I'm going to re-order this post slightly in order to bear out the sort of priority I will pursue in future posts. (Again, feel free to trim it down
) First a quick preliminary remark:
I'll leave open the question of whether this means free will is even possible in these circumstances.
There is a current in your thought that seems to deny free will (in one way or another). Since it bears heavily on this conversation it will be good to keep in mind. I will come back to this point at various places below. Needless to say, the Christian is strongly committed to free will.
I don't think that's right, and I've already given what I think to be a sufficient response. The problem is that "barriers," "omniscience," and "omnipotence" are all essentially quantitative terms in your lexicon, but free will presents a qualitative impediment that cannot simply be steam-rolled by omniscience and omnipotence.
I'm not suggesting that it can be "steam-rolled," but that any barriers arising due to free decisions could probably be overcome by an agent possessing the properties of omniscience and omnipotence.
But why do you think that? You give one reason here:
If mere mortals like us can overcome such barriers (through persuasion, for example) without violating someone's free will, then I don't see why this would present as an intractable problem for a deity whose power and foresight far surpasses our own. If anything, such a being would have an incomparable advantage in forming relationships because, as I mentioned previously, it would know the best way to reach any individual, regardless of their initial disposition.
Humans often overcome the barrier of free will; God is greater than humans; therefore God could all the more overcome this barrier.
I'm wondering about your first premise. In what way do humans overcome barriers such as free will? Perhaps they talk someone into making a deal or forming a contractual agreement. Maybe they form a relationship of friendship or romance.
Yet most human relationships are what might be called relationships of utility. Their heart is mutual benefit. Some marriages transcend this limit, some do not, but I don't think that the relationship that God extends to us is very much at all like a relationship of utility. Conversion tends to be a much more radical move than a contractual agreement. It is a fundamental turning away from self towards God, away from one's own interests towards something that transcends them all. I don't think you'll find many humans creating such a conversion.
Indeed, as I pointed out before, the very place where such a conversion seems most necessary in human affairs is in the case of addicts and suicidal persons. Yet in my experience these are precisely the sorts of problems that we have the hardest time "fixing." It is precisely in the context of a deep conversion where the barrier becomes insurmountable, as experience bears out.
Are some individuals "unreachable"? Potentially. But then who is to blame for this? You seem to want to assign blame to the individual for freely rejecting the offer of a relationship. Given the unfathomable power differential, I'm more inclined to attribute it to the one who created such an individual knowing that they would forever remain "unreachable" and therefore in a wretched state of damnation.
Earlier I explained the essential bidirectional nature of relationships and pointed out why a power differential does not have much to do with it. There is an enormous power differential between Bill Gates and Mother Teresa, but that doesn't lead me to believe that Bill Gates has some kind of necessary relational power over her. Why would a power differential matter if relationships--particularly the kind of friendship-relationships God is interested in--aren't based in power?
In my view, this serves to expose the problems that inevitably arise when one inserts a deity into a social situation. The power differential is so immense that it becomes impossible for this not to be an issue.
Whereas on my view, if one actually believes in free will, then friendship-relationships simply don't come down to power differentials.
In any case, he remains entirely certain of the outcome of his creation: he either creates Sue to freely accept him or to freely reject him. In other words, he either creates her to be saved or to be damned. I'll leave open the question of whether this means free will is even possible in these circumstances.
This is one of those places where it seems that you are denying free will. Why would God either create her to be saved or damned? That simply doesn't follow for anyone who believes in free will.
What seems clear enough is that, being omniscient, he cannot be ignorant of the ultimate outcome either way. So he is left with a choice: to either create Sue knowing what she will do (accept/reject) or to not create her.
Or he could create her with free will and wait to see what happens. (I will address this in more detail below).
I think you've touched on something that is almost universal in human relationships, but which is absent once omniscience and omnipotence enter the picture - risk.
I disagree, but it depends what you mean by "risk."
In forming relationships with others, we each face the risk of rejection because we remain uncertain of the other person's intentions and disposition.
Whereas I would say that we would still face the risk of rejection even if we were certain of the other person's intentions and disposition. Our knowledge of intentions and dispositions isn't going to change the possibility of rejection.
We risk wasting our limited resources in trying to persuade them to willingly accept us. We risk opportunities to form better relationships with more willing partners. We take risks in forming alliances that may upset others in the social situation, and so on.
