Mulling over Molinism

God and Evil: The Current Debate; Section 2: Defenses against Logical Problems of Evil; Chapter 2: The Many Critics of the FWD, Subchapter 2: Mulling over Molinism.

This post is part of a series. For further information, see here.

The last subchapter was rather pithy. Thankfully, this one makes some necessary correctives.

4- Transworld Depravity and its discontents

As seen just above with Little Mack, not everyone likes Transworld Depravity. But, the arguments against Transworld Depravity are so varied it’s hard to keep track of them all. Lucky for you, I have done just that.

That’s a lie. I would begin to reflect on my life choices if I actually went and tracked down every argument against Transworld Depravity.

Here’re just a few-

Transworld Sanctity

Daniel Howard-Snyder (DHS), along with John Hawthorne, think that Transworld Depravity is no more intrinsically likely than Transworld Sanctity.¹ A creature has Transworld Sanctity at a world if they will never do wrong in that world. Since Transworld Depravity and Transworld Sanctity are, for all we know, equally likely, DHS concludes that we have no more reason to believe that one is true over the other (prior to witnessing how humans behave). But, Universal Transworld Depravity would make TS impossible, so, if TS is possible, then UTD is impossible. Hence, we have as much reason to think that God could have prevented all moral evil as we do that God could not. Some issues- First, Transworld Sanctity is clearly a much more ambitious claim that Transworld Depravity. TD at a world says that a creature does wrong at least once in a lifetime, while TS at a world says a creature never does wrong ever. So, it’s not clear that we should pick TS over UTD, or even pick a side. Second, even if TD were intrinsically unlikely, how would that make it an unsuccessful answer to Little Mack’s argument, which aims to establish a logical inconsistency? Third, why think that worlds where every creature has TS and none has TD are weakly actualizable? We get an attempt at an answer for the first two from DHS himself and the groundwork for an attempt at an answer for the third one in section 7.

DHS distinguished between Interworld Plentitude and Intraworld Plentitude. According to DHS, Interworld Plentitude is the view that the distribution of CCFs and creaturely essences is spread out across worlds. Thus, there will be worlds where there are only essences which get saddled with TD and worlds where those same essences get TS instead. Meanwhile, Intraworld Plentitude is the view that the range of CCFs and creaturely essences are always fully distributed in every world. No essences or CCFs are excluded at any given world. Thus, there must be at least one essence with TD and one essence with TS at every world. Thus, Interworld Plentitude allows for UTD, but Intraworld Plentitude does not. Therefore, there will always be TS individuals at a world who God can weakly actualize instead of a TD individual.

Felipe Leon summarized the argument as follows-

In short, FWD succeeds in showing the compossibility of God and evil only if [UTWD is possible] is true. But [UTWD is possible] is true only if Interworld Plenitude is true and Intraworld Plenitude is false. But we have no reason to prefer one of these two pictures of the distribution of the counterfactuals of freedom to creaturely essences over the other, in which case we have no reason to think [UTWD is possible] is true. And if that’s right, Plantinga’s FWD fails to show the compossibility of God and evil.²

But is it the case that you can only be justified in believing that a proposition is possible if you have ruled out any proposition which would make it impossible? Further, it’s not clear that intraworld plentitude is enough to guarantee that a weakly actualized world will only include only the TS individuals. In fact, the logic of weak actualization basically guarantees that God cannot guarantee that.³

Edenic Countermodels

Another kind of critique of TD comes (independently) from Alex Pruss and JH Sobel.⁴ Pruss and Sobel recognize that a counterexample to Grunkle Al’s UTD must show that there is a weakly actualizable world where a creature does nothing wrong. Notably, this is not an attempt to say that these are better overall worlds than the actual world, but only to be proof of concept for worlds without any sort of UTD, which would short circuit Grunkle Al’s FWD. So each came up with a tiny possible world where only one agent exists and said agent does good, which they conclude is, if possible, a countermodel to UPD.

