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THE GROUNDING OBJECTION REVISITED:
A CRITIQUE OF MIDDLE KNOWLEDGE
by Steven B. Cowan
That God has what is called "middle knowledge" (MK) is a position developed by Luis de
Molina, a 16th-century theologian, in order to provide a solution to the classic philosophical
problems associated with God's providence and foreknowledge.
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This solution, if successful, is
supposed to provide the Christian with a strong view of God's sovereignty over creation while at
the same time preserving the belief that human beings have indeterministic or libertarian freedom.
How does MK accomplish this grand solution? Advocates of MK, called Molinists,
distinguish between three aspects or kinds of knowledge possessed by God. First, God is said to
have natural knowledge, through which, by virtue of his nature, he knows all necessary truths
such as the laws of logic, the existence of numbers, logical possibilities, etc. Second, God knows
all of the contingent truths that have come about as the result of his free decisions, such as which
of all the possible worlds he could have created is actual, that the Allies landed in Normandy in
1944, and that Washington, D.C. is the capital of the United States. God's knowledge of such
truths is called free knowledge.
In addition to natural and free knowledge, Molinists claim that God possesses a form of
knowledge logically midway between the former two. This middle knowledge is God's
knowledge of the courses of action which would be taken by free creatures in any possible
circumstance. That is, MK is God's knowledge of the truth-values of what are popularly known
as counterfactuals of freedom (CFs).
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God knows (and has always known), for example, the
truth-value of the counterfactual proposition:
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See Luis de Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge, trans. Alfred J. Freddoso (Cornell University
Press, 1988).
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The term "counterfactual" is somewhat misleading here, since many of the CFs God is said to
know are those in which the antecedent and/or consequent are true. Hence, they are not necessarily
counterfactual. This has led many philosophers to prefer designations like "deliberative conditionals" or
"subjunctives of freedom." However, I will continue to use the more popular "counterfactuals of freedom."