Miracles and Prayer
In the two previous chapters we explored some of the major arguments for and against the existence of God. There we saw that, in favor of God’s existence, philosophers have offered ontological, cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments. Against God’s existence, atheists have typically argued that the problem of evil either disproves God’s existence or at least makes it improbable. Most recently, skeptics have argued that the hiddenness of God is also troubling for theistic belief.
In this chapter we will explore an additional philosophical puzzle related to Christian theism: the question of divine interaction. Generally speaking, theists—at least Christian theists—affirm at least five different ways that God interacts with his world. First, Christian theism maintains that God interacts in a basic ontological way with creation by holding all things together continually. Second, Christian theism claims that God interacts spiritually with his creatures through the ongoing encounter with the Holy Spirit. Third, Christian theism holds that in the incarnation, God has interacted with his world by being bodily present. Fourth, Christian theism holds that at times God performs miracles within the natural order. And finally, Christian theism claims that God works providentially in response to prayer. Such affirmations may raise any number of interesting questions. But three particular questions seem most pressing: (1) What is a miracle? (2) Are miracles really possible? (3) How does God’s providence work? We begin with the first question about miracles.
Throughout history, reports of miracles abound, especially within religious literature and in religious contexts. In the Bible, for example, we are told of bushes that burn but are not consumed, seas that divide, ax heads that float, blind people made to see, lame people healed, and people raised from the dead, just to name a few. In each case, something supernatural and spectacular takes place that defies ordinary explanation. In the section below we will explore the question of whether this really happens.
Before jumping in to answer this question, we must first define miracles. There is actually a significant amount of debate about the definition of miracles, but by most accounts something like the following could serve as a general definition. Perhaps most famously, for example, David Hume suggests that a “miracle is a violation of the laws of nature.”1 But while this rather abrupt statement begins to get at what he understands a miracle to be, it does not reflect the more precise definition that he offers in his footnotes, where he says, “[A] miracle may be accurately defined, a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.”2 Generally speaking, definitions like these have been very popular in discussions on miracles. Most recently, Yujin Nagasawa offers the following definition: “A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature that is caused by an intentional agent; and it has religious significance.”3
What these popular definitions have in common is that (1) they understand miracles as a violation of the laws of nature, (2) they have an agent behind them, and (3) they relate to God in some way. Despite our agreement with some aspects of these definitions, we suspect that such definitions don’t fully, or accurately, reflect the way miracles are understood within the Christian faith. Therefore we offer this definition:
Miracle = A God-caused event that suspends the regular flow of the natural order to accomplish some divine purpose.
There are several significant features of this definition that call for our attention. First, this definition is clear about the cause of such events. While miracles may involve human agents, ultimately God is the one who causes the miracle to take place.
Second, we dispute the language of “violation” and instead contend that miracles should be thought of as a “suspension” of the regular flow of nature. If God’s miraculous work is a violation of the laws of nature, then this seems to strip the laws of their inherent integrity. Moreover, since God is the author of the laws of nature, the notion of violation suggests that he is now working against his own original intentions. Likewise, to use the language of “breaking” the laws of nature is problematic. If the laws are broken, does this now suggest that nature is dysfunctional and that God is at fault? Either way, we suggest that the language of “violation” or “breaking” prejudices the case against miracles and thus is unhelpful. A miracle is more rightly thought of as a suspension of the laws of nature. Winfried Corduan offers a helpful analogy to show what this involves. He uses the example of a car coming to a stoplight where the driver would expect to find a traffic light directing traffic. Instead, the driver comes to the light, sees it working, but notices a police officer waving traffic along in a different order than the traffic lights would be doing. In this case, the traffic lights are still in place and unbroken, but they are simply suspended by the police officer in the intersection. While traffic lights are what normally facilitate the flow of traffic in the intersection, there are still times when, due to factors we may not know or understand, law enforcement officers supersede the lights and direct traffic differently. This type of understanding appears to be a better way to think about the laws of nature. The laws of nature do not appear to possess absolute power for how things must work. Rather, they appear to serve as guidelines for what normally happens.4
Third, as this definition makes clear, miracles are productive toward some divine end. When God performs a miracle, he does so for some eschatological reason, where he secures or achieves something that furthers the coming of his kingdom. Take, for example, the exodus encounter with Pharaoh when God uses Moses to part the Red Sea. Why did he do that? On this account we would say that God performed a miracle to save his people, Israel. And why does he care to do that? He cares to do that because he has committed himself to protecting them and because they carry the bloodline of the Messiah. If Israel is snuffed out by the Red Sea, then the bloodline of Christ is cut off, and this would prevent the Messiah from coming, thus thwarting God’s divine plan for the world. In cases like these, God performs miracles when he sees the need to protect or advance the outflow of his kingdom. But now comes the bigger question: Are such things really possible?