Pruss offers something like the following scenario: consider a group of possible worlds, each with only God, an apple, a dance pad, and a woman conspicuously named Eve. Suppose that, at world 1, God tells Eve to dance a jig and not to eat the apple. Eve wants to eat the apple (it looks yummy), but she’s more interested in obeying God, so she obeys God. Now, at world 2, Eve wants to eat the apple (still looks yummy), and God tells Eve to eat the apple but not to dance. Since Eve obeyed God in world 1, even though she had a tempting round and red reason not to, she’d definitely obey God in world 2 when he tells her to do what she wants. This follows from the Domination principle, which roughly holds that if you would freely do something and I make it a better deal for you to do it, then you would still freely do it (this is an axiom for many moral systems as well as some Bayesians). Thus, Pruss reasons, whichever world God actualizes, Eve will do good. Since this choice is the only thing done in either world (God annihilates the world afterwards or something), God can ensure that Eve will freely do good by not disobeying him. Therefore, Eve is not Transworld Depraved. And, since Eve is the only creature in world 1 or world 2, it is also false that at least one creature is Transworld Depraved at every world. Presumably, an advocate of TD can just deny that world 1 or 2 (or both) are possible, probably because they’re too simple of worlds to actually exist.

One response to this argument would be to reject the universality of the Domination principle.⁵ There are some well-known counterexamples to the principle which run along the following lines: sometimes sweetening up a deal too much makes it seem less enticing as it draws suspicion. Imagine I offer you $10,000,000,000 to take my picture. You’d probably think there’s a catch or a trick at play and that you won’t get paid. If I offer you a quarter though, these suspicions would not arise. Coming from a different angle, we can think of Pascal’s Mugger, who says that if you give him your wallet today that he will come back tomorrow and give you a million dollars.⁶ Such a ludicrous price is likely to make you not believe him, whereas he may have been more believable if he said $10.

Sobel makes a simpler Edenic countermodel than Pruss. He offers a Perfect Adam World (PAW), where God only creates one creature who never errs,

There is a world in which there is a perfect being, a person Adam, and no one else, in which world Adam is of an exemplary moral character who, on every morally significant occasion, of his own free will acts in character and does the right thing. Plantinga insists on it: “[T]here are possible worlds in which God and Curley both exist and in which the latter is significantly free but never goes wrong” ([p. 185], cf., p. 47)⁷ (Italics in original).

Surely this is possible, at least insofar as Grunkle Al is concerned. The next question is whether or not it is feasible. What then, would Grunkle Al say in this situation? No need to speculate, Grunkle Al’s reply here was explained in the last chapter. God cannot weakly actualize a world where Curley/Adam never does wrong unless Curley/Adam cooperates with God. Whether or not Curley/Adam will do so is totally contingent from world to world, so God cannot simply ensure that strongly actualizing a world with Curley/Adam will result in a world where Curley/Adam never goes wrong.

Another issue with this objection is that there are only possible worlds in which Curley/Adam freely never errs insofar as there are also possible worlds where Curley/Adam freely does err. Thus, Sobel’s objection may win the battle, but it loses the war. For more on this, you’ll have to wait for the chapter on Sobel’s argument.

No Transworld Shenanigans

A slightly different angle of attack against TD is to say that there is no transworld identity. If there are no creaturely essences which we can pick out as identical across different possible worlds, then something like TD will be impossible (or true by definition for every creature that does wrong, but whatever). An individual essence, at least for Grunkle Al, is a property that some individual always possesses in every possible world that individual exists in, and is only ever possessed by that individual in all possible worlds. For example, the property of being identical to Alvin Plantinga is possessed only by Grunkle Al across all possible worlds, including the actual world.

