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0Хассан Али
Аспирант. Российский Государственный Социальный Университет, Москва.
Молинизм и Раннее Христианство*
Аннотация. Социокультурные механизмы, ответственные за становление христианства, начинались с простейшей концепции мышления. В процессе мышления многие соображения были адаптированы к социальному и культурному пробуждению и изменениям общества, что привело к конформизму религиозного мышления, особенно в соответствии с изначальными христианскими убеждениями. Данные методы состоят в отношении общества к монотеизму, а также в таких понятиях, как бесстрастие, неизменность, божественное предвидение, провидение и человеческая свобода. Эти методы включают в себя то, как общество относится к монотеизму и как понятия, такие как бесстрастие, неизменность, божественное предвидение, провидение и свобода человека, влияли на актуальность Создателя в интересах человечества, потому что эти идеи, в свою очередь, использовались для разрешения различных дилемм вопроса о том, как социокультурные концепции должны формировать конформность, специальные сотрудничества и даже угнетение, чтобы запутать обычного человека. Тем не менее, молинизм послужил одной из таких моделей, которая предоставила новый образ мышления для обсуждения проблематичных альтернатив, которые возникали из-за идей, которые уже поддерживали широко распространенные христианские темы, такие как, например, божественное предвидение и человеческая свобода.
Ключевые слова: знание, молинизм, христианство, необходимое, случайное, естественное, бог.
Hassan Ali
Graduate student. Russian State Social University.
Molinism and Early Christianity
Abstract. The sociocultural mechanisms that are responsible for the formation of Christianity began with the simplest concept of thought. Through the process of thought, many considerations were adapted to the social and cultural awakening and adaptations of society that would drive the conformity of religious thinking, particularly along the lines of Christian persuasions from its beginning. These methods consist of the way that society regards monotheism and how concepts such as impassibility, immutability, divine foreknowledge, providence and human freedom" all effected the relevance of a creator for humanity's sake, because these ideas would in turn be used to address various dilemmas of how cultural and social concepts ought to deliberate constructions for conformity, special collaborations and even oppression to further confound the average person. Nevertheless, Molinism served as one such model that provided a new mindset to negotiate the problematic alternatives that were incurred by ideas that already supported widely accepted Christian themes such as divine foreknowledge and human freedom, for instance.
Key words: knowledge, molinism, Christianity, necessary, contingent, natural, god.
* © Хассан Али, 2024. Молинизм и Раннее Христианство
The goal of establishing circumstantial aspects to buttress the phenomenology of religion, begins with a modicum of rudimentary methodological approaches, particularly with respect to theism and the standpoint of believers. These collective or social formations to theism, invariably enhance the proclivity of directing over-complications and/or oversimplifications, which frequently thwart the possibility of ever reaching a satisfactory consensus about religion, especially Christianity and its foundations. Not to mention the impractical applications of thought that remain elusive and allusive within the everyday world. In his book Imagining Religion, J.Z. Smith stated that: "Religion is solely the creation of the scholar's study. It is created for the scholar's analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no existence apart from the academy" [7, p. 18]. It seems then, that the profundities which incorporate ideas of semantics as it applies to academia is justifiable in its rhetoric regarding theological predications concerning God. Unavoidably therefore, ipso facto we revisit the aforementioned discussion of methodological approaches to early Christian thought, to demonstrate their relevance and (in)viability regarding Molinism and how it applies to the social and religious aspects of divine foreknowledge, providence and human freedom toward God.
Molinism or middle knowledge is a position about what God knows and how it affects the free will of his creatures in its simplest terms. The theory was thought-up by Luis de Molina in an attempt some say, to reconcile the differences of prevailing notions from other philosophers and theologians about God. Molina presented God's knowledge and His ability to control the outcome of any situation in such a way, so as to reveal that God's own will
would happen through the rationalization of a middle-ground. Molinism takes into account the wide separation of mainly two viewpoints about the nature of God, which were made popular by the church and theologians over the course of time. Hence the term, "middle knowledge" that situates its position between the opposing aspects of God's knowledge. Additionally, Molina's paradigm didn't interfere with the aspect of the free-will of humankind, but instead, maintained its virtue by protecting that ability of anyone to have the maneuverability of their actions or thoughts as they would like to select for themselves. The first type is a sort of passive knowledge of God about his world, creatures and events, which is called his natural knowledge and arguably necessary knowledge, which is not to be confused with contingent knowledge about what an entity may or may not do in various situations, but rather the way that things are, in effect.
