Justified True Belief

(●) God's plan for history runs through choices that nothing but the chooser settles. + Somebody has to do the seating chart, and at a family wedding it is usually the bride's mother. She sits down with a sheet of paper and a pencil, and she knows things. She knows that if she puts her brother beside the cousin who sells insurance, those two will be arguing about the bypass before the soup is cleared. She knows that the quiet nephew will not say a word all evening if she seats him among strangers, and that he will talk for two hours if she seats him beside the girl who taught him to drive. She has known these people for forty years. So she arranges the room, and the evening goes the way she hoped. Nobody at those tables was made to say anything. Every word spoken was the speaker's own, and the nephew who talked for two hours could have sat there in silence if he had wanted to. He simply did not want to. Her knowledge is not perfect, of course. She could be wrong about the nephew. People surprise us, which is exactly why a seating chart is a hope and not a plan. Take the guesswork out, though, and give her knowledge instead of a shrewd read, and you have the shape of something Christians have been arguing about for four hundred years. The name for it is middle knowledge: God knows what any person would freely do in any situation he might be placed in, and he knows it before he decides which people to make and where to place them. Three things the Christian faith says about the world sit here together, and each of them is held by ordinary believers who have never heard of any of this. - God knows what you will do before you do it, down to the word before it is spoken. - What you do is yours. Nothing settles it but you. - God governs the whole of history, and nothing in it takes him by surprise or defeats his purpose. Those three can be held at once, and holding them together is what the church means by providence: God's government of the world he made, down to its details. Whether they can be explained at once is a further question, and it is the one worth asking. The determinist across the table says that everything you do was settled before you did it by whatever came before, and a Christian who answers only that all three are true and that the how is a mystery has not so much answered him as declined to. What is on offer is a model, and a model gets judged the way a detective judges a suspect. A detective cannot prove his case the way a mathematician proves a theorem. What he can do is lay the facts on the table and ask which account makes sense of all of them at once, without inventing convenient extras, and better than any rival anybody has put up. Philosophers call that inference to the best explanation, and it is the kind of case an account of providence has to be. Its strength is exactly the strength of the fit, no more. None of this is new, and none of it is settled. Luis de Molina, a Spanish Jesuit, published the idea in 1588, and Domingo Báñez and the Dominicans were fighting it before Molina was dead. It went quiet for three centuries outside Catholic theology, came back into philosophy in 1974, and has been argued over hard ever since, by people on both sides who know the objections better than anyone did in Molina's lifetime.

(P1) God knows in advance what his free creatures will do. + The first of the three facts, and the least disputed among Christians: God's knowledge of the future reaches the free acts of people and not merely the motions of the planets. (1) Announcing what has not happened yet is the credential Scripture gives God. - Isaiah stages a courtroom and calls the idols of the nations to the stand. The test is not a display of power. It is this: "Tell us what is to come hereafter, that we may know that you are gods" (Isaiah 41:23). Knowing the future is offered as the mark of deity itself. - God's answer is the thing the idols cannot do. He is the one "declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done" (Isaiah 46:10). - He also says why he announced things ahead of time: "before they came to pass I announced them to you, lest you should say, My idol did them" (Isaiah 48:5). A forecast issued after the event proves nothing. The whole weight of the claim is that it came first. (2) The knowledge reaches the small free acts of particular people. - "Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O Lord, you know it altogether" (Psalm 139:4). A word half-formed and about to leave a mouth is as free and as small as a human act ever gets. - Jesus tells the disciples about the betrayal in advance and says exactly what the telling is for: "I am telling you this now, before it takes place, that when it does take place you may believe that I am he" (John 13:19). - The word to Peter could have been checked against a clock: "before the rooster crows twice, you will deny me three times" (Mark 14:30). Not a tendency, not a temperament. A count and a deadline. (3) Foreknowing a thing is not the same as bringing it about. - The worry usually arrives before the doctrine does, and it deserves an answer rather than a postponement. If God knew a hundred years ago what you would do this morning, people ask, how could you have done anything else? - Boethius worked out the answer in the sixth century, in a prison cell, waiting to be executed, and the schoolmen, the teachers of the medieval universities, made it standard. Everything turns on where the word "necessarily" is allowed to sit in the sentence. - Put it at the front and the sentence is airtight: necessarily, if God knows a thing will happen, then it happens. Nobody disputes that, because knowing something false is not knowing at all. - Move it inside and the sentence says something far bigger: that the act itself had to happen, and could not have gone otherwise. That is the claim the fatalist needs, and the first sentence never hands it to him. - Think of it this way: a forecaster who has never once been wrong says it will rain on Thursday, and on Thursday it rains. Her certainty did not fall on the fields. Certainty is a property of a mind, necessity a property of an event, and sliding from the one to the other is the whole of the mistake. - Knowledge takes its shape from what is known and not the other way round. A wedding photograph is accurate because of what happened at the wedding, and nobody has ever suspected the photograph of making the bride say yes. Therefore, God knows what his creatures will freely do, and his knowing it is the first fact any account of providence has to carry.

