When Heaven invades Hell

Philosopher and philosophical theologian Josh Rasmussen and his wife Rachel just published a novelistic defense of universalism. Josh is a far better philosopher than theologian. I'm going to quote and comment on some representative passages from the novel. 

So, perhaps some forgiveness for some souls will come after an age of separation.”

Moses replies sharply, “But what about the unforgivable sin, Adam?”

Moses points down at the scroll. “Look! Here it is written, ‘whoever blasphemes against

the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; they are guilty of an eternal sin.’ The words are plain. Never means never. Are you going to tell me that never doesn’t mean never?”

Adam smiles. He asks, “Where does meaning come from, Moses? Does not your own experience create the meanings you associate with words?”

Adam then touches the text on the scroll and pulls his finger upward. Golden words appear above the scroll. The words are translated in your mind as follows:

‘Whoever may speak evil in regard to the Holy Spirit hath not forgiveness for an age, but is in danger of age-enduring judgment.’

Different people, depending on their experiences, will read the scroll according to different interpretations.

“So, what if the meaning in someone’s mind concerning what the scroll says is inconsistent with the meaning in someone else’s mind? Where will you find the truth then?”

Different people, depending on their experiences, will read the scroll according to different interpretations.

“So, what if the meaning in someone’s mind concerning what the scroll says is inconsistent with the meaning in someone else’s mind? Where will you find the truth then?”

Adam shares his reasoning with Moses:

“Our experiences unlock our understanding of the Lord’s revelation. To have sight, we must have the Lord’s light. Where we do not have light, we do not have sight.

“Let me tell you, Moses, what I see most clearly. By the Lord’s light inside my heart, I see that love creates boundaries of protection. Joshua and Rachel Rasmussen, When Heaven Invades Hell (Great Legacy Books 2020), chap 5, 72-74.

i) This gets into complicated debates over the locus of meaning. Is meaning located in the text or the reader? In one sense, a text must have a recognizable meaning to the reader. So the reader brings something to the text. But there must be something in the text to recognize. So that's something the text brings to the reader. As a rule, authors write to be understood. They draw upon a cultural preunderstanding which the author and the target audience share in common. So even though there's a sense in which the reader must complete the process of communication, the reader is expected to interpret the text in a certain way. To recognize what the text means is not to determine what it means. Authors write with an ideal reader (the implied reader) in mind. 

ii) In folk theology, the Holy Spirit gives Christians the correct interoperation of Scripture. Josh seems to be making a similar claim. But the Bible doesn't promise that, and interpretive diversity among Christians belies that. Some unbelievers have a more accurate understanding of Scripture than many believers. For instance, a critical Bible commentator.

“We suffer by the sight of this beast’s suffering. But would our suffering end if this beast were no longer in our sight? It would not. We would still suffer, knowing that this beast is suffering somewhere separated from our presence. Even if the suffering of this beast were blocked from our sight—and removed from our memory—that would still not eliminate all suffering in heaven.

“Remember, the Lord also suffers as the beast suffers. Can the Lord, the Ruler of Heaven and Earth, choose not to see or even remember the suffering of this dark soul? It is written, ‘If I ascend to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.’ Where could we possibly send a soul to escape the Lord’s sight? I tell you, the suffering of even one soul, even the darkest of souls, will be felt by the Lord.

“Children of the Most High, I present to you a mystery: how can heaven be fully heaven while there remains the pain of seeing someone in hell?”

The quiet whisper of the Lord replies, “My heart is large enough for all the cosmos to fit inside.” The Lion’s gaze then returns to the dark orb and the suffering beast.

The desire for the suffering in heaven to end builds. As it builds in size and power, something strange happens...Suddenly, a violent shock wave erupts from the singularity...Everyone watches in shock.

Lucifer is no longer in his cage of torment. The beast is now free, chap 8 (104).

“When I brought Lucifer, who was the Dark One, into heaven, I protected him inside an orb... chap. 10 (125).

