Imagine you knew, of every person you will ever meet, exactly what would win them over. The right word, spoken at the right moment. The kindness that would melt them. The appeal they could not ignore, because it fit them so well. You would never have to force anyone. You would only have to know them, perfectly. And be patient.

If God knows not only what will happen, but what every free person would freely do in any possible situation, then something remarkable follows. He can arrange the world, place each person in the right time and circumstances, and compose a saving appeal tailored to that person's own heart. He does not override freedom. He works with it. He knows the combination to every lock, and He turns it gently.

This idea has a name. It is called middle knowledge (Latin scientia media, "the knowledge in between"), and it was first given careful form by the sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina.¹ Philosophers call the broader system Molinism in his honor. I want to spend this chapter explaining what middle knowledge is. I want to show why it is reasonable, where Scripture hints at it, and why it matters for the hope that God will save all. This is the engine that makes the rest of the book's argument run. If God really does know every "what if," then sovereignty and freedom stop being rivals. And the door to universal salvation opens without a single lock being forced.

A word of honesty before we begin. Molinism is debated. Serious philosophers accept it; serious philosophers reject it. I will lay out the strongest objection fairly, and I will tell you what I think the case looks like even if you decide Molinism is not quite right. But I do think it is right, and I think it is the most powerful tool the universalist has. It deserves a careful, plain-language hearing.

Why It Matters

Here is the problem middle knowledge solves. Two things seem true at the same time, and they seem to pull against each other.

On one hand, the Bible teaches that God is sovereign. He plans all things. He works all things according to the counsel of His will (Ephesians 1:11). Nothing catches Him off guard. He is Lord over history from beginning to end.

On the other hand, the Bible teaches that human beings make real choices. We are not puppets. God commands us to choose (Deuteronomy 30:19). He holds us responsible for what we do (Romans 14:12). And as I argued in Chapter 13, the freedom we have is real. It is libertarian freedom, the kind where you could have chosen otherwise. A forced "yes" is not a real "yes," and God wants real love from real hearts.

So how can God be in control, if we are genuinely free? Calvinists answer this by saying God causes our choices. But that spends freedom. Arminians answer by saying God foresees our choices but does not direct them. But that weakens sovereignty. The old debate goes around and around, and both sides feel the pinch.

Molinism offers a way through. God does not cause your choices. But He does not just watch them from a distance, either. He knows what you would freely choose in any possible setting. And He uses that knowledge to arrange the world so that free creatures freely do what He plans. He is sovereign. You are free. Both truths hold, because God's sovereignty works through His knowledge, not through causal force.²

For the universalist, the stakes are even higher. If God really does know the "what if" for every soul, then He can compose the single best sequence of saving appeals for each person. He can place each person in the circumstances where they are most likely to freely say yes. And He can keep doing this after death, across all the time eternity allows (Chapter 21). That is not force. That is wisdom married to love, with infinite patience. And it is the reason I believe every soul will, in the end, come home freely.

Think about what this means for the hardest cases. What about someone born in a time or place where the gospel was never preached? What about someone who grew up hearing a distorted version of the faith that made God seem cruel? On the Molinist view, God knew all of that. He knew what each of those people would freely do if presented with the truth clearly, lovingly, in the right circumstances. And He has eternity to arrange exactly those circumstances. No one is left out because of the accident of when or where they were born. Middle knowledge means that God's saving plan is personal, not generic. It reaches each soul on its own terms.

The Argument

Move 1: What Middle Knowledge Is

The idea starts with a simple question about God's knowledge. What does God know, and in what order does He know it?

