Does anyone understand "Middle Knowledge?"

Help me out.........please define these terms.

 

duplicated post

 

Hello Humblesmith, physical premotion is basically the belief that a creature is moved by another mover. Aquinas will list examples like a cook putting food to the flame to cook the food or an axeman swinging an ax to chop wood. Of course the premotion cannot supercede the nature of the creature or overcome any defects, so Reformed scholastics would give an example of a man pushing a horse with a broken leg. The horse is limping, moving according to its nature, but the limp is not the result of the man pushing it but a defect in the creature.

For divine concursus, I will paste what I see as an excellent definition by Fredosso:
"According to concurrentism, a natural effect is produced immediately by both God and created substances, so that (pace occasionalism) the latter make a genuine causal contribution to the effect and indeed determine its specific character, but (pace mere conservationism) they do so only if God cooperates with them contemporaneously as an immediate cause in a certain "general" way which goes beyond conservation and which makes the resulting cooperative transeunt action to be in all relevant respects the action of both God and the secondary causes."

Now, my suspicion is that WLC and most contemporary Molinists opt for conservationism, which was defended robustly by Durandus (who invented Molinism before Molina). Fredosso presents some arguments against the view, which you may or may not find persuasive. Oddly, you will see that Molina was not a conservationist, but what passes today for Molinism seems to me to be more in line with Durandus. Fredosso's work just highlights the problem with ignoring the historical debates when appealing to historical positions or figures. This happens all too often in analytical philosophy, and opens it up to the charge of being ignorant or unfair to history.

For the whole article on Fredosso's defense of concursus appealing to Suarez and Molina (he does not spend time dealing with premotion in this article) click: http://www.nd.edu/~afreddos/papers/conserv.htm

 

Hello Skypair,

To an extent you are correct. The Dominicans (largely indebted to Aquinas) believed that there was divine causal involvement for every causal event in two ways: God reduces the agent's powers from potency to act and He acts on the patient by giving it being, which had to occur for any effect to obtain. Thomas used the analogy of a saw that has the potential to cut even when it is not being used, but an agent must come and apply it for it to cut.

Since God was involved in every event in this manner, even free actions, then by virtue of God's knowledge of His own activity He foreknows what free creatures will freely choose to do. God's infallible knowledge includes foreknowing things as freely performed. Dominicans extended this knowledge to counterfactuals too, but such knowledge was subjunctive and merely hypothetical.

The Jesuits, Suarez and Molina, rejected this explanation because it abandoned freedom. They argued that God's knowledge is based on something independent of His own activity, something in the creature alone. This, of course, leads to the "grounding objection" (although it didn't have a spiffy name back then) that asks how God can know just what a free creature would choose to do under any circumstance and if he foreknows it as "would" or as "will." This is where middle knowledge comes in for the Jesuits, but Suarez and Molina never abandoned concurrence. I think contemporary Molinists sound a lot more like Durandus than Molina when it comes to their views of causality.

The Reformed and Leibniz saw a problem here along with the Jesuits when the ax type of analogy translates to free creatures, but Leibniz I believe uses synchronic contingency which still relies on premotion and concurrence, but in a different way than the Dominican and Jesuit teaching. The Reformed utilize the decree along with synchronic contingency, premotion and concursus, which can still involve decreeing that God upholds the options freely generated by free creatures, so it does not have to be compatibilistic.

All of these positions presuppose a view of God and time in which God is eternal or timeless so to speak (but once again not the caricature that analytic philosophers give to it...don't trust what they say on God and time or divine attributes, especially simplicity).

Well, I'm about spent in this thread. I don't know if any of this helps.

 

Don't speak for me when you say we're getting too far from Scripture. All of these views exist because of what God has revealed in Scripture, and given that these views are often above people's heads (including mine), then how much more Scripture that points to an amazing God worthy of all praise.