The Lion walks close to the pitiful creature who is rolled up in a ball on the ground. Instead of towering over the creature, the Lion kneels on the ground beside him. Tears stream from the Lion’s glossy eyes, down his cheeks, and onto His mane. Emotions of love pour out of the Lion’s chest in the form of gentle waves. The waves flow from the Lion’s chest to the dark creature beside him...The multitude joins the Lion in expressing love toward the beast. Waves of love roll out of every being, chap 9 (105-6).

The Lion turns to Lucifer and speaks: “This first insight is about you, my beloved angel.

Lucifer, you have a great power to affect my emotions. I traveled through the caverns of darkness to reach you. But when I stood in your presence, you felt something inside of me. Do you remember what you felt? You said you sensed fear in me. You were right, Lucifer. I was afraid.

“You, my dear angel, didn’t understand my fear or your power. You had the power to make me tremble. I trembled at the thought of losing you...“All beings are connected. Every being affects me...“My love for Lucifer was so great that I would do anything to restore him to wholeness. If I could suffer the torments of hell a million times over in his place, I would do it... chap 10 (123-4).

i) Freewill theism ranges along a continuum. The view of God expressed in these passages represents what happens when that's taken to a logical extreme. Creatures wield power over God. He's an emotional hostage to our uncontrollable actions. Because he's afraid of losing us, we can pull his strings. It's like parent and child trading places. 

ii) In the acknowledgments, the authors thank Jerry Walls (among others) for his "inspiration and valuable feedback on an earlier draft of this book". That's a window into his own position. He recently published Does God Love Everyone?: The Heart of What's Wrong with Calvinism. For Jerry, the worst possible thing you can believe is to deny that God loves everybody. But the universalism in the novel represents the consistent alternative. Everyone including Satan will be saved. 

iii) Then there's the feminist angle, where Josh and Rachel make Eve a heavenly counselor, font of spiritual insight and wisdom.

iv) I wonder if part of the problem is due to the pernicious influence of C. S. Lewis. My immediate point isn't to bash Lewis, but the use people make of  him. For instance, it's striking how many professing Christians get their eschatology from The Great Divorce. The popularity of Lewis fosters a mentality in which many professing Christians begin with fiction as their source of theology. An inspirational fictional story. 

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

God doesn't force anyone to love him

In this clip, 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRw1kFSSAnA

Frank Turek offers some wise advice, but the falls back on the Arminian trope that "God doesn't force anyone to love him". Of course, that's a cliche swipe at Calvinism. 

Problem is, the objection is nonsense. You can't be forced to do what you were predestined to do. If you were predestined to do it, then it's not like you were going to do something else before God stepped in to override your plans. If you were predestined to do something, then there never was anything else you were going to do. It's not like you chose to go in one direction until God thwarted your choice.

Now, you can disagree with Calvinism for other reasons, but the "forced" trope that Arminians mechanically bandy about is simply thoughtless.

I, Robot

A few observations about the Arminian trope that Calvinism reduces human beings to robots.

1. To begin with, a metaphor is not an argument. While metaphors can be useful ways to illustrate an argument, they are no a substitute for having an argument. 

2. In addition, the problem with the comparison is that if we're supposed to take it seriously, then the analogy has to posit artificially intelligent robots, but once robots are endowed with consciousness, the invidious comparison between robotic minds and human minds breaks down.

Where's the point of contrast? That robotic minds are programed while human minds are free? But presumably the claim isn't that it's possible to program robotic minds but impossible to program robotic minds? If that's the claim, why should we grant it? If they're both minds, what makes robotic minds programmable while human minds are unprogrammable? The difference isn't at the level of minds. So what makes the difference, if any? 

Moreover, the usual objection to Calvinism isn't that God can't program human minds, but that doing so would have unacceptable consequences. 

If the Arminian is comparing human beings to artificially intelligent robots, how is that comparison presumptively problematic for Calvinism? The objection can't be to robots, per se (see above), but to predestination. But in that event, the comparison is a distraction. Present a direct argument against predestination,  if you have one. 

Guillaume part deux

French Calvinist Philosopher Responds to Critics

Cliché objections to Calvinism

@RandalRauser

Calvinists often respond to the question "If God could've elected all to salvation, why didn't he?" by replying, "Hey, he didn't need to save any!" But that's a problematic response for two reasons. First, on the Calvinist view, God is the primary cause of the Adamic fall in the first place. 

