There’s a theoretical way for God to exercise quasi-meticulous providence (if He wants to) while respecting creaturely freedom and doing so without either having middle knowledge or exhaustive definite foreknowledge. In short, you can get (nearly) all the advantages of Molinism without the internal incoherence and metaphysical baggage. This is not to say that the model is a good one all things considered—for one thing, it seems just as bad as Molinism with respect to the problem of evil—but it’s a model that, to my knowledge, has not been much explored. I’ll call it Hypertemporalism.
The idea is simple. God gives creatures libertarian free will. If those creatures misuse their free-will in a way God deems “out of bounds” given His overall goals for creation, then God resets creation-time to before those free choices and lets things play out again. God keeps resetting until He gets a result He’s happy with.
- Analogy #1: God is like a movie director. If the actors don’t perform the way God wants, then He calls “Cut! Take 2” and has the actors go at it again. The disanalogy here is that, when God does a reset, the actors don’t remember any of the previous attempts. For them it is just as if they were acting out the scene for the first time.
- Analogy #2: God is like a gamer playing a complicated simulation game. If the simulation goes off the rails, God simply reloads the game from an earlier save point and plays it forward from there. God keeps reloading as necessary until He gets a result He’s happy with.
Some consequences of Hypertemporalism:
- Hypertime. This view is committed to a metaphysics of hypertime. Specifically, it requires a distinction between God-time and creation-time. God-time includes creation-time along with all of the reset time segments. Creation-time excludes any time-segments that were reset.
- If God is patient enough, He can get virtually any creaturely result He wants, given enough resets. I say “virtually” because, when dealing with indeterministic events, there’s always the theoretical possibility that things never go precisely the way God wants. This is also why I say “quasi-meticulous” providence.
- But God doesn’t have to be that picky. He can be a much more permissive “movie director” and only reset when absolutely necessary. This scenario is close to standard Open Theism.
- Problem of Evil. Unlike standard Open Theism, Hypertemporalism raises the question, for every specific evil that ever occurs, why God didn’t reset things to avoid that evil.
- Moral Luck: Unlike standard Open Theism, Hypertemporalism has a potentially serious issue dealing with moral luck. This is a problem facing some versions of LFW whereby whether a person does the morally right thing or the morally wrong thing seems to be a mere matter of chance or luck. That, in turn, seems to undermine moral responsibility. For example, suppose I don’t sin on Take 1, but I sin on Take 2. And suppose you sin on Take 1 but not on Take 2. Finally, suppose God resets Take 1 but doesn’t reset Take 2. I am now held blameworthy for a sin I wouldn’t have committed on Take 2 had God not reset Take 1 and you are not held blameworthy for a sin you committed on Take 1. So, our respective moral statuses seem dependent on whether we are “lucky” wrt to God’s resets.
- Creaturely Agency. Another worry about Hypertemporalism is that it seems to undercut or perhaps even trivialize creaturely agency since God can just “undo” our choices any time He wants to.
Again, to be clear, I don’t endorse this model. It is both metaphysically (because of hypertime) and morally problematic. But it is, I think, vastly more plausible than Molinism. Providentially speaking, Hypertemporalism lies somewhere between Molinism and Open Theism in terms of the degree of control God exercises over creation.