Mystery or Missing Ground?

Reflections from a Friendly Exchange on Molinism, Reformed Concurrence, and Divine Providence

This blog post is a plain-language, easy-to-read version of a longer scholarly essay. If you prefer a more detailed, fully documented, and academically rigorous treatment of these issues, the complete essay, The Missing Ground, is available for download at the end of this post. It grew out of an actual Facebook conversation; the replies simply outgrew the comment box. For those who prefer listening rather than reading, a companion Spotify podcast covering what is discussed in the paper is also available near the end of this post.

A Friend, a Thread, and a Fair Question

A brother in Christ recently urged me, in a Facebook comment, to “try reading about Molinism… a better way of explaining this than Calvinism.” It is a friendly and increasingly common recommendation. Molinism is enjoying a genuine moment of popularity, and the people commending it are usually thoughtful believers who care, as I do, about honoring everything the Bible says about God’s sovereignty and everything it says about human responsibility.

What followed was a substantial back-and-forth. My friend eventually pressed the point harder, insisting that Calvinism is “drowning in questions it cannot answer,” that it is “biblically incoherent at its foundation,” and his sharpest line, that my very own doctoral work, (dissertation ongoing), is still trying to explain Calvinism’s hurdles,” which he offered as proof that the system is broken. The exchange was respectful and well-read throughout, and I want to answer it in the same spirit. Because the replies grew far too long for a comment thread, I have gathered them here.

Let me say at the outset what this post is not. It is not a claim that Calvinism has no hard questions; it does, and I will name the hardest one myself. It is a comparison. The real issue is not whether one view faces difficulties, every serious account of providence does, but which view faces the fewer and less severe difficulties while remaining faithful to Scripture. On that comparison, I remain persuaded that the Reformed position is stronger, and here is why.

What Molinism Is Trying to Do

Let me state Molinism at its best, because a position is only worth engaging in its strongest form. Molinism wants to hold two things together that can feel like they are pulling apart: that God is completely in control of history, and that human choices are genuinely free in the strong, “could-have-done-otherwise” sense. Its ingenious proposal is that God possesses a special kind of knowledge (middle knowledge) that lets Him accomplish the first without overriding the second.

Stated that way, it is easy to see the appeal. It looks like it keeps God fully sovereign and human beings fully free, with no coercion anywhere. If it worked cleanly, it would be a remarkable solution. The trouble is a single question that the whole system rests on and that it has never been able to answer.

The One Problem Molinism Can’t Shake

Everything in Molinism hangs on those “would-freely-choose” facts being true before God decides anything. So here is the question philosophers call the grounding objection: what makes them true?

Notice why the problem is so stubborn. The whole point of Molinism is libertarian freedom, choices not settled by prior causes. But that is exactly what removes every possible answer to “what makes it true.” If Peter’s character and circumstances did settle the choice, we would have our answer, but the choice would no longer be libertarian free. The one feature Molinism exists to protect is the feature that empties the cupboard of truth-makers.

Molinists have offered answers, and fairness requires naming them. Thomas Flint argues that the truth about what a person would freely choose is grounded in that person’s unique identity or “individual essence.” Others, following Alvin Plantinga, say that such truths do not need any explanation; they are simply true. Both views face problems. A person’s individual essence is necessary and unchanging, but a free choice is contingent, it could have gone differently. Something necessary and fixed cannot adequately explain why a person freely chooses one option rather than another. On the other hand, saying that these truths have no explanation leaves them as brute facts: truths that no one caused or determined, not even God. These facts would therefore exist independently of God’s will and would, in effect, place limits on what God can do.

“But God Is Outside Time”

My friend’s reply was that I am confusing God being “inside the time loop” with His being outside of time, that because God is eternal, He simply sees what Peter will do. This is a natural response, but it misses what the objection is actually asking.

The grounding objection is not about when God knows, or from what vantage point He sees. It is about what makes the thing He knows true in the first place. God’s timelessness beautifully explains how He can know all of history at once without waiting for it to unfold. What it does not explain is why “Peter would freely deny” is the true option rather than “Peter would freely stay faithful.” Seeing a fact, even seeing it eternally, from outside time still presupposes that there is a fact there to see. Timelessness answers a real question, just not this one.

