HoP 451 - Could’ve, Would’ve, Should’ve - Free Will in the Second Scholastic
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Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Kura Wura Shura, Free Will in the Second Scholastic.

Some philosophers have, despite having produced extensive and nuanced bodies of work, become associated above all with just one phrase. Examples that leap to mind are Descartes' "I think therefore I am", Leibniz's "The best of all possible worlds", and Hannah Arendt's "The banality of evil". From the 16th century, the best example might be Louis de Molina,

As we'll be seeing, he was a versatile thinker who, among other things, made important contributions on the subject of legal philosophy. But to speak of Molinism is to refer to just one of his ideas, which goes by the catchphrase middle knowledge. This idea, and the theory of which it was a part, triggered a major controversy, one that gripped Catholic intellectuals around the turn of the 17th century. And it's still what he's known for today.

Perhaps this is not so inappropriate because he first became a Jesuit after a spiritual conversion, brought on in part by meditating on the example of Mary Magdalene, who turned away from a life of sin to follow Christ. So, though he did explore a wide range of topics in the scholasticism of the day as a professor in Coimbra, Évora, and finally Madrid, it makes sense that his philosophical work on the topic of sin and free will should make his name.

The problem he was trying to solve is one that should by now be familiar to us. How can it be that human actions are free if God already knows in advance what we will do? Unlike God, I'm a bit shaky even on the past, never mind the future, but I think this is a problem we last saw in episode 380 when we saw Luther referring to it as a thunderbolt that undermines a belief in humans' unconstrained freedom.

And of course, the debate goes back further still, all the way to Aristotle, who posed a similar problem in his logical work called On Interpretation.

There, the puzzle is somewhat different because it concerns truths about the future, not knowledge about the future. If it is already true now that Arsenal will win the next league title, then doesn't that mean that it is already necessary that it will happen? If so, then there's not much point in the other teams trying to compete, since they would only be attempting to forestall the inevitable. Hopefully, Manchester City's players are listening and find the argument persuasive.

Posing the problem in this way, so that it is about mere truth and not knowledge, allows for an easy escape. We can just say that there is no truth of the matter about contingent future events until they happen.

In fact, Aristotle is often read as having proposed this solution. But once you bring God's foreknowledge into the picture, that escape is no longer available. If he knows everything before it happens, then he must know from eternity that Arsenal will win that future title, so it must already be true that they will. After all, knowledge is always about things that are true. There were attempts to solve the problem of divine foreknowledge long before Luther and Molina came along.

Especially prominent is Boethius, whose consolation of philosophy offers a lengthy treatment. His solution appeals to God's eternal grasp of all events, which appear to him as if they were present. That influenced Thomas Aquinas, for whom God just sees from eternity what will happen, including what human agents will do. It's not entirely clear how Aquinas could square this with his own conviction that our actions are not making God know anything, the way that Arsenal could make you see them score a goal by scoring it.

After all, nothing should be able to exert causal influence on God. Another solution, which we discussed in episode 276, came from William Ockham. According to him, God's knowledge is subject to the same kind of counterfactual logic as contingent events.

Suppose that Arsenal is going to win the league. In that case, God knows now, and has always known, that they will do so. But still, Manchester City could win the league instead, even though they won't. If they were to win it, then God's knowledge would have been different. He would always have known that Manchester City would win, just as he knows about all kinds of other terrible things that do in fact happen. Molina doesn't like this response, and not just because he'd be more interested in titles won by Real Madrid and Portugal.

To his mind, Ockham's solution is tantamount to saying that it is possible to change the past. After all, if Manchester City have the power to win the league, even though they won't, then they must have the power to alter God's eternal knowledge retrospectively. Molina has no hesitation in dismissing Ockham's subtle reasoning in this way, but when it comes to Aquinas, he needs to tread more carefully. As we know, Jesuits like Molina preferred to have Aquinas on their side when they could, and were reluctant to criticize him openly.