Transworld identity is not without its critics. Depending on one’s modal metaphysics, it could be quite scary. For instance, David Lewis thought that every possible world existed in the same way. If there is transworld identity, the Lewis’s view commits us to the view that there are actually multiple ‘us’ in existence. These ‘us’ have different properties from each other, which seems prima facie impossible to most philosophers today. A little less controversially, there is a problem of the oddity of identity in empty worlds. We may say that Mark Twain is identical Sam Clemens in the actual world. In a nearby world, perhaps there is Sam Clemens who never went by Mark Twain. He’ll still be identical to our Mark Twain. In another world, there’s a Mark Twain who was born with the name Mark Twain. Also identical. But what about a world with no Mark Twain, nor Sam Clemens? Are they still identical in that world, even though no creature counts as either in that world?⁸ Or, perhaps, this whole essence business is too spooky since the word essence scares some people.

5- CCF’s prior to creation

Grunkle Al’s Molinist theory of CCF’s made a lot of waves, but it also has many detractors. Theists and non-theists alike both find it puzzling how there can be contingent truths about how creatures will act outside of God’s control simply out in the aether prior to any world. Others claim that this account does not provide freedom, but actually strips freedom away from creatures. I will survey some of these arguments.

Logic that may be scary for unsupervised children

Quentin Smith made two primary arguments against Grunkle Al’s FWD. The first was to deny that is is logically possible that there can be true CCF’s prior to creation and the second was to attempt to show that Grunkle Al’s argument rests on a confusion of different conceptions of freedom. I will show the first argument here and his second argument in objection 7 (which will appear next week).

Smith argues that Grunkle Al’s theory of CCF’s is in contradiction with the standard Stalnaker-Lewis account of counterfactuals.⁹ According to Lewis and Stalnaker, what makes a counterfactual true or false is the ‘nearness’ relation between possible worlds. A counterfactual will be true in the actual world, like “I could have worn a shirt with a seal on it”, if there is a nearby possible world where it is true that I (or a counterpart of me) wears a seal shirt. Nearness means something along the lines of “is very similar to the actual world”. However, this model obviously cannot account for CCFs which are prior to the distribution of possible worlds. For Grunkle Al, the relationship between counterfactuals and worlds is precisely the opposite. Other worlds are nearer to the actual world because counterfactuals in our world are true in them. With the seal shirt example, the possible world in which I wear a seal shirt is ‘nearby’ because it is true that I could have worn a seal shirt.

Grunkle Al (with help from Bill Craig¹⁰) tried to unify his account with the Stalnaker-Lewis account by pointing out that prior to the actualization of any world, there is already God and all of the states of affairs which God could actualize. These exist as brute facts prior to creation, and this does a pretty decent job of creating something like what Lewis and Stalnaker want. For, these brute counterfactuals of states of affairs serve the job that Lewis and Stalnaker want “nearness” to.

However, Smith asserts that this account makes counterfactuals unverifiable. For, we do not have access to counterfactual states of affairs. How could we? But, since we do know some counterfactuals, Smith reasons that they must be based in something more easily grasped, such as possible worlds. How this is any better is an exercise left to the reader.

What, ultimately, is at stake if Grunkle Al’s account is inconsistent with the Stalnaker-Lewis account of counterfactuals? Plausibly nothing. After all, the Stalknaker-Lewis account of counterfactuals cannot account for dice rolls either. It would be perfectly legitimate to say that the Stalnaker-Lewis model is nice for general examples, but that it is a fallible heuristic which can be violated at minimal cost.

The Grounding and Priority Objection¹¹

Two different interrelated objections, close to that of Little Mack’s earlier, are the grounding and priority objection to CCFs. Robert Adams and William Hasker have each put these objections forcefully.¹² The grounding objection asks what could be the explanation of these CCF’s which make them true in different worlds? After all, it can seem profoundly strange that God is stuck with these CCFs at the start of creation which are totally contingent. Why are there contingent facts before creation? Does that even make sense?

All of the available answers to this question require doubling down on something funky-sounding. If CCFs are made true by the actions of creatures in worlds, then the future would explain the past.¹³ That’s funky. If CCFs are made true by creaturely essences, then these essences must predate creation and thus be eternal. That’s funky. If these CCFs are made true by brute counterfactual states of affairs (as described by WLC), then they seem to be just brute facts. That’s funky. If they’re really just true for no reason, then that’s really funky.¹⁴ In short, CCFs are funky.¹⁵ Hence, the funkiness must be met head-on.

