Simplicity, eternity, and two related objections

According to a widespread tradition in philosophical theology, God is necessarily simple and eternal. At the heart of the claim that God is necessarily simple is the belief that it is a necessary truth that God lacks composition of any sort. Eleonore Stump captures the doctrine of divine simplicity as comprising four central claims:

1. (1) God cannot have any spatial or temporal parts.

2. (2) God cannot have any intrinsic accidental properties.

3. (3) There cannot be any real distinction between one essential property and another in God's nature.

4. (4) There cannot be a real distinction between essence and existence in God.Footnote ¹

While claims (2) through (4) are important, for present purposes I want to limit my attention to the first of these four claims because of its relation to the doctrine of divine eternity. The second disjunct of claim (1), that is, the claim that God necessarily has no temporal parts, is often thought to imply that God is not a temporal entity. The only way an object could lack temporal parts is to either be a temporal, but instantaneous, entity, or to be a non-temporal entity. Proponents of divine simplicity opt for the second alternative for obvious reasons. This leads, then, to a discussion of divine eternity.

The claim that God is eternal is sometimes taken to be the claim that God exists at every moment of time. Understood in this way, God would have temporal parts, contrary to claim (1) above. More often, this view is referred to as ‘divine everlastingness’, and the claim that God is eternal is taken to mean that God is a non-temporal or timeless entity, that is, that God doesn't exist in time at all. It is this second understanding of eternity that I intend to discuss in the present paper. The classical articulation of divine eternity is found in Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy:

Aquinas also provides a succinct articulation of divine eternity: ‘God is entirely without motion and therefore is not measured by time …. He is therefore without beginning and without end, having all His being at once, wherein consists the essence of eternity.’Footnote ³

As this brief discussion suggests, divine simplicity entails divine eternity.Footnote ⁴ However, it doesn't appear that the entailment runs the other way. Brian Leftow, for example, argues that it does not.Footnote ⁵ While I am persuaded by Leftow's argument, nothing of substance in what follows hangs on this being the case. In what follows, I will proceed by focusing on divine eternity rather than simplicity for the following reason. If Leftow is wrong and simplicity and eternity mutually entail each other, than any objection to one of these doctrines will also be an objection to the other. However, if Leftow is correct, then an objection to divine eternity will also be an objection to divine simplicity, but not vice versa. In other words, if the objections to divine eternity that I consider below are good objections, then they would undermine divine eternity and divine simplicity whether or not eternity entails simplicity.

There are a number of philosophical objections to the doctrine of divine eternity. Some philosophers argue that the idea of an eternal God is incoherent.Footnote ⁶ Others argue that it leads to absurdities,Footnote ⁷ that the doctrine isn't biblical,Footnote ⁸ or that an eternal God couldn't act in time.Footnote ⁹ Still others object that divine eternity rules out all contingency in the world.Footnote ¹⁰ My aim in the present paper is not to canvas all these objections to the doctrine of divine eternity; rather I want to focus solely on two further, but interrelated, objections. According to this first of these, which I'll call the ‘responsiveness objection’, the doctrine of divine eternity is incompatible with God's being responsive to human actions. The responsiveness objection can be summarized as follows:

• Responsiveness objection:

• According to the doctrine of divine eternity, God is a non-temporal entity. But in order for God to be responsive to human agents, God would have to do something only because of what a human agent does. But if God does something only because of what a human agent does, then that agent causally affects God. However, the doctrine of eternity rules out God's being causally affected by anything outside of Himself, since to be causally affected is a kind of change, and change requires time.

The responsiveness objection is closely related to, and perhaps based on, a second objection. This objection, which I'll call the ‘knowledge objection’, focuses on the kind of knowledge that God would have to have in order to be responsive.

• Knowledge objection:

• If libertarianism is true, then it is not the case that all of agents' actions are determined by antecedent causes outside of their control (including God). But if God isn't the ultimate cause of an agent's action, then He does not know about that action in virtue of causing it. Instead, God actually has the knowledge that He does because of the agent's free action. Thus, God is dependent on the agent's action for His knowledge. However, if God's knowledge is dependent on another agent's action, then that agent's action causally affects God. However, the doctrine of eternity rules out God's being causally affected by anything outside of Himself, since to be causally affected is a kind of change, and change requires time.

