Molinism is an ingenious system, and its appeal is real: it promises to hold together what many find impossible to reconcile—meticulous divine providence and genuine human freedom—by the elegant device of middle knowledge. Yet by Reformed lights it fails, and its failure is instructive. Its foundation is libertarian freedom, the notion that a free choice is one not determined by anything, not even by the agent’s own nature and strongest inclination, nor by God’s decree. But Scripture knows no such autonomous will in fallen man; it presents the will as in bondage to sin, and it grounds what comes to pass in the sovereign decree of God who works all things after the counsel of His own will. A system built on libertarian freedom is built on a foundation Scripture does not lay.

The decisive philosophical objection is the “grounding objection”: what makes the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom true? Molinism requires that, prior to and independent of God’s decree, there be definite truths about what each possible free creature would freely do in every possible circumstance. But if these choices are truly libertarian—undetermined by anything—then nothing grounds their truth; there is no fact of the matter about what an undetermined will “would” do. And if something does ground them, then the choices are not libertarian after all, and the whole apparatus collapses back toward either determinism or arbitrariness. Beneath the machinery, moreover, Molinism shares the root error of Arminianism: it lodges the decisive factor in the autonomous creaturely will rather than in the sovereign good pleasure of God, so that God must, as it were, work around the free choices He finds rather than ordain them. The Reformed confess instead that it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy, and that God’s certain foreknowledge of all things rests on His decree, not on a middle knowledge of what undetermined wills would do.