Against Middle Knowledge

As a result of my teen–age conversion to the Catholic Church … I read a work called Natural Theology by a nineteenth–century Jesuit… and found it all convincing except for two things. One was the doctrine of scientia media , according to which God knew what anybody would have done if, e.g., he hadn't died when he did…. I found I could not believe this doctrine: it appeared to me that there was not, quite generally, any such thing as what would have happened if what did happen had not happened, and that in particular there was no such thing, generally speaking, as what someone would have done if… and certainly that there was no such thing as how someone would have spent his life if he had not died a child. I did not know at the time that the matter was one of dispute between the Jesuits and the Dominicans, who took rather my own line about it. So when I was being instructed a couple of years later by a Dominican at Oxford … and he asked me if I had any difficulties, I told him that I couldn't see how that stuff could be true. He was obviously amused and told me that I certainly didn't have to believe it, though I only learned the historical fact I have mentioned rather later.