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. 

The limits of apologetic dialogue

A common limitation or deadlock in apologetic dialogue is that one or both sides think the other side has nothing worth saying. Take debates between Christians and atheists. Many atheists think Christianity is indefensibly false. Christians only believe in Christianity due to childhood indoctrination. So when a Christian provides a rational defense his faith, the atheist isn't listening. He tunes out the explanation. He just waits for the Christian to stop talking, then the atheist launches into his prepared objections. 

The atheist has no intellectual patience for a sophisticated defense of Christianity. He assumes that's just a snow job. The more intelligent the Christian, the more sophisticated the explanation, the greater the suspicion of the atheist that he's been snowed by a blizzard of technicalities. 

The same holds true for many debates between Catholics and evangelicals, or Arminians and Protestants. It's funny how many Arminians act like compatibilism must be special pleading. An ad hoc explanation which Calvinists concocted just to defend Calvinism, even though compatibility is a philosophical position about the relationship between determinism and moral responsibility that's philosophically independent of Calvinism. But many Arminianism screen it out without bothering to understand the position. They don't think there could possibly anything worth understanding. 

The more erudite or intellectual the defense, the more preemptive the dismissal. That must be smoke and mirrors. Same thing happens in debates between Christians and unitarians. 

Do you find the Gospel shocking?

A basic problem I have with Arminianism (I'm using that as shorthand for varieties of evangelical freewill theism, including universalism) is that they only grasp half the gospel. The Gospel is supposed be shocking. That's because a good God, a just God, is supposed to punish the wicked. This is a point of tension that runs throughout the OT. On the one hand, Yahweh is supposed to punish the wicked. That's one of the things that sets him apart from heathen deities. The heathen deities are wicked, so they can't very well be just judges!

On the other hand, Israel is wicked. Some OT heroes of the faith do wicked things. So how can anyone be saved?

That's a point of tension or apparent contradiction which Paul wrestles with in Romans. For him, the contadiction is resolved through vicarious atonement and penal substitution. 

For those of us who've led charmed lives, the idea that God is supposed to punish the wicked is an abstraction. But many people throughout history and right up to our own day, live in societies where individuals or entire regimes commit hateful miscarriages of justice, and get away with it. They even flaunt their immunity. They get away with it because the legal system is twisted by nepotism and bribery. Where the administration of justice all depends on the race, religion, or social class of the perpetrator and victim. They are used to seeing atrocities committed with impunity. 

From that standpoint, the idea of a God who forgives the wicked is shocking and appalling. You can't understand or appreciate the gospel unless you allow yourself to find it morally shocking or even initially repellent. 

And for many Christians, that takes a conscious effort. If you've led a charmed life, you need to seriously imagine what it's like to suffer horrendous injustice, and watch the perp get off Scot-free. You need to mentally project yourself into that situation. 

Likewise, Christians can become so conditioned by the notion of divine love and forgiveness that they take it for granted. The shock of the Gospel rolls right off their backs. 

They jump straight to love. They jump straight to forgiveness. They skip right over the morally shocking, morally outrangeous stage of the Gospel. 

But Christians should never lose the shock value of the Gospel. That's not a phase to outgrow. Without that point of contrast, you lose have the message.

That's what's so repulsive and nauseating about the glib theology of someone like Jerry Walls. 

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

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. 

Gathering the children of Jerusalem

Mt 23:37 is one of the most popular Arminian prooftexts. I've discussed in in some detail a few years ago:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2014/07/o-jerusalem-jerusalem.html

i) But I'd like to revisit the issue. One complication is how to translate the passage. In order to render the statement in idiomatic English, translations obscure the fact that the same verb (thelo) is used both in reference to Jesus and Jerusalem:

Jerusalem, O Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you! How often have I wanted (ēthelēsa | ἠθέλησα) to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! (ēthelēsate | ἠθελήσατε). 

It's difficult to capture the contrast in smooth English, using the same synonym. Thelo can mean to wish/will/want/intend/decide/desire, &c. So in that respect, the point of contrast lies between something Jesus wanted to happen and something Jerusalem didn't want to happen. For now I'll stick with the word "want," but revisit that (see below). 

ii) Apropos (i), Arminians typically ove look the fact that the passage has three subjects rather than two subjects. It doesn't say:

I wanted to gather Jerusalem but Jerusalem didn't want to be gathered

I wanted to gather the children of Jerusalem but they didn't want to be gathered

Rather, it says:

I wanted to gather the children of Jerusalem but Jerusalem didn't want me to gather her children. 

So in that respect the point of contrast doesn't lie between those Jesus wants to gather and their disinclination to be gathered, but between those Jesus wants to gather, and the disinclination of a third party (Jerusalem) to let Jesus gather the second party (the children of Jerusalem). The object of Christ's desire isn't Jerusalem but the children of Jerusalem. It doesn't say the object of his desire rebuffed his desire. It doesn't say he reached out to the children of Jerusalem but they spurned his overtures. 

iii) Another question is the nuance of the verb, and whether it has the same nuance in each occurrence. In English, "wish" has a weaker connotation than "will". If Jesus meant that it was his wish to gather the children of Jerusalem, but Jerusalem was resistant, that raises the question of whether he got his wish. 

