Jumping from a burning building

Freewill theists often contend that allowing evil is distinct from causing evil. Suppose someone must jump from the fifth story of an apartment building to the parking lot below. Suppose there's a bystander underneath who's watching. Suppose there's a trampoline which the jumper will just miss, and the bystander can see that. Suppose the bystander can push the trampoline over so that the jumper will fall into the trampoline, but the bystander does nothing. Is there no sense in which the bystander caused the death of the jumper? Sure, freewill theists can resort to a stipulative definition of causation to deny that implication, but that's an ad hoc definition.

Causing and Not Causing Not to Occur

This is germane, both to the freewill defense as well as the oft-repeated claim that freewill theism avoids the moral liabilities of Calvinism:

One natural suggestion is that the agent who does harm causes it to occur; whereas the agent who allows harm doesn’t cause it, but simply fails to prevent it where she could have done so.[9]This suggestion has immediate moral implications. It seems true by definition (almost) that you can be causally responsible only for upshots that you cause. And it is arguably true that you can be morally responsible only for what you are causally responsible for. So, if you cause a bad state of affairs, you’ve probably done wrong; whereas if you don’t cause a bad state of affairs, you haven’t. In choosing between killing and letting die, you are choosing between doing wrong and not doing wrong. (Of course, this doesn’t apply to non-harmful cases of killing, such as, arguably, some cases of active euthanasia.) The question of what you ought to do is then tautologously easy.

This argument begins to get into trouble when we reflect on the fact that we are often responsible for upshots we allow: the death of the houseplants or the child’s illiteracy. When we notice that, in these cases, the plants die or the child remains uneducated because of some failure on the agent’s part, it becomes clear that the agent does, in some sense, cause the upshots. Moreover, most widely accepted contemporary accounts of causation imply that some event or fact involving these agents causes the deaths or illiteracy. For example, the counterfactual account of causation—according to which (very roughly) event E causes F if and only if had E not occurredF would not have occurred either—implies that it was the agent’s failure to water the plants that caused the deaths.[10] John Mackie’s INUS condition[11]—according to which E causes F if and only if E is a(n insufficient but) necessary part of a(n unnecessary but) sufficient condition for F—implies that the fact that the agent failed to water the plants causes the plants to die.[12]

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/doing-allowing/#CausNotCausNotOccu

Can a Christian be demon-possessed?

1. If you're a freewill theist, then that commits you to the proposition that a Christian can be demon-possessed. And that's because a freewill theism believes a Christian can lose his salvation. If, a fortiori, a Christian can lose his salvation, then he can be demonically possessed. It's an argument from the greater to the lesser. If loss of salvation is possible, that's a greater case than possession. If something is possible in the greater case, then that includes the possibility of lesser cases.

Isn't subjection to demons a less radical condition than reversion to an unsaved condition? For a Christian to be possessed would be a horrific degree of subjection, yet lack or loss of salvation isn't a matter of degree but having nothing to counterbalance possession. If a believer can be possessed, that generates enormous tension between two opposing forces, but in the case of lack or loss of salvation, there is no tension because there's nothing on the other side (the Holy Spirit) to counteract the evil. 

Indeed, to be unsaved makes unbelievers liable to demonic possession. Conversion is sometimes an exorcism which liberates unbelievers from possession. So a reversal in your spiritual status, by losing you salvation, would render you vulnerable to the possession all over again. 

Now a freewill theist might object by saying that's not a case of  believer being possessed, but a former believer. But that takes us back to the a fortiori argument. 

2. So the upshot is that I think we have a clearcut answer to the question where freewill theism is concern. The answer is less clear in the case of Calvinism due to ambiguities in the concept of possession, including degrees of sin. Christians are sinners. What degree of sin is compatible with being a sinner? That's one of those sorites paradox questions. 

Molinism three layers deep

Thanks to Bill Craig, who's done so much to popularize Molinism (while Plantinga did much of the intellectual heavy-lifting), this has become a chic alternative to Calvinism and Arminianism. 

Molinism goes three layers deep:

1. It posits that God has counterfactual knowledge of what libertarian free agents would do in every hypothetical situation. Molinists act as if it's self-evident that such knowledge is possible. 

There are, however, very sophisticated freewill theists who deny it. If the outcome could go either way, then even God can't know the outcome in advance. There's nothing to be known before it happens. 

