Does God permit evil?

1. Calvinists often say God "permits" evil. Some Arminians say it's misleading or meaningless to speak of divinely determinate events as divinely permitted events. 

2. To begin with, the usage varies with the Calvinist. Paul Helm uses permissive language. He's defined and defended what he means by that. Here's one example:

http://paulhelmsdeep.blogspot.com/2008/02/evil-love-and-silence_01.html

Scroll down to the "willing permission" section. 

Calvin himself was ambivalent about permissive language. Calvin made the elementary observation that you can't drive a wedge between what God wills and what God permits. Divine permission is either willing or unwilling. If unwilling, it would be coercive rather than permissive. But if permission is willing, then God wills to permit evil. Yet in that event, what's the big difference between willing evil and permitting evil? If he wills to permit evil, then he wills evil. To will to permit it is to will it. The circumlocution doesn't eliminate divine volition in the matter. At best, permission indicates God's grudging attitude towards the relative necessity of evil. 

And notice that this applies to freewill theism, not just Calvinism. 

3. Let's compare two questions:

i) Why does God permit evil?

ii) Why doesn't God prevent evil? 

These are equivalent questions. They convey the same idea. The only difference is that the first formulation is positive while the second formulation is negative. 

4. Moreover, this is consistent with predestination since God could prevent evil by not foreordaining evil. Therefore, it's not contradictory for a Calvinist to say God permits evil. 

5. I myself have no particular attachment to permissive language. However, in discussing the problem of evil, I often frame the question in terms of why God permits evil.

An Arminian like Jerry Walls, who assumes the worst about the Calvinist motives, might suspect that I use permissive language to conceal the true nature of Calvinism. If I were more forthcoming, I'd come clean and phrase the question, "Why does God predestine evil?" The fact that I avoid that either means I'm lowballing Calvinism or that I'm conflicted. 

But as I just demonstrated, that language is consonant with Calvinism.

Moreover, I've often defended the claim that God predestines evil. I'm not running away from that fact. 

6. I generally use permissive language for two other reasons:

i) It's the stereotypical way in which the problem of evil is framed. And since that's consistent with Reformed theology, there's no overriding reason to depart from that formulation.

ii) But more importantly, I don't usually phrase the question "Why does God predestine evil" because that has the wrong emphasis.

That formulation suggests the question at issue isn't so much about God and evil, but about predestination. Why does God predestine evil, in contrast to evil coming about some other way. 

But although that's worth discussing in its own right, the problem of evil centers on the divine rationale for the existence of evil in God's universe. Given that God could prevent evil, why doesn't he? What possible reason could he have not to prevent it? 

That's why I generally use permissive language in framing the issue. To phrase the question in terms of predestination would distract attention away from that central concern. 

Moreover, once we discuss the purpose that evil serves in God's world, that can naturally segue into a discussion of predestination. But doing that in reverse is less logical. 

Three ways movies are searching for the gospel

"Three Ways Movies Are Searching for the Gospel" by Gavin Ortlund.

Prophet without honor

In 1933, when Aaron Lebensträume was an 18-year-old college student, he began to have dreams about the future. He didn't know right away that these were about the future. He only found out later.

One time he dreamt about two diners in a restaurant having a conversation. Next day, as he was having lunch in that restaurant, he overhead two diners at adjacent table having that verbatim conversation.

Another time he dreamt about a traffic accident. The next day as he heading down the sidewalk, about to cross the street, that accident took place right before his eyes, at the very same intersection, with the same car models. 

After having several dreams like this, he had a dream about Hitler's rise to power, the death camps, and the carpet-bombing of German cities. He immediately began to warn his friends, family, and classmates about the future. They thought he was crazy.

He started to pass out leaflets at school, resulting in his expulsion from college. He then penned a self-published pamphlet. He'd stand on street corners, handing out copies of his pamphlet.

His parents found this embarrassing, and the authorities found this irksome. He was involuntarily committed to an asylum. There he found himself locked up with a real bunch of lunatics. Yet, in a way, they were more sane than his countrymen.

As time went by, the psychiatrist wore a Nazi uniform. Pictures of the Führer were posted in  rooms and hallways.

Inmates could hear airplanes overhead. At night, they could see the city in flames, on the horizon, through their grated windows. 

Aaron lost track of time. There came a point when the skies went silent. The staff deserted the asylum. Inmates were running out of food. The situation was getting desperate. 

