If God’s knowledge is truly complete and not composed of parts, then we must be careful not to describe it in ways that suggest process, deliberation, or dependence on hypothetical conditions outside of Himself. God does not deliberate as creatures do, nor does He come to knowledge through a process of reasoning. He knows all things. There is nothing for Him to evaluate or learn. God is not processing anything. He is the Great “I AM.” He simply is.

Some presentations of middle knowledge appear to move beyond the original concerns of Luis de Molina himself into what might be described as a kind of “Hyper-Molinism” or a Molinism 2.0—an increasingly elaborate attempt to explain divine providence and human freedom through possible-world constructions. I am not deeply versed in these discussions, so I will speak cautiously. But I have seen it argued that God created a world in which all those who would believe are saved, and all those who would not believe are not saved—regardless of which possible world God might have chosen.

William Lane Craig has argued along similar lines[1], but if one reads the explanation for how this is said to work, it can seem unnecessarily complicated and difficult to follow. It appears to be an attempt to answer the question of fairness—why God does not save everyone—by appealing to the idea that, of all possible worlds, God has actualized the best one. Within that framework, those who do not believe are not saved because they would not have believed under any set of circumstances. The responsibility, then, rests entirely on the sinner. This explanation is often presented as a way of preserving both God’s goodness and human freedom.

But it is not clear that this resolves the original tension. Instead, it seems to introduce a different problem. If a person would not believe in any possible world, what becomes of the force of the Gospel call to that person? The concern is not merely philosophical. It can begin to feel almost fatalistic, as though the outcome is fixed across all possible worlds. If that is the case, it becomes difficult to see how the free offer of the Gospel remains meaningfully free.

For all its sophistication, it is not clear that middle knowledge solves the problem it is meant to address. It seems instead to push the question back one step. 

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