The responsiveness objection seems to be based on the knowledge objection in that for God to be responsive to an agent, God would have to have the relevant knowledge of the agent or her actions. For this reason, I'll first focus on the knowledge objection, and then will later return to discussing the responsiveness objection.

A number of philosophers raise versions of the knowledge objection. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange uses a version of the knowledge objection to argue for theological determinism:

Similarly, Katherin Rogers argues that according to the doctrine of divine eternity,

There are also other advocates of the knowledge objection, though for present purposes these two indicative expressions of the objection should be sufficient.Footnote ¹³

As these quotations indicate, Garrigou-Lagrange and Rogers think that if something other than God determines His knowledge, then that thing causally affects God's knowledge. However, the doctrine of divine eternity precisely rules out God's being causally dependent on anything. If God is causally affected by something, then He is changed by that thing. But change presupposes temporality, and an eternal entity is precisely non-temporal. So an eternal entity cannot be causally affected by anything outside of itself. Thus, it looks as if the only way an eternal God could know the free actions of humans is if He were to determine those actions. It is for this reason that Garrigou-Lagrange embraces both theological determinism and compatibilism such that humans act freely even though they are causally determined to act as they do by God.Footnote ¹⁴ Thus, according to Garrigou-Lagrange, God can know the actions of humans only insofar as He causes those actions. Note, however, that while embracing theological determinism might thus avoid the knowledge objection, it does so at the expense of conceding the responsiveness objection – for it is hard to see how God is responsive if He determines everything. Furthermore, there are numerous reasons why one might not want to accept theological determinism and compatibilism, though I won't pursue those reasons here.Footnote ¹⁵ In what follows, I will focus on how one might respond to the responsiveness and knowledge objections without rejecting libertarianism.

Others have given what I take to be convincing rebuttals to the responsiveness and knowledge objections elsewhere,Footnote ¹⁶ yet not all are convinced. My aim in what follows is to give a new reply to these objections which, while in the same spirit as those given by others, makes use of the metaphysics of truth-making. It is my hope that focusing on truth-making will help show exactly where these objections go wrong.Footnote ¹⁷

Truth-making

The metaphysics of truth-making is one way of approaching the relation between the world and truths about the world. At its core, the truth-making principle holds that truth depends on reality, or to put it another way, that certain propositions are true because there is something in the world that makes them true, namely a truth-maker.Footnote ¹⁸ Truth-makers are needed for true propositions so that that truth doesn't, as David Lewis has pithily put it, ‘float in a void’.Footnote ¹⁹ If one denies the need for truth-makers, it looks as if what propositions are true is simply a primitive or brute fact. True propositions are true, but their truth is not to be explained in terms of anything else. In contrast, truth-making holds that a truth-maker ‘makes true’ a true proposition, or ‘grounds’ it, or ‘suffices’ for it; one could also say that a true proposition ‘owes’ its truth-value to the truth-maker. Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra captures the fundamental insight of truth-making as the claim that ‘being and truth are importantly and asymmetrically related by a relation of grounding. Truth depends on being in that it is grounded on being – being is the ground of truth’.Footnote ²⁰ And according to J. L. Austin, truth-maker theory enjoys a certain degree of obviousness: ‘When a statement is true, there is, of course, a state of affairs which makes it true.’Footnote ²¹

Truth-making has recently received much explicit attention, culminating in the first book-length treatment of truth-making, D. M. Armstrong's Truth and Truthmakers,Footnote ²² as well as the more recent Truthmakers: The Contemporary Debate.Footnote ²³ In contemporary philosophy, one finds explicit incorporation of the metaphysics of truth-making in a variety of metaphysical issues: the correspondence theory of truth,Footnote ²⁴ discussions of supervenience,Footnote ²⁵ accounts of dispositions and other counterfactuals,Footnote ²⁶ the realism/nominalism debate,Footnote ²⁷ the philosophy of mathematics,Footnote ²⁸ and the presentist/eternalist debate.Footnote ²⁹ Truth-making has also been linked to issues in the free-will debate.Footnote ³⁰ In fact, the truth-making principle is so prevalent in contemporary metaphysics that Julian Dodd remarks that ‘the current Zeitgeist has it that the question to be answered is not whether the principle itself (or a version thereof) is correct, but how the details of a theory of truthmaking should be fleshed out’.Footnote ³¹

While there are a few metaphysicians who deny truth-making, the bulk of the disagreement regarding truth-making is found in delineating exactly how the truth-maker principle should be expressed. Here are a few representative samples:

In addition to disagreement about the exact formulation of the truth-making principle, there is also significant disagreement over how truth-making theory should respond to a number of challenges, such as accounting for what the truth-makers are for negative existential truths,Footnote ³⁶ necessary truths,Footnote ³⁷ and other modal truths.Footnote ³⁸

While resolving these disputed issues is an important task for truth-making theorists, as Peter Simons notes, ‘it should not be thought that rejecting [a] particular truthmaking package entails rejecting truthmaking as such’.Footnote ³⁹ Similarly, Armstrong suggests that we separate a general theory of truth-making from questions about the particular kinds of truth-makers that exist for particular truths, such as negative truths. Following Simons's and Armstrong's lead, I am less concerned in the present article with the exact specification of truth-making or whether it can handle these problematic cases than I am with how truth-making theory can help us see why the responsiveness and knowledge objections fail. Furthermore, given that the true propositions involved in the responsiveness and knowledge objections are existential propositions concerning free human actions rather than negative existential or modal propositions, I can set these controversial cases to the side.

There is one final issue regarding truth-making that needs to be addressed, namely the controversy regarding what the relevant truth-makers are. Numerous entities have been suggested as truth-makers. For instance, Lewis suggests qua-versions of things, which are based on certain counterpart relations;Footnote ⁴⁰ Armstrong suggests states of affairs or facts;Footnote ⁴¹ while Mulligan, Simons, and Smith suggest tropes.Footnote ⁴² In the present paper, I will assume that the relevant truth-makers are actions, and I'll conceive of actions as particulars. However, those who prefer truth-makers of a different ontological kind are free to substitute their preferred truth-makers for actions. For example, those who prefer facts as truth-makers could replace my discussion of actions as truth-makers with the corresponding facts that an agent performs the relevant free action. So far as I can tell, nothing of importance for the objections under consideration here hangs on these issues.

Rebutting the knowledge objection

I will address the knowledge objection first. In responding to this objection, it will be helpful to look more closely at the truth-making relationship that holds between truth-makers and truth-bearers. Let an action A's being the truth-maker for a particular proposition p be symbolized as

• A⊧p

Focusing on a particular action, we have the action ‘Allison's eating chocolate at time t’ serving as the truth-maker for the proposition Allison eats chocolate at time t, or Allison's eating of chocolate at t⊧Allison eats chocolate at time t. Given the common assumption that the objects of knowledge are true propositions, we can also say that actions serve as the truth-makers for the content of an individual's knowledge. For example, I can know Allison eats chocolate at time t only if Allison eats chocolate at time t is true. I will represent an agent X's knowing that p is true as: X_kp. Let us then define the truth-making claim for knowledge (TMK) as follows:

• TMK=_df An action A is the truth-maker for the content of X's knowledge that p is true iff (i) X knows p, and (ii) A is the truth-maker for p (that is, if X_kp and A⊧p).Footnote ⁴³

Let me be clear that I'm not suggesting that TMK directly follows from the truth-making principle, whatever its exact formulation. I grant that it is possible that p be true and for X not to know p; in these cases, the truth-maker for p will not ensure that X_kp. Returning to our previous example, the action of Allison's eating chocolate is the truth-maker for the proposition Allison is eating chocolate, but this in no way insures that some individual, say Lloyd, knows that Allison is eating chocolate. Perhaps Lloyd is in the other room, or is napping, or has never met Allison. In any of these cases, Allison is eating chocolate can be true and yet Lloyd not know it. Thus, a particular instance of the truth-making relationship does not entail that the related instance of TMK will also be true precisely because it is possible that A⊧p and yet it not be the case that X_kp. Ignorance, we might say, can drive a wedge between truth-making and TMK.

However, in the case of an omniscient God, there exists no such wedge. Attempts to specify the exact nature and scope of divine attributes are notorious for being the grounds of significant disagreement, and omniscience is no exception. For present purposes, I will adopt the following relatively common definition of omniscience:

1. A being X is omniscient iff:

2. (i) for every true proposition p, X knows p, and

3. (ii) there exists no proposition p such that X believes p and p is false.Footnote ⁴⁴

If God is omniscient in this manner, then for every A and p such that A is the truth-maker for p (i.e. A⊧p), then A will also be the truth-maker for the content of X's knowledge that p is true. In other words, what makes it the case that God knows Allison is eating chocolate is the conjunction of God's knowing every true proposition and the action that is Allison's eating the chocolate. Furthermore, if God is necessarily omniscient, then the connection between the truth-making principle and TMK as applied to God will itself be a necessary relation.