Through the grated windows they saw American G.I.s approaching the asylum. The G.I.s broke down the doors and liberated the asylum. 

On foot, he made his way back home. Block after block was reduced to rubble. He saw a tattered copy of his pamphlet on a corner where he used to pass them out.

When he got home the house was damaged and abandoned. 

Then he saw an old neighbor. At first the neighbor didn't recognize Aaron, who, by then, had a few gray hairs. After Aaron introduced himself, the neighbor shook his fist: "The Jews have ruined us!"

Evaluating the claims of scientists

"Evaluating the Claims of Scientists" by Vern Poythress.

"Ban Democrats from owning guns"?

Dawkins and the limits of atheism

http://www.salon.com/2015/11/29/can_we_prove_that_god_exists_richard_dawkins_and_the_limits_of_faith_and_atheism/

A story of grief: six months and counting

Today is the six-month anniversary of the day my wife died. You can’t help but reflect back on something like that. Grief is an ongoing thing, and it comes back to bite at you at the strangest of moments.

About a month ago, my church interviewed me for the church newsletter. That went like this:

Enablers

I'm going to respond to some comments that Lydia McGrew left on this post:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2015/12/typhoid-mary.html

Concerning Typhoid Mary, you are not acting contrary to what is medically best for her by quarantining her. It's rather surprising you should bring that up in any way in the context of your recommendation that doctors kill their evil patients to harvest their organs for their innocent patients! Or even in the context of deliberately refusing to treat Himmler (as, say, ER doctors) with the intent of letting him die. This has pretty much nothing to do with quarantining a patient. 

I bring it up because it forced you to introduce a more qualified position on patient care than you originally presented. Now you've conceded that it's not just a question of acting in the best interest of each individual patient. Rather, there are situations when we must take into account the impact on others. Since you didn't volunteer that qualification, I had to smoke it out of you.

It's strange that you are so resistant to the example of killing baby Himmler but are actually quite open to the example of a fireman with ESP who leaves baby Himmler to die in a fire. 

Lydia, there's often a morally relevant distinction between killing a person and refusing to intervene in an ongoing situation that will result in fatalities, absent intervention. There are lots of hotspots around the world. I could hop on a plane, go to one of those places, and kill some bad guys. My action would save innocent lives. 

But I don't have a general obligation to be a vigilante. The fact that I didn't intervene to save the victims by killing the perpetrator is not equivalent to my killing the victims. Likewise, if the perpetrator is caught in quicksand, I don't have a duty to pull him out so that he can proceed to kill even more innocent people. But I didn't kill him–the quicksand did. I didn't put the quicksand there to trap him. 

Of course, there are situations in which we do have an obligation to intervene. There's no single criterion. There are multiple criteria. Likewise, what's obligatory may depend on the particular circumstances.

You also said at one point that it just wouldn't be legitimate to ask Himmler's mom to kill him as a baby because she has a duty and an emotional attachment to him, which seems to mean that you aren't _entirely_ closed to killing baby Himmler outright. 

I also said: That's different than killing the child in the daycare. There are many evils we have no moral opportunity to prevent. In that case, we must let them happen. If they are to be prevented, God must prevent them, because he hasn't given us a morally licit opportunity to do so. 

But for some reason you ignore that. Likewise, I also said:

Conversely, advance knowledge of Himmler's future gives the fireman many opportunities to intervene during Himmler's formative years to redirect his course in life. There are alternatives to letting him die. Depends on how much we insulate the hypothetical. 

Which I reiterated in a later post:

In addition, you're ignoring something I said before in response to the same basic objection: you have a lot more options when Himmler is four than when he is forty. As an adult, as head of the SS, with the Final Solution underway, saving his life guarantees the death of millions. But at the age of four, there are many potential opportunities to influence his development for the better and deflect him away from that horrendous career. 

Yet you continue to ignore that. You don't appear to be making a good faith effort to accurately represent my stated position. 

Yet in this post, you act as though you think innocent baby Himmler should be treated as an innocent child. But in that case, the fireman has a duty to rescue the innocent child. The active-passive distinction can't be combined, in anything but a really weird, ad hoc manner, with the innocence consideration to give us the conclusion that it's 

a) right for doctors actively to kill adult Himmler when he is not a present threat, partly because of what he intends to do later,
b) wrong for anyone actively to kill baby Himmler when he is not a present threat, because of what he will otherwise grow up and do later,
c) right for a fireman with prophetic powers to stand by and deliberately do nothing while baby Himmler burns to death in a fire from which he could have been rescued, because of what he will otherwise grow up and do later. 