Why is it a problem that CCFs are funky? Well, in part because it makes it hard to explain how God is still omnipotent without finding a safe ground for these truths which constrain God’s activity, but a ground for these truths which does not bind God would presumably put them within God’s power to change, hence the problem. Michael Losonky and Heimir Geirsson’s point to what they call Clause 1.4 to explain the problem. Clause 1.4 states that “If S´ were actual, then person P would go wrong with respect to A.” “S´” refers to a state of affairs, “P” is a person and “A” is an action. Silly analytic speak. Clause 1.4 represents a specific CCF where a person would choose to do wrong at a world.

Clause (1.4) is a contingent truth, and so if God does not control the truth of clause (1.4), God is constrained by a contingent truth. What sort of contingent state of affairs that is actual but that God does not actualize could make clause (1.4) true? We are looking for a contingent state of affairs that obtains, but not in virtue of something God actualizes. We are reminded that if clause (1.4) is made true by states of affairs that are actual in virtue of something that God actualizes, then Plantinga is open to the criticism raised earlier, namely, that clause (1.4) constrains God, but it is a constraint of God’s own making and God could have done otherwise. To avoid this criticism, the theist needs to show that it is possible that clause (1.4) is true but that God did not make it true. The theist needs to explain how it is possible that clause (1.4) is true but not in virtue of something God actualizes and that this is compatible with God’s omnipotence. Plantinga does not have an argument to show that it is possible that clause (1.4) is a contingent truth not of God’s own making and that this is compatible with God’s omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence.¹⁶

Losonky and Geirsson’s argument above expresses the tension nicely. Either total depravity is based on a contingent state of affairs which is in God’s control, and thus God is responsible for total depravity, or there are contingent states of affairs which are outside of God’s control which can make total depravity true. Either way, the theist loses something major. The former option removes the FWD’s ability to shift the blame from God, and the second horn leaves us to ask what contingent things could exist without God? Worse still, how could there be contingent things outside of God’s control which delimit God’s power? For more on the issues for omnipotence with regard to contingent things that are independent of God, see the “Penal Colony” response to Sterba at the end of this section.

CCFs are freedom-canceling

In contrast to the aforementioned views which challenge the possibility of CCFs, some critics deny that CCFs allow for free will. Instead, they say that CCFs would destroy free will entirely.

Richard Gale accused CCFs of giving God “freedom-canceling control” over creaturely actions.¹⁷ He presented the God-Cannot-Do-As-Much objection against CCFs prior to creation. Gale argues that if CCFs determine how creatures will act in a world prior to the choices of those creatures, then these creatures are not free. Instead, their decisions are determined by abstract propositions beyond their control. Worse still, God picks out a world based on these CCFs, so God scans the CCFs for a world and then weakly actualizes it based on God’s approval of them. Gale put forward what he conceived to be two necessary constraints on human freedom:

C1. If M1s actions and choices result from psychological conditions that are intentionally determined by another man M2, then these actions and choices are not free.

C2. M2 has a freedom-canceling control over M1, if M2 causes most of M1’s behavior.¹⁸

These are for human-human freedom and Gale recognized that human-human relations and God-human relations are not exactly analogous, but these principles “might take the smirk off the face of a Free Will Defender and replace it with a worried grin.”¹⁹

Gale gave two common-sense analogies to defend his principles, “The case of the sinister cyberneticist” and “The case of the evil puppeteer.”²⁰

The first is a Sanford Wife rip-off: a cyberneticist decides he wants his wife to be more obedient, so he replaces his wife’s brain with a computer. She’s less free now (for hopefully obvious reasons).

The second is an equally blatant Pinocchio rip-off: Stromboli the puppeteer controls poor Pinocchio’s every act with strings. Pinocchio doesn’t seem very free.

