Introduction. Traditional theism proposes certain hypotheses about the nature of God that are bound to be questionable under different logical and thinking approaches. The problem of evil and the problem of free-will are the two mutually inseparable, yet distinctly evocative challenges that traditional theists need to overcome in order to sustain their belief system. Molinism, the term coined to represent the views of Luis de Molina (1535-1600) and the ideas derived from his views, offers by way of explanation, God’s omniscience and omni-benevolence that support theistic ideology in some aspects and weaken it in others. Molinism depicts God’s omniscience in a way that it can both offer free-will to human beings and explain the existence of evil in an intuitive and infinite way known as “middle knowledge”. Here, God presents a being with circumstances, but the choices you make in those circumstances are entirely yours. To do or to not do evil, to choose the morally deterministic path or not under a certain circumstance is indeed equivalent to exercising free will, but the Molinistic view holds that God has the foreknowledge of what choices a person will make under factual and counterfactual circumstances. If one chooses evil, according to Molinism, it still serves God’s plan for the realisation of a greater good which is basically saying that God’s plan encompasses all the choices that one is likely to make at any point in one’s life.
The choice of evil is the solution of evil. The presupposition of Molinism is that evil is a choice taken by human beings when the circumstance offers it. The idea is to take a broader view of God’s omniscience and understanding that although God might not stop one from performing evil because of his omni-benevolence, the result of which is free will, he knows in a probabilistic or intuitive sense as to what choices will be made under several counterfactual circumstances (Flint, Divine Providence: The Molinist Account, Philosophical Studies, 98). The probabilistic approach diminishes God’s omniscience in several ways. But, in the context of evil, it adds up to the spirit of salvation. For example, if a person counterfactually will commit the evil act of vengeance when presented with an opportunity, according to Monolist ideology, God knows with a great deal of probability what the outcome will be. But a counterfactual circumstance is either true or false. It need not definitely result in the predicted outcome. It might just happen that this person, at the last minute, realises what he is about to do and not commit the evil after all according to his own free will. This need not necessarily mean that God’s omniscience is questionable, because it is much deeper than it is possible to imagine. Free will being the truest gift of all, it will pertain in every moment during the occurrence of an event, right from loosely making the decision to commit evil to actually performing the action. At any second, a person could change his heart and choose a more morally correct path. At the same time, the person could also, after deciding not to give attention to his evil intentions, might be triggered by external circumstance to go back to his original decision. If every second of the evil act or every shred of information relating to a naturally existing evil is taken into account, the sum of all good and bad elements including the intentions, results and an offset of changes that succeed the evil might just prove that in the end, more good was done than evil. But that end result cannot be perceived and can only be believed by the feeble human mind because only God is omniscient.
Logic and Theism. This is the logic behind the Molinistic approach to the problem of evil in a way that it is counter-intuitive and counterproductive even to question the will of God. Traditional theists might not be fully satisfied with the Molinist’s logical approach because of the inclusion of such things as miracles and other forms and attributes given to God. In that way, the price they pay maybe too high in giving to Molinism because any logical approach is counter-intuitive to all the qualities God is supposed to possess.
Creation and Omniscience: Process Theism in the Current World
As two most important characteristics of God, Creation and Omniscience are both on-going processes that aid God in implementing his plan for the human race, or maybe all creatures. In the current world, there are several issues, in fact, hundreds of thousands of them that routinely bring to question God’s very existence. If there is God that is seeing all the unjust suffering that human beings, other animals and even nature has to go through due to the greed and selfishness of a few people, why wouldn’t he as a benevolent and omnipotent creator remove the evils of the world? The question is whether God sees the events of the world as we see them, with a temporal view point although his existence is non-temporal. If he is looking at his creation from a non-temporal view point, there would be no cause for him to correct the apparent unjust sufferings of the creatures on earth as soon as they occur. On the other hand, if God’s omniscience is temporal and he can see and feel everything a human being or a creature can feel, he would be just as much in the dark as to the future events which will be the result of future decisions and therefore could not be held responsible for all things wrong in the world.
The idea is to believe that creation and omniscience go hand in hand. Science has proved that the universe is expanding. Creation is vast and timeless, but what is indeed affected by time is perception or God’s omniscience. On a cosmic scale, it is not hard to imagine that every evil and every suffering has a greater purpose, because in such a hypothesis that the universe is expanding, there is more scope for creation that for destruction or evil.
