Between Hartshorne and Molina: A Whiteheadian Conception of Divine Foreknowledge

Abstract

Abstract The doctrine of inerrant divine "middle knowledge" of future contingent events, first developed by the sixteenth century Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina, has resurfaced as a prominent position within contemporary debates over divine foreknowledge, creaturely freedom, and the ontological status of possibilities. As yet, the only substantive response to the new Molinism from a process perspectiv has come in a brief section on "Hartshorne and the Challenge of Molinism," in an essay on Hartshorne’s view of "The Logic of Future Contingents" by George W. Shields and Donald W. Viney, in Shields’ edited anthology Process and Analysis. Shields and Viney offer an insightful critique of Molinism. However, their use of Hartshorne’s understanding of possibility presents problems for those, like me, who prefer Whitehead’s more robustly realist notion of eternal objects. Here, I defend Whitehead’s Platonism from the main lines of criticism leveled against it by Hartshorne, while demonstrating that a "thick" conception of the objective content of the possible within the context of the divine understanding need not cross over into a deterministic conception of God’s foreknowledge, à la Molina.