If libertarian freedom is true, then our choices are independent of the circumstances. The past can be the same right up to the moment of choice, yet the agent is able to choose either way. So you can't predict the agent's choice from his situation. 

2. However, Molinism takes it down another layer. This isn't about God's counterfactual knowledge of what real agents would do, but nonexistent agents. Molinism posits that God has counterfactual knowledge of what agents who don't even exist would do in every hypothetical situation. They haven't been actualized as of yet. So that's one step removed from (1), which many sophisticated freewill theists already reject.

3. Finally, there's a third layer. Molinism posits that God has counterfactual knowledge of what agents who will never exist would do in every hypothetical situation. The class of possible persons is subdivided into a subset whom God will instantiate and another subset who will remain unexemplified possibilities. So that's two steps removed from (1), which many sophisticated freewill theists already reject. 

So it's odd to see how Molinists take key assumptions for granted that are not conceded even by many distinguished freewill theists. 

What is the authorship of sin?

This is not a complete answer to the author of sin charge, simply because the author of sin objection is not one objection at all but a family of objections. It has as many different versions as there are objectionable relations to sin that the traditional view might be thought to entail God bears. It might be argued that the traditional view entails that God is the cause of sin, or that God intends sin, or that God desires that sin occur, or that God fails to love the damned. Each of these charges must be treated individually (for a variety of responses, see the collected essays in Alexander and Johnson 2016). Here it may suffice to point out that with respect to each individual charge it is not obvious both that theological determinism entails that God bears the property and that God’s bearing the property would be incompatible with divine perfection. For instance, as the above author-storyteller model makes clear, theological determinism does not entail that God causes evil in the same way that created agents cause evil, and if the traditional privation theory of evil is true, then theological determinism does not entail that God causes evil at all. Nor it is clear that, on the correct view of creation, theological determinism entails that God intends any evil at all; perhaps God selects the possible world he wishes to create all at once, so to speak, intending only the good aspects of creation and merely foreseeing (as an unintended side effect) all the evil that is caught up with it (White 2016). God may even love the damned and decide to decree their damnation, if there is a sufficiently great good that cannot be brought about without it; a general may, consistent with perfect love, order his son (a captain in his army, whom he loves) to a certain death in defense of a city in order to prevent the greater tragedy of the city’s sacking (Johnson 2016). The question is whether there is such a great good; and this is the ordinary, axiological problem of evil.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/providence-divine/#Sin

Flipping Molinist dominoes

Molinism

Since CCFs do not depend for their truth values on God's will, and God is omniscient, God knows the field of CCFs "ahead of time," that is, in a way explanatorily prior to his decision to create. He can therefore foresee exactly what world will result from any set of initial conditions he might choose to create. Thus, Molinism is a No-Risk view, and it offers wide scope for divine providential control. For example, supposed it is true that if Eve were offered an apple by a snake, she would freely take and eat it. If God wishes Eve to eat such an apple, all he has to do is arrange for a snake to offer her one. On the other hand, if he wishes Eve to avoid this action, he simply sees to it that no such offer is made. In either case, God exercises providential control by  managing, so to speak what conditions free agents find themselves in rather than by making things happen directly as a result of his will, and either case Eve acts only on her free will. 

Theological determinism

It follows that determinism in this model is exclusively theological, and there need be no causal determinism in the created order. God can create as random a universe as you like, in the case that he can create a universe where, for example, there is no set of simple natural laws that describe all or nearly all of the events in the universe. On the other hand, it will not be random at all in the sense that it will be exactly the universe God intended to create. Heath White, Fate and Free Will: A Defense of Theological Determinism  (Notre Dame 2019).

This is interesting because it means Molinism is, in its own way, even more deterministic than Calvinism. If it's certain that the agent will respond in a particular way in a particular situation, then the initial conditions predetermine the outcome. Flip the first domino and all the other dominoes fall in a particular, inevitable sequence.

In Calvinism, by contrast, it's possible for the same outcome to eventuate from different initial conditions because it's not deterministic in that way. Rather, it operates more like dramatic logic, where the plot unfolds in a particular way, characters act in a particular way, for teleologically and psychologically plausible reasons. Not a mechanical domino effect, but because God prefers one world history or cosmic narrative over another. 

