God. Real. Right.

This post concludes the first difficulty of denying the reality of free will. That first difficulty is that it underestimates the nature and power of God.
2.1.2.2 Even explaining God’s foreknowledge while accepting free will is too great a limit on God.
Using God’s foreknowledge of possibilities as a means of explaining freedom while maintaining God’s control of events misses the significance of freedom (Molinism’s failure regarding the significance of human freedom is not the point of this paper, but it can be mentioned briefly. Creating layers between God’s knowledge and the actions of his creatures in the future does not eliminate the apparent problem for freedom foreknowledge forces. That is, if God knowing the activity of a person means she does not have an option, then God knowing what she will do in every possible circumstance still does not leave her a genuine option since God knows which world [and therefore which circumstances] He will actualize. That is, God actualizing only the circumstances which will produce a certain choice makes her choice no freer than the compatiblist’s subject, although her determination is buried one layer deeper) and inappropriately attempts to explain the knowledge of God. The question is how God could know the future without eliminating genuine options from His creatures. Jonathan Edwards makes a compelling case that foreknowledge precludes freedom. Since God has always had foreknowledge of everything, there is no possibility that things could be other than they have been and will be. The future is as necessary (Although later authors and thinkers distinguish between certainty and necessity, the point for Edwards is the same. The future is as necessary as the past. Further, necessity and certainty are indistinguishable when God’s activity is so pervasive in nature that each moment is practically a re-creation.) as the past; otherwise God’s knowledge would have been incomplete at some point. Once God knows it, it must be. God has always known it. So it must always have been that it would necessarily be the way it has been or will be.
One attempt to get around this objection to freedom is to expand the scope of God’s foreknowledge not only to include all possible worlds, but also to include exactly what every free creature would do in every one of those possible worlds. As God actualizes the world based on His knowledge of what His free creatures will do He maintains sovereign control of what will transpire and His foreknowledge is explicable in the context of still-free creatures. There is something likable about that approach. But there is also something wrong with it.
Here is what is wrong. Although Molinism attempts to salvage freedom and foreknowledge without falling into the ultimately non-theistic abyss of misnamed open theism, it does so by making an unwarranted assertion about God—or, more specifically, about how God comes to know something. Effectively, Molinism claims that God knows all the possible worlds and what all of his free creatures would do in each of those worlds and, because He knows which world He will actualize He knows what will happen. Such an explanation of how God knows something is not called for. God’s complete knowledge of the future need not be the product of the interaction of His will with a complex set of counterfactuals. Such an explanation presumes too much and too little about God. It presumes too much by pretending there is something about God’s acquisition of knowledge which men both can and ought to explain. It presumes too little by thinking that God’s knowledge is bound by the same possibilities humans associate with their knowledge. Suppose it is the case that humans can only know something if it is either logically necessary or experientially evident. Such a fork (as Hume’s) has no bearing on God. God’s knowledge of the contingent future need in no way be restricted by human epistemology. To cut the Gordian knot, God knows the future, including the actions of His free creatures, because He is God. Not being able to explain how He has that knowledge should be no less disconcerting than not being able to explain how He is three persons but only one God or how Christ is eternally the same and yet becomes complete through suffering. Neither should the inability to explain the mechanism of God’s foreknowledge incline a theist toward open theism—a diminished view of God based solely on the mistaken idea that what cannot be explained (how God could know a future which does not exist) cannot be (that God knows a future which does not exist.) As always, it is not important for a person to know how or why God knows something, only that she acknowledge that God knows it.
The next post in this series begins the second problem with denying the reality of free will: the loss of moral responsibility.