If baby Himmler is innocent, he's just innocent. and the normal duties of doctors, firemen, etc., toward him hold.
If, however, their carrying out their normal duties toward him rather than deliberately withholding their aid so that baby Himmler dies makes them "enablers" of his later evil actions, it's difficult to see how there can be an absolute prohibition on killing him as a baby outright to prevent his later evil actions.

Because your objection is reductionistic, as if there's one universal criterion. I see no reason to accept that. You can only accuse me of inconsistency by oversimplifying my stated position.

I'm not an open theist, nor flirting with the idea that future statements have no fixed value. But words like "taking the lives" of other children or "insuring genocide" and the like simply abrogate free will. One can know, truly, future events that hinge on the contingent free choices of other rational creatures, but it does not follow from this that one's contributing causal actions guarantee, insure, or even are the same as (as if one is oneself "taking the lives" of their victims) those actions. To say so is simply to abrogate the fact that the later choices are _free_.That they are free doesn't mean that there is no truth value to what those choices will be. It does mean that other people's actions in saving my life don't "guarantee" or "insure" what I do later.

Well, you haven't begun to demonstrate how your affirmation of foreknowledge is consistent with your denial of inevitability. Moreover, you haven't offered a refutation of the reasons I gave. You simply assert their mutual consistency.

There can be, but those are cases of what the Catholics call "remote material cooperation," and they are as a class pretty un-cut-and-dried. Whereas the duty of firemen to save people from fires or of doctors in the ER to treat those in front of them is much more cut and dried. Your entire approach involves turning morality on its head: The good and normal actions of people who have voluntarily entered helping professions are being treated as material cooperation with the evil later actions of their patients or the people they rescue (given advance knowledge), and you are then using that to argue that their straightforward act of doing good to that person is morally dubious, that they would be justified in deliberately letting that person die despite their role in society. Indeed, given the strength of your rhetoric ("enabling," "taking the lives," "complicit," etc.), it's difficult how you can avoid arguing that the doctor or fireman has a _duty_ to _at least_ allow the person who will later do evil to die when he finds out that this is the person whom he would otherwise help.
That completely reverses the order of moral duties and the clarity of moral duties.

Ironically, it's your own position that represents a moral inversion, when–at best–you treat innocent and guilty alike, and–at worst–treat the guilty better than innocents.

You also have a bad habit of overgeneralizing. I daresay most folks don't volunteer to become firemen or trauma physicians to save the life of Himmler or Pablo Escobar. Rather, they enter those professions for the common good. To do good for garden-variety patients or ordinary at-risk citizens.

Likewise, they don't normally take future outcomes into account when making decisions because they don't have ESP. 

It doesn't follow that if they had advance knowledge, that would (or should) have no affect on their decisions. Their motivations for entering these professions are based on ordinary circumstances involving normal knowledge, not extraordinary circumstances involving paranormal knowledge.

It's difficult how you can avoid arguing that the doctor or fireman has a _duty_ to _at least_ allow the person who will later do evil to die when he finds out that this is the person whom he would otherwise help. That completely reverses the order of moral duties and the clarity of moral duties.

Which simply begs the question. Ted Bundy lands in the ER with internal bleeding. If I patch him up, he will abduct, rape, torture, and murder a coed next month. ESP alerts me to that eventuality. Therefore, I give him placebo treatment instead.

According to you, that "completely reverses the order of moral duties and the clarity of moral duties." Really?

The moral duties to whom? Ted Bundy or his next victim? I doubt the coed would share your sense of moral clarity.

What makes you think the order of moral duties was ever based on that scenario? 

Sign of the horns

Recently, the Most Holy Family Monastery did a devastating expose on the true identity of James White. Based on incontrovertible photographic evidence of White routinely using the sign of the horns, they confirmed what many have long suspected: "James White" is an alias for Damien.

This led to a crisis of confidence at Team Apologian. Security footage picked up TFan, Jeff Downs, and James Swan sneaking into a Roman Catholic church to siphon water from the font into a whiskey flask. The experiment was to determine if White sizzles on contact with holy water–like those vampire flicks. That would confirm his infernal paternity.

