I need to recap and summarize what has gone before prior to proceeding, but I first need to clarify what I mean by personal essence. One could simply go through the blogs on Quiddities and Haecceities, but even that does present a rough and ready, intuitive sense of what one would mean by the phrase “personal essence.” A crude way of looking at it is that an essence is what one has in order to be that particular thing—e.g. those properties that make you, you. A personal essence would be those essential properties or property that that thing alone enjoys. Now, just what would count as either an essential property or a personal essence is a matter of some dispute. One might say that one’s sex or DNA or ancestry would count as essential properties while other would be disinclined to make any such assertion (I would among the latter) but at least we have a rough idea of what these personal essences are. We can also say that if God knows these essences prior to creation, they somehow precede our existence or (to use the general formula) for creatures at least, existence follows essence.
If so, we have the following:
- Prior to creation God knows what any person would do if God actualized a given state of affairs that included that person. (Affirmation of Middle Knowledge)
- The object of God’s knowledge prior to creation regarding (1) is one’s personal essence.
- Middle Knowledge is a special case of Natural Knowledge.
- God’s Natural Knowledge includes all an only those things God knows necessarily prior to his decision to create (note: “prior” in this case is a purely formal consideration, since we are not assuming that there is such a thing as time between Natural and Free Knowledge).
- One has no control over what one’s personal essence is (existence follows essence).
- What one would do in a given possible world follows from one’s personal essence.
- If there is a world W that includes personal essence P and state of affairs S where P does A, there is no world W’ that includes personal essence P and state of affairs S where P refrains from A.
The reason (7) follows is that if God knows what P would do and if the actual person that instantiates P is entailed by P, then that person would have no choice with regard to A in S. The upshot is that, despite appearances, Molinism does not have a way to represent subjective counterfactuals. I should hasten to add that this analysis does not in itself entail physical determinism because we have not established that an instantiated personal essence is a physical object. In saying that, I am conceding that a physical state of affairs does not entail that a person would perform a particular action. This only heightens the problem at hand because Molinism can’t represent this concession.
I would now like to consider some possible replies. The first would be to deny (1), specifically to deny Middle Knowledge in any form. That is to say that for any worlds W and W’ that includes state of affairs S and personal essence P, in W P does A and in W’ P refrains from A, but that if God were to strongly actualize T (T being those states of affairs consistent with W and W’ that God can directly actualize), God would not know which world he had actualized prior his action of actualizing T. In short, essence still preceded existence, but one essence does not entail one’s action.
Years ago I was on a list moderated by Wes Morrison of the University of Colorado at Boulder. One of the participants noted to me there are two variants of this line of thinking, one that assumes the A-theory of time and the other the B-theory. The A-theory sees the ordering of time in terms of past, present and future where the present is continually moving from the past to the future as primary. This is sometimes called the “dynamic” theory of time. The B-theory see time primarily as before, now, and after, where the terms “before” “now” and “after” serve simply as indexical terms much like “here” and “there.” Just as “here” is just a real as “there,” the B-theory, holds that no time has any more reality than any other.
Here is where the distinction is important. Open Theism would be an example of an A-theory denial of (1). While I may sometime bring up Open Theism in detail, let me simply state that Open Theism bases God’s knowledge on probabilities. There are two immediate problems. When one acts on probabilities (as we all do) one is making a kind of wager and that wager can be made either to the most likely outcome (lower risk, lower outcome) or the most profitable (less likely and so with a higher risk). What sort of risk (a risk that not only God bears but his creatures as well) is worthy of an infinitely good being? Worlds that include free beings may be better and entail greater risk, but perhaps there were less risky possibility that might have ended up being better than this world has in fact ended up. Perhaps, as the possibilities opened to the divine mind this world was a less risky option that in fact went improbably wrong. In such a case God’s continued support of this world would be like an investor throwing good money after bad. One should expect that a responsible deity would simply cut his losses and try again. Indeed, God need take no risk at all. He could simply take the highest risk and just cut out when things started going badly. We would loose nothing either, for it would be as if we didn’t exist to start with and should we come back in another try, we would have no memory of the deity’s prior attempts. Under such conditions, the problem of evil raises its ugly head. It would seem to be a bigger problem for the deity of Open Theism than for the more traditional view.
A more practical concern would be that God could not (counter to what scripture affirms) provide any sure prophecy. Again, on Open Theism God can only know the future on probabilities. The more particular and the further out in the future a particular prophecy, the more likely that the prophecy will prove false. Moreover, any prediction of the future made to free beings by necessity becomes a factor in their deliberation and so alters the probability of its coming to pass.
