Do Catholics believe in William Lane Craig's "Middle Knowledge"?

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I read part of Mr. Craig’s view on “middle knowledge” and ran into a snag that I think has issues merely on the basis of common sense.

If God can judge what “these children WOULD do were they to be given the opportunity via more time and revelation,” and based upon those “theoretical grounds” make a judgement as to their worthiness, then why would he bother letting humans exercise free choice at all? He could simply prejudge everyone and decide their fate by the same criteria.

I suspect the answer to the quandary of individuals who die before the age of reason has both more subtle and more involved possibilities than Craig’s solution. God must somehow allow those individuals to, themselves, freely decide in some way on their own behalf. I am not sure what that would look like, but it seems to be a requirement given that is how humans, generally, are held to be accountable, i.e., free choices over time.

I confess, this is only a cursory opinion since I did not read the entire article (which is not, it appears, an actual statement of his views, but a series of questions addressing aspects of it.)

My point above is a reaction to what appears a glaring issue from the beginning, but I need to read Craig’s own work before making a more comprehensive critique.
 
Most Catholic philosophers do not believe in middle knowledge (Molinism), though I’m not sure if the Catholic Church is opposed to it (it was proposed by a Jesuit). In general - though my understanding is that the literature on it is complex, and I’m not familiar with it - I think it is based on a wrongful conception of God’s timelessness and causality. Middle knowledge requires that God knows what an agent (so far uncreated) would do in certain circumstances, and so can put them into those circumstances while they still act freely, just in a way that God anticipated.

I think Molinism faces other difficulties: since God is changeless and timeless (and Craig is committed to that), God does not have “foreknowledge” in the sense that He is at time t1 and “sees” every subsequent time. God is present fully to every time as the Creator of time. So this middle knowledge would have to have some metaphysical (though not temporal) priority to God’s creation. But then his middle knowledge is also dependent on creation because it’s dependent on what He creates. He only knows what you will do in situation X because He has created you and willed your existence from eternity. But if His willing you is dependent on His creating you to know how you act in X, then we seem to have an issue in grounding.

I don’t really see what it offers us over traditional accounts of omniscience, timelessness, free will, causality, etc. Those seem to work fine to me.

(Someone like Craig, I’m sure, has addressed concerns like these. I’m not familiar with contemporary accounts, so I’m not sure what he’d have to say.)
 
polytropos said:
Most Catholic philosophers do not believe in middle knowledge (Molinism), though I’m not sure if the Catholic Church is opposed to it (it was proposed by a Jesuit). In general - though my understanding is that the literature on it is complex, and I’m not familiar with it - I think it is based on a wrongful conception of God’s timelessness and causality. Middle knowledge requires that God knows what an agent (so far uncreated) would do in certain circumstances, and so can put them into those circumstances while they still act freely, just in a way that God anticipated.

I think Molinism faces other difficulties: since God is changeless and timeless (and Craig is committed to that), God does not have “foreknowledge” in the sense that He is at time t1 and “sees” every subsequent time. God is present fully to every time as the Creator of time. So this middle knowledge would have to have some metaphysical (though not temporal) priority to God’s creation. But then his middle knowledge is also dependent on creation because it’s dependent on what He creates. He only knows what you will do in situation X because He has created you and willed your existence from eternity. But if His willing you is dependent on His creating you to know how you act in X, then we seem to have an issue in grounding.

I don’t really see what it offers us over traditional accounts of omniscience, timelessness, free will, causality, etc. Those seem to work fine to me.
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I am not clear what Craig’s commitments are regarding time. He has written a great deal on the subject, including a dissertation, I think.

This is what he says in the OP’s quoted article:
If the B-theorist of time is correct, then future events like A are just as real as present or past events. If God is timeless, then all events in time are equally real for Him and can be known by Him in the same way. There’s nothing about events future for us that makes them more difficult for God to know. Hence, there’s just no need for Him to deduce such events from present conditions. **Now I myself do not hold to a B-theory of time. I hold to a tensed or A-Theory of time according to which the future in no sense exists **(see my book Time and Eternity for discussion of these competing views). Neither do I think that God exists timelessly since the moment of creation, since I think divine timelessness stands or falls with your theory of time. So, as you note, I reject a perceptualist model of divine knowledge, according to which God “looks” and “sees” what is happening in the world (a terribly anthropomorphic conception of God’s knowledge in any case!). Rather I accept some sort of conceptualist model, according to which God’s knowledge is not acquired by any sort of perception but is more akin to innate knowledge. God just has the essential property of knowing only and all true propositions.
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Source: reasonablefaith.org/middle-knowledge#ixzz2nKgACUU3
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Ah, then I stand corrected. I knew he (unlike some process theologians) held God to be unchanging, but I guess that doesn’t necessarily extend to timelessness.

Timelessness definitely is central to classical Catholic conceptions of God, so I’d take that to be another strike against Molinism… though Craig would of course disagree.
 
I recently came across this blog which discusses Molinism in a few places (and here).