Of course, splashing him with holy water isn't risk free. That's why they drew straws. I have a reporter stationed at the local burn unit in case the experiment backfires.

Backdoor martial law

Whenever we have a "mass shooting," the liberal establishment calls for tougher gun control laws. Likewise, the DOJ announces an investigation. 

i) To begin with, people fixate on numerically clustered violence, but that's often artificial. If you have 20 people shot on one day in one place, that's a huge news item. But if you have one person killed per day over a 20-day span in the very same city, that's buried in the back pages of the newspaper. Even though the totals may be the same, we tend to hype clustered totals. The same number spread out over days doesn't garner the same attention. 

ii) Because the liberal establishment cannot or will not solve the real problem, it diverts attention to a decoy issue. For instance, there's clearly a correlation between global warming rhetoric and ecoterrorism, but the liberal establishment doesn't demand that we crack down on Al Gore. 

The liberal establishment is in denial about the manifest link between Islam and terrorism, so it must deflect attention away from its failure to address the real problem.

Likewise, some shooters suffer from mental illness, but there's no convenient solution for that. If you make involuntary commitment easier, that will lead to predictable abuses. 

iii) There is, though, a more sinister element to this. There's a sense in which mass shootings further the liberal agenda. Mass shootings are pretext for greater domestic surveillance, a pretext to expand law enforcement, a pretext to disarm the public. It empowers the bureaucracy. Liberal officials have a totalitarian impulse. They don't want freedom. They have a utopian vision that requires both massive and minute social control. 

They're spoiling for an excuse to declare martial law. And we've come close to that. Consider the city-wide lockdown after the Boston Marathon bombings. Although I don't think the authorities instigate these crimes, our immigration policy on Muslims has the same effect. 

Avengers

Unsurprisingly, the authorities denounce vigilantism. Yet vigilantes are very popular in fiction. More realistic examples include the Dirty Harry series and Person of Interest. 

Then you have the whole genre of superhero vigilantes, viz. Superman, Spiderman, Batman, Green Arrow–plus video game characters like Max Payne.

The usual context of fictional vigilantes is when the authorities let crime spiral out of control. Indeed, the authorities are often in cahoots with the criminal class. They get kickbacks for looking the other way. 

The authorities resent vigilantes because it make them look bad. It shines a light on their incompetence or corruption. The effectiveness of fictional vigilantes is a constant embarrassment to the ineffectual authorities. 

There's a popular audience for this character because it has real-world parallels. Big city mayors or US presidents who don't do their job. Who don't protect the citizenry. 

Indeed, we have situations where the authorities perversely protect the bad guys from the good guys. Just recently, in the wake of another jihadist attack (in San Bernadino), the Attorney General vowed to crack down, not on domestic jihadism, but "anti-Muslim rhetoric." 

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428048/san-bernardino-shooting-loretta-lynch-muslim-backlash

I think the popular audience for fictional avengers also reflects an instinctive yearning for eschatological justice. So many crooks elude justice, including heinous criminals. And it never ends. It's like a secularized Second Coming. 

The world's dumbest mugger

I'd like to make a view additional comments on anti-abortion violence. To some degree, this is a follow-up to my "Kill at your own risk" post. 

From what I've read, the only organized anti-abortion violence was sponsored by the Army of God, a domestic terrorist cult. In addition, some figures, like Eric Rudolph, aren't focussed on abortion, per se. 

Whenever there's an incident of anti-abortion violence, which is increasingly rare, there are the usual demands to denounce it and "tone down" the rhetoric. 

A few quick points:

i) I'm the wrong person to ask. If someone demands that I denounce anti-abortion violence, they will get a twofer. I'll simultaneously condemn violence both inside and outside the clinic. I'm more than willing to condemn anti-abortion violence, but that's not all I'll condemn. So they may be getting more than they bargained for.

ii) It's possible that some anti-abortion rhetoric is over-the-top. I don't move in those circles.

Often, though, this is just a matter of using accurate terminology rather than euphemisms. 

Likewise, gruesome posters of aborted babies are no different than news footage of corpses at Auschwitz, or pictures of piled skulls in the Killing Fields of Cambodia. 