That raises a philosophical conundrum. The Calvinist response is twofold:

i) The revelatory authority of Scripture is our point of departure. If that's what Scripture teaches, then that's what we'll defend, even if it generates intellectual challenges.

ii)  There are philosophical conundra on both sides of the determinist/indeterminist, compatibilist/incompatibilist debate. There are sophisticated defenses of compatibilism/determinism. It's not like one side is transparently true while the other side is transparently false. 

Second, if you have a vaccine that could protect 100 people from coronavirus and you only give it to 50, people can reasonably ask "Why not all 100?" And saying "Hey, I didn't need to give it to the 50 either!" isn't a satisfactory reply.

That's a classically ill-conceived analogy because it compares innocent victims with the wicked. But not everyone is entitled to equal treatment. Through misconduct, an individual can forfeit certain prima facie rights. We should treat like cases alike and unlike cases unalike. 

Finessing the problem of evil

From a Facebook exchange:

That's a simplistic caricature of reprobation. The fact that the reprobate end up in hell doesn't mean that's the purpose of God creating them. If a soldier throws himself on a grenade to shield is comrades, that's the last thing he does, but it's not as if he was born for that sole purpose.

You repeat the same oversimplification. According to reprobation, the reprobate are hellbound in part because they were predestined to hell. But that doesn't mean they were born with that sole end in mind. To the contrary, the reprobate have an important role to play in world history and sacred history. In addition, they are damned because they are wicked. Culpability is a necessity (albeit insufficient) condition for reprobation.

To begin with, it's no different from Augustinianism or classical Thomism, both of which are highly predestinarian. If you're posing a philosophical question about whether libertarian freedom is necessary to be blameworthy, that's a hotly contested issue in the philosophical literature. Are you going say God is worse than the devil based on disputed philosophical conjectures?

You're raising a philosophical objection, but you're not prepared to defend your position philosophically. And you're prepared to blaspheme God based on a philosophical objection which, by your own admission, you lack the competence to defend. Reprobation doesn't make eternal suffering the "foundation of creation and salvation." Why not say unconditional election makes eternal bliss the foundation of creation and salvation? The point, though, is that evil is not an unplanned evil. God has a good reason for the foreordination of the fall, otherwise it was within his power to preempt it. There are certain kinds of good, second-order goods, that are made possible by evil. You and I wouldn't exist in an unfallen world. You and I are the product of chains of events leading up to us that include many intervening evil variables. So there are tradeoffs.

i) I'm saying you want to have to both ways. You want to have the benefit of a philosophical objection without the hard work of philosophical argument to justify your objection. You raise a philosophical objection, but then play the "I'm a simple man card". 

ii) The deny that God planned evil means that evil caught God off-guard. If God foresaw evil as a result of his creative fiat, then he intended the consequences of his own actions. That's logically unavoidable. 

iii) Yes, God is responsible for whatever happens. But there's a difference between responsibility and culpability. Responsibility is a necessary but insufficient condition of culpability. The former doesn't entail the latter. And to say God is responsible for whatever happens doesn't make him solely responsible. He's not the only agent. 

iv) The comparison with slaves and murdered children fails to take guilt into account. So your comparison is amoral. 

v) So you deny that God will the long-term consequences of his own actions? 

God doesn't will evil for evil's sake, but he wills evil for the compensatory goods. Do you think God willed the crucifixion of Christ?

vi) Certain kinds of goods require evil. If a child dies of leukemia, and the parents make a replacement child, the new child wouldn't exist apart from the tragedy of the first child's death. 

vii) You've presented no argument for the claim that double predestination is arbitrary.

"it's possible for God to foresee evil without intending either it or its consequences, and to act and plan in a manner that provides for it."

i) It's not just a case of God foreseeing the consequences of an action, but the consequences of his own actions. Does God not intend the consequences of his own creative/providential actions? Is it an divine accident that those actions have those end-results? Like an uncoordinated house guest who breaks an antique flower vase by inadvertently bumping into it and knocking it over?

ii) Perhaps you're using "intend" in the specialized sense of double effect theory, where the evil is a necessary but indirect side-effect of the action. If so, Calvinism can draw the same distinction.

