Predestination and human actions

https://tabletalkmagazine.com/article/2020/04/predestination-and-human-actions/

Your vocation

The plot of the journey may be the most popular and fundamental plot in literature. Presumably, the metaphor of life as a journey is based on the human lifecycle. Were it not for human mortality, this might not be a universal metaphor and central literary plot.

By contrast, a neglected comparison is a plot based on a divine calling. This, of course, figures prominently in the Bible. Paradigm examples include Abraham, Moses, OT prophets, and the apostles.

You might say Jesus had a calling although it would be more accurate to say he had a mission. On the divine side he was an architect of his own vocation, so that's not a calling in the usual sense.

However, the larger point is that every human being has a calling. It's just that most men and women are unaware of their calling. They fulfill their vocation without knowing they have one.

That's because world history is like a drama in which everyone has a divinely assigned role to play. Unbelievers don't realize they are actors in God's drama, but nonetheless they play their part. Ironically, atheists have a divine vocation. Their calling is to play the foil and fall guy. 

Even bit players may have a deceptively significant role to play. No one remembers who Abraham's great-grandfather was. He's a long-forgotten nobody. Yet without him, Abraham would never exist. Little events in the past can become increasingly significant due to their long-range impact. 

Not only is everyone on a journey, everyone has a calling. Vocation and journey are conterminous. 

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. 

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)

Chasing a mirage

The word [hebel] normally refers to warm air, briefly visible as water molecules contained in it condense when it cools. A larger body of warm air, such as mist, can remain visible for a longer time. It is a visual metaphor. Mist appears to be more substantial than it is (ephemerality), soon disappears (transience) and hides objects behind it, obscuring reality from view (illusoriness). All of these aspects of mist are especially prominent in the metaphorical use of the word hebel: its usage to describe the optical phenomenon of "mirages". The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines mirages as "an optical illusion caused by atmospheric conditions through the refraction of light in hot air", giving the following example: "the false appearance of a distant sheet of water in a desert". Figuratively, the word "mirage" can also mean "an illusion, a fantasy". The majority of the occurrences of the word hebel in the OT carry the meaning of "mirage", referring either to an optical illusion or to an illusion in general. In Ecclesiastes, all occurrences of the word hebel refer to an illusion. Knut Martin Heim, Ecclesiastes: An Introduction and Commentary (IVP 2019), Introduction, §5. 

As a native of the Middle East, the narrator and his audience would be familiar with mirages. This doesn't mean the narrator regards the world as illusory, like Eastern philosophy. But a mirage has a twofold effect; on the one hand an observer can't see the reality beyond the mirage. He can't see around or through the mirage. Although there's an objective reality on the other side of the mirage, the optics block the view so that an observer can't see what lies behind it. On the other hand, what the observer does see is unreal. The mirage is an optical illusion. So what can be seen is unreal while what is real can't be seen. That's the paradox. 

Assuming the narrator is exploiting the full connotations of the metaphor, our experience of the world is illusory in some degree. Things are not always as they seem. Appearances are deceptive. What we perceive is superficial and sometimes misleading. But it remains enigmatic because we're in no position to compare it to the underlying reality. An attentive observer like the narrator will discern that something is off, something doesn't make sense, but he lacks the God's-eye viewpoint to discern the correct explanation. There's a larger reality over and above sublunary events, but providence can be baffling. Everything happens according to a master plan, but it remains largely hidden from human view. Only divine revelation can dispel the mirage. Enough of the plan surfaces from time to time to disclose a plan, but too much stays out of sight to figure out the whole or the goal.  

The outlook of Ecclesiastes reflects the narrator's historical position in progressive revelation. I still think Solomon is the best candidate for authorship (a position recently defended by John Currid in his commentary). Christians know more about God's plan than OT sages like Solomon. But it's a matter of degree. Even for Christians, the way we experience the world is still filtered through a mirage. We can't remove the screen. We must use the map of Scripture rather than our own eyesight and insight to find our way through the desert to the eternal oasis. Unbelievers chase the illusory oasis until they die of thirst, lost in the labyrinth of the sand dunes. 

