Divine Foreknowledge - A Comprehensive Examination :
(1) "Foreknowledge - How Could God Know The Future (Part 1 of 2)"
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgSriOp2gFc >
(2) "Foreknowledge - How Could God Know The Future (Part 2 of 2)"
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62LkIxJofcQ >
Arminianism and Molinism on Divine Foreknowledge :
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1703&context=honors
[The following has been extracted from the above linked article, and was written by Nathan Justice as a Senior Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation in the Honors Program at Liberty University in the Spring of 2017].
"At their core, Arminianism and Molinism agree about the proper definition of
divine foreknowledge. Both camps hold that the biblical evidence supports God’s
completely and infallibly knowing the future; the difference arises when one addresses the implications of this definition.
Arminians hold that divine foreknowledge alone is sufficient to explain God’s providential control over creation and the coherent conjunction of God’s sovereignty and human responsibility. However, it was shown that divineforeknowledge alone is incapable of supporting a strong theory of providential control, since it eliminates God’s ability to deliberate between options.
By contrast, Molinism establishes a basis for strong providential control through its affirmation of divine middle knowledge, and it coherently maintains God’s sovereignty and human responsibility. Additionally, Reformed Molinism conjoins Robert Kane’s event-causal libertarianism with Molinism and Reformed soteriology to produce the most biblically consistent and philosophically/theologically coherent view available."
A Molinist View of Election Or How to Be a Consistent Infralapsarian - Ken Keathley :
https://philarchive.org/archive/FREITL
[The following is the concluding statement of the above linked article made by Ken Keathley - Senior Professor of Theology and the Jesse Hendley Chair of Theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina].
"Sometimes Molinism is described as inconsistent Calvinism, but one could argue that it is the other way around. Perhaps infralapsarian Calvinism is inconsistent Molinism. So I say to my infralapsarian brethren, that in regard to the concept of permission, Molinists have simply taken the steps you want to take, or at least you want to appear to have taken. If you wish to be consistent, you have a choice: either supralapsarianism or Molinism. '
I am thankful for the contributions that Calvinists are making to Southern Baptist
life. They are right to call Southern Baptists away from pragmatic methodologies and
reaffirm that salvation is a sovereign work of God. However, the decretal approach to
election taken by Calvinism seems to create more problems than it solves.
Molinism does not provide an explanation as to why God created a world in which it was possible for sin to enter, but it is not necessary to do so. Molinism is a defense, not a theodicy. A theodicy is an attempt to explain why God ordained the world he did. A defense is much more modest. A defense simply attempts to demonstrate that it is logically consistent to believe that a good and sovereign God can purpose to create a world like ours. Molinism accomplishes this. If one is going to do justice to the doctrine of God, he must affirm both God’s sovereignty and his permission. Molinism presents a forceful affirmation of both."
William Lane Craig explains how the Arminian perspective of God's "Simple Foreknowledge" does not account or allow for Divine Providential control :
Watch @30:32 - 34:00 mins. <
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWly0PlaTMI >
"Proponents of Simple Foreknowledge of the future, without Middle Knowledge, can make no good sense of God's Providential planning of a world of free creatures. For logically prior to the Divine Decree, God has only Natural Knowledge of the possible scenarios and no knowledge whatsover of what would happen under any circumctances.
Thus logically posterior to the Divine Decree, God must consider Himself extraordinarily "lucky" to find that this world happened to exist. "What a break", we can imagine God saying to Himself ... Herod, and Pilate, and all those people, all reacted just perfectly. Actually, the situation is much worse than that, for God had no idea whether Herod, or Pilate, or the Israelite nation, or the Roman Empire would even exist posterior to the Divine Decree.
Indeed God must be astonished to find Himself existing in a world out of all the possible worlds that He could have created, in which mankind falls into sin and God Himself enters human history as a substitutional sacrificial offering to rescue them. Now of course I'm speaking anthropomorphically here, but the point remains, without Middle knowledge God cannot know prior to the Creative Decree what the world would be like.
If the defender of Simple Foreknowledge goes on to say that God's foreordination of future events is based upon His Simple Foreknowledge, then this trivializes the doctrine of foreordination, making it a "fifth wheel" which carries no weight ... since the future, by definition, cannot be changed once God knows that an event really is future ... there's nothing more left for foreordination to do ... foreordination becomes a redundancy. And surely there's more substance to the Biblical doctrine of foreordination then the triviality that God decrees that "what [ever] will happen will happen ..."