(P2) Some choices are settled by nobody but the one who makes them. + The second fact, and the one the whole dispute turns on: in at least some of what we do, the person is the source of the deed and nothing else is. (1) A free choice is one that nothing settled but the person who made it. - Libertarian freedom is the philosophers' name for that, and the word has nothing to do with any political party. It comes from liberty, and it marks the view that a free choice is one the agent originates himself, the agent being simply the person doing the choosing. - He chooses for reasons of his own, and nothing outside him and no earlier state of him was sufficient to produce the choice. "Sufficient" is the load-bearing word there, and it means already enough, all by itself, to make the thing happen. - Think of a man handed too much change at a till, standing there with the extra twenty in his hand. He has reasons pulling both ways, and he knows it. On this account his upbringing, his bank balance, the queue behind him and everything else already in place were not enough, all by themselves, to settle which way his hand went. He settled it. - The ordinary mark of such a choice is that more than one thing was open: the man could have done otherwise, with the whole past and every law of nature exactly as they were. That is how anyone would test a claim of freedom at a kitchen table, and in the ordinary run of human choices it holds. • The mark is not the definition, and keeping the two apart matters. God cannot sin, and he is praised for his goodness. The saints in glory cannot sin, and they are freer than they have ever been. Neither has an alternative open to him, and neither is one grain less free, because in both cases the will is the source of what it does. A definition that made a missing alternative fatal would take the freedom from God himself. - What the account denies is that the whole prior state of things, the history and the laws and anything God has decreed, was by itself enough to produce the choice. Where those prior conditions are enough, the choice traces back past the chooser to whatever set them, and the person is a place where something happened rather than someone who did it. • A decree, in this dispute, is God's own settled decision that something will be, the way a king's decree settles that a road will be built. Whether God's decrees work by making each choice unavoidable is exactly what is at issue. (2) Scripture puts real alternatives in front of people and tells them to take one. - Moses ends the covenant with a choice, not a description. "See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil" (Deuteronomy 30:15), and then, in the plainest imperative in the book, "Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live" (Deuteronomy 30:19). He has already said the commandment "is not too hard for you, neither is it far off" (Deuteronomy 30:11). - Joshua does the same at Shechem: "choose this day whom you will serve" (Joshua 24:15). - God says it to Cain with the knife still unmade: "If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door" (Genesis 4:7). - Paul says it about temptation, and he says it to Christians already saved, so nothing about salvation hangs on it: with every temptation God "will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it" (1 Corinthians 10:13). A way of escape that nobody is able to take is not a way of escape. It is a description of the door somebody nailed shut. - A command on its own settles nothing about what the hearer is able to do, and that objection is a fair one (D15). But these texts do not stop at commanding. Moses says in the same breath that the commandment is not too hard and not far off. Paul says the way of escape is provided so that the tempted man may be able to endure it. Both of them state an ability outright instead of leaving it to be read into an imperative, and what stands around those statements is a real alternative set before a particular hearer, and real grief when it is refused. (3) The pleading texts only make sense if the hearer can go either way. - Ezekiel has God begging. "I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die, O house of Israel?" (Ezekiel 33:11). The question at the end is not rhetoric. It is a man asking why somebody is doing something he need not do. - The same prophet puts it as a command with a reason attached: "Cast away from you all the transgressions that you have committed, and make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit!" (Ezekiel 18:31), and then, "so turn, and live" (Ezekiel 18:32). - Jesus says it over the city that killed the prophets: "How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!" (Matthew 23:37). Two wills are in that sentence and they point opposite ways, and the sentence is a lament rather than a report. (4) The alternative account moves the question rather than answering it. - There is a serious and ancient view that a choice is free whenever it flows from the chooser's own wants, whatever produced the wants. A man does what he wants to do and nothing stops him, and on that account he is free even if every want he has was settled before he was born. Compatibilism is the name for it, because it holds that freedom in that sense sits together comfortably with everything being settled in advance. - Take the picture seriously for a moment, because a great many careful people have held it. It gets something right. Being made to act against your will really is the paradigm of unfreedom, and a man in chains is not free in any sense worth arguing about. - The trouble is where the wants came from. If something other than the man put them there and left him no say in the matter, then the wanting is one more thing that happened to him, and calling the resulting act his own is a compliment paid to the machinery rather than a fact about the man. The question was never whether he acted on his desires. It was whether the desires were his doing. - Think of it this way: a man wakes each morning wanting nothing but to sit in one chair, because someone rewired him in the night to want exactly that. He sits in the chair all day, perfectly satisfied, never once prevented from getting up. He has done what he wanted. Nobody thinks he is free. Therefore, in at least some of what people do, the person himself is the source of the deed, and that is the second fact any account of providence has to carry.