Finally, I'd like to expand on a previous point. Let's take a comparison:

A hapless thief is hoping Mafia don Vincent (The Chin) Gigante will let bygones be bygones. Willie King yesterday kissed up to the reputed head of the Genovese crime family and humbly apologized for mugging his 94-year-old mother. King had second thoughts about trying to beat the rap at a trial and decided it might be safer to spend some time behind bars. He pleaded guilty in Manhattan Supreme Court to grand larceny and will be slapped with a jail term of 11/2 to 3 years when he is sentenced Aug. 19. "His motivation was to apologize to the Gigante family and Mrs. Gigante," said King's attorney, Steven Warshaw. "In this way, he is trying to put this behind him, and he also hopes the Gigante family puts this behind them. 

"King, 37, of St. Nicholas Ave. in Manhattan, became the unluckiest mugger in town July 21. He snatched Yolanda Gigante's wallet outside her Greenwich Village apartment as she returned home from a shopping trip with her son the Rev. Louis Gigante. Witnesses who trailed the fleeing thief flagged down Lt. Robert McKenna, who arrested King, recovered Yolanda Gigante's wallet and her $90 and then revealed to the mugger the identity of his victim. McKenna said King slumped in the patrol car's seat and rolled his eyes. 

http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/mugger-hoping-gigante-gentle-article-1.742741 

Now, it wouldn't be my duty to exact revenge on the mugger. For one thing, she wasn't my mother. 

But imagine if Vincent's men caught up with King before the police did. Imagine King walking by the newsstand the next day and reading about the crime. For him, life would get very interesting very fast. 

Suppose I was present when Vincent's men show up, with baseball bats in hand. Is it my duty to interpose myself between the mugger and the avengers? Hardly. 

He mugs little old ladies at his own risk. This time he picked the wrong victim. Big mistake.

But that's his problem, not mine. Even if I disapprove of vigilantism, I'm not going to get that worked up over what happens to the mugger. I'll keep on walking.  

Gun free zone

Typhoid Mary

I'm going to respond to some comments that Lydia McGrew left on this post:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2015/12/windfall.html

Problem is, Lydia starts with a principle that's reasonable in ordinary cases, but stretches it to cover cases where that becomes fanatically unreasonable. Extending plausible cases to lend bogus plausibility to implausible cases. 

For instance, if your patient is Typhoid Mary, then it would be wildly irresponsible to just consider what's best for her. For she needs to be quarantined. To act in her best interests, to the exclusion of everyone else, is far too one-sided.

Rain water versus a heavenly sea in Genesis 1:6-8

"Rain water versus a heavenly sea in Genesis 1:6-8" by Vern Poythress.

The jihadist and the Messianic Jew

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/12/the_jihadist_and_the_messianic_jew.html

The Significance Of George Whitefield

Thomas Kidd published a biography of George Whitefield last year. Albert Mohler recently had a good interview with Kidd. I recommend listening to it, and I recommend the book.

Half-empty glass

I don't know the percentage of registered Democrats, Republicans, and unaffiliated voters, so I can't give precise figures, but this is my general impression:

Neither Democrats nor Republicans have a majority of registered voters. To win, both sides need to attract unaffiliated voters. 

Both parties have almost enough partisan voters to win, but they need unaffiliated voters (or crossover voters) to put a Democrat or Republican candidate over the top.

It's like three glasses of water. Both Democrat and Republican candidates begin with a glass that's fairly full. So they just need to make up the difference by siphoning water from the third class to top off their glass. 

Let's say Hillary becomes the Democrat nominee. She will basically get 100% of Democrats. 

Let's say Cruz or Rubio becomes the Republican nominee. He will probably get about 100% of the Republican vote. 

Suppose Trump is the nominee. He will get far less than 100% of the Republican vote. From what I've read, many conservatives have said they won't vote for Trump no matter what.

So the initial water level for his glass is far below Hillary's. He starts much lower. That means he must get enough unaffiliated voters just to get back up to the level where Cruz or Rubio begin, plus enough additional unaffiliated voters to put him over the top.

By contrast, Hillary has to get far fewer unaffiliated voters to put her over the top, because her glass is so much fuller to begin with. And they'd be competing for the same unaffiliated voters. It seems like Hillary has a strong completive advantage under that scenario. 

Suppose Cruz or Rubio becomes the nominee, and Trump runs as a third-party candidate. There will be a two-way split in the Republican vote between Trump and the Republican nominee, as well as a three-way split in the unaffiliated vote between Hillary, Trump, and the Republican nominee. It seems like Hillary would be undefeatable under that scenario. 