If, however, it means he willed to gather the children of Jerusalem, but Jerusalem was unwilling, it's harder to see how he could fail to accomplish what he willed to accomplish. "Willing" something to be the case is stronger than merely wishing something to be the case. 

Likewise, if he "intended" (or "decided") to gather the children of Jerusalem, but he was thwarted, then that means Jesus was mistaken. Intention carries the expectation of success. You intend (or decide) to do something if you think it lies within your power to do it. If you don't think you have the ability to pull it off, then that's something you hope for, not something you're in a position to decide the outcome on. 

iv) It would be consistent with open theism for the Son of God to intend or decide something but belatedly discover that he didn't have the foresight or mojo to carry out his intentions. So this would make it a better prooftext for open theism than classical Arminianism. So if the verb has the stronger nuance, that's a problem for classical Arminianism. 

v) Returning to (ii), if Jesus wills to gather the children of Jerusalem, but the Jerusalem is unwilling, it doesn't mean his design was overruled unless gathering the children of Jerusalem somehow depends on the cooperation of Jerusalem. Remember, there are three subjects in play. Rather, Jesus and Jerusalem both have designs on the children of Jerusalem–contrary intentions. 

What if the thrust of the statement is just the antithesis of the Arminian interpretation. Jesus gathers her children despite the opposition of Jerusalem. His success does not depend on whether Jerusalem complies. After all, he's not even attempting to gather Jerusalem. Rather, the children of Jerusalem are distinct from Jerusalem.

vi) What does Jerusalem–in contrast to her children–represent? Presumably, the religious establishment. Most of the religious leaders were hostile to his ministry. But that doesn't mean they have the power to veto his outreach to the children of Jerusalem. He doesn't need their permission to gather Jews to himself. Indeed, throughout the Gospels, he draws followers despite the vehement opposition of the religious authorities. They can't compete. They are impotent to stop him. So what if the thrust of the statement is actually that Jesus will gather the children of Jerusalem in spite of everything the religious establishment does to obstruct his ministry? Throughout the Gospels, Jesus bypasses the religious authorities. They can't stand in his way. He doesn't require their consent to save Jews in their midst. He prevails while his adversaries will be left out in the cold.  

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. 

Can God break his promises?

It's commonly argued that if God knows the future, then the future is fixed. If God knows that I will buy a classic Mustang on July 20, 2019, then I cannot fail to buy a classic Mustang on that date. 

In my experience, some Arminians respond by saying that our future choices/actions are the source of God's foreknowledge. If I didn't buy a Mustang on that date, then I cause God to have a different belief about the future.

With that in mind, let's take a comparison: can God break his promises? Suppose Charles Wesley complies with the term of John 3:16, but the moment after death he finds himself in hell. He complains to God that God broke his promise. God responds by saying that if Charles Wesley finds himself in hell, that retroactively makes it the case that God never made the promise in John 3:16 in the first place–in which case God didn't break his promise! Has something gone awry in the reasoning? 

Why I'm a Wesleyan

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/bibleandculture/2019/07/10/why-im-a-wesleyan/

i) Before getting to my main point, BW3 makes two claims that lie in tension with each other: we can't be more loving than God, and love must be freely given and freely received. Yet it's child's play to come up with examples in human affairs where our love isn't limited by the receptivity of the beloved. Take an autistic child who lacks the capacity to reciprocate parental love. Or a baby. Or a teenage drug addict who resents his parents' interventions. Or a senile parent who can't grasp how grown children are acting in their parent's best interests. Or a patient in a coma. 

It's funny how Arminians make blanket claims about the nature of love ("freely received") as if that's self-evident. They make no effort to consider the most obvious counterexamples to their sweeping overgeneralizations. 

ii) In addition, BW3 is selective about the divine attributes. He acts like God's nature is to be loving, which overrides divine justice. 

A den of angry Calvinists and misanthropes

Triablogue is a dark place, a den of angry Calvinists and misanthropes.

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) July 10, 2019

To my knowledge, this is (at least) the second time that Rauser has played the "angry Calvinist" card.

i) How does he know what mood I'm in when I do posts about his stuff? Is he a mind-reader? What is his evidence that I'm angry when I do a post about him? Is that a projection based on what his own mood would be if he did a similar post? Is he an angry, misanthropic progressive? 

ii) Likewise, consider the manifest fallacy of presuming that because someone is a Calvinist, whatever they say is motivated by Calvinism. 

iii) It's revealing that Rauser's chosen allies are atheists and heretics (e.g. Dale Tuggy). That's his center of gravity. That's where his sympathies lie. 

iv) Rauser is a fashionable bigot. He indulges in sweeping stereotypes he couldn't begin to prove. It's funny how "progressive Christians" like Rauser lack any capacity for self-criticism. They picture themselves as tolerant, unbiased, open-minded thinkers, but in reality they are the mirror image of the Manichaean outlook they impute to fundamentalists. A stark, black-and-white polarity between the good guys and the bad guys. They cast themselves in the hero role in their own movie while casting religious and political conservatives as dastardly villains. All Rauser needs is a cape and Batmobile to complete his self-image. 

