Middle Knowledge Reconsidered
Middle knowledge has been variously defined. Norman Geisler says in a critique that God’s natural knowledge is His knowledge of all possible worlds; free knowledge is the knowledge of the actual world; and “[b]etween the merely possible and the necessary there is the contingent.” (Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, “Molinism”) Wikipedia divides knowledge differently: “necessary” means truths that are independent of God’s will and have no possibility to be false; “middle,” contingently true but independent of God’s will; and “free,” contingent truths that are dependent upon God’s will. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy proposes something similar:
Natural knowledge is that part of God’s knowledge which He knows by His very nature or essence, and since His essence is necessary, so is that which is known through it. That is, the content of natural knowledge includes all metaphysically necessary truths. …the content of God’s natural knowledge is independent of His will; God has no control over the truth of the propositions He knows by natural knowledge. Consider, for example, the mathematical truth, 1 + 1 = 2. No matter what God wills, it will always be true that the concepts represented by the symbols 1, 2, +, and =, when arranged in a formulaic expression, one plus one equals two.
Free knowledge is that part of God’s knowledge which He knows by His knowledge of His own will, both His desires and what He will, in fact, do. The content of this knowledge is made up of truths which refer to what actually exists (or has existed, or will exist). … First, the content of that knowledge is contingent; it could have been different from what it, in fact, is. That is, free knowledge includes only… truths that could have been prevented by God if He chose to create different situations, different creatures, or to not create at all. Second, free knowledge is postvolitional; it is dependent upon God’s [decretory, causal] will.
[M]iddle knowledge is like natural knowledge in that it is prevolitional, or prior to God’s choice to create. This, of course, also means that the content of middle knowledge is true independent of God’s will and therefore, He has no control over it. Yet, it is not the same as natural knowledge because, like free knowledge, its content is contingent.
The problem with these definitions is that {necessary, contingent, actual} does not cover all the relevant possibilities. {necessary, contingent/possible, impossible} indeed exhausts all the modal categories, but it is not what we need at all. Both necessary and contingent knowledge are still understood in terms of possible worlds. Thus, if God “knows all the possible worlds,” then He has both the natural and middle knowledge already. It’s true that 1 + 1 = 2 is necessarily true, but the possible worlds in which this statement is true are contingent. The contingency we care about is the contingency of each possible world not the contingency or necessity of propositions or states of affairs in these worlds. That a proposition is true in all possible worlds is a happenstance; good for the proposition, I suppose, but what is it to us? (NB: I’m not saying that PNx & P~Nx which is always false.) Given any world, a proposition in it will either be true or false, whether it is necessary or contingent, and God knows that. It’s the truth value that’s important not the modality. Let me suggest therefore that 1 + 1 = 2 is not part of the natural knowledge of God but of the middle knowledge, defined indeed as the knowledge of all possible worlds. An objection immediately arises: if knowledge of possible worlds is middle, what remains for natural knowledge? The answer is, we cannot know. That knowledge is reserved for the blessed only. We can’t even give an example of a single anything that is true for God naturally. But one thing we can state for certain: God is not reducible to the set of all necessary truths, if such a thing is even coherent. We meet God half-way in possible worlds, but beyond that we cannot progress unless beatified and in the state of glory.
Aquinas would no doubt object. Possible worlds, he would say, are finite reflections of the infinite God. Hence God knows them through Himself. By knowing Himself, God knows how He can be imitated in every possible way. Similarly, the actual world is one of the possible worlds, and since God knows everything to which His power extends, He knows which possible world is the actual one. No need therefore for any kind of knowledge but God’s innate knowledge of His own essence. But here St. Thomas has made a crucial error by failing to countenance the levels within God: necessity, self-interest, and charity or creativity. For example, we humans can easily (perhaps with the help of grace) discuss possible worlds without thinking of them as crude copies of God. Why must God think of them as such? Possible worlds represent what God Himself could be. But He is what He is. He is supremely actual. He has chosen that possible world to live in in which He is omnipotent, omniscient, and all-loving. Of all the possibilities of existence God’s way is the best one. He has rejected every possible evil, every possible deficiency. In a way, God is the best possible world Himself, the best way of them all to be.
It may be true that “God, from a most profound and inscrutable comprehension of every free will in His essence, has intuited what each, according to its innate liberty, would do if placed in this or that condition.” (Geisler, Ibid.) But that intuition is indistinguishable from the knowledge of necessary truths in the possible world in which some free will FW is in condition C; it’s just that 1 + 1 = 2 will also be true there (and everywhere else, but so what?). Again, we are interested in describing each possible world not in the modality of particular propositions.