“Denying Counterfactuals Limits God”

My friend also argued that to question Molinist counterfactuals is to say God’s wisdom and sovereignty are limited by human action, that God “cannot know” or “cannot control” what people would do. This presents a false choice, as if the only two options were Molinism or an ignorant God.

Calvinism affirms, without the slightest hesitation, that God knows every possibility and governs all of history down to the smallest detail. What it denies is something much narrower: that God’s plan must depend on a set of free-choice facts that He did not cause, determine, or decide. The Calvinist does not shrink God’s knowledge; he simply grounds it in God’s own will and decree rather than in facts floating outside of Him. So the real options are not “middle knowledge or an ignorant God.” They are: counterfactuals grounded in God, or counterfactuals grounded in nothing.

There is also a quiet slide here between knowing and controlling. Knowing what someone would freely do is not the same as determining it. Molinism says God steers history by choosing which world to create in light of what people would freely do. But if those free-choice facts are true independently of God’s will, then the menu of worlds God can choose from is fixed by facts He did not author. He may pick from the menu, but He did not write it.

Does Molinism Even Keep Freedom?

Here is an irony worth sitting with. Suppose God knowingly creates the exact world in which Peter will deny Christ. In that actual world, the denial is now certain, it cannot fail to happen without making God’s knowledge false. So the very determinism Molinism wanted to escape reappears at the end: once God selects the world, every “free” act is locked in.

Molinists reply, fairly, that Peter still has a kind of freedom, had he been going to choose differently, God would have known a different fact, and that something being certain is not the same as it being forced. I grant both distinctions. But notice what they amount to: a freedom that lives across possible worlds, not within the one God actually chose. In the world we live in, the one God selected, the outcome is as fixed as anything in Calvinism. Molinism has not really removed the determination; it has relocated it from God’s decree to a set of eternally fixed facts that God did not decree. That is a strange trade: the same certainty, but now anchored in something outside of God.

What the Bible Actually Says

All of this must finally answer to Scripture, and here a careful distinction matters. Yes, the Bible clearly teaches that God knows what would happen under conditions that never come to pass. David is told what Saul and the men of Keilah would do if he stayed (1 Samuel 23:10–13). Jesus says Tyre and Sidon would have repented had they seen His miracles (Matthew 11:21–23). Paul says the rulers would not have crucified the Lord had they understood (1 Corinthians 2:8).

But look closely at what these verses establish and what they do not. They prove that God knows counterfactuals. They do not prove the extra, distinctly Molinist claims: that these are libertarian-free choices, that they are true before God’s decree, and that God uses them to pick which world to create. Those are philosophical add-ons, not statements of the text. Every Calvinist happily affirms that God knows counterfactuals; the debate is about the machinery Molinism builds on top of them.

Meanwhile, the texts that most directly address our actual question, how sovereignty and responsibility fit together, point in the Reformed direction. They put both truths in one breath, about one event:

These verses do not answer every philosophical puzzle they raise. But they set the data any faithful model must preserve. And notice: the Reformed position does not have to bend these texts to fit a theory. It simply reads them.

So What About Calvinism’s Hard Question?

I promised to name Calvinism’s hardest problem, and here it is. The Reformed doctrine of concurrence says God fully governs an event and the creature genuinely, freely causes it, both completely true of the same act. Classically, the tradition has affirmed this while leaving the how a mystery. That is a real limitation.

But it is crucial to name the limitation precisely, because a great deal turns on it. An unexplained mechanism is not the same as a contradiction. To say two complete descriptions of one event do not compete is not to say something self-contradictory; it is to say something whose inner workings have not yet been spelled out. “Incomplete” and “incoherent” are very different verdicts, the first invites more work, the second demands surrender. Calvinism’s difficulty is the first kind.