(P3) God governs everything that happens, and no purpose of his fails. + The third fact, and the one Christians who prize human freedom are most tempted to trim: God's rule over history is not partial, and he is not watching to see how it turns out. (1) Scripture says his purpose stands, without an exception clause. - Job, at the end of everything, says it to God's face: "no purpose of yours can be thwarted" (Job 42:2). - Isaiah has God say it about himself in the same breath as the claim to know the future: "My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose" (Isaiah 46:10). - Daniel, in the mouth of a pagan king who had learned it the hard way, says that "none can stay his hand or say to him, What have you done?" (Daniel 4:35). - The psalm sets the two counsels side by side. "The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing" (Psalm 33:10), and then: "The counsel of the Lord stands forever" (Psalm 33:11). (2) The reach is to particulars, and not only to the broad shape of things. - Paul tells the Athenians that God "made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place" (Acts 17:26), and then gives the purpose of the arrangement: "that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him" (Acts 17:27). Where a person is born and when are on the list, and they are there for a reason. - Proverbs takes it down to the roll of dice. "The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord" (Proverbs 16:33), and, in the same chapter, "The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps" (Proverbs 16:9). - Paul says it at the widest reach the language allows. God is the one "who works all things according to the counsel of his will" (Ephesians 1:11). Not most things, not the important things. All things. - Peter says it of the worst thing that ever happened. Jesus was "delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God," and in the same sentence the crowd "crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men" (Acts 2:23). The church at prayer says it again a chapter later, naming Herod and Pontius Pilate and the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel (Acts 4:27), gathered "to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place" (Acts 4:28). (3) To predestine a thing is not the same as to necessitate it. - Two words get used as though they meant one thing, and untangling them does more work on this question than anything else in the vocabulary. - To predestine an event is to settle beforehand that it will happen, and to see to it that it does. To determine an event, in the sense philosophers use when they argue about freedom, is to make it follow of necessity from conditions that were in place before it: given those conditions, nothing else could have occurred. • Ordinary life keeps them apart without effort. A father who wants his daughter to take the job in Leeds can guarantee the outcome by forging her signature, which determines it, or by telling her that her grandmother lived there, which does not. If he knows her well enough, the second may be every bit as certain as the first. It is not the same act, and she has not been forced either way. - Everything in (P3) is a claim about predestination. Not one verse in it says that God brings his purposes about by necessitating each choice, and anyone who hears that in the words has added it. (4) He is not waiting to find out. - The psalm puts God's knowledge and his ordering in the same line: "in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them" (Psalm 139:16). - A God who governed by reacting would be a very good chess player, and a very good chess player still loses games. The claim Scripture makes is not that God is quick. It is that the outcome was never in doubt. Therefore, God's government of history is complete, and that is the third fact any account of providence has to carry.

