Those Who Have Never Heard, Part 3: Divine Foreknowledge

Let’s take a few moments to talk about predestination versus free will. Just kidding. Well, sort of. As you know, this question comes up a lot, especially as related to the issue of personal salvation. In high school, the teacher in one of my Bible courses once divided the class in two and actually had us engage in a debate on the issue. I don’t remember which side won. 

If you’re like me, you’re maybe a little tired of the question. However, a little bit of serious thinking about divine foreknowledge and predestination can really help us with a different question, the one I’ll be considering in this reflection—the question of the fate of “those who have never heard” the gospel. In a previous reflection, I set the stage for our consideration of this question by talking about the three main ways people typically approach the question of who will and who will not be saved (exclusivism, universalism, and inclusivism). In another reflection, I discussed a couple of frequently-overlooked circumstances (population growth and infant mortality) that—in my humble opinion—greatly curtail the severity of the problems created by the “those who have never heard” question. If you haven’t read those, I encourage you to do so now.

Here, I want to discuss a particular perspective on God’s foreknowledge and predestination that may entirely eliminate the problems associated with the question of “those who have never heard.” An article written by Christian philosopher William Lane Craig first introduced me to this approach. In fact, in much of what follows I will attempt to lay out in plain terms some of the material Craig presented in his article.

According to Craig, God knows how every single person would respond to Him under any possible set of circumstances. With this knowledge, God has thus ordered the world in such a way that any person who never hears the gospel during earthly life would—in fact—have rejected iteven if he or she had heard the gospel. 

If that just flew right over your head, don’t worry. I think everything will become more clear as we consider some details. Just put on your thinking cap and hang with me for a bit, okay? 

We can think about God’s knowledge in three stages. 

Stages one and two describe God’s “thought process” regarding how to arrange things (or, in more philosophical terms, which world to actualize). In the first stage, God envisions every possible combination of various states of affairs, including any possible decision that any free creature could (but not necessarily would) make in any of those circumstances. In other words, God, in the infinite vastness of His intellect, visualizes all at once how things could play out in any logically possible world. 

Remember Bob the Mayan from my previous reflection? Let’s revisit Bob for a moment, and, for the sake of illustration, address one of the countless factors God might consider in deciding which world to actualize. In stage one of God’s thought process, He sees all the worlds in which Bob only keeps cats as pets, all the worlds in which he only keeps dogs, and every possible world in between. God sees all the worlds in which Bob has no pets. God is even able to see worlds in which Bob has a pathological fear of cats (and would never, under any circumstances whatsoever, adopt one) but still chooses to keep cats anyway. Such worlds may not actually be feasible, but they are logically possible. 

In the second stage, God narrows down His knowledge from stage one and envisions what states of affairs would actually lead to any other, including what any free creature would actually choose under any possible set of circumstances. God’s knowledge in this middle stage is called “middle knowledge.” (The philosophical position associated with “middle knowledge” was pioneered by 16th century Jesuit thinker Luis de Molina, and is often called Molinism.) Armed with this additional knowledge, God winnows down His initial list of possible worlds into a set of actually feasible worlds that takes human free-will into account. This means that all worlds in which Bob has a pathological fear of cats andkeeps cats get eliminated from the list. 

God then chooses to actualize one of these feasible worlds, presumably the one He considers most optimal. So then, God’s knowledge in the third and final stage is His knowledge of the actual world. 

To illustrate, let’s say that the world God chose to actualize is the one in which Bob has the greatest chance of coming to know God in a saving way. If Bob’s greatest chance of coming to know God in a saving way somehow involves owning a cat (let’s say he marvels at his pet’s ability to leap from one tree branch to another and land with near-perfect balance, and then thinks to himself, “Such graceful and agile creatures couldn’t exist by mere chance, but must have been created by an intelligent designer”), then Bob will not have a pathological fear of cats in the actual world.

Let’s assume that God chose to actualize our world in the way I just described. Let’s also assume two additional things—first, that in any of the feasible (stage 2) worlds in which some people would accept God, some would also reject Him; second, let’s say that there are some people who would reject God in any of the feasible worlds (Craig calls this “transworld damnation”). We can’t prove these additional assumptions, but we can’t disprove them either. They are both logically possible. 

We can now bring all of this to bear on the problem of “those who have never heard,” and say that it’s at least possible that God chose to actualize such a world that any person who never hears the gospel in earthly life would have rejected it even if he or she had heard the gospel. Pretty interesting, yes? 

We can confidently say that it’s possible that God arranged things this way, but can we say He probably did with the same degree of confidence? I don’t know, probably not. But I do know that if anyone can pull something like this off, it’s our creator God, whose thoughts and ways transcend ours as much as the heavens do the earth (Isaiah 55:8-9; Romans 11:33). 

So—what does this gain us? If true, our problem shrinks to nil. And as we saw, no one can argue against it with 100% certainty. At the very least, then, no one can hold up the question of “those who have never heard” as a surefire defeater of the Christian worldview.