Debates about the possibility of miracles almost always center on the work of David Hume, who by all accounts offers the most influential and important objections. His argument against miracles is multifaceted and has been represented in a variety of different ways. Perhaps the best way to describe his argument, however, is by understanding it as an inductive argument that contends for the improbability of miracles. He says, for example, that a “wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.”5 In other words, when it comes to things like miracles, wise people will always believe what is most probable in light of the evidence. To make his case against miracles, he considers the evidence on both sides.
To support miracles, Hume notes that believers typically rely on the testimony of those who say they have experienced a miracle. So, for example, for the miraculous claim that Jesus was raised from the dead, believers point to the testimony of those who claimed to have seen Christ after the tomb was discovered to be empty. But as you might expect, Hume is unpersuaded by such claims and raises at least four criticisms.
First, he argues that “there is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good-sense, education, and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves; of such undoubted integrity, as to place them beyond all suspicion of any design to deceive others.”6 In other words, Hume thinks there are an insufficient number of witnesses to establish miracles and that those who claim to have experienced them are of the wrong kind of character. Second, suggests Hume, testimonies that support miracles are given by those who have a bias toward religion. He says, “But if the spirit of religion join itself to the love of wonder, there is an end of common sense; and human testimony, in these circumstances, loses all pretensions to authority. A religionist may be an enthusiast, and imagine he sees what has no reality: he may know his narrative to be false, and yet persevere in it, with the best intentions in the world, for the sake of promoting so holy a cause.”7 Third, Hume argues that miracles are never attested to by intelligent, upstanding, and civilized people, but always by the poor, uneducated, and ignorant. He says, for example, “It forms a strong presumption against all supernatural and miraculous relations, that they are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations; or if a civilized people has ever given admission to any of them, that people will be found to have received them from ignorant and barbarous ancestors, who transmitted them with that inviolable sanction and authority, which always attend received opinions.”8
Fourth and finally, Hume notes that miraculous claims from one religion are often countered by miraculous claims in another religion. He says, “There is no testimony for any, even those which have not been expressly detected, that is not opposed by an infinite number of witnesses.”9
These are Hume’s objections to the testimonial evidence offered in support of miracles. We shall respond to his concerns shortly, but before we do that, we must first hear the rest of his argument. What we just described above is Hume’s rebuttal to the evidence put forward in favor of miracles. But what about the evidence against miracles? Against the possibility of miracles, Hume famously says: “A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.”10 So in other words, Hume is committed to something like the following:
Putting it all together, Hume believes that evidential support for miracles is rather weak and that, by contrast, the evidential argument against miracles (per 1–3 above) is strong. So then, the wise person who “proportions . . . belief to the evidence” should not believe in miracles.