Models of providence

Open theism is a view relatively easy to understand. According to open theism, God simply created a world with many libertarian-free agents in it and turned them loose. Their free choices were ultimately contingent, and–the hallmark of the view–God did not know ahead of time what they would do. (A primary motivation for open theism is the conviction that, if God did know what agents  were going to do ahead of time, they would not be free.) Thus they are responsible for their deeds and, to a large extent, God is not. God governs the world by controlling the nonfree aspects of creation and by being vastly more intelligent than his creatures the way a chess grandmaster might outplay a tyro. Divine providence is exercised through God's fantastic chessmaster skills, but open theists admit that God "takes risks" in creating and in further interacting with the creation…Open theism is incompatible with divine eternity, and there is a vast swath of knowledge–knowledge of future contingents–that it entails that God does not know…

For the Molinist picture of God's creative choice can be famed this way. Imagine that, prior to creation, the set of possible free creatures forms a union and comes to God with their employment demands…Or imagine a little differently, that they have a long list of all the possible worlds, and they have crossed off a number that they refuse to cooperate with. God, then, has to work within the boundaries his "employees" have set. Less picturesquely, he has to work within the boundaries of CCFs he did not choose to be saddled with.

One way of thinking about God's relationship to his creation goes like this God created seven billion or so other agents, all with libertarian free will, and turned them loose. These seven billion agents tend to get in each other's way. We are all quite familiar with our projects' being frustrated by our recalcitrant fellow human beings. God is in much the same situation, except that he is vastly more powerful, intelligent, and long-lived than the seven billion others that he must outwit, outplay, and outlast. 

According to the theological determinist…God's position vis-a-vis other agents is not that of a grandmaster playing a ninety-dimensional chess match against seven billion opponents, not even if we add that he somehow has advance knowledge of what moves they will or would make. 

Traditionally, God is held to be not only omniscient but essentially omniscient. TD not only embraces these attributes but also has a very clear explanation of both how God is omniscient and why he is essentially omniscient. God knows what happens because he makes it happen; his knowledge of the world is through (or just is) his knowledge of his plan for the world. Since his plan is comprehensive and his power is almighty, there is no possibility of his foresight's going wrong. 

Providence is the divine attribute that says God orders the world wisely and well. It is the attribute that allows the theist to trust God and to believe that, however unwisely or badly the world seems to be going at a particular time and place, in the end God's presently hidden goodness will overcome the apparent evil. Devotionally speaking, providence is one of the most important of the divine attributes.

In No-Risk views of God's relationship to his creation (i.e., those of TD and Molinism), God knows the end from the beginning, and his creation proceeds exactly as he wills it to at all times.  This means that evils done or suffered early in the narrative of a life or a world can be planned out so as to play a positive role later on. 

[In Risk-Taking views] the analogy of an adult supervising children at a playground captures the basic idea. The adult observes from the sidelines the melee of free-willed children running around a jungle gym. She has some idea of how the children are likely to behave, without perfect powers of prediction. She may step in if the play seems to be getting too dangerous or damaging, and she may punish children who do harm to others and comfort or compensate those who have harm done to them…On the other end of the spectrum, God could just let the chips of this life fall where they may–he might turn a blind eye to the bullies on the playground, so to speak–so that sublunary life is not ordered particularly wisely or well, but then set everything right, somehow, in the next life. 

My point in going through this difference between No-Risk and Risk-Taking views of divine providence is that I believe they generate, or are capable of generating, quite different attitudes toward evil and suffering in believers. Let me illustrate this with the biblical story of Joseph. 

In the narrative, Joseph begins as an arrogant young man and parental favorite. His brothers, envious and angry, eventually retaliate by selling him into slavery and convincing their father that Joseph is dead. Joseph is enslaved in Egypt, is unjustly accused of attempting to rape his master's wife, is jailed as a result, is forgotten by a friend he helps while in jail, and then is finally released to serve Pharaoh. He rises to be Pharaohs' chief minister and provides for the country during famine. His brothers, suffering under the famine in Canaan, travel to Egypt to procure food, not knowing Joseph's fate. Incognito, he provides for them, eventually reveals himself, and the family is reunited, with Joseph forgiving his repentant brothers.

In the course of reassuring his brothers of his good intentions at the end of the narrative, Joseph makes a remarkable theological assertion: "Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today". That is, Joseph views his kidnapping and enslavement not, or not merely, as the results of created free wills acting contrary to God's desires, but as part of a divine plan to provide for his family during famine and to ensure their prosperity across generations. God does not intervene to prevent these evils, and he does not compensate for them afterward. Rather, they form an intrinsic part of a narrative in which even the events that we would ordinarily describe as evil are revealed to have good aspects, planned from the beginning by the divine mind though inscrutable to the humans in the midst of events. 