And spelling out that mechanism is precisely what my doctoral work attempts. Working within a framework I call Theoikophysignosis, which keeps Scripture as the governing norm and treats philosophy, science, and formal modeling as strictly subordinate tools, I draw on the idea of complementary descriptions: the recognition that one and the same event can be completely described on two different levels without the descriptions crowding each other out. The divine description (God governs the event) and the human description (the person freely does it) answer different questions, so they were never competing for the same space to begin with. The aim is modest but real: not to peer inside God’s mind or prove the actual mechanism, but to show that the two truths can be held together without contradiction. A model that shows a doctrine can be coherently pictured is not a proof that it is true, but it does dissolve the charge that it is incoherent. By the way, I will also be presenting a lecture on Theoikophysignosis, focusing specifically on the proposed mechanism for understanding how divine sovereignty and genuine human agency may operate together without contradiction. The lecture will be delivered at the Reformation Conference Cebu 2026, happening on October 21–23, 2026.For more information visit www.refconcebu.org 📍Register for the conference here: https://forms.gle/fzGFvqpBn2ceztfs9 (Chose the break out session: DECODING THE DIVINE DILEMMA)

“Your 2026 Work Proves Calvinism Is Drowning”

This was my friend’s sharpest point, so let me take it head-on. The argument assumes that ongoing scholarly work on a doctrine proves the doctrine is failing. But that simply does not follow. Living doctrines attract continued study precisely because they are deep, not because they are broken. The Trinity, the Incarnation, the atonement, and the problem of evil all have vast, active literatures in 2026, and no one sensibly concludes they are collapsing. By this standard, the whole of serious theology would stand convicted.

Worse for the objection, it cuts against Molinism far more sharply. Molinism has a large and busy contemporary literature, (Craig, Flint, Keathley, and the critics answering them) all still laboring to ground those counterfactuals. If “people are still working on it” proved a system was drowning, Molinism would be underwater beside Calvinism. The argument refutes the hand that raises it.

And the history runs the opposite way from what the remark implies. If any position had to be rescued from near-extinction, it is Molinism. After Molina proposed it in 1588 and a long Catholic controversy ended without a ruling, middle knowledge faded from serious discussion for roughly three centuries. It never became the confessional position of any major Protestant tradition; where Protestants did adopt it, it entered mainly through Arminius and the Remonstrants, the very stream the Reformed churches rejected at the Synod of Dort. It owes its modern comeback to Alvin Plantinga in 1974, after which Craig and Flint built out the system we debate today. The Reformed account of sovereignty and freedom, by contrast, has an unbroken confessional life across five centuries, Calvin, Dort, Westminster, the Puritans, Edwards, the Princeton theologians, Kuyper and Bavinck etc., with roots reaching back to Augustine.

Let me be careful here, though, because this cuts both ways and I do not want to overstate it. Age and popularity prove nothing about truth, that is a firewall I hold to strictly. A doctrine is not true because it is old, and not false because it was once neglected. My point is only that my friend made an historical argument, and on his own terms the history embarrasses Molinism more than Calvinism. The real question of truth returns, as it always must, to what Scripture teaches.

So Where Does That Leave Us?

My conclusion is comparative, not triumphant. Molinism is not absurd. It is a serious, biblically motivated attempt to honor everything Scripture says, and its ingenuity is real. But it secures libertarian freedom only by making God’s plan depend on facts He neither grounds nor controls without clear biblical necessity, and without ever solving the grounding problem at its foundation. Its real achievement is not to dissolve the mystery of providence but to move it: from the compatibility of sovereignty and freedom, to the unexplained truth of decree-constraining counterfactuals.

So no, I would not say Molinism explains things better than Calvinism. It relocates the mystery while adding fresh difficulties of its own. The Reformed position keeps the biblical data intact, carries a lighter and more workable difficulty, and I would argue, can now be given a coherent conceptual picture rather than left at a bare appeal to mystery. The how of God’s inner working remains His; the charge that the doctrine is incoherent does not survive.

To my friend: thank you for a genuinely sharpening exchange. Iron sharpens iron, and disagreements pursued in this spirit are a gift. We both want to think God’s thoughts after Him and to bow where His Word draws the line. That shared aim matters more than the debate, though the debate, I hope, has been worth having.

Hi! My name is Zigfred Diaz. Thanks for visiting my blog! Never miss a post. Subscribe to my full feeds for free by clicking here. For updates on new articles and a steady stream of thought-provoking ideas, research, book recommendations, practical insights, and other topics that fascinate a curious polymath, follow the official Facebook page: Life Hacks For Polymaths.