Are these applicable to God? Gale says yes. By picking a world based on foreknowing the CCFs of that world, God is choosing which decisions creatures will make. Since God picks which choices will be made by weakly actualizing one world over another, Gale deems that God is determining the psychological states of creatures (C1) and also the cause of creaturely actions (C2). Thus, Gale concluded that creatures are not free if God knows CCFs prior to creation.

Quentin Smith partially came to Grunkle Al’s defense against Gale. His rebuttal to Gale being that Gale’s first principle is disanalogous to God since God is not altering the psychology of humans, but is the ultimate cause of human psychology.

I believe the disanalogies of the God-human case outweigh the analogies. Specifically, the human-human cases involve the husband altering the original, natural, psychological makeup of his wife and replacing it with a new, artificial one. But in the God-human case, God does not alter the person’s original psychological makeup; rather, the person’s original psychological makeup is precisely what is created by God. What is denoted by “a mind of her own” is precisely what is originally created by God.²¹

I fail to see how that makes it less the case that God is the determining cause of human psychology under Molinism.

Following in the footsteps of Gale, Daniel Rubio and Nevin Climenhaga came up with a similar argument. They offer their argument in clean syllogistic form, referencing Eve in the Garden of Eden,

(1) If Molinism is true, then there is some set of facts Γ that fully explains Eve’s sinning and everything Eve does that influences whether she sins.

(2) If Γ fully explains S’s φ-ing as well as everything S does that influences whether S φ’s, then S does not φ freely.

Therefore, (3) If Molinism is true, Eve does not freely sin.²²

The first premise is true because the free actions of creatures at a world are explained by the CCFs at that world along with God’s weak actualization of said world. The second premise is poorly written in a way that aggravates me (not just for the needless formalism²³). For, the real issue that Rubio and Climenhaga have is that Eve’s acts are explained by God’s creative act and the CCFs without reference to Eve herself. The force of this objection will then turn on the extent to which the CCF’s are explained by facts about Eve, which goes back to the Grounding objection.

Alessandro Fiorello independently found a variant of this argument.²⁴ Fiorello notes that TD is only possible if the CCFs determine how an individual will act. However, like Gale, Fiorello sees in this a tension with LFW. For, no act can be free under LFW if the act was determined. Thus, Fiorello concluded

If Plantinga is going to use free will as a defence against the problem of evil he cannot at the same time utilize a concept like transworld depravity which necessitates what morally significant choices agents will make… Necessity and libertarian freedom are mutually exclusive.²⁵

Fiorello acknowledged that his argument turns on an ambiguity, formalized by Grunkle Al, between “(49a) Necessarily, if God knows in advance that X will do A, then indeed X will do A.” and “(49b) If God knows in advance that X will do A, then it is necessary that X will do.”²⁶

According to Grunkle Al, 49b would jeopardize free will, but the best an atheologian can muster is 49a. Fiorello grants that this would be the case if Grunkle Al’s account of Middle Knowledge were true, but, according to Fiorello, Bob Adams demonstrated that Middle Knowledge is bunk. Therefore, the atheologian is entitled to 49b. But, since Middle Knowledge just is God’s knowledge of CCFs prior to creation, Fiorello’s argument ends up being entirely parasitic on the success or failure of Bob Adams’s Grounding Objection or maybe Rubio and Climenhaga’s argument.

The Absurd Luck of Molinism

Another objection often hurled at Grunkle Al’s Molinism is that is makes God a prisoner to luck. Gale argues that the image of God crossing his fingers and hoping for a world with good CCFs may legitimately be seen as “blasphemous, as a radical distortion of the orthodox concept of God’s omnipotence.”²⁷ Andre Rusavuk argues that what is at stake is not God’s omnipotence, but God’s praiseworthiness. If the moral good that God can actualize in a world comes down to luck, then God is not praiseworthy for the good in that world.²⁸ It would merely be good fortune that there was a feasible world good enough for God to actualize. On the flip side, Daniel Rubio argues that Molinism may make God drastically unlucky, and left with a paltry amount of feasible worlds to actualize.²⁹ Under this account, God would lose providential control over creation, as God’s freedom to pick between worlds would be frightfully diminished.

