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Could Molinism Become a Catholic Dogma?
Molinism, that is the doctrine of middle knowledge (Lat. scientia media) has been a widely debated topic in Catholic and even Protestant theology for the past four and a half centuries. Despite Molina’s ideas being widely debated in the 16th and early 17th centuries, the Church under Pope Paul V chose not to pick a…
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God’s Knowledge of Future Contingents: A Molinist Account
Recently, Alsdair MacIntyre, one of the most prominent Catholic philosophers of the past century, delivered his annual lecture at the Notre Dame fall conference. The lecture is available here. During the lecture, MacIntyre claimed that certain spontaneous acts (“singularities”) of free creatures could not be foreknown even by God. MacIntyre claimed that this was not…
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The real contingency of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom: a response to Ron Digiacomo
Ron Digiacomo published an article over at philosophical-theology.com critiquing Molinism for failing to preserve the real contingency of the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. Digiacomo argues that because Molinism holds that God cannot actualize certain worlds based on the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom, that these words are not as contingent as Molinists want to think. Molinism…
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Luis Molina’s Theory of Middle Knowledge as a Catholic Response to the Reformation
This paper was presented at the undergraduate Medieval and Early Modernists of North Texas and Oklahoma 2019 Conference in February of 2019 at the University of Dallas The Protestant Reformation was undoubtedly the most important theological event of the 16th century and perhaps the most important historical event of that time outright. Since the Reformation,…