But how strong is this argument? Is it sufficiently strong to defeat the possibility of miracles? While some people may find Hume convincing, we suggest that his argument has some problems. Let’s begin by responding to his criticisms of the testimonial evidence in favor of miracles. To be fair, Hume raises several interesting and important insights about the nature of these testimonies. And yet there is a very serious and troubling brand of snobbery, overstatement, and bias present within Hume’s criticisms. For example, consider his first criticism, that miracles are not sufficiently attested to. The problem here is that Hume never actually tells us how many witnesses would be needed and what their level of education must be. As Nagasawa notes, “It is not clear, for example, how many witnesses are required or what sort of educational backgrounds they must have. Hume, however, gives the impression that a miracle report cannot be considered authentic without a very large number of witnesses who are perhaps comparable to Hume himself in terms of education, reputation, and social status.”11 But as Nagasawa points out, this “sets the standard too high”12 and prevents us from affirming a wide variety of things that are reasonable to affirm.
Or consider his second criticism of testimonial evidence, that those who report miracles typically have a desire to believe them for religious reasons. As Nagasawa states, this may be an insightful sociological observation, but it doesn’t follow from this that such testimonies are therefore false.13 Our desire to believe something doesn’t indicate anything about the truth of the belief. Furthermore, as in the case of the apostle Paul and James, the half brother of Jesus, some people hold their religious motivations to be a result of the miraculous events they have experienced.
Hume’s third criticism—that such reports come from ignorant, uneducated, and poor people and therefore are suspect—is deeply problematic. In short, Hume’s criticism here amounts to bias and snobbery, not philosophical reasoning. It is a good example of what philosophers refer to as the genetic fallacy: rejecting an idea or argument because of where or who it comes from. Are we really to believe that only people with a certain level of education are worth listening to? Just because someone doesn’t hold an academic degree doesn’t mean they are stupid or unreliable.
And finally, Hume’s fourth criticism, that competing religions offer competing accounts of miracles, fails to undercut the testimonial value of miracles. It may be true that competing religions affirm different sets of miracles, yet this is completely irrelevant to the possibility of them happening or to the possibility that we can experience them. As Nagasawa reports, “Even though Christian witnesses of miracles and Muslim witnesses of miracles make conflicting claims with respect to which religion is true[,] they are in agreement with respect to the possible occurrence of miracles. [Criticism] 4, therefore, fails to undermine belief in miracles.”14
Hume’s criticisms regarding the testimonial support in favor of miracles raises some interesting points for consideration but ultimately fail to undermine testimony as an evidential basis for belief in miracles. But we still aren’t off the hook yet. What about his case against the very possibility of miracles based on the laws of nature? Again, we could summarize his account this way:
This is perhaps a more significant objection to miracles. In the above section we have already rejected premise 1 in the way we defined miracles as “a God-caused event that suspends the regular flow of the natural order to accomplish some divine purpose.” Nevertheless, we suspect that this will not be enough of a response to the argument, since Hume, or someone like him, could simply reformulate the argument this way:
1ʹ. Miracles, if they happened, would be a suspension of the laws of nature.
2ʹ. But uniform experience suggests that the laws of nature cannot be suspended in this way.