Risking limited resources, opportunities, and social stability is not the same as risking rejection. Generally speaking, God does not risk any of these things, yet he does risk rejection.
When we make a decision not knowing exactly what the outcome will be, we experience some of level risk. An omniscient being faces no such limitation; he knows exactly what the outcome will be in any given situation.
Again, if we knew the outcome this would not eliminate all risk. Nor does it with God.
But one of the deep issues I believe you're confusing is the nature of God's omniscience. God is not a temporal being like we are. Since this is so related to the next quote, let me take it up there:
In my view, I simply don't think you can reconcile this with omniscience. If, at any point, he does not know what will ultimately become of Sue, then he cannot be considered omniscient. Ignorance of any kind is incompatible with omniscience.
I am not saying that he doesn't know, I am just saying that you are misconstruing the nature of that knowledge. You seem to be conflating temporal precedence with logical precedence. (This has a great deal to do with the grounding objection to Molinism.)
Suppose you know "exactly what the outcome will be," and thus "experience no level of risk." How do you know what the outcome will be? This is the key question. Your talk of "intentions and dispositions" smells of a determinism that denies free will. If you--or God--knew exactly what the future outcome would be
based on perfect knowledge of the present (i.e. determining conditions), then there would be no risk in the relevant sense. But if you hold free will, then knowledge of that kind is flat out impossible. No knowledge of the present could extinguish someone's free will and deny their ability to do otherwise (although probabilistic calculations are perfectly possible).
God knows the "future" because he is not bound by temporality as we are. He does not know the future by reasoning from perfect knowledge of the present. He knows the future immediately, without any medium of reasoning. The reason he knows what you will do tomorrow is because he has already seen you do it (to speak metaphorically). He is equally present to all moments of time. Yet he saw you act
freely, just as someone who watched you type into the computer saw you act freely.
...which brings us to one of the problems with Molinism. It is not at all clear that God could determine how a free being would act apart from its actually acting. If the logical grounding for his knowledge of free actions is their existence, then how could that knowledge exist absent the actual existence of free actions? While I grant that your theoretical scenario and conception of God were well-intentioned, I think they mask a determinism that lies in your own premises. When that determinism is combined with purportedly free actions, absurdities naturally arise. But the absurdities are not proper to Christianity, which denies the premise you unconsciously injected.
I also want to point out that this is a surface-level problem with Molinism. I personally tend to think that there are much deeper problems, that Molinism contains problematic premises similar to your own, but much more subtle.
I don't think one can say that she has "intrinsic worth" if her value is ultimately conferred by some other being who created her for the specific purpose of forming a relationship with him.
Quickly, her value is not limited to that. She has a natural worth apart from her supernatural end. The older theory relates to the common good of the natural universe, while a newer theory relates to the intrinsic worth of a free agent as such, but there are probably others as well.
Your solution envisions a God who creates only individuals who will freely love him and who abstains from creating those individuals who would freely reject him. This seems to create a strange asymmetry in freedom, which by nature ought to create the symmetrical options of relationship or rejection. That is, creation would never witness freedom in its fullness. The universe would be narrow and artificial in that respect.
There is already a huge asymmetry in the nature of the relationship, so I don't see why this particular asymmetry would be problematic.
The asymmetry I noted has nothing to do with asymmetry in the nature of relationship, it has to do with an asymmetry in freedom itself. Freedom would entail the possibility of choosing (A or ~A), but the universe would only ever witness anyone choosing A. "You can have any color you want as long as it's black" (Henry Ford). This would obviously take a bit more time to explore in depth, but it is
prima facie bizarre.
Yes, Sue would still be free to decide. I'm inclined to agree with that conclusion tentatively, ignoring questions about free will, at least for the moment. But it does reflect poorly on the character of her creator, does it not? He created her knowing that she would never be united with him, and then also instituted the punishment for not being united with him.
I addressed this above.
Once you rid yourself of the causal connotation in God's knowledge you could find a Molinist and argue this point with him. It would probably be an interesting discussion. For me it's a non-starter.
I'm conscious of the fact that this is an area of significant debate among Christians. I thank you for your response though, since you've addressed my comments thoughtfully, as well as prompting me to think!
I thank you as well. It feels a bit like trying deep-sea diving before learning how to swim, but what the heck.