At the core of the knowledge objection is the idea that TMK as applied to God's knowledge is incompatible with divine eternity. But note in the examples of the knowledge objection from Garrigou-Lagrange and Rogers above the prevalence of causal language. Garrigou-Lagrange, for instance, writes that ‘the knowledge of God is the CAUSE of our free determinations, or else it is CAUSED by them’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Similarly, Rogers writes that ‘the actions of creatures cannot have any causal effect on God at all … . So even God's knowledge of the actions of creatures cannot be caused by what those creatures do’.Footnote ⁴⁶ As these quotations show, both Garrigou-Lagrange and Rogers associate TMK with a causal principle. Though neither Garrigou-Lagrange nor Rogers is explicit at this point, the following seems to be the kind of causal principle they have in mind (where A→B means that B is causally dependent on A):

• CP=_df If a human free action A is the truth-maker for p and X knows p, then X's knowing p is casually dependent on A (that is, if A⊧p and X_kp then A→X_kp).

I'm not suggesting that either Garrigou-Lagrange or Rogers fails to appreciate the difference between truth-making as expressed in TMK and the causal principle as expressed in CP; after all, neither explicitly embraces CP nor says something that entails that they must accept CP. Nevertheless, I think that the above quotations expressing the knowledge objection show that Garrigou-Lagrange and Rogers think that TMK is fundamentally intertwined with something along the lines of CP. Without some causal principle such as CP in place, it is hard to see how the knowledge objection is supposed to go. It is precisely this association that underwrites the inference from the causation involved in CP being incompatible with divine eternity to the claim that God's knowledge cannot depend on the free actions of human agents.

I admit that there is intuitive plausibility to this association of TMK and CP. An agent's action often serves both as the truth-maker for a proposition about that action and as an efficient cause of another agent's coming to know that proposition, given some appropriate epistemic contact between the second agent and the action of the first agent. For example, consider a case involving Lloyd's coming to know Allison is eating chocolate at time t. Let us assume that Lloyd has the appropriate epistemic contact with Allison's action at t – that is, let us assume that he is in the same room as Allison, that the room is well lit, that Lloyd's visual faculties are working properly, etc. In this case, Allison's act of eating chocolate at time t serves as both the truth-maker for the proposition Allison is eating chocolate at time t and is also an efficient cause of Lloyd's coming to know this proposition. The connection between TMK and CP could also hold for an omniscient but temporal God. If God is temporal, then He could be caused to have knowledge of a proposition by the truth-maker for that proposition. In these cases, then, the cause of the knowledge and the truth-maker for the proposition are the same. In other words,

• A⊧p,  and

• A→X_kp.

I have already conceded that the later claim (A→X_kp) is inconsistent with divine eternity. If God is eternal, then God cannot be causally affected by anything outside of Himself. Thus, if TMK and CP are fundamentally intertwined, as the proponents of the knowledge objection seem to suppose, then divine eternity would be incompatible with God knowing the free actions of creatures.

However, proponents of truth-making stress that the truth-making relation isn't a causal relation. Instead it is an example of what Jaegwon Kim has elsewhere called an asymmetric, non-causal dependency relation.Footnote ⁴⁷ For example, consider the following passage from John Bigelow:

Similarly, Dodd writes that ‘it is plain that the necessity involved [in truth-making] cannot be causal. The supposed insight expressed by the truthmaker principle is not that a proposition is made true in a way akin to that in which the sun makes the earth warm’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Instead, Dodd thinks that we should think of a truth-maker ‘guaranteeing’ the truth of the truth-bearer. Finally, Bergmann and Brower write that ‘despite the connotations of its [i.e. the truth-maker principle's] name, the notion is not to be understood in causal terms [i.e. literally in terms of making]’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The truth-making relation thus isn't a causal relation, but rather a form of ‘cross-categorical’ necessitation.Footnote ⁵¹