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. 

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. 

The lynching of Jesse Washington

It is sometimes claimed that Christians who reject hell as eternal conscious torment do so out of "sentimentalism". As if moral horror at the prospect of human beings suffering torture forever is being "too sentimental"? What a grotesque assertion!

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) April 2, 2019

Notice Rauser's sympathy for the damned rather than sympathy for victims of the damned. To take just one example, consider the lynching of Jesse Washington. A developmentally disabled teenager was convicted of murder, without legal representation, in a kangaroo court. A mob was waiting for him outside the courthouse. They chained him and hauled him off to torture him to death. Cut off his ears. Castrated him. Repeatedly raised and lowered his body into a bonfire so that he'd slowly burn to death. When he tried to climb up the chain to escape the flames, they cut off his fingers. 

That's an extreme example, but I use it to establish a point of principle. What punishment does Rauser think is suitable for the lynch mob? 

A "Christian" argument for antinatalism

https://randalrauser.com/2019/03/a-christian-argument-for-antinatalism/

To begin with, this isn't an original argument. Antinatalists have been using variations on that argument as a pressure point against Christians. 

Let's consider the first premise:

(1) The belief that there is a reasonable chance (e.g. more than 20%) that your future child would be born with a horrifying and untreatable disease like Stevens-Johnson syndrome would provide a good reason to avoid having children.

i) Really? That's hardly self-evident. That consideration must be counterbalanced by the good of having other children. To avoid having a child with Stevens-Johnson syndrome by avoiding procreation in toto deprives other future children of the opportunity to have a good life. So this is not a question that can be answered in isolation to what may be countervailing considerations. Acting for the sake of more than one party. Rauser oversimplifies the issue.

ii) In addition, this life is not all there is. This life is just a nanosecond in relation to everlasting life. So the real choice would be between the nonexistence of a child with Stevens-Johnson syndrome or the existence of a child who temporarily suffers from that disease, but may have the opportunity to enjoy eternal happiness. Suffering at the front end is the only way to find happiness at the back end. So, once more, Rauser oversimplifies the issue. 

Since Rauser isn't stupid, he's probably aware of the fact that his formulation is devious. He deliberately suppresses relevant factors. Moving along:

(3) Therefore, if the belief that there is a reasonable chance that your future child would be born with Stevens-Johnson syndrome would provide a good reason to avoid having children, then the belief that there is a reasonable chance that your future child would ultimately experience eternal conscious torment provides a good reason to avoid having children.

In addition to building on a false premise (see above), this seems to operate from the general principle that no one should be allowed to be happy unless everyone is happy. No one should go to heaven if anyone goes to hell. Better for no one to exist than for some to be happy if anyone is miserable. 

But why should we accept that principle? And it's not as if the happy group are happy at the expense of the miserable group. Rauser acts like the wicked should be able to deny everyone else a joyful existence. Why should the wicked by granted ultimate power over the fate of everyone else? What kind of perverted logic is Rauser appealing to?

Posthumous punishment

@RandalRauser

Historically, the most widely held theory of posthumous punishment within Christianity has been eternal conscious torment (ECT), the doctrine that people will be resurrected to face a punishment of unimaginable anguish that will never end. When assessing this idea, we must be accurate with our descriptions. And the first thing to recognize is that this is properly described as torture. After all, torture is, by definition, the infliction of severe mental and/or physical torment as a form of punishment. That's ECT. Thus, when a person says that ECT involves God torturing people forever, they are not indulging in a rhetorical uncharity. Rather, they are accurately describing the view. So the question is whether one ought to think that God would torture people forever. Is that the best view of posthumous punishment?

That's a slipshod characterization:

1. You can believe the damned experience unending punishment without supposing all the damned experience "torture". There can be gradations of misery or punitive suffering. 

2. For argument's sake, let's play along with "torment". Rauser fails to distinguish between three different propositions:

i) God torments the damned

ii) The damned torment each other

iii) The damned torment themselves

Suppose God puts all the brutal dictators on an island. They might well torture each other. That's different from God torturing them. 

Or, to take a less extreme example, suppose God puts mean people on an island. They will be mean to each other. But that's different from an external agent imposing misery on them. Rather, he simply puts some nasty people in a group, and they do the rest. That's collective self-inflicted misery.

In addition, we all know individuals who make themselves miserable. Hateful people are miserable. They aren't miserable because of how they are treated by others. Rather, their hateful disposition makes them miserable. That's individual self-inflicted misery. 

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.