Mind you, it's disputable in the double effect literature whether the dichotomy between intended and foreseen outcomes is stable. 

"I'm using 'responsibility' and 'culpability' interchangeably."

You can do that if you wish, but there's an important conceptual distinction inasmuch as responsibility for an action may be either praiseworthy or blameworthy. 

"I'm actually kind of concerned now by what you mean by those cases being 'amoral'."

It's amoral for you to compare cases of innocent suffering with just punishment.

"God wills only good, otherwise He is not God."

But God can will good indirectly.

"Of course He didn't will the Crucifixion"

Was the crucifixion an unplanned event? If God planned it, how can God not intend or will his own plans? 

How is your denial consistent with Acts 2:23 & 4:27-28? (Not to mention that the Greek is probably using proginosko in the idiomatic sense of prior choice.)

"That the 'replacement' child is a good in no way makes the earlier child dying of leukemia not an evil."

Unresponsive to the argument inasmuch as I never said the death of the first child was not an evil. To the contrary, it was a necessary evil for the second-order good of the replacement child to transpire.

If we were living in an unfallen world, we could discuss what God is prepared to plan with respect to evil with greater speculative freedom because evil would just be an abstraction and the debate would be hypothetical. But in a situation where God and evil actually coexist, that takes certain explanations off the table. At this stage we must play the hand we were dealt, which curtails the range of available theodical options. Lots of Christians act like they can artificially buffer God from complicity in evil, but given the fact of evil along with divine creation and providence, that logically commits us to certain positions, like it or not, and forecloses certain escape routes.

Wrath and redemption

These are very confused objections to Calvinism:

https://www.facebook.com/jesse.morrell.1/posts/10157008212326765

1. The Bible is written in popular language, so Reformed theology often uses biblical language and imagery about God's wrath. Nothing wrong with that.

2. When, however, it comes to systematic and philosophical theology, greater precision is required. What does God's "wrath" stand for? Is that essentially an emotional state? Or is it a colorful, anthropomorphic way to express God's disapproval of sin?

Likewise, does the atonement pacify God's emotional state, or does it satisfy divine justice? Is it psychological or ethical? The literal attribute isn't anger but justice. 

3. The point is not that the atonement is anthropomorphic, but that scripture sometimes uses anthropomorphic descriptions to represent divine salvation and judgment. That understanding is hardly unique to Calvinism. Unless you think Yahweh is actually like the pagan gods of the ancient Near East and Greco-Roman mythology, with their recognizably humanoid psychological makeup, some adjustment is required. To take a comparison, Jesus isn't literally a pascal lamb, but his redemption action is symbolized by the pascal lamb. 

4. The atonement doesn't change God's mind. It's not as if there's a prior time when he's "literally angry with sinners," and a later time when he's pacified. If God is timeless, if God knows the future, then it's not as if he has to wait for the atonement to take effect to make up his mind. Indeed, if God planned the atonement, then there was never a time when that wasn't a factor in his view of the elect. 

So it's hypothetical. Absent the atonement, all sinners would face eschatological justice. The atonement doesn't change God's mind or attitude. Rather, it changes the outcome in the counterfactual sense that absent the atonement, there'd be a different outcome: universal damnation.

There's nothing contradictory about the Reformed position in this regard, if you allow a modicum of intelligence to influence your hermeneutics. Critics may disagree with that explanation, but if you're going to accuse of position of internal contradiction, then the question at issue is whether it's consistent on it is own grounds and not whether you reject the paradigm. 

Causing good and evil

A common objection to Calvinism is that according to Calvinism, God causes evil. A problem with that objection is not that it's false, but that it's not unique to Calvinism. In varieties of freewill theism, there's a sense in which God causes evil. So that objection doesn't single out Calvinism. I'd add that the same outcome can have multiple agents and multiple causes leading up to the outcome. Divine agency is a necessary cause of whatever happens, but hardly the sole factor. 