Predestined regret

https://www.proginosko.com/2019/11/calvinism-and-the-problem-of-contrition/

Another way to approach it that if I have regrets, God predestined me to have regrets, so there's no tension between my regret and God's decretal will. 

By the same token, there's no inconsistency in God willing one thing at one time, then willing something else at a later time, because each serves its purpose at its respective time. Like a screenwriter willing that a character initially be a villain, then, during a later plot development, willing that the character has a life-transforming experience which makes him act heroic. 

What the original objection overlooks is the instrumental value of regret. Consider people whose epitaph is "I regret nothing". That's a cringingly superficial outlook on life. A related motto is "Never look back!" In fairness, some folks have such wretched lives that there may be some wisdom to the advice in their case.

Consider two brothers who take each other for granted. They don't dislike each other, but there's no rapport. They aren't close. And there's no urgency since they have decades ahead of them.

Then one day there's a phone call from the ER saying one of the brothers died in a traffic accident. In an instant it goes from seeing each other every day, or being able to see/talk to each other whenever they want, to never seeing each other for the rest of the surviving brother's life. In a fateful moment it goes from total access to total inaccess. 

The surviving brother is overwhelmed with regret, because it's too late to make up for all the lost opportunities. However, it's not useless. Having learned from bitter experience, he can apply that retrospective insight to other neglected (or future) relationships in his life. 

Fatalism, paganism, and predestination

Many people have an instinctive aversion to the idea of predestination. But one of the interesting things about predestination is the way it requires a Christian worldview to underwrite it. In paganism, predestination is impossible. There's no absolute Creator God. The gods are themselves the product of the ongoing world process. The gods are not omniscient. No one god controls everything. They have territorial jurisdictions. 

So it's not possible in paganism for the world to unfold according to a master plan. Many events happen for no reason. Sheer contingency plays a huge role in history. If you reset history at an earlier date, it will never repeat. 

Greek mythology has a murky doctrine of the Fates. They predetermine the human lifespan. 

Classical fatalism is different from predestination because the outcome is inevitable regardless of what else happens. There is no one chain of events leading to a particular outcome, but multiple paths all converge on the same outcome. Changing the initial conditions doesn't change the outcome. It's not clear that fatalism is even coherent in a pagan worldview, except in the deus ex machina sense.  

Mirror, mirror, on the wall

i) One objection to a timeless Creator is that causes precede effects. But is that necessarily the case? For instance, when I stand in front of a mirror, I cause my reflection to move. But is there a temporal delay between my action and the corresponding image in the mirror? It appears to be simultaneous or instantaneous. 

Perhaps, from the standpoint of physics, there's an indetectable delay in the transmission of light from my body to the reflection. However, I'm not sure if that's the case. Given the speed of light compared to the distance between my body and the mirror, is there a measurable delay?

That raises the question of whether a light beam is a continuously dense stream. Is the transmission of light infinitely divisible into ever smaller intervals? By contrast, what if is light granular, so that below a certain scale or threshold, there are no intervals? This goes to the famous particle/wave duality in physics. Admittedly, in this example, cause and effect both take place in time, so it's not strictly analogous to a timeless Creator, but I'm just addressing the specific objection that causes necessarily precede their effects. 

ii) Parenthetically, this example illustrates the limitations of empiricism. Does the reflection cause me to move or do I cause the reflection to move? Does my shadow cause me to move or do I cause my shadow to move? We intuitively understand that there's a relation of asymmetrical dependence, but that's not given in the phenomenon of reflected motion. To judge by appearances, it might be symmetrical or it might be the case that my shadow causes me to move! 

Imagine a science fiction story in which the motion of the shadow or reflection is primary while your corresponding motion is secondary! You move because the image in the mirror made you move in his direction! The shadow makes you move in tandem with the shadow! 

iii) Although that's backwards in physical reality, there's a sense in which, in relation to predestination, I'm the man in the mirror. What I do is a direct reflection of God's plan. I'm the shadow cast by God's light. 