This is a view that can really be held only with No-Risk assumptions. It gives suffering a meaning in a way that Risk-Taking views cannot do, I think, for in Risk-taking views, the bullies on the playground or the slavetraders in the desert are not agents of the divine plan but confounding factors God has to work around. There is no point, no deeper meaning, in the suffering they inflict. There can only be the promise that its victims will not be forgotten. Heath White, Fate and Free Will: A Defense of Theological Determinism  (Notre Dame 2019).

Predestination and prayer

A stock objection to Calvinism is that it renders petitionary prayer pointless. My stock response is that in Calvinism, prayer and answered prayer are means by which the future is realized. To put it counterfactually, some events will happen in answer to prayer that wouldn't happen absent prayer. That's entirely consistent with predestination. However, I'd like to go beyond that to address the objection from a different angle. 

i) The Bible contains a number of blanket prayer promises. There is, however, a class of unanswerable prayers, and that's contradictory prayers. That's true for Calvinism and freewill theism alike. So there's an implicit exception to the prayer promises in reference to contradictory prayers. That doesn't call into question God's sincerity since God can't perform contradictions, so it should be understood that contradictory prayers aren't included in the promises. 

ii) Mind you, the Calvinist God might prearrange history to reduce the number of contradictory prayer promises. However, that has to be counterbalanced by other considerations. A world history with more unanswerable prayers might be better overall than a world history with fewer unanswerable prayers. Prioritizing circumstances to minimize contradictory prayers would marginalize other goods. 

iii) That said, freewill theism adds another class of unanswerable prayers. According to freewill theism, God has made prayer promises that he cannot keep because God's ability to make good on his prayer promises is often conditional on the independent cooperation of human agents. This means that in many cases, God can't grant your petition even if it's a perfectly legitimate request. In Calvinism, God is able but unwilling to answer some prayers while in freewill theism, God is willing but unable to answer some prayers. 

In that regard, freewill theism calls into question the sincerity of God's prayer promises. Unlike contradictory prayers, which are necessarily unanswerable, these prayers are contingently unanswerable. As a rule, God won't answer them because he must "violate" the freewill of human agents to grant the request. 

If freewill theism is true, there must be a vast number of prayers that God cannot answer if granting the request hinges on the independent cooperation of all parties to the petitioned outcome. Consider prayers for salvation, prayers for persecuted Christians, prayers to halt the wicked from harming the innocent. Since all concerned parties have libertarian freedom, God can't grant the request if they refuse to cooperate unless he overrides their freewill. 

So that creates an enormous loophole in prayer promises. It's unclear how the prayer promises were made in good faith when so many situations we pray about aren't actually covered by the promises. The God of freewill theism was never in a position to deliver on prayers that fall under that incalculably huge, but unstated class of prayer requests. 

It's like offering everyone who shows up at a certain time and place a free laptop, when only 30% of those who show up get the laptop. If the God of freewill theism knows that a vast number of prayer requests are automatically disqualified, should he not word the promise to make it more realistic?  

N.B. Don't compare that to the relationship between special redemption ("limited atonement") and the well-meant offer of the Gospel. To continue the illustration, 100% of those who show up for the laptop receive a laptop. Everybody responding to the offer gets what was offered. 

Freewill theism and evil

The problem of evil is often locked into two-sided debate between Calvinists and freewill theists. The freewill theists are confident that evil is a particular, indeed intractable problem for Calvinism–from which freewill theism is luckily exempt. There are, however, outside observers who think freewill theism operates within the same flawed framework:

One thing I noticed that many of the contributors had in common is a dissatisfaction with the very structure of typical defenses or theodicies, because (the thought goes) the very idea that God allows evil for the sake of some good (even one, as the skeptical theists might say, that we should not expect to be able to identify) would put God into an immoral relationship with those who suffer, because he'd be trading off their suffering for some other good, which would be an immoral way to treat someone. Those who endorsed some version of this line of thought reacted to it in a variety of ways: some wanted to rethink the personality of God in order to deny that he is part of our moral community, while others wanted to rethink the perfection of God so that we can think of him as an imperfect parent. I do think that this line of thought reflects a general turn in the literature on the problem of evil, from arguing about whether we can identify goods that outweigh and require evils, to discussing the ethical principles that would apply to God himself. I myself have most often encountered this turn in some critiques leveled by Abrahamic theists against other Abrahamic theists: the common argument against theological determinism, namely, that it entails that God bears some morally objectionable relation to evil and suffering, even if there is a great good that requires him to allow the evil.[3] The fact that so many in this volume see the problem as applying not just to theological determinists but to any standard theist is striking, and seems to me correct: everyone needs to address the question of God's own ethics. Unfortunately, none of the contribution addresses that question in any real depth, certainly not coming even close to the depth of Mark Murphy's God's Own Ethics.[4] So one useful lesson of this book is that we should try to explore the issue of what ethical principles should apply to God. However, we'll need to look elsewhere for a deep and thorough exploration of that subject.

https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-problem-of-evil-eight-views-in-dialogue/

Blood on my hands

In theodicy, freewill theists lean on the notion that God merely permits evil to happen. The intuition is that if an agent directly causes or determines an event, then that makes him morally complicit in a way that just allowing, or not preventing, an event caused by another agent does not. A cliché comparison is the distinction between killing a patient and letting him die, in medical ethics. 

And sometimes that's a morally salient distinction. But sometimes not. Suppose I'm a guard at a Nazi concentration camp. Suppose I secretly despise Hitler and the Third Reich. I'm not there because I signed up. I was conscripted. I'm there against my will. I privately hope the Allies will win. 

Suppose the commandant has a plan. If it becomes unmistakable that German lost the war, and the Allies are marching into Germany, the prisoners, including Jews, as well as Allied war captives, will be executed so that the Allies can't liberate the camp. After executing all the prisoners, the Nazi personnel will evacuate the camp. Even though the Nazis lost, they will kill as many Jews and Allied war captives as they can on the way out. A final act of spiteful revenge. 

Suppose I have a choice: I can stand by and let the prisoners be mowed down, or I can turn my machine gun on my nominal comrades and save the prisoners. Under that scenario, is inaction morally preferable to action? If I do nothing to prevent the massacre, does that let me off the hook? Conversely, if I take direct action by shooting the commandant and his henchmen to prevent them from murdering the prisoners, am I culpable? 

Two doors

I've discussed this before, but I'd like to use a different example to illustrate the point. Freewill theism touts the necessity of having freedom of opportunity. To have "real" freedom or a "real" choice means having alternate courses of action available to you. 

But here's the problem. Say you're standing in front of two doors. You can choose between Door A and Door B. In a sense, that's freedom of opportunity. You have two options to choose from. 

But here's the catch: the doors don't have windows. They're opaque. So you don't know what lies behind each door. You don't know in advance where each door will take you. 

Moreover, whichever door you go through locks behind you. So you're trapped by the choices you make. 

Even though you can pick one or the other, it's a blind choice. You might as well flip a coin. 

What if you go through Door A and find out that as a bad choice. But you couldn't know that before you did it, and once you do it it's too late to try Door B instead. You're stuck with the choice you made even though you couldn't foresee what you were getting into.

In addition, you didn't get to choose what your options are. Rather, you're confronted with options, and you have to make a choice from the options you're given. But what if none of them are the options you wanted? 

And this isn't just a metaphor. This is what happens to us in real life. This is how "choice" actually plays out. Open theism is so shallow in that regard. 

At least in Calvinism, there's the promise that everything happens for a good reason, even if you have to go through hell on earth in this life. But in freewill theism, you make conscientious decisions with catastrophic unintended consequences for yourself or your loved ones, and it may be utterly pointless. Just your hard luck. 

Free fire zone

In the past I've discussed how freewill theism generates moral dilemmas. Here's a definition:

What is common to the two well-known cases is conflict. In each case, an agent regards herself as having moral reasons to do each of two actions, but doing both actions is not possible. Ethicists have called situations like these moral dilemmas. The crucial features of a moral dilemma are these: the agent is required to do each of two (or more) actions; the agent can do each of the actions; but the agent cannot do both (or all) of the actions. The agent thus seems condemned to moral failure; no matter what she does, she will do something wrong (or fail to do something that she ought to do).