Grunkle Al may respond as follows, God is not any luckier that the CCFs are the way they are than poker players are that they got one of the 1,326 possible starting hands. It’s logically necessary given the constraints on the ‘game.’ Likewise, God is simply logically constrained by the CCFs at each world. It’s certainly not a constraint on power, as omnipotence makes no claim to the logically impossible.

As for praiseworthiness, God would not be more praiseworthy in a world with different CCFs because God is doing the best possible action, and thereby the most praiseworthy action, in both worlds. There is some intuitive pull to the view that a doctor who saves the lives of all one thousand people in a hospital is more praiseworthy than a doctor who saves the lives of all one hundred people in a hospital, but it’s not clear that this intuition can extend to comparing two agents who each do the best possible action. This situation provides a strange inversion on Rowe’s conditions on when it is morally blameless to not do the best possible action. There are areas in which this line of reasoning falls flat though. For instance, Rusavuk notes that if abstract objects necessarily exist independently of God’s creative act, then many thinkers believe God’s aseity is in jeopardy, even though it’s logically impossible for things to be different.³⁰

Finally, I think Grunkle Al would simply deny that Rubio’s argument leads to a loss of God’s providential control. Grunkle Al’s argument merely offers a reason to think that there are fewer logically possible worlds than we may have otherwise imagined, as many narrowly logically possible worlds are not broadly logically possible, and hence not possible. Ultimately, this does not shrink God’s providence anymore than cutting off God’s access to the logically impossible worlds, which is surely an uncountably greater drop in God’s options than Molinism offers.

The FWD without CCFs

All of these objections to CCFs lead to a natural question, what would happen to the FWD if it turns out that there are not CCFs? Grunkle Al’s answer was brazenly optimistic-

The important point to see here, however, is that the atheological objector needs counterfactuals of freedom more than the free will defender does. If there are no true counterfactuals of freedom, the free will defender’s task should be easier, not harder; for on that supposition God would not have been able to have as detailed knowledge of what would happen if he were to strongly actualize various states of affairs T(W) for any possible world W as he would on the contrary supposition (Op Cit. pp. 379). In particular he would not have been able to have the same detailed knowledge as to what would happen if he were to create free creatures.³¹ (typos removed; italics in original)

The idea behind Grunkle Al’s comment here is that the only alternative to his Middle Knowledge position which can ensure that creatures are free is for God to simply not know the future when God actualizes a world. When God actualizes a world, God won’t know the CCFs until after the world is actual, so God won’t know whether or not the creatures within are transworld depraved or not until God actualizes the world. This can be understood in Open Theist or Simple Foreknowledge terms. A FWD based on these lines will be discussed Mid-May.

1. The second is basically a revision of the first

Howard-Snyder, Daniel & Hawthorne, John (1998). Transworld sanctity and Plantinga’s free will defense. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 44 (1):1-21.

Howard-Snyder, Daniel (2014). The logical problem of evil: Mackie and Plantinga. In Justin P. McBrayer & Daniel Howard-Snyder, The Blackwell Companion to The Problem of Evil. Wiley. pp. 19-33.

2. Leon, Felipe & Rasmussen, Joshua (2019). Is God the Best Explanation of Things?: A Dialogue. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 201

3. For an unrelated and much, much more complicated critique of Hawthorne and Howard-Snyder’s argument, see

Almeida, Michael (2012). God, Freedom, and Worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ch. 4.

4. Pruss, Alexander R. (2012). A Counterexample to Plantinga’s Free Will Defense. Faith and Philosophy 29 (4):400-415.

5. This is the position of

Speak, Daniel (2015). Domination and the Free Will Defense. Faith and Philosophy 32 (3):313-324.

6. Bostrom, Nick (2009). “Pascal’s mugging”. Analysis. 69 (3): 443–445. doi:10.1093/analys/anp062. JSTOR 40607655

7. Sobel, Jordan Howard (2003). Logic and Theism: Arguments for and Against Beliefs in God. New York: Edited by Jordan Howard Sobel. pgs. 457.