In opposition to this kind of knowledge which God possesses is his free knowledge that has to do with future plans and his ability to bring his own will to completion. For the other scholars, who do not recognize Molina's model about the knowledge of God as a reconciliation of their debates and how it "dissolves the alleged tension between freedom and divine sovereignty" [8, p. 272] by bringing together the different points of view, there is another opinion. It is that Mo-linism is accepted as a means to subvert other paradigms because it favors the type of framework that would more accurately make sense of the world in which we live and by preserving the consensus of normative views of God's omniscience and the free will of human beings.
To give a better understanding of what definitions and pitfalls to avoid by the common mistakes of modern-day philosophers such as Quine "who instead
regards necessity as disguised contingency" [4] and for the sake of this article such ideas much be avoided, this discourse will utilize the very basic conception of necessary and contingent knowledge according to dictionary references. "A necessary truth is one that could not have been otherwise. It would have been true under all circumstances. A contingent truth is one that is true, but could have been false... permanent philosophical urge is to diagnose contingency as disguised necessity" [4].
So to better understand Molinism, we must first ask ourselves, what is natural or necessary knowledge? The natural knowledge of God is a captivating philosophy that sits on one end of a linear spectrum from Molina's premise. If we were to picture Molina's theory as a midpoint of that line which represents a "golden mean" of sorts as in Aristotle's Eudaimonia (as a reference which comes to mind,) from the edge of the furthest end of the linear spectrum that represents natural knowledge, then we could obtain a reference point that marks Molinism in its center.
As present circumstances exist all around us, there is factual evidence of what is relative to the world in which we live. The factoring-in of a God who has full knowledge of everything that does occur out of necessity, is to introduce a God who has an awareness of everything that is in connection to the existence of his creatures because it is necessary. In other words, it is the type of knowledge which exists that does not fail to exist within the present world. For example, that water is wet or that two plus two equals four. Yet, the existence of these factual realities as they are to God's creatures, has no bearing on the will of God or his desire to see them come to pass; preserving the existence and autonomy of living things as they are inclined to make it exist according to their own free
will. This then, is necessary knowledge that is both passive to God, because it exists and it is not bearing upon his will. "God's natural knowledge is His knowledge of all necessary truths. This knowledge does not depend on what God wills. God's middle knowledge is His knowledge of contingent truths which do not depend on what He wills" [2, p. 29].
On the opposing end of the linear spectrum of necessary knowledge is the free knowledge of God. At this point, God has active knowledge about his own will, his capabilities and achievements of the past, as well as what he will do in the future. Future or free knowledge is reliant on truths that exist in the world which are a part of God's foreknowledge and his ability to maintain that, situations will happen in accordance with his will. "God's free knowledge, by contrast, is His knowledge of those contingent truths which do depend on what He wills" [2, p. 29].
One problem with Molinism is that although this viewpoint endorses the manifestation of God's will. Molinism also considers that may could suppress the pursuit of any person to accomplish his or her own destiny, because nothing is achieved unless it is the will of God. Therefore, whatever a person does that might be conceived as his or her apparent choice to cause an action to take place, isn't necessarily their doing, because God is pulling all of the strings. This notion is supported by the reference in scripture that states: "Man's goings are of the Lord; how can a man then understand his own way?" [5] and many others like it in the Bible. This also creates another problem because it quickly arrives at the question of whether or not God is involved with evil, but this is why there is a separation within Molinism from God's will that does not interfere with the will of the individual to preserve their autonomy.
Although it could be argued that God's will could restrict the choices of human free will.