3. Therefore, given the laws of nature, miracles cannot happen.
To respond to this kind of argument, we must address premises 2 and 2ʹ, and the key issue here is the regularity of the laws of nature. What premises 2 and 2ʹ seem to imply is that the laws of nature are so constant and regular that the universe is guaranteed to obey them and that nothing outside of their purview can interrupt or act in nature contrary to these laws. Put another way, Hume and contemporary naturalists who follow in his footsteps seem to be suggesting that the laws of nature display a regularity that renders the universe to be a closed system. If the universe is a “closed system,” nothing outside the universe can step in and act on it. Causes from outside this system of physical laws, like the supernatural being God, are out of bounds, off-limits, or utterly impossible. Therefore, what happens inside the universe is a result of the physical objects, forces, and laws within nature itself. In addition to Hume’s emphasis on the regularity of the laws of nature, the idea of a closed system was further strengthened by the mechanistic picture of the universe often associated with Isaac Newton. As Alvin Plantinga explains, the universe on this account is understood as
a collection including material particles and the things made of them, evolving according to the laws of classical mechanics. Theologically, the idea is that the world is a great divine mechanical artifact that runs according to the fixed laws of classical science, the laws prescribed for it by God. The world is mechanical in that the laws of physics are sufficient to describe its behavior; no additional laws—of chemistry or biology, for example—are needed, and if there are such laws, they are reducible . . . to the laws of physics.15
From the Humean emphasis on the regularity of the laws of nature and the Newtonian picture of a mechanistic universe, the idea that the universe is a closed system came to be the orthodox opinion of the naturalists. As John Heil suggests, this is precisely what naturalists believe the scientific picture of the universe is committed to. He says, “Modern science is premised on the assumption that the material world is a causally closed system. This means, roughly, that every event in the material world is caused by some other material event (if it is caused by any event) and has as effects only material events.”16 Or as Jaegwon Kim puts it, “One way of stating the principle of physical causal closure is this: If you pick any physical event and trace out its causal ancestry or posterity, that will never take you outside the physical domain. That is, no causal chain will ever cross the boundary between the physical and the nonphysical.”17
But is this view correct? There can be no doubt that the laws of nature act and operate with an astounding regularity and dependability. To deny this would be incredibly foolish. The real question is whether the regularity of the laws of nature actually establishes the mechanistic view of the universe that eliminates the possibility of activity from outside the system. We contend that such regularity is not enough to demonstrate that the universe is closed. First, as Plantinga notes, while it is true that Newton painted a rather mechanistic picture of the universe, we must remember that Newton himself did not take this to mean that it was a closed system. Plantinga says, “But the Newtonian picture is nowhere nearly sufficient for hands-off theology. First, Newton himself (one hopes) accepted the Newtonian picture, but he didn’t accept hands-off theology. He believed that God providentially guides the world. He also believed that God regularly adjusts the orbits of the planets; according to his calculations, their orbits would otherwise spiral off into chaos.”18
But this is not all. Plantinga continues, “More important, however: according to Newton and classical mechanics, natural laws describe how the world works when, or provided that the world is a closed (isolated) system, subject to no outside causal influence.”19 So as Plantinga states and as the case of Newton himself seems to indicate, even if the mechanical view of the universe is correct, there is nothing contradictory in holding that mechanical view of the universe and at the same time holding that God is still able to interact with it. But more important for those who understand the regularity of the laws of nature, demonstrating causal closure seems to make a logical leap. What normally happens does not indicate what must happen, as they seem to think. As Plantinga indicates, the uniformity of the laws of nature shows us what normally happens when the universe is left to run on its own. But the uniformity of the laws of nature “don’t purport to tell us how things always go; they tell us, instead, how things go when no agency outside the universe acts in it.”20 As such, on the basis of the regularity and uniformity of the laws of nature, we have no reason to argue that the universe is a closed system.
But before we move on from this issue, there is one further reason to challenge the Humean argument against miracles from the uniformity of nature. In short, more recent developments and discoveries in physics suggest that the Newtonian picture of a mechanistic universe might not tell us everything we need to know about the world. While Newton’s laws hold true for most objects in the universe (atoms, rocks, planets, stars, solar systems, etc.), his laws don’t seem to apply to objects on the quantum level. The discovery of quantum particles has changed our understanding of physics significantly. As best we can tell, particles at this level do not operate in a deterministic fashion. Rather, their movements and operations function only with varying levels of probability. What this means is that we now have even fewer reasons to think that the laws of nature are causally closed to agents from outside the system. As such, the case against miracles from the regularity of the laws of nature, causal closure, and naturalism seems rather weak. We conclude, therefore, that premises 2 and 2ʹ are both false.
What Is Providence and How Does It Work?
