#963 Molinism and Maximal Greatness
October 26, 2025Dear Dr. Craig,
I had the privilege of seeing you at Passion City today and really enjoyed it. Thank you for devoting your life to a field that so many shy away from for fear of being disproven — it’s encouraging and inspiring to see your commitment.
I also want to thank you personally. I’ve been following your work for years, and during some very difficult skeptical periods of my life your debates and writings were a lifeline. They helped me think through my doubts carefully and hold on to my faith. I’m deeply grateful for that.
I do have a question I’ve been wrestling with regarding Molinism and the concept of God as a Maximally Great Being.
If God is maximally great, He would actualize the best feasible world — the one with the greatest salvation rate consistent with freedom. Yet Scripture speaks of salvation as “narrow… and few find it” (Matt. 7:14). That seems far worse than merely “some reject God.” It suggests the majority are lost.
Here’s my difficulty: if I, as a free creature, can freely choose Christ, then surely it is possible for God to design free beings who also freely choose Him. Why not actualize billions of such agents? Even short of universal salvation, why not “tune the dials” of human nature so that we were more rational, altruistic, or aware of His reality — thus raising the salvation rate dramatically without destroying freedom?
Doesn’t Molinism, when combined with the biblical “narrow road,” risk making God look constrained by counterfactuals of freedom He did not choose and cannot change? And if so, doesn’t that raise doubts about the coherence of the Maximally Great Being concept? I’m conceiving a greater being - one who designs free agents with a higher salvation rate - am I not?
Thank you again for today’s talk, and for your lifelong work defending Christianity with such rigor. I’d be grateful for any clarification or resources you might recommend.
Lucas
United States
Dr. craig’s response
A
I’m so glad that you found my talk at Passion City Church to be helpful, Lucas! Those Zangmeister videos on arguments for God’s existence that I showed are really great, aren’t they?
Permit me to jump ahead to the main point of your question: “Doesn’t Molinism. . . risk making God look constrained by counterfactuals of freedom He did not choose and cannot change?” Yes! The truth of the counterfactuals of freedom known by God via His middle knowledge is explanatorily prior to His free decree to actualize a world, and therefore they limit His options to worlds that are feasible for God to actualize. That truth is central to middle knowledge. God does not choose which counterfactuals of creaturely freedom are true and which false. He has to work within the constraints of those counterfactuals of creaturely freedom which confront His will.
But “doesn’t that raise doubts about the coherence of the Maximally Great Being concept?” No! A Maximally Great being must be omnipotent, and as I explain in my chapter on omnipotence in my Systematic Philosophical Theology, vol. IIa: On God, there is no state of affairs which God is unable to actualize due to a lack of power on His part; but there are states of affairs that lie outside the range of His power because they are logically impossible for Him to actualize. Actualizing infeasible worlds is logically impossible. So this is no limitation of His maximal greatness.
It is misconceived to imagine a God “who designs free agents with a higher salvation rate,” for the salvation rate depends upon the free agents, not upon God. When you say, “if I, as a free creature, can freely choose Christ, then surely it is possible for God to design free beings who also freely choose Him,” you fail to recognize that while you have control over counterfactuals of freedom about you, God does not. Ultimately, He has to stand back and let free creatures make their choices. Sure, God could have designed free creatures with different capacities than ours, but so long as they are free, counterfactuals of creaturely freedom about them will constrain God’s ability to actualize worlds. And it may well be the case that the balance between saved and lost in the actual world is the best balance that was feasible for God.
As for your earlier claim, “If God is maximally great, He would actualize the best feasible world,” that assumes that there is a best feasible world, which may very well not be the case. See the fascinating discussion of whether God must choose the best in my chapter on divine goodness in the same vol. IIa mentioned above.
Finally, I used to think, as you do, that Matthew 7.14 implies that only a small minority of mankind will be saved. But then it was pointed out to me that Jesus may here be speaking only about his Jewish contemporaries; the parallel passage speaks of multitudes coming from far and wide to sit down with Abraham in the Kingdom of God. So that gives grounds for greater optimism about the balance between saved and lost that will finally be achieved.
- William Lane Craig