Finally, I should add that I am not sure how firmly one should hold to a theory of God’s foreknowledge based on the A or B-theory of time. I myself have no firm intuition about which theory is correct and so am hesitant about relying on either in this regard. (Note, I am more confident about the doctrine that states that God is essentially timeless because on either A or B, time is a sort of limit)
The B-theory option would hold that God’s choosing is timeless and since creation is timeless, God would know, once he has chosen a course of action all the possibilities he would take. Since all points of time are real and since God is timeless, God’s interactions are set. This move would seem to answer part of the first objection to Open Theism. God cannot simply order a redo on a world gone wrong or one that is less than optional. Once created, a world can’t be undone, and so the problem of evil is no more vexing here than for the traditional theist. Of course, there is still risk involved and this could have been a relatively low risk world that went bad or perhaps this is a high risk world that did not yield all its promised potential.
Unfortunately, the B-theory denial of (1) fairs no better than the A-theory denial. To explain, let us start with a deistic creation, one where God sets things in motion but does not interact. God doesn’t known prior to creating which world will result from his action, but he knows the range. After creation he does know, but since God is timeless (and so before and after are formal but not objective) and time is static, God really always has known the future and past absolutely. Of course, God can’t go back and interact with the world. Now, lets say God decides to interact with the world. Well again, God would know (or decide) what he would do should a given state of affairs arise, even though there is only a probability that things will turn out has he would intend. Well, that’s fine too. Even if God doesn’t know for certainty that A and not B will follow from a given intercession, God is equally prepared for either eventually and (since time is static) when the world comes into existence, God knows it from front to back. Now let’s say God wants to occasionally clue us into to the future. Just as God’s desired outcome might not come to pass on this theory, so might a projected prophecy turn out be less than accurate. God’s choices to prophecies would be that they either be conditional in nature (something along the lines of “if you continue in your sin, I will raze your city”) or Delphicly vague (“When you go to war a mighty army will fall”). Although a good number of prophesies in scripture are conditional, there are enough examples of specific prophecies of an unlikely nature to exclude the B-theory denial of (1) with it’s A-theory sibling.
I should add that I would imagine that no Open Theist would ever entertain the B-theory. Not only does embracing the B-theory not resolve most of the issues confronting Open Theism, but the B-theory is closed with regard to time. For an Open Theist, the B-theory of time purchases too little at the expense of the core of what makes Open Theism attractive, that the future is open and that God asks no more of us than he does of himself: to act on faith.
Don Turner on the Society of Christian Philosophers’ (SCP) list had proposed that one does indeed choose one’s essence. I objected that in that case since prior to creation there were no actual persons (aside from God) God could, on the basis of a possible state of affairs, connect a given essence with any actual person. Dr. Turner’s reply was that we actualize is a brute fact that God knows prior to creation. I don’t like brute facts. In retrospect, I think the reason Dr. Turner used this language is that he constrained necessity (and so entailment) to that whose negation is logically impossible. To a certain extent we were talking past each other at the time. What he meant by personal essences would be akin to what I’ve called quiddities (see the raves on Haecceties and Quiddities) and at the time I saw personal essences as unanalyzable primitives (much like Dr. Turner’s brute facts). If a brute fact simply is what it is and has been so from eternity and (for those who hold that God freely decided to create from eternity) is not depended on God’s free chose to exist, then a brute fact is the way it is by necessity. Its negation may not be a strictly logical one, but within the constraints of what a brute fact is, there is a contradiction. To illustrate, we all know that no human being can leap over tall buildings in a single bound. This is not a logical impossibility, but given the constraints of human physiology and the force of gravity on earth, one can safely say that leaping over tall buildings in a single bound is impossible. The contradiction arises when physical laws entail certain unyielding constraints and yet we maintain the negation of those constraints to be true.
In point of fact, Dr. Turner’s suggestion simply highlights the problem for the Molinist. If
A and ~
A are both possible for some essence
P in state of affairs
S, how can it be that whenever
P is instantiated, that instance performs
A at
S? Put another way, given that the instantiation of
P would always perform
A at
S, how is ~
A at
S possible? At the time Don Turner and I were arguing on the SCP list I basically argued that it was not possible and that when we said that ~
A at
S was possible for
P what we really meant that there was some exact counterpart (
P*) such that if
P* were actual, then
P* would perform ~
A at
S. To generalize, we would simply abstract the essence of all personal essences (ψ) such for some person or another ψ at
S either
A or ~
A is possible. Unfortunately for this scheme to work, instantiated haecceities must be the same sort of unanalysable primitives that are found in logical states of affairs, and for reasons given in my raves on Haecceties and Quiddities, I simply no longer believe that is the case. Beside, such an analysis always meets with a very basic objection. The objection runs (if I may put it in the first person) as follows: it doesn’t matter if my situation didn’t make me do something, it doesn’t even matter if someone absolutely identical to me in every particular would have done otherwise. None of this does me any good unless I could have done otherwise. Since Molinism does not seem to be able to deliver the promised goods, we are left with either denying divine omniscience, denying human freedom, or choosing the options that seem but a hair’s breath from denying human freedom. Next time, I’d like to look at Thomistic double causation and Scotic (sp?) volunteerism.
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