But let's consider the issue from another angle. Suppose my wife and I have foreknowledge and counterfactual knowledge about what will happen if we do or don't have kids. Unless we practice contraception, we'll have two sons. When they become teenagers, one son will kill his brother under the influence of temporary psychotic drug high. We know that will happen, but we don't know the date, so we can't intervene to prevent it. The only way we can preempt that outcome is to refrain from having kids.

If despite that advance knowledge, we go ahead and have kids, did we cause the death of our son? And assuming we caused his death, are we to blame? Would it have been better for us remain childless? 

But that poses something of a dilemma. It's a tragedy that our son is died as a teenager. He suffers a grave deprivation as a result of his untimely demise. And his death was, in a sense, avoidable. 

However, the cost of averting that preventable evil is to deprive him of existence altogether. Not having the opportunity to exist at all is a more radical, totalistic deprivation than premature death as a teenager. So is he better of living for 15 years, then dying, or is he better off never having the gift of life in the first place?

We could also up the ante by saying he died a Christian and went to heaven. So he has different things to lose under both scenarios. In one case, he misses out on the gift of life. The lost opportunity of existence, culminating in eternal bliss. In the other case, he misses out on a full lifespan. So the good and evil are intertwined. 

How to listen

Over the years I've noticed a pattern regarding respondents to Christianity, social conservatives, and sectarian theological debates. My impression is based on the following sample groups: YouTube commenters on public Christian/atheist debates. The Q/A session after a Christian/atheist debate. The Q/A session after a Ben Shapiro speech. Comments on Catholic videos. Internet Arminians commenting on Calvinism. Reddit atheists/Facebook atheists. Based on this, I'd do a breakdown of different kinds of respondents:

I. The cheerleader

Blind partisans. Loyal teammates. They rubber-stamp whatever someone on their side says. They will quote or applaud a bad argument for their position so long as they agree with the position. 

It's not about the content but the label and group solidarity. They don't listen. They're partisans rather than ideologues. It's not about the position, but belonging to the club. 

A classic example is pollsters who ask trick questions. They will identify a respondent as a progressive or Democrat. They will quote a statement by a social conservative which they attribute to a progressive or Democrat. The respondent will enthusiastically agree, even though the statement is diametrically opposed to the identity of the political respondent. The respondent doesn't listen for content or consistency. They just wait to hear the label. Does it have the approved label? 

II. The seeker

They are undecided. They want to hear both sides of the argument. Some are ripe for conversion while others are temperamentally noncommittal. Some seekers always want to keep their options open.  But others want something to believe in. 

III. The smart ass

This is the counterpart to the cheerleader. They go to a public debate with a prepared question (or screed). They plan to stand in line after the debate and spring their question on the spokesman for the opposing side. They don't listen. They tune out everything the spokesman for the opposing side says during the whole debate. They don't think it's possible that he could have anything intelligent to say. His position is self-evidently wrong, stupid, and evil. 

They only go to the debate to embarrass the speaker by posing a snarky question during the Q/A. Online, the smart ass will pose one-liners on YouTube videos and Facebook comment threads mocking Christianity. 

The smart ass has no deep firsthand knowledge of Christian theology, philosophy, church history, archeology, science, or apologetics. Moreover, they don't read the most sophisticated representatives of atheism. That's way over their heads. They get their objections and applause lines from hack atheists like Hitchens, Dawkins, Dillahunty, YouTube celebutantes. It's all about projecting a flattering self-image of moral and rational superiority. They are the mirror-image of the anti-intellectual "fundamentalists" they disdain. 

This has parallels with internet Arminians and Catholic apologists who always recycle the same stale objections and argument. Catholics who rarely invest in mainstream Catholic scholarship on Scripture and church history. Arminians who rarely study the philosophical literature on freewill. They just go by the seat-of-their-pants. 

IV. The intellectual atheist

There's a fraction of atheists who think atheism is true, but they are genuinely curious to hear the best Christian answers to their questions and objections. They acknowledge that there are some very bright, astute Christians. They are open to the possibility that there may be good answers to their questions. When they go to a debate, they hope the Christian debater will be intelligent. They want an opportunity to ask probing questions. They don't want to embarrass him. Rather, they are hoping for an intelligent exchange of views. They still think they may have something to learn. They are willing to changing their views. 

