Molinism, Predestination, Free Will, Grace?!

[seakelp]

I’m confused.

I was talking about predestination today with a friend, who brought up the argument that it is difficult to square God’s omniscience with free will. If God knows who is going to heaven, and who is going to hell, how is it possible to have free will? I tried to explain that foreknowledge and cause are not the same thing, but I still spent a while googling away and reading about the question.

Unfortunately, that left me more confused than ever before.

One theory I read about is Molinism: which, and correct me if I’m wrong, understands the whole idea this way. God knows all possible realities, and therefore, knows that if A is placed in X circumstance, A will choose F. My understanding is that, in this way, the free choice of A is reconciled with God’s omniscience.

But that left me more confused. If God knows all possible realities, why not create one where all are presented with conditions by which they are saved? Then there is still a free choice, and everyone can enjoy Heaven.

Thoughts on this?

 

[thinkandmull]

Aquinas:

**And so others said that merits following the effect of predestination are the reason of predestination; giving us to understand that God gives grace to a person, and pre-ordains that He will give it, because He knows beforehand that He will make good use of that grace, as if a king were to give a horse to a soldier because he knows he will make good use of it. But these seem to have drawn a distinction between that which flows from grace, and that which flows from free will, as if the same thing cannot come from both.

Thus we might say that God pre-ordained to give glory on account of merit, and that He pre-ordained to give grace to merit glory. In another way, the effect of predestination may be considered in general. Thus, it is impossible that the whole of the effect of predestination in general should have any cause as coming from us; because whatsoever is in man disposing him towards salvation, is all included under the effect of predestination; even the preparation for grace.**

I don’t see what the difference is between “Thomists” and those Molinist who believe God could give the right grace and save everyone and

Aquinas often says that God sees the future as in a vision. I’m starting to think its debatable whether he believe more than this and agreed with Augustine that God knows whether someone will accept a grace based on the grace itself

 

[AyJSimon]

One theory I read about is Molinism: which, and correct me if I’m wrong, understands the whole idea this way. God knows all possible realities, and therefore, knows that if A is placed in X circumstance, A will choose F. My understanding is that, in this way, the free choice of A is reconciled with God’s omniscience.

But that left me more confused. If God knows all possible realities, why not create one where all are presented with conditions by which they are saved? Then there is still a free choice, and everyone can enjoy Heaven.

Thoughts on this?

It isn’t just about God’s foreknowledge of human events. It’s about the fact that God created everyone of which he has foreknowledge. That’s why God’s essence is not compatible with our having free will.

As I understand it, Molinism doesn’t get around this problem.

 

[thinkandmull]

It isn’t just about God’s foreknowledge of human events. It’s about the fact that God created everyone of which he has foreknowledge. That’s why God’s essence is not compatible with our having free will.

As I understand it, Molinism doesn’t get around this problem.

You’re not understanding this. God wills to create, than has foreknowledge, then we are come into existence, giving the source for the foreknowledge

 

[belorg]

You’re not understanding this. God wills to create, than has foreknowledge, then we are come into existence, giving the source for the foreknowledge

That means that everything we do or think is already true before we were even created. That means that, as soon as we are created, we cannot truly choose between two options, hence, there is no libertarian free will.

And the same hold for molinism.

So, yes, prefect foreknowledge does mean there cannot be lberatrian free will.
It’s not that foreknowledge causes our actions to be determined, it’s that our actions being determined are the basis of perfect foreknowledge.

 

[thinkandmull]

The ontological fact that we choose something in time mean it was ontologically true before we were born BECAUSE we choose

 

[belorg]

The ontological fact that we choose something in time mean it was ontologically true before we were born BECAUSE we choose

Firstly, that is not what you said, and secondly, if everything I do is ontologically true before I was born, there is no libertarian choice.

 

[Bahman]

There is no conflict between Gods foreknowledge and free will since we don’t know Gods foreknowledge and always choose what God knows. We however have different fate in this picture we cannot escape.

 

[Richca]

I’m confused.