(C1) Therefore, God governs a world in which some events are settled by his creatures. + All three facts hold at once, which makes a puzzle and not a contradiction. God rules everything. Some things are settled by people rather than by him. And he knew every bit of it in advance. (1) The three do not contradict each other. - Saying that God accomplishes all his purposes, and saying that Cain settled whether to kill his brother, is not like saying a figure is both round and square. The two claims are about different things: what God brings about, and who settled one particular act. - A contradiction takes the same thing affirmed and denied in the same respect. Nothing here does that. Nobody is claiming that God settled Cain's hand and also that Cain settled Cain's hand, which is what it would take. (2) Holding all three is older than the parties now arguing about it. - The rabbis set the two hard halves down together without embarrassment: everything is foreseen, and freedom of choice is given. - Scripture does the same thing, sometimes inside a single verse. The Peter who says the cross went "according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God" says in the same breath that lawless men did it (Acts 2:23). Joseph tells his brothers, "you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good" (Genesis 50:20). One act, two intentions, and not a hint that either one cancels the other. - Scripture states no theory of the will anywhere. It addresses people as accountable and it confesses God as sovereign, in charge of everything that happens, and any doctrine about how the two fit has to be built out of those two the way the doctrine of the Trinity is built out of what Scripture says rather than quoted from a verse that states it. (3) What is left over is a question about how, and it deserves an answer. - If God's purposes run through events he does not himself settle, then something has to account for how a plan can be guaranteed when part of its content is up to somebody else. That is a fair question. Either it has an answer or it does not. - Saying that the how is hidden is a perfectly respectable thing to say about some doctrines. It is a thin thing to say about this one, because of who is usually asking. He is a Christian who has been told, often by people he trusts and reads, that the only way to keep hold of God's sovereignty is to let human freedom go. - A man in that position has not been answered by being told that both are true and the rest is mystery. He has been told to stop asking. Therefore, the three facts together describe a God whose plan runs through the free acts of his creatures, and the question that remains is how.

(P4) God knows what a person would freely do in circumstances that never come about. + Scripture shows a fourth thing about God's knowledge, less often noticed than the first three: he knows what a person would have done in a situation that never arose. That fourth fact is the hinge of the whole account. (1) A counterfactual is an if-then about something that did not happen. - People deal in them constantly. "If you had left at six you would have made the flight." "If I told him, he would tell his sister." A counterfactual is a statement of that form: it says what would be the case under a condition that may never be met, and it can be perfectly true even though the condition never comes. • An if-then statement of any kind is called a conditional, and its two halves have names worth having. The "if" half is the antecedent, the "then" half the consequent. In "if you had left at six you would have made the flight," leaving at six is the antecedent and making the flight is the consequent. - The statements are ordinary, and so is knowing some of them. A mechanic knows what the car would do if you took the corner at sixty. A mother knows what her son would say if she asked him to move home. These are not certainties, and human beings get them wrong all the time. But the form of the knowledge is familiar, and a great deal of ordinary life is planned on it. - What Scripture reports about God is knowledge of that form, without the guesswork. (2) David at Keilah is the classic case. - David is hiding in the town of Keilah and two things are on his mind. Will Saul come down after him, and will the townspeople hand him over? He puts both questions to God, and gets both answers. "And the Lord said, He will come down" (1 Samuel 23:11). "And the Lord said, They will surrender you" (1 Samuel 23:12). - Then comes the part that makes the passage what it is. David leaves. "When Saul was told that David had escaped from Keilah, he gave up the expedition" (1 Samuel 23:13). Saul never came down. The men of Keilah never handed anyone over. - So neither answer was a prediction about the future. Both were true statements about what would have happened under a condition that was never met, and they were given as answers by a God who cannot be wrong. - The objection that God was offering a shrewd read, the way a friend with good judgment might, does not fit what the passage says. A friend says what he thinks is likely. A God who cannot hold a false belief says what would certainly have been. (3) The pattern runs through the whole Bible. - Jeremiah puts two futures in front of Zedekiah while the Babylonians are at the wall. "If you will surrender to the officials of the king of Babylon, then your life shall be spared, and this city shall not be burned with fire" (Jeremiah 38:17), and "But if you do not surrender to the officials of the king of Babylon, then this city shall be given into the hand of the Chaldeans" (Jeremiah 38:18). Both conditionals are announced as true before the king has decided anything, by a God "who never lies" (Titus 1:2). - Elisha is angry about something that did not happen. The king struck the ground three times with the arrows and stopped, and the prophet tells him what the other outcome held: "You should have struck five or six times; then you would have struck down Syria until you had made an end of it" (2 Kings 13:19). The anger