I've been picking on particular types, but as I've pointed out in the past, this has a counterpart in the "confessional Calvinist" mentality, who just check the right boxes.  

The "angry Calvinist" trope

Context: Michael Brown plugged Steve's post "Straining Trumpian gnats while swallowing Democrat camels", in which Steve defends Michael Brown against Randal Rauser's criticisms, then out of the blue someone named Stephen J. Graham decided to call Steve an "angry Calvinist". See here:

https://twitter.com/DrMichaelLBrown/status/1227774795812626432 or https://twitter.com/sjggraham/status/1227856666605039616

I'd add:

Suppose my "normal description" of Graham, who is Irish, is that he's a drunken Irishman, simply because "it's the most fitting", even though there's no reason for me to think Graham is drunk. Suppose I just assumed Graham is a drunken Irishman whenever I read a tweet from Graham, even though there's zero evidence his tweet was sent in a state of inebriation. That would be unfair of me to do, to say the very least! Yet that's evidently how Graham treats Steve: Graham's default setting is that Steve is an "angry Calvinist" even in writings or works which have nothing to do with Calvinism.

Also, ironically, many freewill theists call for universal love, but they defame and malign Calvinists for no good reason.

Why did Adam fall?

1. A few days ago, Catholic apologist Trent Horn posed this question:

Can any Calvinists tell me why Adam sinned (previous conversations didn't yield much answers). If Adam chose to disobey God, then that seems to contradict Calvinism's view of God's sovereignty. But if God caused Adam to disobey him, then that seems to make God the author of sin.

https://twitter.com/Trent_Horn/status/1226363541503954945

I'v been of two minds about answering his question. One reason is that it's much easier to ask some questions than answer them. You can pose a deceptively simply question that demands a long qualified answer. 

2. A short answer is that Adam sinned  because God predestined him to sin. At this stage of the creative process, Adam only exists in God's imagination. God's imagination includes a plot. Adam actually sins (in history) because God reified the imaginary plot. God transferred his idea into a real counterpart in time and space. At that point, Adam is no longer just a character in God's mind, but a conscious agent. 

3. Trent then introduces the categories of choice, causality, and authorship. One of the complications in this debate is the stereotypical way of framing the issue. In that respect it's noteworthy that Peter van Inwagen thinks we should scrap that and go back to the drawing board. For instance:

The most salient change I would make, although perhaps not the philosophically most important one, is that I would not now use the phrase ‘free will’. In fact, I would not use even the adjective ‘free’—I would not speak of free actions, free agents, or free choices. Nor would I use the adverb ‘freely’ and the noun ‘freedom’. In my view, these words have little meaning beyond that which the philosopher who uses them explicitly gives them, and yet philosophers persist in arguing about what they do or should mean. They enter into disputes about what “free will” and “free choices” and “acting freely” and “freedom” really are. These philosophers have fallen prey to what I may call verbal essentialism. That is to say, it is essential to their discussions that they involve certain words: ‘free’, ‘freely’, ‘freedom’… It would be impossible to translate their discussions into language that did not involve those words...I would, moreover, not use the phrase ‘could have’—and I would be particularly careful to avoid the phrase ‘could have done otherwise’. ‘Could have’ is grammatically ambiguous, and this has caused a great deal of confusion in discussions of the free-will problem in English...In the revised book, I would not use the phrase ‘moral responsibility’—for, in my view, this phrase is used in current philosophy without any clear sense. 

http://andrewmbailey.com/pvi/Thoughts_on_Essay.pdf

I quote him because Inwagen is a premier freewill theist. So if he thinks that both sides need to reframe the issue, then that calls into question the conventional way the issues and alternatives are cast. We're dealing with philosophical concepts. These didn't fall from the sky fully formed. We have coarse-grained intuitions and examples to illustrate our intuitions, but this demands a lot of fine-tuning. And it's possible that we will be unable to get to the bottom of these issues due to finite human intelligence and the fact that we're too immersed in the experience to have the necessary detachment. We can't crawl out of our own skin to see ourselves from the standpoint of a detached observer. There are limitations to the analysis when the subject tries to make himself the object of analysis. 