Another major question we must explore is the issue of divine providence: God’s governing mode of interaction with the world. Christians believe, for example, that God can interact with the world in miraculous ways, as argued above, but they also believe that God interacts with people in the way he governs the world toward his ends in response to prayer. This way of interacting with the world is often referred to as God’s providence. The challenge to understanding how this mode of interaction works lies not in the nature of physical laws, as in the case of miracles. Rather, the key to understanding this mode of divine interaction resides in the kinds of historical, moral, and theological concerns that must be kept in balance. So, for example, in God’s providential interaction, factors relating to human freedom and divine purpose must be kept in balance or held in tension. How this is done is understood in different ways by theologians throughout history.
Generally speaking, theologians have offered both theistic (a view that affirms a creator of the world who is personal in nature and remains actively involved in the world) and nontheistic (views that affirm some kind of God or gods that differ in nature from theistic portrayals) accounts of how to think of God’s providence. Some examples of nontheistic views include deism or pantheism. According to deism, God created the universe but is impersonal and therefore inactive in the world. According to pantheism, God and the universe are the same thing, and since the universe is ever in the process of evolving and developing, God is constantly becoming something new. These perspectives have had numerous advocates over the centuries and are worthy of serious attention. But given their distinct views about the nature of God, they are not compatible with Christian theism, and we will not elaborate on them here.
By contrast, the God of Christianity is clearly a theistic God. That is, God is a personal being who created the world ex nihilo (out of nothing) and remains actively involved in the world he created. Within that framework some of the most common accounts of divine providence include open theism, Calvinism, and Molinism.21 We shall explore each of these views very briefly.
Open Theism
Open theism is a theistic view: God is thought of as a personal creator and involved in his world. Open theism holds a distinct understanding about the kinds of knowledge God has. Generally speaking, open theists affirm that God is omniscient (knows everything) but suggest that this applies to events, objects, and states of affairs about only the history and present state of the world. God’s knowledge does not include knowledge of events, objects, or states of affairs about the future, since the future does not exist to be known, because knowing such future states would eliminate human freedom. God is therefore “open” regarding the future. Terrance Tiessen offers a helpful summary of the view:
The openness model gets its name from the proposition that God is open to his creatures, to whom he has given libertarian freedom, and that the future is open because it will be brought about to a large degree by the decisions those creatures make. God is omnipotent, but he has freely limited his own ability to control every event within creation by giving libertarian freedom to moral creatures, human and spiritual. God is personal in his relationships with these creatures, and so he is affected by them as well as having an effect upon them. There were risks in creating this kind of world, but God decided that it was better to have a world in which free creatures love and obey him than to have one in which he could guarantee that his own will would always be done. God is faithful to himself and unchanging in his moral nature, but he is not absolutely immutable, as though he had formed a comprehensive plan for his creation, in eternity, and was now working out all the details of that plan, in the time and space that he created.22
So then, according to open theism, God providentially balances his purposes with human freedom by giving human beings a significant degree of autonomy. But, as critics of this view have noted, this view of God’s knowledge seems hard to reconcile with the teachings of Scripture and the teachings of Christianity. Biblically, God is described as a God who knows the past, present, and future of free creatures like us. As a result, many Christians are hesitant to embrace this view.
