Molinism and the Thin Red Line

January 2012

“Molinism and the Thin Red Line,”, p. 227–238 in Molinism and Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, ed. K. Perszyk, OUP.

Molinism is an attempt to do equal justice to divine foreknowledge and human freedom. For Molinists, human freedom fits in this universe for the future is open or unsettled. However, God’s middle knowledge – God’s contingent knowledge of what agents would freely do in this or that circumstance – underwrites God’s omniscience in the midst of this openness.

In this paper I rehearse Nuel Belnap and Mitchell Green’s argument in ‘Indeterminism and the Thin Red Line’ against the reality of a distinguished single future in the context of branching time, and show that it applies applies equally against Molinism + branching time. In the process, we show how contemporary work in the logic of temporal notions in the context of branching time (specifically, Prior–Thomason semantics) can illuminate discussions in the metaphysics of freedom and divine knowledge.

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