4. Horn uses the word "choice". So what does it mean to choose? According to Robert Kane, another premier freewill theist:

A choice is the formation of an intention or purpose to do something. It resolves uncertainty and indecision in the mind about what to do. Four Views of Free Will (Blackwell 2007), 33.

That's a psychological definition of choice, and it's neural on the libertarian/determinist/compatibilist/incompatibilist sides of the debate. Consistent with either side you take.

5. However, libertarians often define choice is two different ways:

i) To be the ultimate source of your own choice

ii)  To have the ability to choose otherwise under the same circumstances. And the second definition is typically cashed out in terms of access to possible worlds or alternate possibilities. That's called leeway freedom. 

Unlike Kane's psychologicl definition, these are more metaphysical. 

William Lane Craig is a prominent freewill theist, but he doesn't think leeway freedom is necessary man to be blameworthy. 

6. That by itself doesn't distinguish Calvinism from freewill theism, for Calvinism can also make room for possible worlds. Calvinism can say there's a possible world in which Adam obeys God as well as another possible world where Adam disobeys God. 

The real question is what agent makes one of those outcomes actual? Is it the divine agent or the human agent? 

So there's a sense in which a Calvinist can say Adam could have done otherwise. Indeed, there's a possible world in which Adam did otherwise. 

These, however, don't refer to Adam's independent actions, but God's ability to imagine alternate plot endings. 

If, moreover, God has predestined Adam to disobey, then Adam can't act contrary to what he was predestined to do. In principle, God might create a parallel universe in which Adam's counterpart obeys God. But that's because he was predestined to obey God in the parallel universe. 

7. Horn trots out the authorship of sin. I don't think that's a useful analytical term. It's an intellectual shortcut and blind alley. 

The meaning of the phrase is opaque. It's possible to arbitrarily define "authorship of sin" in such a way that Calvinism is implicated while your own position is excepted. But that's just manipulating a definition. 

One question is what the phrase meant historically. For instance: 

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2017/07/does-calvinism-make-god-author-of-sin.html

In terms of historical theological usage, Calvinism doesn't make God the author of sin. 

8. Suppose for argument's sake we grant that Calvinism makes God the author of sin. Is that a fatal concession? Does that disqualify Calvinism from further consideration? But even if (ex hypothesi), Calvinism makes God the author of sin, that doesn't automatically exempt other positions from the same. To say Calvinism makes God the author of sin doesn't establish a point of contrast. There's no implication that Molinism or Classical Thomism don't make God the author of sin. They, too, may make God the author of sin in the same or similar ways. 

9. You don't have to be a Calvinist to use a divine authorship framework. Take the statement by Catholic Thomist Ed Feser:

God as primary cause is like the author of the novel. God’s effects are therefore not to be sought merely in otherwise unexplained natural phenomena, any more than an author’s influence extends only to unusual plot points. Just as a novelist is responsible for every aspect of the story, God is the source of all causality, including ordinary, everyday causes for which we already have good scientific descriptions. 

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/12/conflict-resolution

According to Feser's Thomism, God is the author of sin. Of course, in this case, authorship is metaphorical. But Feser recasts the metaphor in literal terms: "God is the source of all causality…"

10. This in turn goes to the concept of causality–which Horn mentions. Here's a standard definition: 

The basic idea of counterfactual theories of causation is that the meaning of causal claims can be explained in terms of counterfactual conditionals of the form “If A had not occurred, C would not have occurred”.

In terms of counterfactuals, Lewis defines a notion of causal dependence between events, which plays a central role in his theory (1973b).

(2) Where c and e are two distinct possible events, e causally depends on c if and only if, if c were to occur e would occur; and if c were not to occur e would not occur.

