What is God’s Natural Knowledge?

from Conversations in Calvinism Hosted by conversationsincalvinism

This episode was about God’s middle knowledge, rather than a specific verse, although we did discuss Exodus 3:19, Deuteronomy 7:3-4 and 1 Kings 11:2, 9. Our primary point of disconcurrance was, if theistic causal determinism is true, and assuming God creates us and sets up the laws of nature such that secondary causes like our “strongest desires” or our “motives” determine our will in an analogous way to physical force like a rock breaking glass, would God’s knowledge of our voluntary actions in counterfactual circumstances be part of God’s natural knowledge? We also discussed Irenaeus’ comments that God knew Pharaoh wouldn’t believe based on Exodus 3:19 in Against Heresies, Book 4, Chapter 29, Paragraph 2 and we disconcurred on if Irenaeus held to some early form of middle knowledge. Although philosophical discussions are fun and important, we sort of jumped ahead and plan to get back to exegetical questions on more fundamental disconcurrances next time.