Molinists describe God's knowledge in three logical steps, or "moments." These are not steps in time. God does not figure things out one piece at a time the way we do. He knows everything at once, without beginning. But there is a logical order, the way the premises of an argument come before the conclusion even if you grasp them all in a flash.³

The first moment is natural knowledge. This is God's knowledge of everything that could happen. Every possible world. Every possible person. Every possible set of circumstances. This knowledge comes from God's own nature. He knows all possibilities simply because He is God.⁴

The third moment (I am saving the second for last, because it is the key) is free knowledge. This is God's knowledge of what will happen in the world He actually chose to create. It is called "free" because it results from God's free, sovereign decision to bring this world into existence rather than some other.⁵

Between these two sits the second moment: middle knowledge. Here God knows what every free creature would freely do in any possible set of circumstances. Not just what they could do. Not yet what they will do. What they would do, if they were placed in a particular situation.

Notice the three words that Keathley uses to keep these straight: could, would, will.⁶ God knows all three. The key claim of Molinism is that the second kind of knowledge (the "would") is real, is known by God, and comes logically before God's decision to create. That is what makes it "middle." It sits between what God knows by nature and what He knows by decree.

An important clarification: God does not look ahead in time to learn what we would do. He is not watching the future like a movie. As Keathley puts it, God does not perceive the choices of free creatures; He conceives them within Himself. This knowledge flows from His own infinite nature.⁷ Middle knowledge is a feature of who God is, not a report He receives from somewhere else.

Move 2: Scripture Hints at It

Is there any reason from Scripture to think God has this kind of knowledge? The Bible never uses the phrase "middle knowledge." But it shows God knowing "what if" truths about free creatures again and again. The pattern is striking.

The clearest case is in 1 Samuel 23. David is hiding in the city of Keilah. He hears that Saul is coming to capture him. So David asks God two questions: Will Saul come to Keilah? And will the citizens of Keilah hand me over to him?

Here is the point. God told David what the citizens of Keilah would do. But it never happened. David left, Saul called off the chase, and the citizens never had to make the choice. God knew a counterfactual truth: if David stays, then they will hand him over. That is not a prediction of the future. It is knowledge of what free people would freely do in a situation that never came to pass.⁸ Kirk MacGregor draws attention to this point: the knowledge God reveals in 1 Samuel 23 "did not constitute predictions of the future (foreknowledge), for Saul did not actually come to Keilah and the citizens of Keilah never actually handed over David to Saul."⁹

The prophet Jeremiah offers another case. God tells King Zedekiah exactly what would happen under two different scenarios:

Two possible futures, each hanging on a free choice. God knew both. He presented them plainly. Zedekiah chose badly. But the other outcome was a real possibility, and God knew exactly what it would look like.¹⁰

Jesus says that Tyre and Sidon would have repented, if they had seen the miracles Chorazin saw. They did not see those miracles. So the repentance never happened. But Jesus knows it would have happened. He knows the counterfactual.¹¹

None of these texts proves Molinism as a formal system. But they show something important: the Bible presents God as knowing not just what will happen, but what would happen under circumstances that never come about. As Jay Wesley Richards has noted, counterfactual language "permeates the Bible."¹² That is exactly the kind of knowledge Molinism describes.

Move 3: How It Dissolves the Sovereignty-Freedom Problem

Here is where middle knowledge does its real work. If God knows what every free person would freely do in any possible situation, then He does not have to cause their choices to be in control. He only has to place them in the right circumstances.

Think of it this way. A chess master does not force her opponent's moves. She cannot. The opponent is free to move any piece. But the master knows her opponent so well that she can set up the board so the opponent freely makes the move she anticipated. She wins through knowledge, not through control of the other player's hand.¹³

God's knowledge is infinitely greater. He does not just know you well. He knows what you would freely do in every possible set of circumstances. So He can arrange your life, your encounters, your moments of clarity, and your invitations to grace, so that you freely choose what He planned. He achieves His aims not by causing choices, but by placing free creatures where He knows they will freely choose well.