is over a forfeit, and a forfeit requires that the other outcome was really there. - Ezekiel states the counterfactual and makes a man's guilt rest on it: "But if he had taken warning, he would have saved his life" (Ezekiel 33:5). - Jesus makes the same move about guilt on the night he was betrayed. Had he not come and spoken to them, he says, they would not have been guilty of sin (John 15:22). Their guilt is measured against what would have been true of them in a world where the visit never happened. - Jesus says the strongest version of it, and grounds a judgment on it. "For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes" (Matthew 11:21), and of Sodom, "if the mighty works done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day" (Matthew 11:23). • The reading is contested, and some of the contesting is done by the doctrine's own defenders. A leading defender of middle knowledge takes the Tyre and Sidon saying as vivid rhetoric about how hard Chorazin's heart was rather than a report of what those cities would in fact have done, and others read it as it stands. The case for reading it as it stands is that a woe is a judgment, and a judgment resting on a comparison needs the comparison to be true. Why Sodom was never given the chance is the fair follow-up, and the answer turns on the difference between repenting in sackcloth and coming to faith (D10). - Paul's shipwreck holds both halves in one episode. God has granted Paul every life on board, and Paul says it out loud: "there will be no loss of life among you, but only of the ship" (Acts 27:22). A few verses later the sailors try to slip away in the boat, and Paul tells the centurion, "Unless these men stay in the ship, you cannot be saved" (Acts 27:31). A guaranteed outcome and a genuine condition, in the same storm, on the same night. (4) None of these passages shows when God knows such things. - They establish that God knows counterfactuals about human choices, and that much has not really been in dispute among Christians for most of the church's history. - What they do not establish is where that knowledge stands in relation to his decision to create. The limit belongs out in the open rather than buried. Somebody who holds that God decrees everything that comes to pass has an answer ready for every passage here: God knows what the men of Keilah would have done because he had already settled what every creature would do in every circumstance he might decree. - On that reading the verses are true, the knowledge is real, and none of it is knowledge of a free act. Quoting more verses will not touch it, because the disagreement was never about what the texts say (D1). Anyone who denies middle knowledge is not being unbiblical, and it would be unfair to suggest otherwise. - So the case has to be made on the other fact, which is what sort of creatures the men of Keilah were. If handing David over would have been their own doing, then what they would have done is a truth about them, and the question of when God knows a truth like that becomes a live one. Therefore, God knows what people would freely do in circumstances that never come about, and the live question is not whether he knows it but when.

(P5) God knew what his creatures would freely do before he decided what to create. + The whole doctrine stands or falls on that one word, "before". The order it names is one of dependence rather than of time. (1) The order in question is logical, not chronological. - One thing is chronologically prior to another when it comes earlier on the clock. One thing is logically prior to another when it is the reason the other is what it is, whether or not any time passes between them. - The words of a sentence are logically prior to its meaning, and nobody waits between them. "Two plus four" is logically prior to "six" without being earlier in the day. - God's knowledge is eternal and all of a piece. When this dispute speaks of moments in it, a first, a second and a third, the word has nothing to do with minutes. A moment is a step in an order of dependence, one thing standing behind another as its reason, and the whole of it sits inside a single act of knowing that God never had to live through. - Molina was explicit that the order is a way of thinking rather than a series of events, and equally explicit that it is not a fiction. The moments stand in a real relation of dependence, where God can have one kind of knowledge only on condition of having another. (2) God can know three different things about a creature. - By natural knowledge God knows everything that could be: every creature he might make, every circumstance he might set up, every way any of it could conceivably go. It belongs to him by nature, it could not have been otherwise, and no decision of his had anything to do with it. - By free knowledge God knows everything that will be: the actual world in all its detail, known because he decided to make it. Its content depends entirely on his will. Had he made a different world, he would have known different things. - Between those two sits a third. By middle knowledge God knows what any creature he might make would freely do in any circumstance he might place it in. The doctrine has been called Molinism ever since, after the man who put it to work. The name says only where the knowledge sits; what fills it comes from the contrast with its two neighbors. - Think of Peter in the courtyard. By natural knowledge God knows that Peter, standing at that fire, could deny his Lord or could confess him, both being open to a man like that. By middle knowledge God knows that he would deny him. By free knowledge, once God has decided to make Peter and put him there, God knows that he will. (3) A piece of knowledge either stands behind God's decision or follows from it. - God's decree to create this world is an act of will rather than a piece of knowledge. Nothing sits alongside an act of will. A thing either stands behind it as one of its reasons, or it follows from it as one of its results. • Ordinary decisions show why there