Calvinism
As we saw, open theism tries to balance the divine purposes that God may have with human freedom by limiting the extent of God’s knowledge to include only the past and present. Going in the opposite direction, Calvinism embraces God’s sovereign right and power to determine what takes place in the universe and limits the scope and nature of human freedom. Tiessen is again helpful: “[The] Calvinist model believes that God’s comprehensive determination can only be coordinated with a creaturely freedom that is volitional or voluntary. Creatures do what they want to do but what they do is always within God’s overall determination.”23 Thomas Morris describes this approach by showing how some theists “endorse the idea that God has eternally predestined, or predetermined, the course of history in every detail. [For these theists] God is to be thought of as the omnipotent creator of all things. It is typically taken to be a corollary of this that God is sovereign over all things.”24 John Feinberg calls this approach hard determinism. He says, “Hard determinism removes the idea of inevitability more than does fatalism. A hard determinist believes that all that happens is causally determined. As a result, there is no human free will of any sort. That is, some hard determinists agree with libertarians that the only notion of genuine freedom is libertarian free will, but they add that since everything is causally determined, no one has such freedom.”25
Taken to its logical conclusion, God would be understood as the author of sin and evil. While some may not see this as a problem, it is difficult to see how this can be reconciled with the notion of God’s goodness. Thus some who recognize the difficulties with hard determinism attempt to soften it with the notion of compatibilistic freedom. The basic idea here, as discussed in chapter 10, is that each person does as each truly desires to do, even if the choice is determined or caused. That the causation or determinism is in keeping with the desires of the agent renders them as compatible with each other, even if the choice is fully caused. Bruce Ware advocates this view when he states that
our freedom consists in our choosing and doing according to what we are inclined most, or what we desire most, to do. . . . Compatibilist freedom . . . insists that regardless of what struggles we go through in making our choices or deciding what action to perform, in the end, when we choose and act, we do so from prevailing desires which explain exactly why this choice and not another is made. This obviously means, however, that when we choose, all things being just what they are, we must choose as we do!26
Feinberg takes a similar view but refers to it as soft determinism: “Soft determinism says that genuine free human action is compatible with causal conditions that decisively incline the will without constraining it. The causal conditions are sufficient to move the agent to choose one option over another, but the choice and resultant action are free as long as the person acts without constraint. Acting under constraint means that one is forced to act contrary to one’s wishes or desires.”27
What the Calvinist model succeeds in doing is providing an account that retains the classical Christian ideas that God is the sovereign king over all creation. As sovereign, God determines (in either hard or soft versions) the course of nature and the future of the world. Critics, however, have suggested that this view is problematic since it eliminates human freedom and, as a result, suggests a deeply problematic view of God, meaning that God is either the author of evil or at least morally culpable for evil.
Molinism
While open theism accounts for God’s providential work by limiting the knowledge that God has and Calvinism accounts for it by limiting (or maybe redefining) human freedom, Molinism takes the unique approach of expanding God’s knowledge to include the doctrine of middle knowledge. This doctrine is a bit more complex than the open theist or Calvinist accounts and will require a little more attention. The doctrine of middle knowledge was first developed in the sixteenth century during the Counter-Reformation by a Spanish Jesuit priest named Luis de Molina (1535–1600).28 This doctrine was largely forgotten until the early 1970s, when Plantinga seems to have rediscovered it and made considerable use of it in his work titled The Nature of Necessity.29 Since then the doctrine has enjoyed the support of such scholars as Thomas Flint30 and William Lane Craig,31 to name just two.
As Craig explains, the doctrine of middle knowledge deals with God’s knowledge of what are often referred to as counterfactuals of freedom. He says counterfactuals “are conditional statements in the subjunctive mood: for example, ‘If I were rich, I would buy a Mercedes’; ‘If Barry Goldwater had been elected president, he would have won the Vietnam War’; and ‘If you were to ask her, she would say yes.’ Counterfactuals are so called because the antecedent or consequent clauses are typically contrary to fact.”32 That is, they are contrary to the actual world that we live in. Up until the time of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), theologians commonly affirmed that God had counterfactual knowledge. What they debated was at what point or when God had this knowledge logically.33
Before moving forward, it will be helpful to determine what is meant by asking “when” God knows something. The question of “when” God knows something does not refer to a temporal moment in time. Rather, it refers to the logical moment or point when God has a certain aspect of knowledge. In Craig’s view, “To say that something is logically prior to something else is not to say that the one occurs before the other in time. Temporally, they could be simultaneous. Rather, logical priority means that something serves to explain something else. The one provides the grounds or basis for the other.”34 Craig explains that according to the Dominican view, against which Molina is arguing, “God’s counterfactual knowledge is logically subsequent to his decree to create a certain world. They maintained that in decreeing that a particular world exist, God also decreed which counterfactual statements are true. Logically prior to the divine decree, there are no counterfactual truths to be known. All God knows at that logical moment are the necessary truths, including all the various possibilities.”35
In other words, on the Dominican view, God gave the decree for the world and the details therein, and after this possessed counterfactual knowledge. This understanding of counterfactuals leads to determinism and the elimination of human freedom.