The Death Star

Brief exchange I had on Facebook:

Zach 

What’s the point of “engaging” with Mormons and evangelize your beliefs when your god has already elected those who are going to heaven? No amount of influence from Christians will change who is elected and who is not, right?

Hays

In Calvinism, God hasn't elected anyone to salvation apart from regeneration and faith, but through regeneration and faith. Election isn't isolated from other things which God foreordained as a necessary component to achieve the outcome. Your objection is like saying that if, according to the script, Luke Skywalker will escape the Death Star before it explodes, then he needn't leave the Death Star to survive. Yet the script doesn't merely predetermine that he will escape the exploding Death Star, but specifies how he will escape. He won't avoid the fatal outcome if he remains onboard.

Predestination and prayer

A stock objection to Calvinism is that predestination makes prayer pointless. Ironically, there's a parallel objection based on the providential inutility of foreknowledge. So classical freewill theists are on the hook for an analogous objection.

But back to Calvinism. Let's take a comparison: a movie has plot. But the fact that it's scripted doesn't mean it makes no difference what the actors/characters do. Rather, the plot unfolds in a certain way because of what the actors/characters do, which in turn depends on the script. They follow the script. The plot doesn't play out in spite of what the actors/characters do, but rather, actors/characters have an instrumental role by enacting the script. 

Thielman on Rom 9

I was recently reading Frank Thielman's new commentary on Romans. His analysis of Rom 9 is a mess. I'll quote some representative statements, then comment:

Before the plagues descended on the Egyptians, God told Moses twice that he would "harden" Pharaoh's hear and that as a result Pharaoh would not grant Moses's request to let Israel go into the wilderness to sacrifice to God (Exod 4:21; 7:3). Throughout the subsequent narrative, we read either that Pharaoh "hardened" his heart (8:15,32; 9:34), that Pharaoh's heart "was hardened" (7:13; 8:19; 9:7,35), or that "the Lord hardened" the heart of Pharaoh (9:12; 10:20,27; 11:10; 14:8; cf. 10:1; 14:4). 

The interplay in Exod 4:14 between God's initiative and Pharaoh's initiative is helpful in understanding what Paul meant when he said that God "hardens' certain people such as Pharaoh. Paul believed that God punishes people for their own sin, not that God forced people to sin and then punished them for it. Otherwise, God would be acting nonsensically when he endured the rebellions of the wicked "with much patience" and stretched out his hands in appeal to disobedient Israel (Rom 9:22: 10:21). No patience is necessary for enduring the behavior of people doing what one wants them to do, and a lengthy appeal to people not to do what one has designed them to do is obviously fruitless.

When Paul says here, then, that God "hardens" people he must mean that God justly punishes people who, like Pharaoh (Exod 8:15,32; 9:34) and everyone else (Rom 1:18-3:20; 5:12-19), are already in rebellion against him. God punishes them by calcifying this rebellion, or, to put it another way, he further hardens resistant hearts. This second level of resistance, which God himself initiates, is Paul's concern here, and it corresponds exactly to God's judgment in 1:24,26, and 28 when he hands people over to their lust, dishonorable passion, and worthless thoughts [457-58].

Interpreters of this passage [9:21] often explain the image of God as a potter shaping clay as a reference to God's creation of human beings and his determination of their eternal destinies at creation…Paul does not, therefore, picture God as creating people in order to destroy them but as dealing sovereignly with a body of human beings who, without exception, are sinful. He mercifully saves some but justly punishes others [460]. 

One can describe the idea that God decides who will believe the gospel in a way that makes God not only responsible for the salvation of human beings but also for evil since he seemingly creates certain human beings in order that they might sin and that he might then destroy them for his glory. A variation on this idea depicts God as within his rights even to destroy innocent human beings, if any existed, simply because he created them. 

To read Rom 9:7-23 in these ways, however, is to read the passages in a one-sided way, without the balance provided by the context…The idea that this passage teaches God created people in order to destroy them, moreover, attributes conduct to God that God himself finds sinful in human beings. It depicts God as forcing people to sin and then condemning them for it or, worse, condemning the innocent…But he [Paul] tempers the entire concept with the notion that God endured the vessels of wrath that he made with much patience and by speaking of the fitting out of these vessels in the passive voice (9:22). By doing this, he indicates that one must not misread the illustrations to make God the author of evil and sin. 

