The rise of modern philosophy a new history of western philosophy volume 3 (new history of western philosophy) ( PDFDrive ) (1) 319

GOD with Ockham in rejecting the accounts of Aquinas and Scotus, and he accepted the Church teaching that future contingent propositions had truth-values His innovation was to suggest that God’s knowledge of the future depended on God’s knowledge of the truth-values of counterfactual propositions God knows what any possible creature would freely in any possible circumstances By knowing this and by knowing which creatures he will create and which circumstances he will himself bring about, he knows what actual creatures will in fact Molina made a distinction between three kinds of divine knowledge First, there is God’s natural knowledge, by which he knows his own nature and all the things that are possible to him either by his own action or by the action of free possible creatures This knowledge is prior to any divine decision about creation Then there is God’s free knowledge: his knowledge of what will actually happen after the free divine decision to create certain free creatures and place them in certain particular circumstances Between these two kinds of knowledge there is God’s ‘middle knowledge’: that is, his knowledge of what any possible creature will in any possible circumstances Because middle knowledge is based on creatures’ own hypothetical decisions, human autonomy is upheld; because middle knowledge is, prior to the decision to create, God’s omniscience about the actual world is preserved What Molina called ‘circumstances’, or ‘orders of events’, later philosophers have called ‘possible worlds’ So Molina’s theory is essentially that God’s knowledge of what will happen in the actual world is based on his knowledge of all possible worlds plus his knowledge of which possible world he has decided to actualize Before creating Adam and Eve God know that Eve would yield to the serpent and Adam would yield to Eve He knew this because he knew all kinds of counterfactuals about Adam and Eve: he knew what they would in every possible world He knew, for instance, whether Adam, if tempted by the serpent directly rather than via Eve, would still have eaten the forbidden fruit The weak point in Molina’s solution is his assumption that all counterfactual propositions—propositions of the form ‘If A were to happen, B would happen’—have truth-values Undoubtedly, some such propositions, e.g ‘if the earth were to crash into the sun, human life would cease to exist,’ are true; other such propositions, e.g ‘if the Great Pyramid were hexagonal, it would have seventeen sides,’ are false; but when we ascribe truth-values to such propositions we so on the basis of logical or natural laws Matters are diVerent when we construct counterfactuals 304