Saturday, October 19, 2019

Molinism: a problem and a possible solution

I sent William Lane Craig a question about Molinism a while back, and I was just thinking that the question could be made into an argument against Molinism.

Here's the issue. Molinism requires libertarian free will (LFW). According to LFW, there are no condition prior to and up to the moment of choice that are sufficient to determine what that choice will be. With that being the case, we should expect that if we were able to turn back time and put a person in the exact same situation they were in before, they might not make the same choice as they made the first time.

Libertarians acknowledge that antecedent conditions can have some influence over your behavior. So let's say that Jim meets Bob and has a desire to shake hands with him, but he has LFW, so his desire is not sufficient to determine that he will shake Bob's hand. And in the absence of any Frankfurt-type scenarios, Jim could choose otherwise. But his desire has some influence over his action, and the stronger the desire, the more probable that he will choose to shake hands with Bob. So let's say, hypothetically, that the desire is such that there's a 75% chance that Jim will shake hands with Bob and a 25% chance that he won't.

If that were the case, then we should expect that if we turned back time and played the scenario out many times, that 75% of the time, Jim would choose to shake Bob's hand, and 25% of the time, he would choose not to.

But this comes into conflict with Molinism. According to Molinism, there is a counter-factual describing what Jim would do if he were to meet Bob, and this counter-factual has a truth value prior to God creating the world containing Jim and Bob. Suppose the counter-factual is that if Jim meets Bob, then he will freely shake his hand. If that counter-factual is true, then shouldn't we expect that no matter how many times we turn back the clock, Jim will shake Bob's hand? If so, then that conflicts with the earlier stipulations about LFW and how that would play out in Jim's choices when he's put in the same situation multiple times.

There is a possible solution to this, though. If there is some possible world where time gets reversed multiple times, then surely there would be counterfactuals that applied each time it happened. For example, you might have one that says, "If Jim meets Bob the first time, then he will shake his hand, but if time gets reversed, and Jim has the decision to make a second time, then Jim will not shake his hand." And you could string that counterfactual out as many times as time gets reversed in that world. That would solve the problem.

But that does seem to have some bearing on what makes a counterfactual true, which is another thing to think about.

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