Paul's illustration of the potter in 9:19-23, then, is not about God predestining certain people to sin, nor is it about the relationship between the entry of sin into God's creation and God's predestining will. It is instead about God's response to already sinful human beings. 

This does not mean that human sin took God by surprise and was somehow outside the scope of God's original design for the universe. It simply means that the answer to such questions lies beyond human understanding.

[Quoting Bavinck] Sin and its punishment can never as such, and for their own sake, have been willed by God…They can therefore have been willed by God only as a means to a different, better, and greater good…Sin is not itself a good. It only becomes a good inasmuch as, contrary to its own nature, it is compelled by God's omnipotence to advance his honor. It is a good indirectly because, being subdued, constrained, and overcome, it brings out God's greatness, power, and justice. 

God is not willing "that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance" (2 Pet 3:9) [468-70]. 

Modal collapse

I'm going to comment on a post by Joshua Sommer:

https://reformbaptist.com/2018/07/28/stephen-charnocks-response-to-modal-collapse/

. . . if God is identical with his essence, then God cannot know or do anything different from what he knows and does. He can have no contingent knowledge or action, for everything about him is essential to him. But in that case all modal distinctions collapse and everything becomes necessary. Since God knows that p is logically equivalent to p is true, the necessity of the former entails the necessity of the latter. J. P. Moreland & William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview. (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2003), 525.

Les Fleurs du mal

I'm not a regular reader of Leighton Flowers. I try to be fair to freewill theism by taking the most capable exponents as my foil. However, I got a Facebook notification about this post, so I will bite: 

Soteriology 101

A QUESTION FOR MY CALVINISTIC FRIENDS

When we object to the concept of divine determinism and you appeal to the crucifixion as your proof that God brings about all moral evil, are you saying that God is sovereignly working so as to redeem the very sins He sovereignly worked to bring about? Is Calvary just about God cleaning up His own mess — redeeming His own determinations?

Appealing to God’s sovereign work to ensure the redemption of sin so as to prove that God sovereignly works to bring about all the sin that was redeemed is an absurd, self-defeating argument. It would be tantamount to arguing that because a police department set up a sting operation to catch a notorious drug dealer, that the police department is responsible for every single intention and action of all drug dealer at all times. Proof that the police department worked in secretive ways to hide their identities, use evil intentions, and work out the circumstances in such a way that the drug dealer would do what they wanted him to do (sell drugs) at that particular moment in time does not suggest that the police are in anyway responsible for all that drug dealer has done or ever will do. We celebrate and reward the actions of this police department because they are working to stop the drug activity, not because they are secretly causing all of it so as to stop some of it. Teaching that God brings about all sin based on how He brought about Calvary is like teaching that the police officer brings about every drug deal based on how he brought about one sting operation.

Yes, at times the scriptures do speak of God “hardening” men’s hearts (Ex. 7; Rm. 9), blinding them with a “spirit of stupor” (Rm. 11:8) and delaying their healing by use of parabolic language (Mk. 4:11-12, 34; Matt. 16:20), and He always does so for a redemptive good. But the reason such passages stand out so distinctly from the rest of scripture is because of their uniqueness. If God worked this way in every instance these texts would make no sense. After all, what is there for God to harden, provoke, or restrain if not the autonomous will of creatures?

If everything is under the meticulous control of God’s sovereign work what is left to permit and/or restrain except that which He is already controlling? Is God merely restraining something that He previously determined? Why blind eyes from seeing something the were “naturally” predetermined not to see? Why put a parabolic blindfold on a corpse-like dead sinner incapable of seeing spiritual truth? These are questions many Calvinists seem unwilling to entertain at any depth.

