Free Will

Why I see Molinism as the solution to the puzzle of free will and sovereignty

What should we do with narratives like these?

• In Genesis 4:6–7, God confronts Cain with his desire to sin. God tells Cain he has a choice between being ruled by sin or ruling sin.

• In Isaiah 38, Isaiah tells Hezekiah to put his house in order because he is about to die. Hezekiah prays for healing, and God relents.

• In 2 Kings 13:14–19, Joash comes to Elisha to mourn his sickness. The prophet says to the king, “shoot arrows out of this window.” Joash shoots three arrows. Elisha then says, “take these arrows and strike the ground with them.” Joash strikes the ground three times. Elisha then tells Joash he should have shot more than three arrows, and he should have struck the ground more than three times—for each arrow and each strike represented a battle he was going to win. Since he only shot three and struck three he would only win three battles.

• In Matthew 11:21–23, Jesus implies that Sodom and Gomorrah would have repented if they had seen his ministry.

Each of these passages (and many more) plainly say human decisions make a real difference in history.

However, the Scriptures also teach us something else consistently—God is in complete control of history.

Standard Answers

We could start from the position that God’s control means humans have no free will, and argue these passages are accommodations to the human mind. In other words, God wants us to believe our decisions can make a real difference in history although they cannot.

This position has two flaws, however.

First, when we read the Scriptures, we should should just trust what the text says. Yes, there are instances of hyperbole, irony, and sarcasm. Yes, there are places where the Scriptures describe what happened rather than what should have happened. There are no places, however, where God lies, and there are no places where God causes a true prophet of God to lie.

If God tells Cain he has a choice, then he has a choice. Any other reading isn’t “accommodation,” it is placing a lie in the mouth of God.

Second, there is no reason—outside of exposing some specific truth God is trying to tell us—for these passages to exist. Go back and read every one of these passages, omitting the problematic section. Would the story of Cain’s murder make sense without God direct confrontation? Yes. Would the story of Hezekiah’s kingship make sense without Isaiah’s prophecy, and God’s change of mind? Yes.

If these stories all make sense without the text implying human choices can make a difference in the course of history, why is that text there? God must have caused these sections of text to be preserved for some reason—and the only reason that makes any sense, if we are to trust the Scriptures, is that God wants us to know something about him we would not otherwise know if they were removed.

We could start from the position that God does not have the meticulous control of history we think—that God is a “good chess player,” so he always wins, but that he really doesn’t know what the future holds. This is the position of open theology. I reject this position without comment.

Riddle Solving

If we take the Scriptures seriously, then, we must admit two things:

• There is some kind of contingency in human history

• God is in control of history

How do we reconcile these things? This question gets to the root of the problem of evil and to the root of the entire history of theology.

Before considering another answer, I need to say a word about epistemic humility.

I can propose explanations for what the Scriptures describe, but I cannot know the mind of God. I can form a warranted belief based on the evidence at hand, but I must also accept that my belief can be defeated by further evidence. It will not hurt my feelings if I get to the world after this one and I discover I am completely wrong.

We need a theology-philosophy that comports with what the Scriptures—all of the Scriptures, not just the parts I want to pay attention to—say. The Scriptures must be taken as they are written. Every passage must be accounted for, not just some of them.

I propose Molinism, or a variant of Molinism, as a solution. Molinism’s objective is to provide a plausible explanation of how God can create beings with free will (angels, humans, and even potentially animals) while maintaining omnipotence.

Again, this explanation might not be “the one and true” explanation—but without knowing the mind of God, none of us can know “the one and true” explanation. We are all working off partial and incomplete knowledge.

Instead of trying to create “the one and true” explanation, let’s build a theological-philosophical system that allows every passage in the Scriptures to speak fully—a framework in which every passage of the Scriptures can be read literally (assuming there will still be irony, sarcasm, hyperbole, etc.)

Start with this assertion:

The laws of logic are part of God’s character. We can rely on the law of noncontradiction is because it is part of God’s nature to never contradict himself.

Starting with this assertion—which can be backed up with Scripture—we can use modal logic to show:

• God cannot create free creatures without also creating the possibility of evil.

• God can know every possible future.

• God can know what decision every being (with free will) will make in every possible situation without controlling that decision.

The key point is separating the will and knowledge of God. As an example, consider the following statement:

John will cut the grass on Saturday.

The two primary theological systems would say:

• If John does not cut the grass on Saturday, God’s knowledge is false. Since God’s knowledge cannot be false, John does not have free will; what God knows, God wills. This is high Calvinism.

• God can guess that John will cut the grass on Saturday, and he will most likely be right. If John does not cut the grass on Saturday, this just shows that God cannot perfectly know the future. This is open theology.

Molinism presents a third option:

• God knows John will cut the grass on Saturday because he knows, in detail, every event in the history of the world—but God’s will is not connected to God’s knowledge. God can know what John is going to do without willing it. Because John is a free agent, able to make decisions independent of God, he is free to choose whether to cut the grass (or not).

I’m not going to spend a lot of time here proving this view can be supported using modal logic because this post is already too long. I will say, however, that the normal path would be to consider multiple possible worlds as different modal sets. Note you don’t need to believe there actually multiple possible worlds—a common criticism of Molinism. The idea of multiple possible worlds is simply a tool, or model, used to apply modal logic in an approachable way.

Assuming this proof is correct, we can say:

Some limited form of human free will does not interfere with God’s omnipotence or omniscience.

The most common error people make when arguing over free will is to make it absolute. The way libertarian free will is often described is:

A person may, at any moment in time, make any decision they like, regardless of any prior decisions or constraints.

This strawman version of free will, however, is far too simple. Free will can mean something more like:

A person may make a free decision in situations where God has made room for their free will to operate, subject to the constraints and habits of their previously made decisions.

This view does not say, “every decision is free,” nor does it say, “no decisions are ever free.” It says: “Some of our decisions are free, others are not, and we cannot know which are which.” It is right and good for God to step into history and overrule individual human decisions. It is also right and good for God to give humans space to make some decisions freely—even though God already knows the outcomes of those decisions.

To give another example, consider the case of a king headed out to war. This king is completely convinced that a particular priest or magician in his court can “read the entrails” of a sacrifice to determine the will of the gods. The king reaches some crossroad, sacrifices a bull, and brings the priest forward. Unknown to either of them, God has interfered in the sacrifice, so the king chooses the direction God wants him to go.

God has not overridden the King’s free will. God has used the king’s prior beliefs to know, without fail, how the king will act—and then modified the situation so the king acts in the way God has chosen. God is still omniscient and omnipotent, and the king’s decision is still free.

It might be that God rarely intervenes. It might be that God almost always intervenes. It might be that God chooses the color of my shirt today, and the color of my shoelaces tomorrow. It might be that God never cares about the color of my shirt or shoelaces. There is no way for me to know in this life (short of real miracles), and I might not even know in the next life. But God does not need to intervene, or make space for a free decision, in every case to maintain omniscience or omnipotence.

In fact, there is one decision I believe God never intervenes in—a person’s decision to place their faith in Christ—but this is a topic for another dispatch.