I was talking about predestination today with a friend, who brought up the argument that it is difficult to square God’s omniscience with free will. If God knows who is going to heaven, and who is going to hell, how is it possible to have free will? I tried to explain that foreknowledge and cause are not the same thing, but I still spent a while googling away and reading about the question.

Unfortunately, that left me more confused than ever before.

One theory I read about is Molinism: which, and correct me if I’m wrong, understands the whole idea this way. God knows all possible realities, and therefore, knows that if A is placed in X circumstance, A will choose F. My understanding is that, in this way, the free choice of A is reconciled with God’s omniscience.

But that left me more confused. If God knows all possible realities, why not create one where all are presented with conditions by which they are saved? Then there is still a free choice, and everyone can enjoy Heaven.

Thoughts on this?

Molinism and other theological theories or schools of thought such as the Thomism of Domingo Banez (not to be confused with the actual teaching of St Thomas), Augustinianism, congruism and some others concerning the reconciliation of predestination, God’s foreknowledge, grace, and free will are not official Church teaching though there may be elements involved in the different schools of thought mentioned above that are official Church teaching.

The official Catholic Church teaching contains the following elements which can be found in Holy Scripture, the CCC, or official Church documents:

1. God’s universal will to save all mankind. “This is good and pleasing to God our savior, who wills everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4).
2. Christ died for all without exception.
3. God predestines no one to hell.
4. God is all knowing, omniscient.
5. Human beings have free will.
6. No one can be saved without God’s prevenient grace.
7. Human beings must cooperate with God’s grace to be saved; they can reject God’s grace.
8. God is perfectly just.
9. Predestination is official Church teaching for St Paul mentions it among other biblical authors.

The CCC#600 simply states " To God, all moments of time are present in their immediacy. When therefore he establishes his eternal plan of “predestination”, he includes in it each person’s free response to his grace."

 

[thinkandmull]

Firstly, that is not what you said, and secondly, if everything I do is ontologically true before I was born, there is no libertarian choice.

That is what I said. You’re choice in time is the cause of the prior out of time ontological knowledge of what you will do

 

[oldcelt]

Firstly, that is not what you said, and secondly, if everything I do is ontologically true before I was born, there is no libertarian choice.

Precisely, and there is no logical way around it. If God creates knowing the outcome…that God is responsible.

John

 

[Bob_Crowley]

Precisely, and there is no logical way around it. If God creates knowing the outcome…that God is responsible.

John

We’d be better employed in working out just what we mean by “free will”.

For a start, there are quite a few things over which we don’t have any choice. We weren’t given a choice about whether we’d be male or female, which family we’d be born into, our native culture, left or right handedness, IQ level, giftedness or lack of it, short or tall, hair colour, eye colour, skin colour, and a whole host of other things were predetermined without our consent.

Nor did we pick the time of our birth, or the political-economic age we’d live in.

So what do we mean by “free will”?

In the end, I suspect most of us mean who will be saved and who will be damned, and whether we had any real choice in the matter, when it’s all said and done.

So the argument boils down to what do we mean by God’s grace, with regard to this specific question? Does He pick and choose, or do we have some say in it?

I think it’s a bit of both.

I suppose I’m going to drag up the business of my father appearing in my room the night he died, but during the ensuing conversation at one point he cried out “I always was doomed! I didn’t really have any choice!!” I answered back, even though I was an atheist at the time, saying “That can’t be right!”

He replied, “Oh, it’s right, all right. You can see that from here!”

But later in the exchange he admitted “I was WILLING!” (to continue doing the cruel stupid things that condemned him). I also have reason to believe that a (practising) Catholic uncle of mine warned him on several occasions of the consequences, and what he was doing to his own family, but he just took no notice.

So in the one exchange, I heard him saying he always was doomed, and didn’t really have any choice, but also admitting he freely and deliberately did the things that destroyed him in the end.

DId Judas really have any choice, to quote one instance of what seems to be clear predestination, as far as I can see.

John 17:12 NIV

While I was with them, I protected them and kept them safe by that name you gave me. None has been lost except the one doomed to destruction so that Scripture would be fulfilled.