Keathley puts the point clearly: "By utilizing these three phases of knowledge, God predestines all events, yet not in such a way that violates genuine human freedom and choice. God meticulously 'sets the table' so that humans freely choose what He had predetermined."¹⁴

This is providence without puppetry. God is sovereign over every detail. But no one is a puppet. Peter denied Jesus three times, freely and from his own weakness. Yet Jesus predicted it with certainty, because He knew what Peter would freely do in those exact circumstances. God did not make Peter deny Him. God knew Peter would deny Him, and God used that knowledge in the larger story of redemption.¹⁵

Consider how different this is from fatalism. The fatalist says: everything is fixed, and nothing you do matters. The Molinist says the opposite. Everything you do matters. Your choices are real, and they have real consequences. But God already knows what those choices will be, and He has woven them into a story that ends where He planned. You are not a character in a script you cannot change. You are a free person in a world arranged by a God who knows you too well to force you and loves you too much to leave you.

The Calvinist system says God is sovereign because He causes everything. The Arminian system says God foresees everything but does not direct it. Molinism says God directs everything through what He knows, not through what He causes. That is a real middle way. As William Lane Craig has described it, middle knowledge is "the single most fruitful theological concept I have ever encountered."¹⁶

Move 4: What This Means for the Hope of Universal Salvation

Now I want to apply this to the question the whole book is asking. Can we reasonably believe that God will save everyone, freely, without overriding anyone's will?

If God has middle knowledge, the answer looks very different than it does without it. Here is why.

A God with middle knowledge does not present the gospel to each person in the same generic way. He knows each person's heart with a depth no human counselor could match. He knows what would melt a given heart: the right word, the right moment, the right combination of truth and tenderness. He can compose, for each soul, the single most effective sequence of freedom-preserving appeals. The appeal that is most likely to win a free "yes" from that particular person, given everything about them.¹⁷

This is what Chapter 15 will call optimal grace: grace fitted to each heart, not a one-size-fits-all offer. Middle knowledge is the engine that makes optimal grace possible. Without it, God would be guessing. With it, God knows exactly how to reach each person without forcing them.

And notice: this does not stop at the grave. If death is not a deadline on grace (and I argue in Chapter 19 that it is not), then God has all of eternity to keep making these perfectly fitted appeals. Each appeal is tailored by middle knowledge. Each respects freedom fully. And across an infinite number of such appeals, the probability that any person holds out forever drops toward zero.

That is the mechanism behind the infinite-opportunity argument (Chapter 17). Middle knowledge is what keeps it from being merely a numbers game. It is not that God just tries and tries randomly, hoping to get lucky. It is that God knows exactly what would work, for this person, in these circumstances, and He keeps placing them in those circumstances. The appeals grow more fitting, not less, as God's unveiled presence burns away ignorance and heals wounds over time.

Picture a person, centuries after death, still resisting. God does not give up. He knows what would reach them. He knows the wound they carry, the lie they believe, the fear that keeps them closed. He knows the exact encounter that would crack the wall. And He brings it, gently and freely. No force. No threat. Just perfect knowledge meeting patient love. I find it hard to imagine that any human soul, facing that, would hold out forever. And the reason I find it hard is not that I think they cannot. It is that I cannot see why they would, once they see God clearly.

Keathley himself, while not a universalist, observes that Molinism "affirms God's genuine desire for all to be saved in a way that is problematic for Calvinism."¹⁸ I want to press that point further than Keathley does.

Think about it this way. God genuinely desires all to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4). He has perfect knowledge. He has endless patience. He can reach each soul on its own terms. So the question is not can He do it. The question is: would He stop trying? And I do not see why He would. A God of infinite love, infinite knowledge, and infinite time is a God who gets everyone home.¹⁹

Move 5: The Honest Limits

I said I would be honest, and here is where honesty costs the most. Molinism faces a real objection, and the reader deserves to hear it at full strength before I answer it.