Not only is the truth-making relation not causal, but there is also reason to think that it is possible for TMK and CP to come apart, particularly as applied to an eternal God. If this is so, then the proponent of divine eternity could grant that CP is incompatible with divine eternity without also having to say that TMK is likewise incompatible. According to the doctrine of divine eternity, God is outside of time, and thus His beliefs don't change as a result of A; the occurrence of A doesn't cause God to have different beliefs than He previously had. As Aquinas says, ‘there can be nothing caused in God, since He is the first cause’.Footnote ⁵² In other words, divine eternity rules out the causal dependence that is requires by CP. Nevertheless, the incompatibility of CP and divine eternity doesn't mean that divine eternity is similarly incompatible with TMK. The doctrine of divine eternity claims that whatever beliefs God has, He timelessly has. But this claim makes no mention of what serves as the truth-maker for the propositions that God timelessly knows. It is possible for the propositions that God timelessly believes to be made true by temporal truth-makers such as human actions. In other words, while TMK requires a kind of dependency between God's knowledge and the truth-makers for the propositions He knows, this dependency is not a causal dependency.

Instead, the truth of a true proposition p is counterfactually grounded in the existence of its truth-maker, A. Had A not existed, then p wouldn't have been true. Likewise, God's true belief can be counterfactually grounded in the existence of that same truth-maker. Had the truth-maker not existed, God wouldn't have believed the proposition in question, because in that case the proposition would have been false. In other words, had A not existed, then it would be false that God_kp. But this in no way entails that God is caused to believe something that He didn't previously believe. Thus, while God's knowledge is determined by the truth-maker, the determination involved isn't itself causal. An instance of TMK can be true with regard to God's beliefs even if the related instance of CP is false.

Perhaps an example will help at this point. In her own defence of divine simplicity and eternity, Eleonore Stump illustrates the gap between TMK and CP via an example of God's knowledge of a woman's prayer to conceive a child:

In this example, Hannah's prayer functions as the truth-maker for God's knowledge without it causing God's knowledge. In other words, the doctrine of eternity only commits its proponents to the claim that God's knowledge does not and cannot change over time, since such a being is not in time. The doctrine of divine eternity does not, however, commit one to the claim that God's knowledge doesn't depend ontologically on the existence of truth-makers. Thus, TMK isn't incompatible with divine eternity. Insofar as the knowledge objection requires the incompatibility of TMK and divine eternity, the knowledge objection fails.

The responsiveness objection and divine providence

The previous section should also go some distance toward indicating where the responsiveness objection fails as well. As mentioned above, an agent's responsiveness to another's action requires the agent to have knowledge of the action in question and the preceding section shows how God's having such knowledge is compatible with the doctrine of divine eternity. But one might think that more than this is needed. One might think, for example, that an account of divine providence – an account of how God interacts with and controls His creation – is also needed to show that the responsiveness objection fails. In other words, one might still wonder how God can be active and responsive to agents' free actions even if one grants that God could have knowledge of those actions.Footnote ⁵⁴ A complete treatment of divine providence in relation to the doctrine of divine eternity is beyond the scope of this paper, partly because of the plethora of available models of divine providence. Nevertheless, in this section let me indicate two notions of providence that will not help in countering the responsiveness objection and tentatively sketch one that I think will.

Theological determinism provides the strongest possible notion of divine providence. According to the theological determinism, God determines all events, including all human actions, through His volitions.Footnote ⁵⁵ But the proponent of theological determinism must either reject that there are free human actions or embrace compatibilism, thereby rejecting libertarianism. Insofar as I am attempting to show how divine eternity can be reconciled with God's knowledge of and response to the actions of free agents on the assumption of the truth of libertarianism, this approach to God's providential control cannot be made use of.

The next strongest notion of God's providential control is offered by Molinism. According to Molinism, providence is based on middle knowledge – God's contingent and pre-volitional knowledge of what agents would freely do in various circumstances. The objects of God's middle knowledge are commonly referred to as counterfactuals of creaturely freedom: ‘conditionals specifying, for any free creature who might exist and any set of circumstances in which that creature might be placed and left free, what that creature would freely do if placed in those circumstances’.Footnote ⁵⁶ It is God's middle knowledge of such counterfactuals that allows Him to govern His creation providentially despite the truth of libertarianism. Furthermore, while Molinists need not embrace the doctrine of divine eternity, the two doctrines are compatible.Footnote ⁵⁷ The Molinist who also endorses divine eternity could account for God's responsiveness as follows. Recall the earlier example from Stump involving Hannah. If God has middle knowledge, then among the objects of His middle knowledge is the following counterfactual of creaturely freedom:

• CCFIf Hannah were in circumstance C, then she would freely ask God to allow her to conceive a child.