1. In my (albeit limited) experience, Flowers is like atheists ("Street Epistemologists") who stick a microphone in the face of ordinary Christians and pepper them with trip-wire questions. The atheists then think they prove something by catching Christians offguard. But most Christians aren't theologians, philosophers, or Bible scholars. And even seasoned, expert debaters like William Lane Craig prepare for their debates. 

2. The appeal to Acts 2 & 4 is not to prove meticulous providence, but to prove that predestination and providence extend to evils. Even paradigm evils like the Crucifixion. If God predestines the worst, then a fortiori, he predestines lesser evils (as well as goods). And that's hardly the only prooftext for absolute predestination or meticulous providence.

3. Flowers makes it sound circular: "Does God clean up his own mess"? To take a few human illustrations, men–and I do mean men (i.e. human males)–like to test themselves, stretch themselves. They create physical challenges (sports) and intellectual challenges (games). They create problems in order to solve problems. But that's not absurd because the goal is to develop certain skills or camaraderie.  It isn't like digging a hole to fill a hole. 

Or take the quest genre, where the hero leaves home, faces challenges on his journey, undergoes trial by ordeal, then returns home. However, that's linear rather than circular because the quest is a maturing experience. He achieves enlightenment. So it's not a return to the status quo ante. Rather, the man who comes home is a different man from the man who left home.

Suppose a rich man has two teenage sons. They're not juvenile delinquents. They're not sadistic or sociopathic. But their moral character is underdeveloped. Because they had it so easy, they are soft and self-absorbed. They lack sacrificial virtues. 

So he arranges for them to explore a desert island. And he instructs the guide to abandon them. Now they're thrown back on their own resources, in a survival situation. The brothers depend on each other. 

The danger is illusory. Unbeknownst to them, their dad fitted the island with hidden cameras so that he can monitor their situation. He had a subdermal chip implanted in their arms to keep track of them. So their life is never at risk. But they don't know that. From their perspective, the hazards are real. 

The father picked an island with fresh water, edible plants, and game. He made sure his sons had elementary survival skills. Their backpacks are equipped with the necessities. 

But it's a challenge. They don't know when–or if–they will be rescued. Suppose, after two years of having to tough it out together on the island, their father rescues them.

But that's not the father cleaning up his own mess. Rather, he inserted his sons into a testing environment to cultivate soul-building virtues. The rescue is not a reversion to the status quo ante. Rather, they are different–and better-for their hardy experience. 

4. No, God isn't restraining something he previously determined. Restraint is part of what he determined all along. God has a variety of means to realize his plan. 

Take Gen 20, where God appears to Abimelech in an ominous dream. That's how God deters Abimelech from violating Sarah. He doesn't first predestine Abimelech to violate Sarah, then counteract what he predestined by the ominous dream. Rather, he predestined that Abimelech not to violate Sarah, and the ominous dream is the deterrent. 

If God hadn't restrained Abimelech, then Abimelech would act on his impulses. There's a possible world with an alternate history in which Abimelech violates Sarah. That's because God can imagine alternatives. But God chose not to instantiate that timeline–at least not in our universe (but maybe a parallel universe). 

Satan's cleanup boy

We all hesitate here…"What about my little girl who was run over by a trash truck?"…Here's where the Bible becomes practical…Imagine a God who didn't deliberately permit the smallest details of your particular sorrows. What if your trials weren't screened by any divine plan? What if God insisted on a hands-off policy towards the tragedies swimming your way? Think what this would mean.

Either God rules or Satan sets the world's agenda and God is limited to reacting. In which case, the Almighty would become Satan's cleanup boy, sweeping up after the devil has trampled through and done his worst, finding a way to wring good out of the situation somehow. But it wasn't his best for you, wasn't Plan A, wasn't exactly what he had in mind. In other words, although God would manage to patch things up, your suffering itself would be meaningless. One Christian writer who believes that God has little to do with the specific circumstances that come your way expressed it like this: "sadly, there was no meaning in those deaths. Each was a bizarre, horrible coincidence, nothing more. Therein lies the tragedy." Joni Eareckson Tada & Steven Estes, When God Weeps: Why Our Sufferings Matter to the Almighty (Zondervan 1997), 83-84.