is no third option. The price chalked on the windshield is one of the reasons you bought the car. The dent you put in the bumper a week later is one of the results. Nothing in that transaction is neither a reason nor a result, and "logically at the same moment as the decision" names no relation that a reason or a result could stand in. - So God's knowledge of what creatures would freely do is either logically before the decree or logically after it. There is no third shelf, and which of the two shelves it sits on is the whole argument. (4) If that knowledge came after the decree, the choice was never the creature's. - Suppose it comes after. Then God knows what you would do in a circumstance because he has decreed what you would do in it, and the truth about your would-be choice is a truth he made. Whatever you would have done in the room you never entered, he settled it, exactly as he settled what you will do in the room you did enter. - On the account of a free choice given in (P2), the choice is then not yours. Its source lies behind you in the decree, and you are the place where the decree arrived. • That step leans on (P2), and nothing is gained by hiding it. Against somebody who denies (P2) it proves nothing at all. What it does is name the price of denying it, and the price is that no human being is ever the source of anything he does. - Both sides read that consequence the same way, and the agreement matters more than it looks. Those who put the knowledge after the decree do not, as a rule, go on to claim that creatures have the kind of freedom described in (P2). They hold instead that freedom is doing what you want, with the wants themselves decreed. - So nobody is being caught out in an inconsistency, and nobody has quietly conceded the case. They have weighed what an all-determining decree costs and judged the cost worth paying. All that follows is that the argument is about (P2) itself rather than about what (P2) would imply. • A minority in that tradition keeps creaturely freedom of the (P2) kind for ordinary choices and confines the determining decree to salvation. Nothing here is aimed at them. Wherever they leave the creature as the source of a choice, the question of where God's knowledge of that choice belongs comes back in exactly the same form. - Which is why the case cannot be won or lost by quoting Keilah. It is won or lost on (P2). If some human choices are the creature's own, then the conditionals about them cannot be true because God decreed them, and the only shelf left is the one before the decree. (5) Two features keep the middle from collapsing into either neighbor. - The first is that it comes before God's decision. That much it shares with natural knowledge, and it is the one thing free knowledge can never have. - The second is that its content could have been otherwise. That much it shares with free knowledge, since what each of them contains depends on somebody's free decision. The difference is whose. Free knowledge turns on God's own decision, and middle knowledge on the creature's, which is why what it contains is not up to God. - The second feature is the one people find startling, and it loses nothing by being put bluntly. God cannot make it the case that a free creature, placed in a given set of circumstances, would choose otherwise than it would. He can decline to make that creature. He can make it and place it somewhere else. What he cannot do is reach into the conditional and change what is on the other side of it. - That is not a dent in omnipotence, any more than his inability to make a square circle is. Omnipotence is the power to do anything that can be done, and "cause someone to freely do what he would not freely do" is not a description of a feat. The word "cause" and the word "freely" cancel each other out, and what is left is a sentence with nothing in it. Therefore, God's knowledge of what his creatures would freely do stands logically before his decision about what to create, which is what the doctrine of middle knowledge asserts.

(P6) God chooses among the worlds his creatures' free choices leave open to him. + With the knowledge in place before the decree, God has something to choose among: the worlds his creatures' free choices actually leave open to him. That choosing is the mechanism of providence. (1) Not every world God could imagine is a world God could bring about. - A possible world is any complete way things could conceivably have gone, as long as it contains no contradiction. A world where you emigrated at twenty is possible. A world where you both did and did not is not. - A feasible world is narrower: it is a world God could actually bring about, given what free creatures would in fact freely do. A world in which Peter, standing at exactly that fire on exactly that night, freely confesses his Lord is perfectly possible. If the truth is that he would deny him, that world is not one God can make, because making it would mean making a free man freely do what he would not freely do. - The set of feasible worlds is therefore a portion of the possible ones, and which portion is not up to God. He does not choose the counterfactuals. He finds them, and they mark out the range he has to work in. - Think of it this way: a host can cook anything in the book, and can still only serve a dinner his guests would actually eat. His skill is not in question. The menu is narrowed by other people, and the narrowing is what makes hosting a craft rather than a recital. (2) Choosing the world is not determining the choice. - God can guarantee an outcome without necessitating it, and everything in the dispute turns on that difference. - Necessitating it would mean arranging conditions sufficient to produce it, so that given them nothing else could have happened. Guaranteeing it, on this account, means selecting circumstances in which he knows what the person will freely do. The conditions were never enough by themselves. The man settled it. - The difference shows up in where the act traces back to. On the first picture, follow the