In opposition to this, Molina’s Jesuit view suggests that God has counterfactual knowledge logically prior to the decree for the world, which locates this knowledge logically between his natural and free knowledge.36 Craig says, “The Molinists charged that the Dominicans had in effect obliterated human freedom by making counterfactual truths a consequence of God’s decree, for on the Dominican account it is God who determines what each person will do in whatever circumstances he finds himself. By contrast, the Molinists, by placing God’s counterfactual knowledge prior to the divine decree, made room for creaturely freedom by exempting counterfactual truths from God’s decree.”37 Thus, as Morris puts it,
The Molinist view is based on a distinctive conception of the makeup of God’s knowledge. The range of divine knowledge is thought of as divided into three types: natural knowledge—knowledge God has prior to (conceptually prior to) any act of creation, concerning what all the possibilities of creation are; free knowledge—knowledge of everything that will actually happen in the world given God’s free choice of which possibilities of creation to actualize; and middle knowledge—comprehensive knowledge of what contingently, as a matter of fact, would result from any creative decision he might make.38
With this, we could sketch the Molinist model this way:
Natural Knowledge = God has knowledge of all necessary truths, including all the possible worlds he might create. This gives him knowledge of what could be. This knowledge serves as the parameters in which any possible world might develop.
Middle Knowledge = God has knowledge of how each contingent being in any possible world would freely react to the given circumstances if those circumstances were actual. That is, God knows all the counterfactuals of each world before he actualizes one world.
——————————
Divine Decree to Actualize a World
——————————
Free Knowledge = Logically subsequent to his decree to create a particular world, God knows all the contingent truths about the actual world, including its past, present, and future. This includes all of God’s knowledge of what will be in the actual world.
As you will notice, the Divine Decree is placed between God’s Middle Knowledge and his Free Knowledge. But why? In short, this is one of the distinct philosophical moves that Molina makes to provide a way of balancing God’s foreknowledge of our future choices with our libertarian freedom. If the Divine Decree came prior to God’s Middle Knowledge (specifically, his counterfactual knowledge entailed within Middle Knowledge), then this would entail a rather hard version of determinism, as this would require God to determine what will be without our choices having a chance to play out beforehand. By placing the Divine Decree where he does, Molina thinks that God’s choice of what will be in the world comes logically after his knowledge of what could be given our free choices.
So what does the Molinist account of providence do for the questions of divine purposes and human freedom? According to many philosophers and theologians, the doctrine of middle knowledge offers an attractive proposal for reconciling the foreknowledge of God with human freedom. In Garrett DeWeese’s view, “Molina’s theory of Middle Knowledge represents a remarkable advance in the understanding of the problem of God’s foreknowledge and human freedom.”39 Craig also sees this as a valuable doctrine and says, “Once one grasps the concept of middle knowledge, one will find it astonishing in its subtlety and power. Indeed, I would venture to say that it is the single most fruitful theological concept I have ever encountered.”40 Critics, however, have suggested that Molinism is implausible, since the future does not yet exist and thus there is no reality to ground God’s middle knowledge. Like most philosophical questions, debates about its merit continue.
Conclusion
As we have seen, questions about the way God interacts with his world are complex and much debated. Some, like Hume and the naturalists who follow him, suggest that the evidential support for miracles is weak and that the regularities of the laws of nature suggest that miracles could never happen. We’ve explored those claims in this chapter and have found them wanting. We have also explored the question of God’s providence. How is it that God balanced the concerns of his own divine purposes in creation with the seeming reality of human freedom? To answer this question, theologians have offered a variety of different accounts, but three of the most popular contemporary accounts are open theism, Calvinism, and Molinism. In the end, Christian philosophy seems to be fully capable of dealing with the complex issues relating to divine interaction.
