Robert Adams's objection that counterfactuals of freedom lack truth-makers does not establish impossibility but only epistemic or metaphysical uncertainty about Molinist providence.

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Reasons For

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Reason for

1.Lack of truth-makers entails only unknowability, not logical contradiction or metaphysical impossibility in principle.
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2.Molinism can coherently posit God's knowledge of counterfactuals via divine intuition even without naturalistic truth-maker accounts.
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3.Adams conflates semantic/epistemic gaps with modal impossibility, a distinction standard logic preserves.
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Reasons Against

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Reason against

1.If counterfactuals lack truth-makers, they lack determinate truth-values, making God's knowledge of them logically impossible.
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2.Distinguishing unknowability from impossibility requires explaining what grounds counterfactual facts—the original problem remains.
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3.Appealing to divine intuition as truth-maker merely relocates the problem rather than solving the metaphysical grounding issue.
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Key Terms

Counterfactuals of freedom(the specific kind Adams is critiquing): 'What-if' statements about what someone would freely choose to do in situations they'll never actually face.
Epistemic: "Epistemic" relates to knowledge—how we know things, what counts as knowledge, and whether we can trust what we believe to be true. It comes from the Greek word for knowledge and is used to describe questions about the reliability and validity of our beliefs and understanding. For example, "epistemic humility" means acknowledging the limits of what you can actually know for certain.
Molinist providence(the theological doctrine being discussed): A religious/philosophical theory (named after Luis Molina) about how God can know the future and have a plan for the world while still allowing humans to make free choices.
Providence(theological concept): God's plan for and control over future events; the idea that God guides everything that happens.
Robert Adams(the author being cited): A prominent American philosopher who wrote influential work on metaphysics and the nature of identity; this quote is from his essay on what makes something uniquely itself.
counterfactuals(as used in logic and philosophy of free will (related to 'subjunctives of freedom')): Statements about what *would* happen in situations that aren't actually happening—'if I had studied harder, I would have passed the test' is a counterfactual about a situation that didn't occur.
metaphysical(Ayer's Logical Positivist usage): Language that purports to refer beyond the physical world and lacks empirical consequences, which Ayer classifies as not literally significant
truth-makers(Used here to explain how future facts could be determined now under eternalism): Entities or states of affairs in virtue of which a proposition is true

Connections

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Problem of Evil1 linked

Adams conflates semantic/epistemic gaps with modal impossibility, a distinction ...Appealing to divine intuition as truth-maker merely relocates the problem rather...Distinguishing unknowability from impossibility requires explaining what grounds...If counterfactuals lack truth-makers, they lack determinate truth-values, making...

Details

Type: claim
Perspectives: 2 (1 for, 1 against)
Edits: 1 edit