Farid al-Din Sebt

In this paper, I argue that Molinism’s two basic principles—God’s single act of will and divine providence—are incompatible. To this end, I first distinguish between general and special providence. According to the former, God guides the universe and all creatures as a whole, whereas the latter affirms that God cares for every individual creature and has specific plans for each one. In the next step, I argue that Molinism ascribes special providence to God. Then, I try to indicate that, according to the Molinist account, God exercises His special providence through the single act of will. In the following, I demonstrate that assuming counterfactuals of freedom in divine knowledge does entail God experiencing ‘temporal succession’. As a result, contrary to the widely accepted claim, the Molinist God is temporal. Finally, I argue that assuming a single act of will for a temporal God leads us to reject divine special providence because the assumption of such a will for a temporal God implies that He cares for His creatures only at a certain time, whereas a provident God must always care for them. Therefore, the Molinist God is not a provident being. I conclude that Molinism is incoherent.

We argue that there is an incompatibility between the two basic principles of Molinism, i.e., God’s middle knowledge of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom, and divine immutability. To this end, firstly, we set out the difference between strong and weak immutability: according to the latter only God’s essential attributes remain unchanged, while the former affirms that God cannot change in any way. Our next step is to argue that Molinism ascribes strong immutability to God. However, according to Molinism, some counterfactuals of freedom need to be actualized by divine will. We argue that this claim does entail a change in God because it attributes a knowledge to God that involves moving from possibility to actuality through divine will. Therefore, claiming God knows counterfactuals of freedom leads us to reject the strong sense of divine immutability. Further, we argue that assuming God’s knowledge encompasses counterfactuals of freedom cannot be consistent even with weak immutability because, according to Molinism, a change in God’s knowledge requires a change in His essence. We conclude that Molinism is incoherent.