Indeed, Molina explicitly says that he would rather have Aquinas as a patron than as an adversary. Still, he can't accept the idea that God's knowledge of future events consists in his grasping them all at once in a single eternal vision. This would leave no possibility that things go differently, which is for Molina an absolute requirement.

For him, there can be no freedom unless there is a genuine possibility of acting differently. And if we are not free in acting as we do, it is unjust for God to reward and punish us for our actions. Somehow then, Molina needs to explain how God can know, and know for certain, what is going to happen in the future, without making everything happen necessarily.

This point is most crucial for human actions, since as I just said, moral responsibility requires having alternative possibilities, but it also would apply to anything else that happens in the world without being necessary. Molina gives examples like a rope being stretched until it breaks. While there is a cause for its breaking, it may be a matter of indifference where exactly along the rope the break will occur. In such a case, God will know just where it will break without it being impossible for the rope to break in a different spot.

Now, there seem to be two ways for God to know anything. Molina calls these kinds of knowledge natural and free. Natural knowledge concerns things that cannot be otherwise. For instance, God's knowledge that humans are animals or that squares have four sides. God knows these things in advance of making any choices of his own about what he will create or do.

Not in the literal sense that God at one time has natural knowledge and then at a later time starts to make decisions. Rather, the point is that God's natural knowledge is conceptually prior to his freely taken decisions or actions. Those decisions and actions are the object of God's free knowledge. For example, when God decided he would perform a miracle by allowing Leicester City to win the league in 2016, he knew that this would happen by free knowledge.

Now we're ready for Molina's big idea, which is that freely performing human actions cannot be known by God either naturally or freely. Let's consider a sinful action you might or might not decide to perform. Suppose, for instance, that you're chatting to your boss and are trying to stay on her good side. Your boss casually mentions that she hated a philosophy class she took in college. Now you are tempted to say something like, oh, I know philosophy is such a waste of time.

This would be a sinful act. For one thing, you'd be lying. For another, you'd be missing the opportunity to improve your boss's life by pointing her to a podcast that would give her a more enlightened attitude. Now, if God knows naturally that you will lie to your boss, then your doing so is an immutable fact written into the nature of things, like squares having four sides. Obviously, this can't be the case.

If, on the other hand, God chooses for you what you will do, then your action is an object of his free knowledge. But in that case, too, your action would be necessitated. You would be nothing more than God's puppet. Instead, concludes Molina, there must be a special third kind of knowledge that is in the middle between being natural and being free.

It is like natural knowledge, in that God has the knowledge before he makes any decisions, but it is like free knowledge, in that it concerns events that are contingent, that is, where it is genuinely possible for the event to occur or not to occur. This middle knowledge consists in God's knowing not what we will do, but knowing in advance what we would do in any given situation.

Here's how Molina puts the point: "Contingent things are represented not only as being possible, but also as being future. Not absolutely future, but future under the condition, and on the hypothesis, that God should decide to create this or that order of things and causes with these or those circumstances. For example, God might know that you would be willing to lie to your boss, but only if you're in line for a big promotion. More generally, God knows what every one of his creatures would do in every situation they could be put in.

Furthermore, he knows this in advance of knowing which situations will actually occur. That would be a matter for his free knowledge. It's only once he actually decides to create the universe and chooses which things will happen in it that it becomes clear that you will not elect to join in on the unfortunate philosophy bashing, because also unfortunately, there's no prospect of your getting a promotion. To be honest, you should just quit and go work for someone else, someone who likes Aristotle and Arsenal.

Often, philosophers talk about Molina's solution by speaking of counterfactuals of freedom. But strictly speaking, middle knowledge is not about what is counterfactual any more than it is about what is factual. Instead, it is about what would be factual under certain circumstances. And just from his middle knowledge, God does not yet know whether those circumstances will arise.

Likewise, when explaining Molina's theory, philosophers naturally slip into using Leibniz's language of possible worlds, as in that famous phrase, best of all possible worlds. But as we can see from the passage I just quoted, Molina instead talks about what would happen under a certain hypothesis.