causal line back from the deed and you arrive at the decree without passing through anyone. On the second, follow it back and you stop at the man, because nothing before him was enough to produce it. - Think of it this way: a chess teacher who has played a pupil three hundred times knows that if she opens this way he will castle early, tucking his king into the corner behind a rook, and she can plan the whole game around it. Nothing in her planning moves his hand. He castles because he decides to, for reasons that seem good to him, and if he decided otherwise she would have been planning a different game. God's knowledge is better than hers and his reach is total, but the shape of the thing is the same. (3) Every event in the world God chose is either willed or permitted. - Either way he knew exactly what it would be before he chose. That is a strong claim and it is the payoff: there is no corner of history that merely happened, no event God was resigned to because it got past him. - Nor is there any free act in it that was necessitated from outside the one who performed it. What God did was choose, out of all the worlds his creatures' would-be choices left open, one in which his purposes are carried through. - So the God of this account is not a gambler. He does not create and hope. Every risk was priced before anything existed, which is why Scripture can say that no purpose of his can be thwarted (Job 42:2) without any hedging about how the free choices inside those purposes turned out. (4) The cross is the case that shows the whole machine at once. - Consider what had to be true on one Friday. Certain men had to be sitting on the council who would vote to condemn. A crowd had to be standing in the street who would call for Barabbas. Herod had to react as he reacted, and Pilate had to break under exactly the pressure he was put under. - Not one of those was compelled. Every man in that chain did what he wanted to do, and the New Testament says so with unusual force: they were "lawless men" (Acts 2:23), and lawlessness is not a thing a puppet can be charged with. - And yet Peter says the whole of it went "according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God" (Acts 2:23), and the church praying in Acts names the participants one by one and says they gathered "to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place" (Acts 4:28). - On this account there is no strain in holding both. Knowing what each of those men would freely do in each of the circumstances he might be placed in, God arranged for just those men and just those circumstances. The plan was exact, and every actor in it was free. - Paul looks at the same Friday from the other side and says of the rulers, "None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory" (1 Corinthians 2:8). That is one more counterfactual about what free men would have done. Therefore, God settles what happens by settling which world to make, and the choices inside it remain the choosers' own.

(C2) Therefore, God's providence runs on his knowledge of what his creatures would freely do. + God plans the whole of history, in detail, through choices that nothing settles but the people who make them. He does it by knowing, before he decides anything at all, what each of them would freely do in any situation he might be placed in. That knowledge is what the tradition calls middle knowledge, and it is the best account anyone has given of the three facts on the table. (1) Each rival is recognizable by which of the three facts it gives up. - Start with the strongest of them: God brings his purposes about by determining each choice. It deserves to be heard at its full height before a word is said against it. • It needs no machinery beyond God's own will. It never has to explain how a plan can run through something God did not settle. It has the sovereignty texts in its hand and reads them without a single qualification. • It can say with a straight face that a choice flowing from a man's own heart is all the freedom anybody ever meant by the word. • So the third fact is beautifully served, because a plan carried out by decree cannot miss. The second fact is what pays for it. If the decree is what settles the choice, the source of the deed lies behind the man, and every text in (P2) that sets a real alternative before somebody has to be re-read as setting before him something he was never able to take. - Say instead that God does not know what free creatures will do, because there is nothing there to know until they do it. • This deserves the same courtesy, because its defenders are not saying that God is ignorant. They are saying that omniscience is knowing every truth there is, that a free act nobody has made yet is not yet a truth about anybody, and that failing to know it is no more a limit than failing to make a square circle is. • They read the prophecies as announcements of what God himself will do, or as warnings that hang on what the hearer does next, and they have the texts where God grieves that he made man (Genesis 6:6) and relents over Nineveh (Jonah 3:10). • The second fact is served and the price is the first, and it falls due where Scripture is most specific. A rooster, two crowings and three denials (Mark 14:30) is not an announcement of what God will do, and it is not a warning about what might happen. It is a report of what one frightened man would say before morning. - Say instead that God simply knows the future, straight off, with no account of how and no middle step. • This one keeps the first two facts, and it is the quiet position of a great many thoughtful Christians. It has two real advantages as well: it asks nobody to believe anything about conditionals, and it never owes an answer to the grounding objection. • What it struggles with is the third fact. Knowledge of what will actually happen already includes every decision God has taken and every response he will make, so there is nothing left over in it for him to plan by. Knowing the final score before the match is not the same as knowing what would