Abstract

In 1588, Spanish Jesuit Luis de Molina published the Concordia and thereby espoused for the first time a complete formulation of the doctrine of divine middle knowledge . This doctrine was to reconcile a robust sense of human freedom with the entrenched Church doctrines of grace, providence and predestination. However, it was a publication that immediately sparked vigorous theological and philosophical debate. The debate has been revived by Alvin Plantinga's views on freedom and omniscience. The doctrine's primary contemporary opponents are Robert M. Adams and William Hasker . Both argue that the propositional objects of the theory lack truth-value. Thus the theory is lacks any content. These three scholars rely upon the logical constraints of libertarian freedom and/or popular Lewis-Stalnaker semantics for counterfactuals to allegedly show that the doctrine of middle knowledge cannot be true. ;However, it will be argued that arguments driven by presuppose a wooden understanding of the correspondence theory of truth. Thus this objection can be denied. Furthermore, it will be argued that relative to the friend of middle knowledge is under no obligation to retain an unrestricted account of the Lewis-Stalnaker semantic for counterfactuals as it applies to conditionals of freedom, i.e., the propositional objects of middle knowledge. Alternatively, a competing truth-functional semantic, property conceived, will be offered to understand how conditionals of freedom can be true. Therefore, we need look for no other metaphysical grounds for the truth of any conditional of freedom than our categorical freedom, the well-accepted truth that every proposition is bivalent and a divine omniscience not based upon inferences from other truths to middle knowledge. Thus an omniscient deity with non-inferential knowledge of all and only true propositions could utilize these truths to be robustly provident without sacrificing the categorical freedom of Her creatures