Windfall

I'm going to respond to some comments that Lydia McGrew left on this post:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2015/12/saving-little-himmler.html

I'll begin with a general observation. Lydia has recast my original position. I didn't suggest that the duty of a doctor is to sort out good guys from bad guys and then impose rough justice. Rather, I've discussed what's morally permissible for a doctor to do, using some hypothetical limiting-cases. 

Clientitis

I listened to James White on the Dividing Line yesterday:

http://www.aomin.org/aoblog/index.php/2015/12/02/james-type-here-3/

This will probably be my last post on the subject.

i) The timing was unfortunate for White. His "Two Contrasting Views of Islam" happened on the same day as what has all the earmarks of another domestic jihadist attack (in San Bernardino). 

ii) His broadcast continues a recent pattern, both on Facebook and Youtube, of scorched-earth rhetoric to characterize those who don't share his viewpoint. If you disagree, he brands you a bigot or Islamophobe.  The whole show was full of mockery.

I have to repeat a question I asked before: what does he hope to accomplish? Is his objective to persuade or to burn bridges?

iii) One irony is how his rhetorical tactics on this issue parallel homosexual activists. They brand their critics as homophobes while White brands his critics as Islamophobes.

Likewise, both invoke the argument from experience. Homosexual apologists ask "How many gay friends do you have?" If you just get to know us, you'll see that gays are good neighbors, too. We're not all alike. Don't lump us in with those obscene, flamboyant exhibitionists at gay pride parades. Don't lump us in with gays who frequent the bathhouses. No, we're monograms, all-American, hand-holding, boy-next-door gay couples. Right out of Norman Rockell. 

Now White is using exactly the same approach in reference to Muslims. He seems to have a bad case of clientitis. 

iv) James White and Rich Pierce had little exchange about how you just can please the critics. How many people over last 14 years have been calling for Muslims to denounce jihad, but when they do so, they must be liars. As soon as they do that they're not the real Muslims. Can't win for losing. 

Speaking for myself, my stated position has been more specific. It really doesn't matter what moderate Muslims in the West say, because they don't speak for the Muslim world. They aren't taken seriously by their own. 

The lead to come from high-level representatives in the ancient, influential centers of the Muslim world. Not from Westernized ex-pats. 

v) Later, White makes fun of Ben Shapiro. For Shapiro, commitment to sharia is a hallmark of radical Islam. White accuses him of knowing nothing about the varieties of sharia and does a facepalm.

But Shapiro didn't actually say that. Moreover, for White's distinction to work, he'd need to give examples of kinder, gentler versions of sharia that can peacefully coexist with the infidel. And he'd need to show how popular that version is. But he gave no such examples. 

vi) Later, White quoted Phil 2, then said it sounds like We christians believe every tongue will confess, Jesus will reign over all the earth, God's will shall be accomplished, his kingdom established. And yet we freak out when another religion says we're going to do the same thing. You can't do that! I'm that weird guy that goes you probably need to be consistent. It's a bummer!

But that comparison is so equivocal. Phil 2 doesn't summon Christians to wage war agains the infidel. it says nothing about Christians imposing this regime on the world. There's no suggestion of conversion by the sword. 

Indeed, that's incompatible with evangelical theology, which attributes conversion to the Holy Spirit. Conversion, in the Christian sense, can't be compelled. 

So how in the world is that seriously analogous to jihadist passages in the Koran and the Hadith? Why does White pretend these are comparable when he knows perfectly well that's not the case?

vii) Later, he attempts a comparison between Robert Dear and jihadists who frequent brothels and get drunk. He then accuses Christians of a double standard: That works for us but not to you!

Yet White keeps hectoring critics on how Islam is not monolithic. But if Islam is so diverse, why can't at true Muslim frequent brothels, get drunk, and go to paradise so long as he dies in jihad? White careens between saying we're not entitled to distinguish true Muslims from nominal Muslim, only to draw that very distinction when it suits the immediate needs of his argument. 

viii) He then suggests the solution to ISIS is to change hearts, but for a lot of Christians the Gospel isn't a good enough answer anymore. Let's trust in horses and men.

But, of course, that's a caricature which he himself doesn't take seriously. White is not a pacifist or universalist. So he doesn't think evangelism alone is a substitute for the armed forces or counterespionage.

White is a very smart guy, so why does he feel the need to burn so many straw men? The whole show is talking back at critics rather than reasoning with critics. He accuses the critics of "roid rage," but he's pretty hopped up himself.