He seems to be thinking much smaller, not in terms of the entire history of a given world that might or might not exist, but in terms of specific possible scenarios that might or might not come about, and what a specific person would do in them. This makes sense, because he's really just trying to get at the sense in which the person is indeed free. How does the theory of middle knowledge secure this result?

Well, when God has middle knowledge, he's not knowing about something that has to happen. Indeed, he has infinite knowledge about things that will not wind up happening, since there's an infinity of possible scenarios that do not arise. Just think about the fact that the hypothetical promotion could have come with a raise of $1,000, $1,001, $1,002, and so on.

Instead, middle knowledge is about things that could happen and would happen in the right circumstances. So, if human actions fall under middle knowledge, they are contingent and not necessary. Exactly the result we were looking for, right? Well, maybe. We might worry that God is putting his finger on the scales in a way that does undermine human freedom. God is, after all, deciding which hypothesis is indeed going to become actual.

God can ensure that you do something sinful by putting you in a scenario where he knows you will sin. Equally, he can ensure that you remain innocent by putting you in a different scenario, one where you do not sin. So in our example, if he wants you to sin, he sees to it that you'll be up for a promotion at the moment when you are tempted to lie to your boss. But if he takes pity on you, then he will let you speak truth to power by reducing your career advancement prospects. Doesn't that undermine your freedom?

No, says Molina, because in either scenario, it is you who decides what to do. Admittedly, it might seem unfair for God to put some people in circumstances where they commit horrendous sins when they would not have done so otherwise. Consider the case of someone who decides to participate in a genocide committed by a murderous government. Under different political circumstances, they would never have had the chance to engage in mass murder and so could not have elected to do so.

Here Molina just admits that it is a mystery why God chooses to expose some people to temptations to which they will succumb and why he spares others this choice. But the point is again that they are indeed still choosing. This is enough to preserve human free will and thus human moral responsibility. At the time, some of Molina's readers had the opposite worry, that he was not giving God enough influence over human actions.

Remember, in this period, theologians were, like Wile E. Coyote in one of those old Roadrunner cartoons, caught between a rock and a hard place. The rock was determinism, depriving humans of meaningful free will entirely. Catholic theologians wanted to avoid this at all costs, because it seemed to them to be the view of the Protestants. The hard place was Pelagianism, the view that it is in the power of humans to avoid sin without God's help.

Again, this was to be avoided because ever since Augustine, Pelagianism had been deemed doctrinally unacceptable. With his theory of middle freedom, Molina could seem to be agreeing with the Pelagians, since he held that humans just freely choose whether to be good or not, and that God knows in advance which we would choose depending on the circumstances. But unlike the coyote, Molina sees the danger coming. To escape it, he says that God's grace is needed in each case where a human chooses rightly, but that grace does not determine the action.

Rather, God and the human cooperate in every righteous act and every successful resisting of temptation. Recycling an example from Aristotle, he compares this to two people cooperating to pull a heavy boat on shore. Furthermore, thanks to divine mercy, grace is always on offer to those who make the effort to choose rightly. So, in effect, the people who choose rightly are guaranteed to act rightly because God is always going to help out.

We are like weaklings who, whenever we need to pull a boat or pick up a heavy box, find that a powerfully built friend steps in to help manage the load. This doesn't mean though that any human could in theory avoid sin completely, as the Pelagians said: "Even if it is possible to refrain from sin on every occasion, it isn't possible to refrain from sin on all occasions. This might seem unconvincing. What would stop me from getting things right all the time, if nothing is stopping me from getting things right at each time?

But I think Molina's point is a cogent one. Consider that a darts player, even a bad one, has a chance of getting a bullseye on each throw. Yet no darts player can get a bullseye on every single throw they ever take. So this is a well-thought-out theory that anticipates and responds to various objections. Under different circumstances, perhaps it would have become the unanimous position of Catholic thinkers.

But the thing about circumstances is that they are never different. As a philosopher friend of mine remarked recently, I don't know about you, but I've never been in a counterfactual situation. Molina faced strenuous opposition, just as God knew he would. It was led by Domingo Bañez, whose name may sound familiar because he was one of the confessors of Teresa of Ávila, whom we saw giving guarded approval to her writings. He was less favorable about Molina and argued that God should be given a more substantive role in facilitating human action.