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-dilemmas/#ConMorDil

I've quoted Roger Olson as a freewill theist who concedes the reality of moral dilemmas. BW3 is another example:

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/bibleandculture/2019/06/25/pros-and-cons-of-the-pro-life-issue-part-five/

BW3 uses moral dilemmas as a wedge issue to justify abortion in cases of rape, incest, or the life of the mother. It isn't clear if by the life of the mother he means situations where one must die for the other to survive or where both will die unless one is killed. If moral dilemmas are a fixture of your worldview, then the world becomes a free fire zone where anything is permissible under dire circumstances. Freewill theists rail against the morality of Calvinism but it's ironic what their own position commits them to. 

Holy moly Molinism

But now you raise a quite different objection aimed specifically at (3). “Before God sticks Fred in second century Tibet wouldn't He have to ascertain that Fred would freely reject the Gospel in all circumstances, not just some of them?” Well, He wouldn’t have to, but that’s my hypothesis. Clearly, God could place a person anywhere He wants in human history, regardless of how that person might freely behave in different circumstances. But my suggestion is that God, being so merciful and not wanting anyone to be damned, so providentially orders the world that anyone who would embrace the Gospel if he were to hear it will not be placed in circumstances in which he fails to hear it and is lost. Only in the case of someone who would be saved through his response to general revelation would a person who would freely respond to special revelation, if he heard it, find himself in circumstances where he doesn’t hear it.

https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/molinism-and-the-soteriological-problem-of-evil-once-more

This is Craig's general solution to the problem of the unreached. But it has a strange implication. Historically, most Christians have been Caucasian (along with Middle-Eastern Christians). Craig's explanation is that God left Africans and Asians largely unevangelized because Africans and Asians are generally far less receptive to the Gospel than Caucasians. Is that a plausible explanation? I think Craig might be ill at ease defending that proposition, yet that's a necessary implication of his position.

Unplanned pregnancies

Critics of Calvinism like to bring up hard cases. That's legitimate inasmuch as Calvinism can't duck the hard cases. It is, however, self-deluded for freewill theists to imagine that their alternative exempts themselves from equally hard cases. 

Let's take the case of "unplanned pregnancies". From a theological perspective, are unplanned pregnancies good or evil? 

In popular parlance, I think an "unplanned pregnancy"is generally a euphemism for a pregnancy resulting from premarital sex, extramarital sex, failure to use contraception (even though the couple didn't want a child), or contraceptive failure. From the standpoint of the couple, the pregnancy was unintended and usually undesirable. The most extreme example is a child conceived in rape.

From a human perspective, such pregnancies are unintended. But are they unintended from a divine perspective? According to open theism, just about every pregnancy is unplanned from God's viewpoint since God doesn't know the future. Exceptions might be Isaac and Jesus, although it's an interesting question how the God of open theism could promise Abraham a child if God doesn't know or control what human beings will do, including sex.

However, it's hard to see how any pregnancy can be unplanned under Molinism or Arminianism, for God's actions in creation and providence are necessary causes of every particular pregnancy, and God knows the end-results of his actions in creation and providence.

From a Reformed perspective, every pregnancy is predestined. Do freewill theists think humanly unplanned pregnancies are evil? Freewill theists often charge the God of Calvinism with hypocrisy for decreeing what he forbids. 

But that's morally complex. If a child is conceived in sin, the process is evil, but does that mean the product is evil? Do freewill theists think the child is tainted by the process (e.g. premarital or extramarital sex)? Presumably not. Does it impugn divine benevolence if God welcomes every child into the world? Presumably not. 

Assuming that every pregnancy is a providentially planned pregnancy, even if many pregnancies are humanly unplanned, the good outcome is inextricably linked to sinful causes in however many cases. Do freewill theists regret the outcome? Open theists might. 

Is freewill theism a pipeline for apostasy?

Here's what I mean: lots of churchgoers are indoctrinated in a theology of God's "unconditional love". By theologians and apologists. In sermons and praise songs. A lopsided emphasis on God's "unconditional love". That's treated as God's central, overriding attribute, eclipsing all other attributes. And that's often set in explicit contrast to Calvinism. 

I imagine, for many churchgoers, who never read the Bible cover to cover, that when they actually read about Noah's flood, God firebombing Sodom and Gomorrah, the holy war commands and narratives, capital crimes, God sending plagues, and hellfire passages in the NT, it generates cognitive dissonance. Having been conditioned by a one-sided theology of God's "unconditional love", they shake their heads in disbelief and ask how a "loving" God can say and do the things Scripture attributes to him. 