1. David Hume, An Inquiry concerning Human Understanding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 83; specifically, see his essay “Of Miracles,” 79–95, for his detailed treatment of the possibility of miracles.
2. Hume, Inquiry concerning Human Understanding, 127; this elaboration on the nature of miracles comes via footnote 11 in part 1, paragraph 12, of the essay “Of Miracles,” in Inquiry concerning Human Understanding.
3. Yujin Nagasawa, Miracles: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 18.
4. Winfried Corduan, No Doubt about It (Nashville: B&H, 1997), 151–52.
5. Hume, Inquiry concerning Human Understanding, 80.
6. Hume, Inquiry concerning Human Understanding, 84.
7. Hume, Inquiry concerning Human Understanding, 85.
8. Hume, Inquiry concerning Human Understanding, 86.
9. Hume, Inquiry concerning Human Understanding, 87.
10. Hume, Inquiry concerning Human Understanding, 83.
11. Nagasawa, Miracles, 73.
12. Nagasawa, Miracles, 74.
13. Nagasawa, Miracles, 74.
14. Nagasawa, Miracles, 77.
15. Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 77.
16. John Heil, Philosophy of Mind: A Contemporary Introduction, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2012), 23.
17. Jaegwon Kim, Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 40.
18. Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 77.
19. Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 78 (emphasis in original).
20. Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 79.
21. One might also offer a Thomist account of providence, but space issues forbid such in this chapter.
22. Terrance Tiessen, Providence and Prayer: How Does God Work in the World? (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2000), 71.
23. Tiessen, Providence and Prayer, 232.
24. Thomas V. Morris, Our Idea of God (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 1991), 89.
25. John S. Feinberg, No One Like Him (Wheaton: Crossway, 2001), 635.
26. Bruce A. Ware, God’s Greater Glory (Wheaton: Crossway, 2004), 25–26.
27. Feinberg, No One Like Him, 637.
28. Luis de Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge: Part IV of the “Concordia,” trans. Alfred J. Freddoso (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).
29. Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974).
30. Thomas P. Flint, Divine Providence: The Molinist Account (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
31. William Lane Craig, “The Middle Knowledge View,” in Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views, ed. James K. Beilby and Paul R. Eddy (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2001), 119–43; and Craig, The Only Wise God: The Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1999).
32. Craig, “Middle Knowledge View,” 120.
33. Craig, “Middle Knowledge View,” 120.
34. Craig, Only Wise God, 127.
35. Craig, “Middle Knowledge View,” 121.
36. God’s natural knowledge is typically understood to refer to God’s knowledge of all necessary truth. His free knowledge is understood to be the knowledge that God possesses about the actual world after the decree has been given.
37. Craig, “Middle Knowledge View,” 122.
38. Morris, Our Idea of God, 95.
39. Garrett DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 204.
40. Craig, “Middle Knowledge View,” 125. He adds, “In my own work, I have applied it to the issues of Christian particularism, perseverance of the saints and biblical inspiration.” For Craig’s treatment of particularism, see William Lane Craig, “‘No Other Name’: A Middle Knowledge Perspective on the Exclusivity of Salvation through Christ,” Faith and Philosophy 6 (1989): 172–88; for his treatment of perseverance of the saints, see Craig, “‘Lest Anyone Should Fall’: A Middle Knowledge Perspective on Perseverance and Apostolic Warnings,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 29 (1991): 65–74; for his work on biblical inspiration, see Craig, “‘Men Moved by the Holy Spirit Spoke from God’ (2 Peter 1.21): A Middle Knowledge Perspective on Divine Inspiration,” Philosophia Christi 1 (1999): 45–82.