This condition states that whether e occurs or not depends on whether c occurs or not. Where c and e are actual occurrent events, this truth condition can be simplified somewhat. For in this case it follows from the second formal condition on the comparative similarity relation that the counterfactual “If c were to occur e would occur” is automatically true: this formal condition implies that a counterfactual with true antecedent and true consequent is itself true. Consequently, the truth condition for causal dependence becomes:

(3) Where c and e are two distinct actual events, e causally depends on c if and only if, if c were not to occur e would not occur.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-counterfactual/

On that definition, God caused Adam to sin. But that doesn't single out Calvinism. On that definition, the God of Molinism and Thomism caused Adam to sin. 

11. We can also distinguish between positive and negative causation. For instance:

Negative causation occurs when an absence serves as cause, effect, or causal intermediary…So what is causation? What is it that positive and negative causation shares, and that misconnection lacks? The moral I would draw is that causation involves at least some aspect of difference making. In both positive and negative causations, whether or not the cause occurs makes a difference as to whether or not the effect will occur…causation has a counterfactual aspect, involving a comparative notion of difference making, J. Schaffer, “Causes need not be Physically Connected to their Effects: The Case for Negative Causation,” C. Hitchcock, ed.Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Science (Blackwell 2004), 197-214.

The debate quickly devolves into intractable issues with no clear winners or losers. Although freewill theists recycle stock objections to Calvinism, the issues run very deep and resist decisive debunking. For instance: 

Guillaume Bignon, Excusing Sinners and Blaming God: A Calvinist Assessment of Determinism, Moral Responsibility, and Divine Involvement in Evil (Pickwick 2017)

http://theologui.blogspot.com/2019/03/response-to-kevin-timpe.html

Heath White, Fate and Free Will A Defense of Theological Determinism (Notre Dame 2019)

John D. Laing, Kirk R. MacGregor, and Greg Welty (eds.), Calvinism and Middle Knowledge: A Conversation (Wipf and Stock Publishers, February 2019)

Bragging rights

@RandalRauser

Calvinists often say that if we retain the ability to respond to the offer of salvation then we've contributed to our salvation. That's like saying that the man stranded on a cliff who remains sufficiently conscious to grasp the hand of his rescuer contributed to his own rescue.

i) Except that the man stranded on a cliff did contribute to his own rescue by cooperating with his rescuer. And even that small gesture may have been necessary to save him. 

After all, there are people who successfully commit suicide, despite rescue efforts, because they refuse to cooperate with their rescuers. They resist and evade rescue attempts. So Rauser's illustration disproves his point.

ii) Perhaps what Rauser is laboring to say in his confused and fumbling way is that even though the man stranded on the cliff did in fact contribute to his own rescue, his contribution isn't praiseworthy. But if that's Rauser's claim, he failed to express his real point. 

iii) Dropping the picturesque metaphor, if sinners have the independent ability to accept or refuse the offer of salvation, then those who accept it do contribute to their own salvation. They make a necessary personal contribution without which the outcome wouldn't occur. Rauser may deny that that gives them bragging rights, but they do contribute to the outcome since their cooperation or refusal makes a difference to the outcome. 

If I forgive you a debt of a million dollars, do you take some credit for having accepted my offer of debt forgiveness? I mean, who reasons in this way? If Calvinists thought that way in their daily lives, I might get it, but nobody thinks that way. It's just rhetorical bluster.

Hmm. I can think of someone who thinks that way:

8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast (Eph 2:8-9; cf. Rom 4:2).

i) So according to Rauser, Paul's statement is just rhetorical bluster. That wouldn't be surprising, given his open disdain for biblical authority.

ii) This isn't something Calvinists say because, in the first instance, it's an inference they draw from Reformed theology. Rather, they get this direct from St. Paul. They are simply repeating or paraphrasing his principle. It's straight from Scripture. 

iii) Moreover, it's easy for Christians to develop contempt for unbelievers because so many unbelievers think and act in such willfully foolish and contemptible ways. It's very tempting to look down on unbelievers. But the principle enunciated by St. Paul is a reminder that if we're wiser and more discerning than unbelievers, that's not because we're superior by nature or achievement, but because God unilaterally changed us (Eph 2:1-5; Titus 3:3-5).