If they were exposed to a more muscular, dare I say masculine theology, if their theological diet was balanced by God's justice and holiness as well as his love and mercy, reading these passages wouldn't create the same cognitive dissonance. To what extent is freewill theism making churchgoers apostates waiting to happen? Even passages condemning homosexuality are hard to square with God's "unconditional love". Such passages seem to be so judgmental and exclusionary. 

Calvinism and Middle Knowledge A Conversation

https://wipfandstock.com/calvinism-and-middle-knowledge.html

Is God an evildoer?

In theory, there are different ways in which God might relate to evil:

i) Allows 

ii) Determines 

iii) Causes 

iv) Commands 

v) Commits 

Freewill theists grant that God allows evil. And they say Calvinism makes God "causally determine" evil, which they set in contrast to their own position. However, they rarely define their terminology. Some freewill theists think the OT contains "abhorrent commands" or "texts of terror," and they deny that God issued the commands which the narrator attributes to him.

Normally, both sides (Calvinists, freewill theists) deny that God commits evil. They strive to put some kind of buffer between God and evil. To say that God commits evil is typically discountenanced as wholly unacceptable. On a spectrum from allowing to committing evil, committing evil is the worst. Of all the theoretical ways God might relate to evil, that's off the table. That can't be exonerated. If God commits evil, that makes God evil. 

In my experience, that's the usual position. However, in a book review, Michael Almeida makes the following observation:

Since God has the traditional attributes of perfect beings Rowe concludes that it is impossible that God should choose to perform an evil action. But it is not at all clear why Rowe urges that" a being who freely chooses to do what it knows to be an evil deed thereby ceases to be a perfectly good being"(p. 26). Certainly in ordinary moral contexts no one would make such a claim. Suppose a being freely chooses to do what it knows to be an evil deed because it necessarily faces a moral dilemma. If an agent necessarily faces a moral dilemma then there is nothing the agent could have done to avoid the dilemma. Indeed there is nothing that an omnipotent being could have done to avoid the dilemma. The agent must choose some wrong action or other. It is difficult to see how the agent's choice might nonetheless be blameworthy or how that choice might reflect poorly on his character. Since blamelessly choosing to do wrong does not diminish moral perfection at all, it cannot be assumed that necessarily a perfect being does not choose to do wrong. Almeida, Michael (2006) "Book Review: Can God Be Free?," Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers: Vol. 23 : Iss. 3 , Article 8. 

And that's of more than hypothetical consequence. For the freewill defense is usually cast in terms of how God's hands are tied. He'd like a better outcome, but he's stymied by the intractable defiance of free creatures. Given the freewill defense, God is routinely confronted with moral dilemmas, because human agents remove the best options from consideration. God stuck with the worst remaining options. So freewill theism leaves God with no choice but to commit evil, and does so on a regular basis.  

In Calvinism, by contrast, creatures never back God into a corner. Ironically, then, the Calvinist God is never in a position that requires him to be an evildoer–whereas the freewill theist God often finds himself in that predicament. So their theology and theodicy commits freewill theists to the most odious position along the continuum–one which Calvinism escapes. 

Ethics is not enough

Freewill theists raise two major objections to Calvinism: exegetical objections and moral objections. However, the moral objection cuts both ways.

Moral realism is not enough. You must live in the kind of world where it's possible to do the right thing. You must live in the kind of world where you're not confronted by moral dilemmas. Objective moral norms are not enough if, through no fault of your own, you find yourself in situations where you can't apply moral norms consistently. If there's a mismatch between morality and reality, where morality and reality represent divergent paths, then moral realism becomes a kind of fatalistic, Kafkesque entrapment, where you are doomed to do wrong no matter which way your turn. 

In varieties of freewill theism, God lacks sufficient control of the variables to ensure that our duties and our circumstances align. In the case of open theism, God doesn't even know where the future is headed. In the case of Molinism and classical Arminianism, the libertarian freedom of human agents limits God's options. God can only work with what's left over. Free agents may take the best options off the table. God is out of luck. 

Indeed, there are freewill theists who admit that libertarian freedom leads to moral dilemmas, because God can't coordinate all the variables to guarantee a licit choice in every situation. Yet it would be unjust for God to punish agents for wrongdoing if, through no fault of their own, no licit course of action was open to them. So God must suspend morality under those circumstances. A zone where good and evil don't apply. 

In the face of moral dilemmas, some ethicists propose threshold deontology: dire situations where moral norms are suspended. And that's the kind of train-wreck that freewill theism invites. 

