a kind of necessity constituted by lack of power on the part of human subjects to exert any causal impact on the states of ašairs in question. Interpreted in this way, the closure principle Molina discusses is indeed false and the argument he reconstructs on behalf of the critic, and dismisses, collapses.
