After a several month blogging hiatus, I’m resuming my eleven-part series responding to the essays in Ben Arbour’s edited volume, Philosophical Essays against Open Theism (Routledge, 2019). In this post I tackle chapter 10 by Ken Perszyk, “Open Theism and the Soteriological Problem of Evil” (pp. 159–177). In this essay Perszyk compares and contrasts Open… Read More »
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… Read More »
This is part eight of eleven in a series responding to the essays in Ben Arbour’s edited volume, Philosophical Essays against Open Theism (Routledge, 2019). In this post I tackle chapter 8 by James N. Anderson, “‘May It Have Happened, Lord!’: Open Theism and Past-Directed Prayers” (pp. 121–139). This is one of the more interesting… Read More »
This is my third and final post on Kirk MacGregor’s book, Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures (2022). My first post dealt with chapters 1–3. My second post dealt with chapter 4. This post covers chapters 5–6 and part of the concluding chapter. In Chapter 5 MacGregor defends Molinism’s Biblical credentials against various open theism friendly prooftexts.… Read More »
This is a long-planned continuation of a previous post from several months ago in which I commented on chapters 1–3 of Kirk MacGregor’s book, Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures (2022). MacGregor is one of the most active contemporary defenders of Molinism, a fairly popular model of divine providence that aims to reconcile a meticulous model… Read More »
As part of my ongoing research for my book project on Open Theism (under contract with Cambridge Univ. Press), I’ve recently begun reading Kirk MacGregor’s latest book, Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures (2022). I’m looking at the book because he addresses some aspects of an anti-Molinist argument that I’ve been developing over the past few… Read More »
Author analogies for different models of providence (somewhat tongue-in-cheek): Theistic Determinism: God as sole author – God writes the whole story without any outside input. He writes only for His own enjoyment, which He calls “glory” for some reason. Creatures are merely characters in the novel. Molinism: God as sole author, but with outside “inspiration”… Read More »
In a previous post I presented the infamous grounding objection to Molinism. The problem stems from the fact that for Molinism God’s middle knowledge (MK) is supposed to be non-natural, i.e., not part of, entailed by, or grounded in God’s nature contingent, i.e., neither necessary nor impossible in the abstract metaphysical sense that I describe… Read More »
In my previous post, I discussed the grounding objection to Molinism and also briefly touched on another problem having to with divine aseity. In this post I want to try to cut to heart of the matter and show as simply and directly as I can that Molinism is necessarily false because it is internally… Read More »
This post has three parts: To begin, I will (§1) explain what Molinism is. I will then (§2) explain the infamous “grounding” objection to Molinism. I will argue that Molinism cannot give a positive answer to the grounding objection. The Molinist simply has to bite the bullet and admit a boatload of ungrounded contingent truths and/or… Read More »