The objection is called the grounding objection. It asks: what makes these "would" truths true? In ordinary cases, we know what makes a truth true. "The cat is on the mat" is made true by the cat being on the mat. But what about "If you had offered Jones the job, he would have taken it"? Jones was never offered the job. There is no actual event to make this true. So what grounds the truth?²⁰

Some philosophers say these counterfactual truths simply have no grounds. They have no "truthmakers," no concrete facts that make them true. And if they have no truth value, then God cannot know them, because there is nothing there to know. This is the grounding objection in its starkest form.²¹

The first is that the grounding objection assumes a particular theory of truth called truthmaker theory, on which every true statement requires some concrete entity to make it true. But most philosophers of truth today do not hold truthmaker theory. The simpler view is that a statement is true if and only if what it says is the case. As Craig has pointed out, the standard Tarski schema ("p" is true if and only if p) makes truthmakers unnecessary.²² MacGregor's careful survey of the grounding objection identifies multiple independent reasons to reject it, including the observation that even most truthmaker theorists are not "truthmaker maximalists" (people who demand a truthmaker for every truth).²³

The second is that the Molinist can offer a positive account. Timothy Stratton walks through a sequence of grounding principles. Each one is modified to handle a new class of truths (truths about things that no longer exist, truths about the future, truths about nonexistence). By the end, the most natural version of the principle says: "A true contingent proposition is true in virtue of the fact that some concrete objects exist, did exist, will exist, do not exist, or would exist under specific conditions." The "would" facts sit comfortably beside all the others.²⁴

The third is that some Molinists offer a deeper account. MacGregor, building on Molina's own suggestion, argues that God's infinite intuition grasps these counterfactual truths directly. God's "intuited beliefs about counterfactuals of creaturely freedom constitute their truthmakers." On this view, the ground of the truth is God's own perfect comprehension of creaturely natures.²⁵ The mystery, if there is one, lies in the depth of God's knowledge, not in God's character. Keathley makes this point well: "Molinists generally reply by arguing that God innately knows all things by virtue of His omniscience and that for God to have infallible knowledge of all things is simply in His nature." He adds, with refreshing candor: "I'd rather have the Molinist difficulty of not being able to explain how God's omniscience operates than the Calvinist difficulty of explaining how God is not the author of sin."²⁶

Still, I want to be honest about a further question. Is Molinism even true? Thoughtful Christians disagree. Some hold simple foreknowledge (God knows what will happen, but not middle knowledge in the Molinist sense). Some hold open theism (God does not know future free choices at all). Some hold theological determinism (God causes everything, so "would" knowledge is not needed).

I think Molinism is the best account. But the larger argument of this book does not require the full Molinist apparatus to stand. Even on a simpler view of God's knowledge, the core claim holds: a God who knows each person exhaustively, who loves each person perfectly, and who has all of eternity to work, is a God who can win every heart without forcing a single one. Middle knowledge makes the case sharper and stronger. But the case survives without it. For the full plain-language treatment of the Molinist framework and its alternatives, see Appendix D.²⁷

The Voices in the Room

The Molinist tradition has serious defenders, and I want to give credit where it belongs.

The sixteenth-century Jesuit Luis de Molina first gave the concept careful philosophical form. He coined the term "middle knowledge" and argued that it sat logically between God's natural and free knowledge. His great work, the Concordia (1588), aimed to reconcile divine grace with human freedom, and the debate it sparked, between the Jesuits and the Dominicans, became one of the most important in the history of Christian thought.²⁸

In our own time, William Lane Craig has done the most to bring Molinism into mainstream analytic philosophy. Craig argues that middle knowledge gives the most elegant account of how God can be sovereign without being the author of evil. He applies it across a wide range of problems: the problem of evil, the fate of the unevangelized, the relationship between prayer and providence. I should note, however, that Craig is not a universalist. He uses middle knowledge to argue that God has created a world with the best feasible balance of saved and lost.²⁹ I take the same tool and press it further: if God's desire is truly for all to be saved, and if middle knowledge is real, then the best feasible world is one in which all are eventually, freely saved.