Preempting God

According to open theist William Hasker:

If we really, seriously believed that God would prevent any evil that did not have a greater good as its result, this would significantly undermine our own motivation to prevent or mitigate such evils. If I prevent some serious evil from occurring, I will actually prevent the greater good that, absent my interference, God would have brought about as a result of the evil in question. If, on the contrary, the evil would have no such good result, then God will not permit it, regardless of what I do or don't do. The failsafe option, then, is to do nothing, C. Meister & J. Dew, eds. God and the Problem of Evil: Five Views (IVP 2017), 160.

i) I don't think God permits evil only for the sake of greater goods. An alternate good will suffice.

ii) If I was a consistent open theist, I'd be more risk-averse. On that view, God is less likely to override the laws of nature or override the freedom of perpetrators. So why should I stick my neck out? The world of open theism is sufficiently hazardous, sufficiently random, without me further endangering myself for the sake of others. 

iii) I don't see how Hasker's alternative solves the problem he poses. If an open theist prevents, or endeavors to prevent, an evil that God would otherwise permit, then isn't the open theist acting as though he's wiser or better than God?

iv) From a predestinarian standpoint, if I intervene to prevent an evil, then that didn't frustrate God's plan. To the contrary, God intended me to intervene in that situation. God intended the consequences of my intervention. God intended the goods that flow from my intervention. So there's no tension. No need to second-guess my actions. 

Hedge maze

I'm going to comment on some related statements by A. J. Ayer. He was a prominent English atheist, not as famous as Russell, but also not as flippant. I'd note in passing that Russell and Ayer were both gifted children as well as emotionally neglected children. Both men were womanizers. As Paul Vitz has documented (Faith of the Fatherless), emotional neglect is a pathway to atheism. 

Nevertheless the vast majority of those who believe that the universe serves a purpose do so because they take this as conferring a meaning on life. How far down in the scale of organisms are they prepared to go is not always clear. The hymnodist Mrs. Alexander boldly strikes out with 'All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small, All things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all.' 

Even if life had a meaning in the sense that we have just been discussing, it would not be known to the persons who had faith in it, nor would they have any inkling of the part that their own lives played in the overall plan. It might, therefore, seem surprising that the question was so important to them. Why should it matter to them that they followed a course which was not of their own choosing as a means to an end of which they were ignorant? Why should they derive any satisfaction from the belief that they were puppets in the hands of a superior agent? I believe the answer is that most people are excited by the feeling that they are involved in a larger enterprise, even if they have no responsibility for its direction. A. J. Ayer, The Meaning of Life and Other Essays (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1990), 120,122.

i) One obvious answer is that God is infinitely wiser than we are, so he can devise far better plans for our lives than we can if left to our own devices. 

ii) To take a comparison, suppose a military unit is sent on a mission of pivotal strategic value. If successful, it will be a turning-point in the war effort. But their superiors don't inform team regarding the strategic value of the mission. They don't know that in advance. It's only after the war, with the benefit of hindsight, that they come to appreciate the critical significance of their role. Why does Ayer seem to assume that creatures need to know ahead of time what part their lives play in the overall plan? Why can't that be something they discover as they go along? Why can't that be retrospective rather than prospective? 

iii) Consider a father who builds a jungle gym in the backyard for his young sons. Or maybe a tree house. His kids didn't choose that playground equipment. Their father created that recreational opportunity for them. He gives their lives structure. Something fun to do. Something they couldn't imagine or construct on their own. Should they not derive satisfaction in the jungle gym or tree house because they didn't choose that course of action? 

iv) When a creative writer invents characters, he doesn't create them in a vacuum, with nothing to do. He also creates a setting and a plot. Should God make rational creatures without giving them any direction in life? Just blunder along without any sense of purpose? Thrown them into existence with no guidance, like feral children, to fend for themselves? 

What does he even mean by saying they have no inkling about their place in the great scheme of things? The Bible describes the origin, fall, redemption, and destiny of man. Indeed, that's the great narrative arc of Scripture.  

