The Problem Of God's Omniscience Of Free Will

Traditionally, God has been conceived as possessing the property of omniscience, or perfect and infinite knowledge. His omniscience covers all events – past, present, and future. However, this presents a potential problem for the argument that humans have free will. If God has knowledge of all future actions performed by agents, then in what sense do agents have genuine choice? If God already knows the outcome of every agent's choice, then it seems that no agents are truly free to make choices other than those that they actually do. Alternatively, if agents are genuinely free then it seems that God cannot have prior knowledge of how they will act. This could threaten the status of God's omniscience. The knowledge of what free agents would do
in any possible set of circumstances has been called “middle knowledge.” In this paper, I will first explicate the concept of middle knowledge. I will then examine Robert Adams' general argument against the coherence of attributing middle knowledge to God, and in particular his engagement with Alvin Plantinga's account of such knowledge. Finally, I will argue that Adams is correct that propositions about the potential future actions of free agents cannot be proper objects of knowledge because there is no clear sense in which they can be “true.” According to the Jesuits of the 1580's, early proponents of the notion of middle knowledge, humans are genuinely free but God is able to “maintain control over human history” by actualizing specific circumstances in which the actions of all human agents will be consistent with his divine plan for humanity. When one attributes middle knowledge to God, one asserts that he has the ability to know not only what every free agent will do in the future, but also what every free agent would do in any possible situation. As Adams explains, this knowledge is said to be “middle” because it exists “between God's knowledge of the merely possible and His knowledge of the actual” (109). Adams considers an example from the Bible which the Jesuits used to support the claim that God has middle knowledge. In the story in question, David learns from God that if he stays in the city of Keilah then Saul will besiege the city, and the men of Keilah will surrender him to Saul. Consequently, he leaves the city and avoids capture. The Jesuits claimed, in this case, that the actions of the actors involved were genuinely free and that God knew that:
(1) If David stayed in Keilah, Saul would besiege the city; and
(2) If David stayed in Keilah and Saul besieged the city, the men of Keilah would surrender David to Saul (110). Adams denies that these two propositions are true, but their lack of truth is not to be explained by asserting that their contraries are true. Instead, he thinks that these propositions cannot be said to be true because it is not obvious how their “truth” is to be interpreted. He emphasizes that there is an important distinction between middle knowledge and foreknowledge. By this, he means that middle knowledge does not simply pertain to what will actually happen in the future, as foreknowledge does. Instead, it also encompasses what could possibly happen in the future. This Biblical case does not concern foreknowledge and is not an example of God having “categorical predictions,” or predictions which would be true in virtue of attaching to actual events. This is because, in fact, David fled Keilah and there was no besieging by Saul nor surrendering by the men of Keilah (110). So, what else could be meant when one asserts that these propositions are “true”?
It cannot be that Saul besieging the city or the men of Keilah surrendering David would be logically or causally necessitated by David staying in the city, because then these acts could no longer count as free. Adams next considers the idea that God knew the truth of the two propositions because he knew the characters and intentions of the implicated actors. However, an attempt to ground the truth of the propositions in intentions ultimately fails because the actions would still be free. An agent is not necessitated to act on the basis of their intentions. Intentions are alterable and can be fleeting, agents can perform actions counter to their intentions, and not all intentions are acted upon. Grounding the truth of the propositions in intentions would only support claims about what the involved agents would likely do. Of course, this is not sufficient to qualify as middle knowledge, as God's knowledge is supposed to be definite. Since it is unclear what it would mean for God to know the “truth” of propositions (1) and (2), Adams reaches a sceptical conclusion about the possibility of God possessing middle knowledge
(111). According to Adams, Plantinga would argue that proposition (1) is true if “the actual world is more similar to some possible world in which David stays in Keilah and Saul besieges the city than to any possible world in which David stays in Keilah and Saul does not besiege the city” (112).
Adams concedes that, due to Saul's character, it is possible that a world in which David remains in Keilah and Saul besieges the city is more similar to the actual world than one in which than one in which David stays and Saul fails to besiege the city. However, this does not justify the assertion that the former world is more similar to the actual world than the latter, because, as Adams points out, there is no reason why individuals in counterfactual circumstances cannot act out of character. Therefore, the similarity of an agent's character across possible worlds does not guarantee that the agent's actions will be aligned with their character in each of the worlds
(113).