Thomas Flint's major work on Molinism, Divine Providence: The Molinist Account, offers the most careful and technically precise treatment of the system. Flint explains how counterfactual truths about free creatures are logically prior to God's creative decree, and he provides a strong defense against the grounding objection. Like Craig, he is not a universalist. But his account of the mechanism is one the universalist can use with gratitude.³⁰

Kenneth Keathley brings Molinism into the Baptist and evangelical mainstream. His Salvation and Sovereignty argues that Molinism is not an exotic piece of Catholic metaphysics but a framework that arises naturally from the Bible's own teaching about sovereignty and freedom. His ROSES framework (Radical depravity, Overcoming grace, Sovereign election, Eternal life, Singular redemption) is a Molinist alternative to the Calvinist TULIP. Keathley affirms God's genuine desire for all to be saved and argues that Molinism handles this better than Calvinism can. I am drawing on his work heavily in this chapter, and I am pressing it toward a conclusion he does not himself reach.³¹

Kirk MacGregor, in Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures, extends Molinism into new areas. His defense of "divine supercomprehension" as an answer to the grounding objection is the most creative and philosophical response in print. MacGregor argues that God's perfect intuitive grasp of creaturely natures grounds the counterfactual truths. He also demonstrates that Molinism is not an imposition on Scripture but arises from it.³²

Timothy Stratton builds the case for what he calls "mere Molinism," the minimal core of the view: that God has middle knowledge and that human beings have libertarian freedom. Stratton's achievement is showing that even some Reformed theologians, when pressed, affirm both of these claims. His point is that you do not have to buy the whole Molinist package to agree that God knows what free creatures would do. That minimal commitment is enough.³³

I want to be clear about one thing. None of these scholars is a universalist. Craig, Flint, Keathley, MacGregor, and Stratton all use middle knowledge within frameworks that do not reach universal salvation. I am not enlisting them as witnesses for my conclusion. I am using the tool they have built and applying it to a question they answer differently. That is honest disagreement among people who share the same machinery. And I think the machinery, taken seriously, points further than they take it.

Counter-Objections

"Molinism is just Calvinism in disguise. God still picks who is saved by picking the circumstances."

I understand why it can look that way. If God arranges the world so that certain people freely say yes, is He not just picking them indirectly? Is this not determinism wearing a mask?³⁴

No. The difference is real, and it runs deep. In the Calvinist system (at least in its strongest forms), God causes the person's will to choose as it does. The will is determined by God's decree. On Molinism, the person's free choice is the independent variable. God does not manufacture the willing. He works with what each person would freely do. The choices are genuinely the person's own, grounded in their own nature and character. God's contribution is the arrangement of circumstances, not the production of the choice.³⁵

There is a further point here for the universalist. In traditional Calvinism, God picks some and passes over others. In the Molinist universalism I am arguing for, God does not select some for salvation and leave the rest. He uses His knowledge to reach all. He does not choose favorites. He tailors the appeal to each heart, and He keeps at it across eternity. The universalist Molinist uses the tool to save everyone, not to sort people into saved and lost.

This is also where the boundary matters. David Bentley Hart argues that universal salvation follows from the very nature of rational freedom: a truly rational will, seeing the Good clearly, cannot finally reject it. I admire Hart, and I use his moral case throughout this book. But I part from him here. As I argued in Chapter 13, I keep libertarian freedom. A real "yes" requires a possible "no." Middle knowledge does not eliminate the possible "no." It makes the "yes" overwhelmingly likely, across enough time and with enough wisdom. That is conviction, not necessity. And it is why I hold the hope humbly, as I said in Chapter 2.³⁶

Conclusion and the Boundary

Here is what this chapter has argued. God knows not only what is and what will be, but what every free person would freely do in any situation. This is middle knowledge, and it has been defended by serious philosophers from Molina in the sixteenth century to Craig, Flint, Keathley, MacGregor, and Stratton today. Scripture hints at it in passage after passage. And it dissolves the old rivalry between sovereignty and freedom: God controls all things through His knowledge, not through causal force, so freedom is real and sovereignty is complete.

For the hope of universal salvation, middle knowledge is the engine that makes the mechanism run. It means God can compose the single best sequence of saving appeals for each person. Each appeal is tailored, fitted, personal. None is coercive. And across all of eternity, these appeals grow more precise, not less. If this is right, then the question is no longer "can God save everyone freely?" The question is "why would He stop?"

