Molina's middle knowledge & free market ideology

 Luis de Molina, a prominent member of the School of Salamanca which some see as originating laissez faire ideology, also proposed that God has 'middle knowledge' - scientia media- i.e. the power of knowing future contingent events. One might say, 'an expert chess player or arbitrageur may be able to predict how others will react to a series of events. Moreover, if others have equally 'rational expectations', then those outcomes will be inevitable. Thus, we see one grandmaster resigning to another once he sees his defeat is inevitable. It is 'common knowledge' that there would be no point in  moving the pieces till the foreordained conclusion is reached.'

 Similarly, we may find that 'cobwebs' arising from 'adaptive expectations' disappear as all agents expect the outcome predicted by the right economic theory. We may say, following Samuelson, that 'ergodicity' prevails over 'hysteresis'. 

We may also believe that there is something like 'natural law' or 'spontaneous order' or a 'reflective equilibrium' must exist such that there is a Social Contract which all rational people will commit themselves to even absent the passing of any type of consideration.

 Molinism is also a way of reconciling free-will & God's omnipotence (or, indeed, His being the only efficient cause). What ties Molina's theology & economics together is faith that there is a 'mysterious economy' or 'invisible hand' which solves coordination problems and prevents 'combinatory explosion' of the underlying configuration space.

Sadly, by the end of the Sixties, there were purely mathematical reasons to do with complexity, computability, concurrency & categoricity such that any type of 'compatibilism' or chaos free co-evolution appeared vanishingly unlikely. Put another way, 'naturality' seemed ever further to seek. Even if there is an objective function, the thing being optimized is arbitrary to some degree. Moreover, uncorrelated asymmetries would drive Eusocial 'bourgeois strategies'.

 One such asymmetry is thinking your God or ideology or culture is superior to all others. This puts paid to the Thomist dream of getting rid of an angry, arbitrary, God or, if that was always impossible, at least, asserting that the Katechon might be nice even if the Eschaton is going to be fucking horrible.

 Molinist 'middle knowledge' has been described as-  'God's pre-volitional knowledge of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom—hypothetical scenarios exploring what free agents would do in any given set of circumstances'. This is another way of saying every Brouwer choice-sequence is actually 'lawful' though the reverse may appear to be the case for a finite intelligence. 

Suppose 'middle knowledge' was 'volitional'. Then we might say God is a 'creative subject' in the Brouwerian sense. But then Troelstka's paradox would arise. One way around it would be to reject Markov's principle on the grounds that God, or his Knowledge, is neither possible nor impossible.

 But the thing would still come across as weak sauce. Equally, non-volitional knowledge sounds fatalistic. If the being is strong and has a will, then the thing is virtually empty or trivial. 

But the same can be said of free market ideology or natural law or Enlightened Humanism or the project of everybody being so filled with empathy as to incessantly offer gratuitious rape-counselling to all sentient beings. 

Religion has no obligation to feel at home in the world. Nor, indeed, do some positional goods and services in the commodity space. Ontological dysphoria isn't a scandal- a stumbling block- to either Faith or Enterprise or Thrift or whatever. The best Molinist would be Mayavaad.