have happened had a different player been sent on. • The reply from that side grants that God lays no plans by consulting what he foreknows, and argues that he never needed to (D17). Whatever else that does, it leaves the third fact exactly where it found it. - Say instead that God knows the counterfactuals, but only because he decreed them. That is the old Dominican answer, and it is not a muddle. • It is the most economical position anyone has held here. The puzzle dissolves, God's knowledge of his creatures is knowledge of his own will, and nothing about any creature has to be true independently of him. • But the counterfactuals are then about what God settled rather than about what creatures would settle. The second fact is gone by another road, and the position turns out to be the first rival wearing a different coat. - Middle knowledge is what is left when all three facts have to survive. God knows the future because he knows what free creatures would do and which ones he made. His plan cannot fail because he chose a world in which it does not. And the choices inside it are the creatures' own, because nothing but the creature settles any of them. - None of which is to say it comes free. A family house-hunting on a budget is not looking for the house with nothing wrong with it, because there is no such house on the street. They are working out which faults they can live with. The fault in this house has a name, the grounding objection, and it is the price of everything else (D6). (2) A best explanation is less than a proof and more than a preference. - The step from the facts to the doctrine is tight. Grant that some choices are the creature's own, and the rest is close to forced: a piece of knowledge either stands behind God's decision or follows from it, and knowledge of what a creature would settle cannot follow from a decision that settles it instead. - The looseness is all in the granting. The three facts are argued for rather than seen, the second of them is exactly what the other side denies, and the most anyone should claim is that no other account on offer keeps all three. - The doctrine is not taught in Scripture, and its own defenders say so. Scripture shows that God has counterfactual knowledge without ever saying where in the order of his knowing that knowledge belongs (P4, D14). - Its own defenders disagree about how God knows the conditionals, and nothing here depends on settling that. Molina thought God's grasp of a creature's nature ran so deep that he could simply read off what the creature would do. Others hold that God knows these truths the way he knows any truth whatever, because they are true and nothing true escapes him. The doctrine is a claim about where the knowledge sits, not a theory of how it is come by. - Nor is the doctrine load-bearing for the Christian faith. If it fell tomorrow, the God who knows the future and the creature who acts freely would still stand together, because the answer to the fatalist runs on nothing in (P4 through P6). What would be lost is reach: providence would have to be described more thinly, and the how would go back to being a mystery. That is a real loss and not a fatal one. - The best objection to all of it has a name, the grounding objection. A counterfactual of freedom is an if-then about what some free creature would choose, and the objection asks what makes one of those true in the first place, given that the person may never exist and the circumstance may never come. It is a good question. It has serious answers (D6), and anybody weighing this account should weigh the objection in the same hand. (3) Two places the doctrine has been put to work. - Predestination. Paul writes that "those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son" (Romans 8:29), and Peter addresses Christians chosen "according to the foreknowledge of God the Father" (1 Peter 1:2). Molina read those texts as election on the basis of what God knew such persons would freely do, and modern defenders of middle knowledge have read them the same way. Whether that is the right account of election is a question of its own, with a long argument attached. - Those who never hear. Paul tells the Athenians that God set the times and the borders of every nation "that they should seek God" (Acts 17:26-27), which is a claim that where and when a person lives is part of the plan rather than an accident of it. A God with middle knowledge could arrange the map knowing what each person would freely do with whatever light reached him. That is an old use of the doctrine and a serious one, and settling it belongs to the debate about the unevangelized. (4) The history, told straight. - Molina published the Concordia in 1588, writing in the aftermath of Trent and against what he took to be the Reformation's denial of human freedom. The Dominicans, led by Domingo Báñez, answered that the doctrine made God wait on his creatures. - The fight went to Rome. Clement VIII convened a commission on grace, the Congregatio de Auxiliis, and it sat through eighty-five hearings and forty-seven formal debates over about ten years. Molina died in 1600, amid rumors that he was being burned in effigy in Rome. - It ended in 1607, and it ended in a draw. Paul V closed the controversy by forbidding either side to call the other heretical, which is where Rome has left it ever since. - The doctrine did not die with its author. Suárez refined it. Bellarmine and du Perron came through the controversy still holding versions of it, though neither man was a simple follower of Molina, and Arminius reached for the tool within a decade of Molina's book. - Then came three centuries of near silence outside Catholic theology. In 1974 a philosopher put the idea back into circulation and turned it against the charge that God and evil cannot both be real, and the modern literature on middle knowledge runs downstream of that. Therefore, the God who knows what you would do in any circumstance, and who chose the circumstances you are in, has planned everything without deciding anything for you.