Let us assume that CCF is true and that as a result of His middle knowledge, God knows that it is true. God could also know, again via His middle knowledge, that as a result of His initial act of creation, that Hannah will be in circumstance C. Thus, God could respond to Hannah's prayer and cause her to conceive on the basis of the prayer that He timelessly knows she will make.Footnote ⁵⁸

Yet it isn't clear that the Molinist's response at this point is consistent with the earlier response to the knowledge objection. The response to the knowledge objection uses the metaphysics of truth-making to show how God's knowledge of free actions could depend upon those actions without the dependency being a causal dependency. But one of the most prominent objections to Molinism, often referred to as ‘the grounding objection’, holds that the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom are without truth-makers. Since those counterfactuals that are true are so (logically) prior to any volition on the part of God, He cannot be the truth-maker for them. Additionally, it is hard to see how libertarianism could be preserved if God were the truth-maker for them. Neither can the agents involved in the counterfactuals be their truth-makers.Footnote ⁵⁹ According to Thomas Flint, a contemporary champion of Molinism, ‘between God and us free creatures, we have exhausted our list of the usual suspects … . The conclusion that seems forced upon us, then, is that nobody actually causes the counterfactuals in question to be true.’Footnote ⁶⁰ In other words, it looks like the Molinist will reject the claim that there are truth-makers for counterfactuals of creaturely freedom such as CCF. In this case, it is unlikely that the Molinist could then avail herself of the response to the knowledge objection given above. Perhaps the Molinist might say that while the objects of God's free knowledge (that is, the knowledge that is logically posterior to God's volition) require truth-makers, the objects of God's middle knowledge do not, thereby accepting a limited version of truth-making. It is hard to see, however, what would motivate such a view. There thus seems to be a tension between Molinism and an unrestricted acceptance of the metaphysics of truth-making.

The above discussion of Molinism nevertheless suggests how one might begin to understand providence in a way that is consistent with a metaphysic of truth-making. As indicated above, the Molinist thinks that God's responsiveness is primarily a function of His middle knowledge. But there is no time at which God comes to have His middle knowledge and God's providential response is not causally dependent on the content's of God's middle knowledge.Footnote ⁶¹ Instead, the Molinist understands God's providential response as counterfactually dependent upon the contents of His middle knowledge. Had the contents of God's middle knowledge been different, then God would have acted otherwise. For example, if the above counterfactual CCF were false, then God would not bring about Hannah's conception as a response to Hannah's freely offered prayer in circumstance C. This is because if CCF were false, then Hannah would not freely pray even if she were to be in circumstance C. For this reason, the Molinist thinks that God's responsiveness to the actions of free agents is ultimately rooted in a counterfactual dependency relation.

If such a counterfactual dependency relation can provide for God's knowledge, then a similar line of argument can be used to further the reply to the responsiveness objection. In order for God to be responsive to humans, all that is required is that God does something because of what a human does. But all that is needed for God to do something because of what a human does is for God to have knowledge of what that human is doing and to act on the basis of that knowledge. On this understanding, God is responsive in that had the human agent done otherwise, then God would also have done otherwise. As applied to the example of Hannah and her prayer, we can understand God responding to the prayer as follows: God timelessly knows that Hannah offers a prayer at t ₁ to conceive, God timelessly brings it about that Hannah conceives at t ₂, and had Hannah not offered the prayer God would not have timelessly brought about her conceiving. In such a case, God's will is not efficiently caused to be in the state that it is in when God freely wills to cause Hannah to conceive because of Hannah's prayer for a child. Nevertheless, God acts as He does as a result of Hannah's action. God can therefore will what He does because of Hannah's prayer without its being the case that His will is causally acted upon by something outside of Himself.

Here we see the same sort of counterfactual dependency that the Molinist appeals to. Divine responsiveness does not require that God's action temporally comes after God's knowledge or that the knowledge changes God; it only requires that God's action is counterfactually dependent on the truth-makers for the contents of His knowledge of the actions of free agent.Footnote ⁶² And if, as I've argued above, an instance TMK can be true with regard to God's knowledge of human actions even if the related instance of CP is false, God's responsiveness can also be understood along truth-making lines via TMK.Footnote ⁶³