The question hangs on whether God predestined Judas to be doomed, or whether He simply foresaw Judas’ action before time began, and indicated it as a such in the Scriptures.

Watching a thief steal some money is not the same thing as making him steal the money.

Did God foresee my father acting the way he did before time began, and his blunt refusal to listen to anybody else’s warnings about his behaviour?

I know this much though - if you walk away from Christ, it becomes much easier for the devil to draw you into immoral behaviour. And in the end, it leads to despair.

To sum up, I don’t know the answer. But I do know our wills are involved, as my own father admitted the night he died. We do make choices, and we answer for them.

And if you think I’m being a bit tough on my father, my mother told me that when he was a kid, he was sometimes altar boy to the Archbishop of Sydney, as he lived in North Sydney at the time. He had some church background - it wasn’t something he knew nothing about.

 

[Bob_Crowley]

…And if you think I’m being a bit tough on my father, my mother told me that when he was a kid, he was sometimes altar boy to the Archbishop of Sydney, as he lived in North Sydney at the time. He had some church background - it wasn’t something he knew nothing about.

As a further bit of evidence regarding my father’s alleged altar boy episode, I remember him once commenting that either Michael Kelly or Sir Norman Cardinal Gilroy, KBE was an “outstanding man”. They appear to have been the archbishops of Sydney during the 1930’s and 1940’s.

Now he rarely had a kind word for anybody (l can assure you of that), so I wondered where that came from. I can’t remember which of the two he spoke about, since it was probably over 40 years ago, and I never heard about it again.

But I wondered why he bothered to single out a long deceased Archbishop of Sydney for a compliment when he never went to church, treated his own family like dirt, and generally ridiculed just about everybody.

It sort of fits in with my mother’s comment about his being an altar boy.

 

[belorg]

That is what I said. You’re choice in time is the cause of the prior out of time ontological knowledge of what you will do

No, you said, “God wills to create, then has foreknowledge,* then* we are come into existence, giving the source for the foreknowledge”

IOW you claim that God knows before we exist what we will do. That’s Molinism.
So, everything I do is ontologically true before I exist, therefore everything is determined and there is no liberatrian free will.

 

[belorg]

We’d be better employed in working out just what we mean by “free will”.

For a start, there are quite a few things over which we don’t have any choice. We weren’t given a choice about whether we’d be male or female, which family we’d be born into, our native culture, left or right handedness, IQ level, giftedness or lack of it, short or tall, hair colour, eye colour, skin colour, and a whole host of other things were predetermined without our consent.

Nor did we pick the time of our birth, or the political-economic age we’d live in.

So what do we mean by “free will”?

In the end, I suspect most of us mean who will be saved and who will be damned, and whether we had any real choice in the matter, when it’s all said and done.

So the argument boils down to what do we mean by God’s grace, with regard to this specific question? Does He pick and choose, or do we have some say in it?

I think it’s a bit of both.

I suppose I’m going to drag up the business of my father appearing in my room the night he died, but during the ensuing conversation at one point he cried out “I always was doomed! I didn’t really have any choice!!” I answered back, even though I was an atheist at the time, saying “That can’t be right!”

He replied, “Oh, it’s right, all right. You can see that from here!”

But later in the exchange he admitted “I was WILLING!” (to continue doing the cruel stupid things that condemned him). I also have reason to believe that a (practising) Catholic uncle of mine warned him on several occasions of the consequences, and what he was doing to his own family, but he just took no notice.

So in the one exchange, I heard him saying he always was doomed, and didn’t really have any choice, but also admitting he freely and deliberately did the things that destroyed him in the end.

DId Judas really have any choice, to quote one instance of what seems to be clear predestination, as far as I can see.

John 17:12 NIV

The question hangs on whether God predestined Judas to be doomed, or whether He simply foresaw Judas’ action before time began, and indicated it as a such in the Scriptures.

Watching a thief steal some money is not the same thing as making him steal the money.

Did God foresee my father acting the way he did before time began, and his blunt refusal to listen to anybody else’s warnings about his behaviour?

I know this much though - if you walk away from Christ, it becomes much easier for the devil to draw you into immoral behaviour. And in the end, it leads to despair.