I have been honest about the limits. The grounding objection is real, and I have given my reasons for thinking it fails. Molinism itself is debated among good philosophers, and I have said that the book's larger case can survive even on a weaker view of God's knowledge. But I think Molinism is right, and I think it makes the case for universal hope stronger than any competitor.

In the next chapter, I turn from the engine to the vehicle. Chapter 15 asks: if God really does have this knowledge, how does He use it? The answer is optimal grace, grace fitted to each heart. And that is where the non-coercion argument really takes flight.

The psalmist was right. God's knowledge is too wonderful for us. It is high; we cannot attain it (Psalm 139:6). But we can trust that a God who knows us that well, and who loves us that much, will not rest until every last one of us is home.³⁷

Notes

↑ 1. Luis de Molina, Liberi Arbitrii cum Gratiae Donis, Divina Praescientia, Providentia, Praedestinatione et Reprobatione Concordia (Lisbon, 1588). The title translates roughly as The Concordance of Free Choice with the Gifts of Grace, Divine Foreknowledge, Providence, Predestination, and Reprobation. The work is commonly known simply as the Concordia. For a modern critical edition and translation of the key sections, see Luis de Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge: Part IV of the Concordia, trans. Alfred J. Freddoso (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).

↑ 2. Kenneth Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty: A Molinist Approach (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2010), 5–8. Keathley frames Molinism as the only view that "coherently holds to all ten affirmations" of both the Calvinist and Arminian sides of the sovereignty-freedom debate.

↑ 3. Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, 16–17. "It is important to keep in mind that these three moments are a logical sequence, not a chronological sequence. Since God is omniscient, He innately knows all things." Timothy Stratton and Jacobus Erasmus make the same point with an analogy: "the stages of God's knowledge are logically, not temporally, prior or posterior to each other, since God has these stages eternally without beginning or timelessly." See Timothy A. Stratton and Jacobus Erasmus, "Mere Molinism," Perichoresis (2021), 25.

↑ 4. Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, 17. Natural knowledge encompasses "all possibilities, everything that could happen. He knows what reality would be like if He had created a world without you or me in it, or never created anything or anyone at all." See also Thomas P. Flint, Divine Providence: The Molinist Account (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 39–40.

↑ 5. Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, 17–18. "Molina referred to this third moment as 'free' because it is the result of God's free, sovereign decision to bring this particular world into existence."

↑ 6. Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, 18–19. The full passage is quoted in the body. The three-word summary (could, would, will) is Keathley's own mnemonic for the three moments.

↑ 7. Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, 40–41. "God does not perceive what free creatures would do, but rather He conceives their choices within Himself. That is, God does not look forward in time to ascertain what decisions we would make; instead He innately knows all free choices due to His omniscience."

↑ 8. Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, 37–38. "God told David that if he stayed in Keilah, then he would have been handed over to Saul. David promptly left and Saul gave up the chase. Divine counterfactual knowledge was used to affect the outcome in the actual world."

↑ 9. Kirk R. MacGregor, Luis de Molina: The Life and Theology of the Founder of Middle Knowledge (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015), cited in Timothy A. Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism, 2nd ed. (Freethinking Ministries, 2025). MacGregor's observation highlights that the knowledge revealed in 1 Samuel 23 is counterfactual, not foreknowledge of what will actually occur.

↑ 10. Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, 37–38. The two scenarios presented to Zedekiah are "possible world scenarios," on Keathley's analysis: two genuinely open futures, each conditional on a free choice.

↑ 11. Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, 38. "When Jesus denounced the cities in which He had preached and performed miracles, He made counterfactual statements to emphasize their culpability." The relevance for middle knowledge is direct: Jesus speaks as though the repentance of Tyre and Sidon was a determinate truth, not a guess.