For banyas, humans have the possibility to act, but only in the sense of having a potentiality or power for action, one that God must actualize. In fact, no creature can ever do anything or "operate" in the technical vocabulary favored by the scholastics without God working in them. This does allow for humans to be free, but only insofar as they have powers to operate in one way or another, powers that are then activated by divine influence.

It almost sounds as if we are instruments in God's hands and that our contribution to action is that God uses us to accomplish those actions. This obviously would not be enough for Molina, who wants humans to have an independent ability to choose between contrary possibilities. But Banyas went on the attack too, polemicizing against the theory of middle knowledge, subjecting it to a barrage of criticisms.

One objection is that Molina falls into the trap I mentioned when talking about Aquinas. It is apparently the human choice that causes God to know what the human will do, which means humans are exercising some degree of influence over God, purely an unacceptable conclusion. Another complaint was that Molina hadn't really solved the problem of divine foreknowledge after all.

If we are worried that an action is necessary because God knows about it in advance, then it should be just as problematic to say that God knows what we would do in a given situation. The foreknowledge guarantees that we will indeed act in just the way that God foreknows once the situation occurs. But perhaps the most interesting objection made by Báñez, one with far-reaching implications for the philosophy of contingency and counterfactuals, is this: On what grounds does God know what we would do in a situation that will never arise?

After all, the choice will never wind up being made, so the human agent won't in fact be deciding how things go. Nor is God deciding what we would do in the counterfactual situation. That's Molina's whole point. So what exactly makes it true that you would, for example, lie to your boss if the temptation to do so was sufficiently strong? To my mind, this is more a good question than a good objection. We are constantly saying things like, if I hadn't lived in London before moving to Munich, I would never have become an Arsenal fan.

Such statements do seem to be true, even if it is hard to say what makes them true. Indeed, this remains a difficult problem for philosophers today. As I say, they tend to approach it using the language of possible worlds, and might solve the problem as follows. Obviously, there's an infinity of possible worlds where I never lived in London, and in some of those worlds, I wound up being an Arsenal fan nonetheless.

But we can understand my statement to mean something like, in the possible worlds that are most similar to this one, apart from the fact that in those worlds I didn't live in London, I did not become an Arsenal fan. This raises all kinds of further questions. For instance, what makes one possible world similar to another one? So even if Molina had possessed the technical notion of possible worlds and had said this to Banyas, Banyas would have been able to press him with further objections. Which is to say that in the possible worlds most like this one, that's exactly what did happen.

In the actual world, the dispute between Bañas and Molina quickly escalated. Bañas was backed by members of his order, the Dominicans, not least because they took his anti-Molinist view to be closer to that of the great Dominican theologian Aquinas. Molina's fellow Jesuits rose to his defense and built on his solution.

In particular, Jesuits, including Suarez, added the notion that God bestows a special grace on those who seek to do good, which is congruent to their individual needs and natures. This is why grace guarantees the success of the attempt. But of course, this didn't appease the Dominicans. The Portuguese Inquisition got involved, and Báñez advised them to condemn Molina's teaching.

The issue then came to the attention of Pope Clement VIII, who in 1597 convened a commission that censured Molina's work, but also allowed for further discussion. The dispute was still going on when Molina died in 1600, but even that didn't calm things down. Finally, in 1607, another pope, Paul V, announced that both positions were tolerable and that the papacy would in due course hand down a verdict as to which one was correct.

That verdict still hasn't come, meaning that the church's stance on the controversy remained neutral, in the middle, if you will. As I say, we're not yet done with Molina. In an upcoming episode, he'll be featuring when we look at theories of law in the Spanish Scholastic. But next time, the central figure will be Suárez, as we look at his innovative ideas in metaphysics.

Remember, you have free will and no one can boss you around, so use your power of choice to join me, here in the actual world and not just in an infinity of possible ones, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.