To sum up, I don’t know the answer. But I do know our wills are involved, as my own father admitted the night he died. We do make choices, and we answer for them.

And if you think I’m being a bit tough on my father, my mother told me that when he was a kid, he was sometimes altar boy to the Archbishop of Sydney, as he lived in North Sydney at the time. He had some church background - it wasn’t something he knew nothing about.

If God foresaw ‘before’ time began, your father acting the way he did, then ‘before’ time began, there was only one way time could work out. That’s the same as watching the end of a movie by looking at the last picture frame. You can only do that IFF there is such a last picture frame (and there is only one. The porblem is, on libretarian free will, ‘before’ time here are at least two last picture frames.

 

[thinkandmull]

God always knew what you would do because of what you did in the present. Its that simple. We have answered your and oldcelt’s position many times. Maybe it would help for you to write out what our responses have been in a post and than analyze them

 

[belorg]

God always knew what you would do because of what you did in the present. Its that simple. We have answered your and oldcelt’s position many times. Maybe it would help for you to write out what our responses have been in a post and than analyze them

No, it’s not that simple. It involves backward causation as well as forward causation of the very same thing. that’s a contradiction.

 

[thinkandmull]

The supernatural order is a different level than the natural

 

[oldcelt]

We’d be better employed in working out just what we mean by “free will”.

For a start, there are quite a few things over which we don’t have any choice. We weren’t given a choice about whether we’d be male or female, which family we’d be born into, our native culture, left or right handedness, IQ level, giftedness or lack of it, short or tall, hair colour, eye colour, skin colour, and a whole host of other things were predetermined without our consent.

Nor did we pick the time of our birth, or the political-economic age we’d live in.

So what do we mean by “free will”?

In the end, I suspect most of us mean who will be saved and who will be damned, and whether we had any real choice in the matter, when it’s all said and done.

So the argument boils down to what do we mean by God’s grace, with regard to this specific question? Does He pick and choose, or do we have some say in it?

I think it’s a bit of both.

I suppose I’m going to drag up the business of my father appearing in my room the night he died, but during the ensuing conversation at one point he cried out “I always was doomed! I didn’t really have any choice!!” I answered back, even though I was an atheist at the time, saying “That can’t be right!”

He replied, “Oh, it’s right, all right. You can see that from here!”

But later in the exchange he admitted “I was WILLING!” (to continue doing the cruel stupid things that condemned him). I also have reason to believe that a (practising) Catholic uncle of mine warned him on several occasions of the consequences, and what he was doing to his own family, but he just took no notice.

So in the one exchange, I heard him saying he always was doomed, and didn’t really have any choice, but also admitting he freely and deliberately did the things that destroyed him in the end.

DId Judas really have any choice, to quote one instance of what seems to be clear predestination, as far as I can see.

John 17:12 NIV

The question hangs on whether God predestined Judas to be doomed, or whether He simply foresaw Judas’ action before time began, and indicated it as a such in the Scriptures.

Watching a thief steal some money is not the same thing as making him steal the money.

Did God foresee my father acting the way he did before time began, and his blunt refusal to listen to anybody else’s warnings about his behaviour?

I know this much though - if you walk away from Christ, it becomes much easier for the devil to draw you into immoral behaviour. And in the end, it leads to despair.

To sum up, I don’t know the answer. But I do know our wills are involved, as my own father admitted the night he died. We do make choices, and we answer for them.

And if you think I’m being a bit tough on my father, my mother told me that when he was a kid, he was sometimes altar boy to the Archbishop of Sydney, as he lived in North Sydney at the time. He had some church background - it wasn’t something he knew nothing about.

There should be no question, when referring to a deity, about “free.” Everything you wrote, IMHO, shows the lack of involvement of a god. It can be an uncomfortable belief, until you see the logic.
I struggled with this all through my Catholic upbringing…then, it became clear…when I was about 50.

John

 

[belorg]

The supernatural order is a different level than the natural

I assume the supernatural order is logical. If it isn’t, why would we discuss it in a philosophy forum?