How does Molinist thought - God arranging coincidences to fulfill his purpose differ from that of the concept of the Sovereignty of God?
I really don’t have a lot of time to get into this but:
Some seem not to be able to get past that free will/human volition can and does exist and God still have foreknowledge of all things because they believe His Sovereignty to unavoidably be deterministic if true divine foreknowledge exists.
AS explained previously, Ad nauseam, to Open Theists who fail to maintain the attribute of divine foreknowledge by limiting it and as well as to Classical Theists, who attempt to maintain divine foreknowledge through views of “Divine Deterministic Sovereign Control” which limit human volition leading to fatalist theology, that Molinism believes and maintains that God is in “Divine Providential Sovereign Control” of all things (or possible worlds) while truly and logically holding to the attributes of divine foreknowledge and human libertarian free will.
In short, something to consider is the complexity of Divine knowledge and the
infinite number of possible worlds available for God to actualize which allows for
infinite possibilities of possible worlds in which a human can exist whereby they “
freely” choose, in real time, whether or not to respond the influences of God in the worlds He providentially places one in according to His ongoing judgments of the creatures He miraculously designed to have the attributes of sense, reason and intellect.
William Lane Craig explains, "It is up to God whether we find ourselves in a world in which we are predestined, but it is up to us whether we are predestined in the world in which we find ourselves."
Keathley explains a scenario that fits in with the above using the ambulance analogy. “Imagine you wake up and discover that you are in an ambulance being transported to the emergency room. You clearly require serious medical help. If you do nothing, you will be delivered to the hospital. However, if for whatever reason you demand to be let out, the driver will comply. He may express his concern, warn you of the consequences, but he will abide by your wishes. You receive no credit for being taken to the hospital, you receive all the blame for getting out. This is a picture of the Molinist view of salvation.”
A common mistake OT's make is to believe humans must be so free as to pick/design/create their own "possible worlds" or they are not truly free. Such is to conclude a standard of human freedom that man must be as God to create and/or control his own worlds and this amounts to a complaint of being a created creature, unlike God (Romans 9:17-23) but Molinism does not even attempt to maintain such a type of human freedom nor define LFW to that necessary extent of freedom.
IOW's Molinists absolutely claim that God is Sovereign - Providentially so...