Returning to the middle of our paradigm and the linear spectrum, we arrive at Molinism that suggests the middle knowledge of God. One attempt to explain Molinism states that it is: "A doctrine about the method by which God acquires complete foreknowledge and the means by which God exercises providential control" [9, p. 1], but it also strat-egizes something else. Molinism definitively allows God to have some awesome features which resolves the debates on whether humankind has total autonomy to possess and enforce their will for their desired ends and its opposing idea of God sovereignty and being in complete control. The latter divulges the legacy of the will of humankind to be inconsequential, but Molinism does take into account the means of finding out exactly how God gets this foreknowledge, according to Zimmerman, which comes from "the most important objects of middle knowledge, known as conditionals or counter-factuals of creaturely freedom" [9, p. 2].
To better understand conditionals and counterfactuals, it might help to take a look at what Molinism looks like in the real world. Suppose that we use the random example to apply to this theory such as a female named Lilia and a slice of pizza, where the "if agent X were in circumstances K, X would freely do Y" [1, p. 465]. Therefore, every possible consideration as far as the agent X or Lilia uses her free will or Y, depending on the circumstances or K to exercise her choices of: eating the whole slice; eating a portion; dropping it on the floor; not eating it at all; or any of the infinite number of scenarios which are all affected by Lilia and what she freely decides to do, or counterfactuals concerning the slice of pizza is now a part of God's omni-
science because he already knows all of the outcomes. Then any of the "propositions describing what each person - actual or possible [or in this case Lilia] - would do with respect to every decision... she might face (or might have faced) and every action. she might have (or have had) an opportunity to perform" [3, p. 31] becomes a part of this middle knowledge that is privy to God's hidden knowledge.
In any such situation God has the ability to exercise his own free will by taking action that does not interfere with the agent's free will but allows the execution of his own plan. For instance, if it was not God's will that the slice of pizza should be eaten, he could use his abilities or fore-knowledge to have the pizza placed in an area where it would not be visible to the agent nor being eaten. This seems to thwart the idea of whether our total free will is truly possible and can coexist with the will of God especially if it (God's will) is different from our desires. Yet it preserves the idea that God doesn't use force nor control any person to guarantee the outcomes of his choice.
The other aspect of this is the conditionals which amounts to what the agent or Lilia in the preceding case would do concerning the pizza in any number of these situations. In terms of the Bible, there are many references that illustrate this point in dialogues that reveal God's knowledge of what would happen in certain circumstances if the agent(s) took a unique course of action. For instance, when Jesus who is presumed to be the embodiment of God said that "For if the mighty works done in you [Capernaum] had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day" [3], it supports the idea that God has the ability to know of every outcome in every possible scenario that could ever exist in this revelation and many others like it in scripture. Another example is "what Jesus was really telling Peter was that if the apos-
tle acted in accord with the character he'd formed up to that point, he'd deny Jesus. And some prophecies may be revealing what God intends to do regardless of how his creatures act" [8, p. 274].
Molinism also goes a little further to apply the understanding that God used his middle knowledge in creating the world because he knew the best possible outcomes between his plan to create the world and the actual fruition creating this world that now exists, so that "the Molinist is committed to the claim that the actual world is one of the best feasible worlds" [6, p. 190]. The problem with this philosophy is that it separates God's working knowledge of the world in which we live, from a world in which God's will surpasses the will of his creatures. If God's will is always realized and he always exercises his power to have the end result that he desires by moving situations to his advantage, it then complicates the issue of whether or not we truly have free will. "It is controversial whether middle knowledge is possible because it is controversial whether there can be true subjunctive conditionals of freedom" [1, p. 465].
In conclusion, there are any number of considerations that can object to Mo-linism, however it's philosophy can be quite appealing to resolve the issue of God's necessary knowledge versus his free knowledge. This paper could have been considerably longer on account of many other viewpoints which surrounds Molinism, but for the sake of brevity it was reduced to describe and evaluate the main factors of Luis de Molina's proposition of middle knowledge or between God's knowledge of what could have been and what could be. While taking into account the capacity of how God's knowledge ultimately affects the free will of all humanity, his creation and future events that affects them both.
References
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