Sure, Ayer doesn't believe in God, but he needs to adopt a Christian viewpoint for the sake of argument to critique it. Yet he's made no effort to get inside that viewpoint. 

But now, it may be objected, suppose that the world is designed by a superior being. In that case the purpose of our existence will be the purpose that it realizes for him; and the meaning of life will be found in our conscious adaptation to his purpose…Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that everything happens as it does because a superior being has intended it should. As far as we are concerned, the course of events still remains entirely arbitrary. True, it can now be said to fulfill a purpose; but the purpose is not ours…It merely happens to be the case that the deity has the purpose that he has and not some other purpose, or no purpose at all. E. Klemke & S. Cahn, The Meaning of Life: A Reader (Oxford, 3rd. ed., 2008), 200.

Why does Ayer assume that God can have no good reason for intending one thing rather than another? Why assume the choice must be arbitrary rather than judicious? 

Nor does this unwarrantable assumption provide us even with a rule of life. For even those who believe most firmly that the world was designed by a superior being are not in a position to tell us what his purpose can have been. 

Scripture does provide a rule of life. Scripture contains many instructions about how to live. Scripture contains a roadmap about where to go, how to get there, and what to avoid. So what is Ayer talking about? Yeah, he doesn't believe in the Bible, but he makes no effort to refute Christianity on its own terms. It's like he never really thought about it. 

They may indeed claim that it has been mysteriously revealed to them, but how can it be proved that the revelation is genuine?

i) What makes  him think there's something mysterious about the process of divine revelation?

ii) There are various lines of evidence that Scripture is what it purports to be, viz. argument from prophecy, argument from miracles, archeological corroboration, answered prayer. 

Either his purpose is sovereign or it is not. If it is sovereign, that is, if everything that happens is necessarily in accordance with it, then this is true also of our behavior. Consequently, there is no point in our deciding to conform to it, for the simple reason that we cannot do otherwise. However we behave, we shall fulfill the purpose of this deity; and if we were to behave differently we should still be fulfilling it; for if it were possible for us not to fulfill it it would not be sovereign in the requisite sense. 

That confounds sovereignty with fatalism. However, predestination and providence employ multiple means to achieve the end. Opening doors, closing doors, incentives and disincentives. It's not whatever will be will be, for sovereignty coordinates ends and means. There's one particular pathway to the goal–like a hedge maze. 

But suppose that it is not sovereign…In that case, there is no reason why we should try to conform to it unless we independently judge it to be good. But that means the significance of our behavior depends  finally upon our own judgments of value; and the concurrence of a deity then becomes superfluous. 

That may be a valid critique of freewill theism. 

Preexistent future

There's some dispute as to whether the B-theory of time is deterministic. On the face of it, if the future already exists, then that excludes alternate timelines forking off in different directions from the present. That interval has been filled. That slot has been taken. It seems symmetrical with the accidental necessity of the past. If it's now the case that the future is already in place, then that's fixed. A fait accompli. It's already happened–just not in the present. 

That doesn't necessarily mean it's deterministic in the sense that the past causes the future. But however the future eventuated, that's now over and done with. Someone in the present has yet to experience that preexistent future, but it's already played out. 

Paul Helm has championed the B-theory of time, mainly as a model for creation by a timeless God. A fringe benefit might seem to be how it dovetails with Reformed "determinism".

However, we need to be careful about that. Reformed predestination and providence isn't based on a particular theory of time. And that might actually be inconsistent with what makes the future determinate according to Calvinism.

Assuming that there's a sense in which the B-theory of time makes the future determinate (see above), that's based on the metaphysics of time rather than a divine plan. It could be random. 

In Calvinism, the future is determinate in the way a movie plot is determinate. The director has scripted the story in his mind. It has dramatic logic. 

But that doesn't mean things had to happen in that particular sequence. Indeed, it's quite flexible. In God's imagination, the present could fork off in different directions. It's just that God picks one of those hypothetical trajectories to actualize. What makes it determinate isn't that a particular series of events had to go together, but that God chose to instantiate that particular plot. God can imagine alternate endings, but he didn't reify those counterfactuals.