↑ 12. Jay Wesley Richards, cited in Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, 37. Other biblical examples of counterfactual language include Exodus 32:10 (God's counterfactual promise to Moses about destroying Israel and raising a nation from Moses) and 1 Samuel 13:13–14 (Samuel tells Saul his kingdom would have been established permanently had he obeyed). See also Matthew 26:24; John 15:22, 24; 18:36; 1 Corinthians 2:8.

↑ 13. The chess analogy is imperfect, since even a grandmaster cannot anticipate every possible move with certainty; God's knowledge, by contrast, is exhaustive and infallible. The analogy serves to illustrate the basic mechanism: achievement through knowledge rather than causal control.

↑ 14. Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, 152. The context is Keathley's chapter on sovereign election. He continues: "Remember the example of Simon Peter's denial of the Lord. The Lord predicted Peter would deny Him and by use of middle knowledge ordained the scenario with infallible certainty that Peter would do so. However, God did not make or cause Peter to do as he did."

↑ 15. Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, 152. MacGregor also emphasizes the Peter example. See Kirk R. MacGregor, Luis de Molina, 92–93.

↑ 16. The remark is widely attributed to Craig and appears in several of his published discussions of middle knowledge. See also Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, 7, where Keathley quotes Craig's assessment.

↑ 17. The concept of a perfectly fitted saving appeal, tailored to each individual through God's knowledge of what they would freely do, is developed more fully in Chapter 15 under the heading of "optimal grace," following Jerry Walls's framework in Hell: The Logic of Damnation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992).

↑ 18. Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, 152–153. Keathley notes that most Calvinists "have either denied God's desire for all to be saved, or else they claimed that God has a secret will which trumps His revealed will." Molinism, he argues, avoids this tension.

↑ 19. The argument here presses Keathley's own premises further than he takes them. Keathley affirms that God genuinely desires all to be saved and that middle knowledge equips God to pursue that desire through perfectly arranged circumstances. The present chapter draws the conclusion that, given infinite time and infinite wisdom, the desire is fulfilled. This extension is the author's own, not Keathley's.

↑ 20. The grounding objection has a long history. Robert Adams may have been the first to hint at it; see Robert Merrihew Adams, "Middle Knowledge and the Problem of Evil," American Philosophical Quarterly 14, no. 2 (1977): 109–117. It was developed most fully by William Hasker in God, Time, and Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 39–52.

↑ 21. For a clear recent summary of the objection and the main responses, see Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism, ch. 13. See also Kirk R. MacGregor, Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2023), ch. 3.

↑ 22. William Lane Craig, "Truth-Makers and Counterfactuals," cited in MacGregor, Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures, ch. 3. Craig argues that truthmaker theory is a minority view among contemporary metaphysicians and that Tarski's T-schema renders truthmakers unnecessary for truth. See also Craig, "Middle Knowledge View," in James K. Beilby and Paul R. Eddy, eds., Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2001), 138.

↑ 23. MacGregor, Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures, ch. 3. MacGregor identifies multiple "exits" from the grounding objection: rejecting truthmaker theory entirely, rejecting truthmaker maximalism, appealing to the disquotation principle, and his own account based on divine supercomprehension.

↑ 24. Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism, ch. 13. The sequence of revised grounding principles is Stratton's own formulation, building on the work of Trenton Merricks and Jonathan Tallant.

↑ 25. MacGregor, Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures, ch. 3. MacGregor's proposal, called "divine supercomprehension," is that God's intuitive knowledge of creaturely essences grounds the truth of counterfactuals. This is inspired by Molina's own notion of supercomprehensio, in which God's perfect grasp of each creaturely nature yields infallible knowledge of what that creature would do in any circumstance.

↑ 26. Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, 162. The full passage continues: "In other words, Molinism's difficulties are with God's infinite attributes rather than His holy and righteous character."

↑ 27. Appendix D provides the full plain-language primer on middle knowledge for readers who want a more detailed treatment than this chapter offers. It includes a glossary of technical terms and a fuller discussion of the grounding objection and the alternative accounts of God's knowledge.