The author is also a Scholastic substance dualist, which is interesting, although I don’t find his critiques of hylemorphism convincing.
 
polytropos said:
Ah, then I stand corrected. I knew he (unlike some process theologians) held God to be unchanging, but I guess that doesn’t necessarily extend to timelessness.

Timelessness definitely is central to classical Catholic conceptions of God, so I’d take that to be another strike against Molinism… though Craig would of course disagree.
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It is not always clear where Craig stands in terms of classical theism. Feser has some difficulty with his position and tends to view Craig as somewhat of a theistic personalist.
I have said a lot more about this subject in a number of posts, links to which interested readers can find collected here. **The question of where Craig’s own views fit is a tricky one. **On the one hand, the kalām cosmological argument, of which Craig is famously a champion, seems (as Geisler points out) clearly to entail that God is eternal or non-temporal. On the other hand, Craig suggests in his book The Kalām Cosmological Argument that “God is timeless prior to creation and in time subsequent to creation” (p. 152). (But as Geisler and House point out, this statement can be read in different ways, and while on one reading it is incompatible with classical theism, it is not necessarily incompatible with it on another reading.) Craig has also been critical of the doctrine of divine simplicity. I have responded to his criticisms…
Source: edwardfeser.blogspot.ca/2013/04/craig-on-theistic-personalism.html#more
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JerryZ said:
Since one of the topics addressed on that page is the salvation of infants I will refer you to a document from the Vatican that explains the Catholic position.
Good reading! 😃

vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20070419_un-baptised-infants_en.html

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I think it’s important to note, that although the said document is probably very interesting, is well worth a read, and quite probably right, the document is from a theological commission, and thus is not apart of the teaching authority of the Church. It is not an exercise of the magisterium of the Church.
 
Peter_Plato said:
It is not always clear where Craig stands in terms of classical theism. Feser has some difficulty with his position and tends to view Craig as somewhat of a theistic personalist.
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He has struck me as falling somewhere in the middle. He’s not a theistic personalist in the sense that Plantinga and Swinburne are, but in the end he probably tends in that direction. He does not accept divine simplicity, which is a pretty central tenet of classical theism.

I also find his reasons for rejecting it a bit wishy washy, though he’s written on it elsewhere too. It seems like what he has to say about metaphysically proper parts does not quite engage the debate over divine simplicity. He gives an example of performing an operation to remove someone’s kidney and concludes, “The best solution to this problem is to deny that there really is any object called Dottie* [ie. the person minus the kidney]. It’s just a figment of our imagination.”

But in an Aristotelian-Thomistic framework there are much better solutions than saying that the the difference is in our imagination, and it rather seems like support for a substance-accident ontology. Dottie* is not a separate object. She is substantially identical to Dottie. But the difference between them is real, though.

It’s also worth noting that “metaphysically proper parts” does not just refer to being materially divisible into bits and pieces. It refers to things which are compounds of essence and existence, form and matter, and so on.
 
polytropos said:
He has struck me as falling somewhere in the middle. He’s not a theistic personalist in the sense that Plantinga and Swinburne are, but in the end he probably tends in that direction. He does not accept divine simplicity, which is a pretty central tenet of classical theism.

I also find his reasons for rejecting it a bit wishy washy, though he’s written on it elsewhere too. It seems like what he has to say about metaphysically proper parts does not quite engage the debate over divine simplicity. He gives an example of performing an operation to remove someone’s kidney and concludes, “The best solution to this problem is to deny that there really is any object called Dottie* [ie. the person minus the kidney]. It’s just a figment of our imagination.”

But in an Aristotelian-Thomistic framework there are much better solutions than saying that the the difference is in our imagination, and it rather seems like support for a substance-accident ontology. Dottie* is not a separate object. She is substantially identical to Dottie. But the difference between them is real, though.

It’s also worth noting that “metaphysically proper parts” does not just refer to being materially divisible into bits and pieces. It refers to things which are compounds of essence and existence, form and matter, and so on.
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I suspect his wishy washiness stems from his theological commitments to the form of Protestantism he accepts which is incompatible with the philosophical or metaphysical conclusions that would take him directly into Catholicism were he to fully engage with them. In some ways, he looks askance at the more logically sound solutions because he foresees where these will take him, so he treads the path carefully so as not to “go there.”
 
To be honest about it we really can’t say anymore than that we have a free will and make our choices freely. And he knows what our choice will be each moment of our lives. He also know what we woulc have chosen in different circumstances because he knows all possible things. Why do we have to put a label on it?

Linus2nd
 
I am reading Garrigou-Lagrange’s Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought, and he says that Thomists also deny middle knowledge because “it posits in God dependent passivity.” That seems to make sense; if God’s choice to create is dependent on how his creatures would act in certain circumstances, then his choice to create is dependent on his creature’s actions. That seems unpalatable, and also recalls the previous objection I gave: how could God’s creation depend on his creatures who are metaphysically consequent of his creation?
 
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