8. This is plausibly a non-issue, but I once made a professor very happy when I raised this question in a logic course.

9. Smith, Quentin (1997). Ethical and Religious Thought in Analytic Philosophy of Language. New Haven, CT, USA: Yale University Press. pg. 137-148

The SL model isn’t perfect, but it’s a nice model. For instance, a dice roll is too complicated for it, but it’s great for bimodal scenarios.

10. Craig, William Lane (1991). Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom. The Coherence of Theism: Omniscience. Leiden: E. J. Brill

later,

Craig, William Lane (2000). Only Wise God: The Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge & Human Freedom. Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers.

11. Most everything I write in this section comes from

Perszyk, Ken (2013). Recent Work on Molinism. Philosophy Compass 8 (8):755-770.

12. Adams, Robert M. ‘Middle Knowledge and the Problem of Evil.’ American Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1977): 109–17.

Hasker, William Providence, Evil and the Openness of God. New York: Routledge, 2004

13. The priority objection adds a second layer to this objection. If CCFs are made true by facts in a world, how can God know them if that world doesn’t yet exist? Presumably, this question will only show up if the answer to the grounding objection is that CCFs are made true by the actions of creatures in worlds.

14. Merricks, Trenton. Truth and Ontology. Oxford: Clarendon, 2007.

This man has the most forgettable name of all time. I’m sorry. I have forgotten it so many times that I have a mental block about it.

Anyways, Ryan Mullins has also said this or something. Just fully denied that true things need Truthmakers to make them true.

15. Even if funkiness is not itself a decisive objection, it’s still some sort of problem for a position, ex.

Hasker, William Providence, Evil and the Openness of God. New York: Routledge, 2004 pg. 194

16. Losonsky, Michael & Geirsson, Heimir (2005). What God Could Have Made. Southern Journal of Philosophy 43 (3): p.368-9

17. Gale, Richard M. (1991). On the Nature and Existence of God. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. pg. 110

18. ibid. 158-9

There is a third, but don’t worry about that one.

19. ibid. 158

20. ibid. for both examples

21. Smith, Quentin (1997). Ethical and Religious Thought in Analytic Philosophy of Language. New Haven, CT, USA: Yale University Press. pg. 157

22. Climenhaga, Nevin & Rubio, Daniel (2022). Molinism: Explaining our Freedom Away. Mind 131 (522):462.

23. For, it ends up saying that an action cannot be free unless it is unexplained. However, this would put LFW at odds with the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), and that would be very sad. However, Libertarian Alex Pruss says that every free action is explained, and who am I to say that he’s wrong? What 2 should say is that If Γ fully explains S’s φ-ing as well as everything S does that influences whether S φ’s without including any fact about S’s own choice, then S does not φ freely, or something like that.

They obviously treat it in the paper like they’re saying what I’m saying, but it still irks me.

24. Fiorello, A. Free will, transworld depravity, and divine omniscience. Int J Philos Relig 97, 33–44 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-024-09930-4

This 2025 paper includes the line: “No one in the literature has to my knowledge challenged Plantinga on endorsing libertarian free will and the compatibility of it with transworld depravity.”

I’ll just leave that here.

25. ibid. 37

26. ibid. 39 citing Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil, (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1977 p. 67

27. Gale, Richard M. (1991). On the Nature and Existence of God. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. pg. 141.

28. Rusavuk, Andre Leo (2024). “Molinism’s kryptonite: Counterfactuals and circumstantial luck.” Philosophical Quarterly 75 (3):1121-1141.

29. Rubio, Daniel (2024). “Still Another Anti-Molinist Argument.” TheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology 8 (2).

30. Rusavuk, Andre Leo (2024). Molinism’s kryptonite: Counterfactuals and circumstantial luck. Philosophical Quarterly 75 (3):1121-1138.

31. Plantinga, Alvin (1986). Is Theism Really a Miracle? Faith and Philosophy 3 (2): pg. 127