John Frame has often argued that in ethics, the duties and situations must coincide (normative and situational perspectives). If you subscribe to absolute predestination and meticulous providence, then God can prearrange events to elude moral catastrophes. But in freewill theism, that's inescapable. 

In the mind's eye

Calvinism as well as some varieties of freewill theism (e.g. Molinism, classic Arminianism) affirm God's future knowledge and/or counterfactual knowledge. However, even in that respect they share less in common then meets the eye.

Let's take a comparison. I've read that Alfred Hitchcock filmed his movies in his mind before he filmed in reality. We might say he had a mental representation of the future film. Likewise, if I watch Psycho, my memory of the film is a mental representation of what I saw. 

Yet there's clearly an asymmetry here. On the one hand, my mental representation of Psycho is a copy of the original whereas there's a sense in which Psycho is a copy of Hitchcock's original idea. He filmed what he saw in his mind's eye, whereas I visualize the end-product. What's in my mind's eye is caused by the film while what's in his mind's eye is the cause of the film. 

That's analogous to the difference between Calvinism and freewill theism respecting omniscience. In freewill theism, God's knowledge of a creature's future or hypothetical actions is a copy of what they will do or might have done. For their agency is in some respect independent of God. In Calvinism, by contrast, a creature's future or hypothetical actions is a copy of God's exemplary idea. 

In Calvinism, God's concept of what will happen or might have happened is metaphysically prior to the outcome. That's the source of origin. The mental event (in God's mind) is primary while the extramental event (outside God's mind) is secondary. 

In Molinism or Arminianism, by contrast, what will happen or might have happened is metaphysically prior to God's concept. His concept is derivative. The extramental event is primary while the mental event is secondary.

In Calvinism, what will or might have been is ultimately subjective to God. Originating in God's mind and will. 

In Molinism or Arminianism, what will be or might have been is objective to God, originating outside God's mind. His mind mirrors that semiautonomous reality. Imprinted on God's mind. 

Random determinism

1. One of the dividing lines in historical theology is the difference between freewill theism (e.g. open theism, simple foreknowledge Arminianism) and predestinarian traditions (e.g. Calvinism, classical Thomism, Augustinianism, Jansenism). Molinism tries to split the difference, combining elements of predestination and meticulous providence with libertarian freedom. 

In my experience, freewill theists, at least the internet variety, typically classify Calvinism as committed to "causal determination". That's become a rhetorical trope. 

Conversely, there's an attempt in some quarters (e.g. Richard Muller, Oliver Crisp) to promote "libertarian Calvinism". I think that's confused on both historical and philosophical grounds.

2. Determinism and indeterminism are usually treated as opposites. Contrasting or contrary principles.

On the one hand, the natural world generally–perhaps invariably–operates according to physical determinism. Like a machine.  

A possible exception is quantum events. There are, however, deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics. And even if quantum events are physically determinate, they could still be predestined (since predestination isn't a physical determinant). 

In the popular imagination, dynamic systems are indeterminate. However, from what I've read, the key distinction in chaos theory isn't indeterminism but nonlinearity. Dynamic systems are, in fact, deterministic, but nonlinear:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chaos/

Indeterminism is often related to randomness. A classic example is throwing dice. The outcomes are random in the sense that if the dice are fair, each throw of the dice is causally disconnected from the preceding or succeeding throw of the dice. 

However, the outcome isn't uncaused. It's unpredictable because there are too many variables to consider. Yet the outcome remains determinate. 

3. At the other end of the spectrum, God is the freest entity in the world. God's actions are indeterminate in the sense that nothing absolutely causes God to choose one way or another–although God has reasons for his choices. 

This is sometimes taken to imply that God's choice of which world to create (or not create) is arbitrary. However, God isn't forced to choose between different options, since God can instantiate multiple options (i.e. a multiverse). So there's no dilemma. 

4. One neglected consideration is that the same outcome can be both random and determinate. That might seem counterintuitive, but it's a familiar principle. Consider algorithms to generate randomized outcomes. To my knowledge, that's central to encryption technologies.

Or take a state lottery, which is random by design. Computerized randomization. 

But that's deterministic randomness. The system is designed to ensure random results. You might say it's "rigged", but rigged to guarantee random numbers. In that respect, randomness isn't synonymous with indeterminism. In theory, the world might contain genuinely random events, but still be thoroughly deterministic.