↑ 28. The Jesuit-Dominican controversy over Molinism, sometimes called the De Auxiliis controversy, occupied Catholic theology from the 1580s through 1607, when Pope Paul V suspended the debate without ruling for either side. See MacGregor, Luis de Molina: The Life and Theology of the Founder of Middle Knowledge (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015), for the fullest recent biography and intellectual history. Note that the medieval theologians Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas had earlier proposed three-moment models of divine knowledge, but Molina was the first to identify the second moment as a distinct kind of knowledge and to demonstrate its power for reconciling sovereignty and freedom. See Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, 16–17.

↑ 29. William Lane Craig, The Only Wise God: The Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987). See also Craig, "The Middle-Knowledge View," in Beilby and Eddy, Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views, 119–143. Craig's own position is that God has created a world with "an optimal balance between the number of the saved and the number of the damned" (quoted in Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, 153). Note Craig's statement, cited by MacGregor: "The lost are not created as mere means to some end…. Rather as persons created in God's image the lost are ends in themselves and are loved and valued by God, who wills their salvation." See MacGregor, Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures, ch. 2, footnote 63.

↑ 30. Flint, Divine Providence: The Molinist Account, esp. 39–52, 138–158. Flint's treatment of the grounding objection in chapters 6–7 of Divine Providence remains one of the most careful in the literature. His distinction between "causal-style" and "truthmaker-style" grounding objections, extended by his student Andrew Jensen, has shaped the subsequent debate.

↑ 31. Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty. The ROSES framework is introduced at pages 2–8 and developed across the book's seven chapters. Keathley does not draw the universalist conclusion; his position is that God's sovereign election, mediated by middle knowledge, results in a world where many (but not all) are freely saved. The move from "God genuinely desires the salvation of all" to "God will achieve the salvation of all" is the step the present book takes beyond Keathley's own framework.

↑ 32. MacGregor, Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures. MacGregor's central argument in ch. 3 is that "God's intuited beliefs about counterfactuals of creaturely freedom (CCFs) constitute their truthmakers, thus yielding a novel answer to the grounding objection." His ch. 1–2 argue that Molinism arises from the Bible's own teaching and "provides the best explanation of various categories of scriptural texts that have historically been regarded as in tension with one another."

↑ 33. Timothy A. Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism, 2nd ed. (Freethinking Ministries, 2025). "Mere Molinism" is defined as "the conjunction of two core claims: (1) God possesses middle knowledge… logically prior to his creative decree—and (2) humans possess libertarian freedom." See the exchange Stratton reports with a Reformed theologian who, after reflection, conceded: "If that's what it means to be a Molinist, then I guess I'm a Molinist!" Stratton's point is that the core of Molinism is not denominational or sectarian; it is a minimal philosophical commitment about God's knowledge and human freedom.

↑ 34. This objection is raised frequently in popular theological discussions and is addressed at length in Flint, Divine Providence, ch. 8, and in Stratton, Mere Molinism, ch. 13. Stratton's reply identifies the charge as a "straw man" and argues that God's knowledge is grounded in His perfection, not in any dependence on creaturely freedom.

↑ 35. The formal distinction is between God as the efficient cause of choices (the Calvinist-determinist model) and God as the circumstantial arranger who knows what free creatures would do and places them accordingly (the Molinist model). On the Molinist model, the person's choice is genuinely their own; God's role is to know it in advance and to situate the person where that free choice serves His purposes. See Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, 150–153.

↑ 36. See Chapter 2 for the full treatment of why this book holds its conclusion as overwhelming conviction rather than metaphysical necessity, and Chapter 13 for the parting from Hart on the question of freedom.

↑ 37. Psalm 139:1–6 (ESV): "O LORD, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar.… Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it." The psalm does not use the term "middle knowledge," but it captures the experiential reality on which the concept rests: a God who knows every dimension of our lives, including the interior life of thought and intention, with a depth that exceeds our own self-knowledge.

What God Knows About Every “What If”

The Question on the Table