Giving Calvinism a ... longer glance

Molinism is an academic exercise that turns God into an epistemological calculator. It also has negligible support in scripture.

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Not if God is omnitemporal.

It is incompatible by definition. Libertarian free will states the agent is the fundamental originator of their choices. Omnitemporality is orthogonal to that definition. E.g. Anselm states God knows and causes all choices according to their own nature, so if the choice is truly agent originated, then God is essentially causing the agent to be able to originate their own choices but not causing the specific choice itself nor determining the agent’s will. This is related to Aquinas’ idea of condignly merited grace, whereby we human agents still have a role in meriting our eternal life, even though it is all enabled via God. It is like God has given us all a grace car, taught us how to drive it, paved the roads, provided the gas stations, built in a GPS, stuck directions and warning signs all over the place, internally motivating us to want to drive to heaven, and so on, but it is still ultimately up to us to drive the car to heaven.

Are any of your verbs above about God not time-based, tensed?

No, but that’s just a deficiency of our language talking about a being who is both active but atemporal.

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Exactly (I would say omnitemporal, obviously).

Let me, yes, once again :grin:, refer you to the providential sequence that God used in Maggie’s life to show himself to her. Were those events planned? Absolutely. Was anyone’s libertarian free will suppressed? Absolutely not.

Then consider a conversation between two people, and in a thought experiment, if you can, make that conversation instantaneous. Does either party deterministically impose their choice of words on the other?

No, but that is no longer determinism either, and no longer Calvinism I would argue.

Maybe that’s why I say that I am a God-is-omnitemporal Calvinist. Does Calvinism even mention the time aspect? It is integral, isn’t it?

Calvinism doesn’t have verses highlighted in black marker like Arminianism in effect does. (I noticed your foggy redaction above. :grin: I would have used square brackets around Molinism.)

(You can use [s] and /s for strikethrough, as well. But you probably knew that.)

I don’t believe that’s relevant to Calvin’s theology of God’s sovereignity. From my recollection, God is so sovereign that He actively determines everything, including double predestination of the damned, and even people who to the best of their understanding are saved, but are actually damned.

It comes out of the Reformation, and Luther’s rejection of the role of human free will in salvation, to counter the Catholic view of condignly merited grace, and thus the necessity of works in salvation. Luther insisted that man has absolutely no role whatsoever in salvation.
Also why he tore the book of James out of the Bible.

Pre-destination is a tensed word and does not really apply, as is damned, but it the only in the only language available to us, being mortals in linear, sequential time.

I should reread this – I think there are a few salient points:

  The Omnitemporality of God

I’m not arguing that modern Calvinists believe Calvin’s doctrine of God determining absolutely everything, including individuals’ every choice. They very well may have reverted to the traditional Catholic perspective. I am only saying that Calvin’s original formulation is incompatible with libertarian free will, and he seems to have rejected the traditional solution to making lfw compatible with omniscience, probably due to the Reformation doctrine of grace alone.

My perception is the modern Protestant church is indeed moving away from the original Protestant distinctives formulated by Luther and Calvin, and back towards the traditional Catholic doctrines on these matters.

Yeah, could be. God’s timelessness (or rather, timefulness) covers all the bases for me, not that I’m saying we can get our heads around it.

Maggie, again, for example: God ‘planned’ and ‘dictated’ (again, those are actually inapplicable tensed verbs with respect to God), in his absolute sovereignty from eternity past, for those events to happen and in that order. Judas Iscariot was free and remained responsible in his choices, but he was also in instantaneous conversation with the omnitemporal God.

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“Libertarian” free will, in the strict sense, is incompatible with lots of things, lots of thought experiments, and nearly any single philosophical position I am aware of. And moreover, I think it a logically self-contradictory just by itself.

We didn’t decide our own inclinations, even in a world without God… evolution would have given us our base impulses, inclinations, Basic preferences, as did society, nature, nurture, etc. we are in no sense in any philosophical system “masters of our own destiny” in the sense that libertarian free will (if I understand the term” demands.

Moreover, the very concept I find self-refuting. In order to make a decision, we have to start with some preference_ for something… we cannot “stand outside” all our thoughts,inclinations, moral convictions, and the like in order to make a “free” choice… our choices - every last one of them - are all influenced by some state of affairs that we ourselves did not choose.

Moreover, I find objections to free will on the basis of pre-knowledge simply odd when given any thought… Maybe I’ve seen too much Star Trek and time travel stories. But if I could hypothetically go back in time, and watch Booth shoot president Lincoln as if a fly on the wall (so as not to interfere in any way), in what sense could anyone seriously say that my knowledge had somehow “taken away” Booth’s free will?

Or think of the “Trials and Tribblations” episode of DS9, if you’re familiar. Sisko and company go back in time to station K7 during the time of CAPT Kirk. Studying their history, they know (unerringly) certain actions that Kirk and company are going to be taking. Now, lots of objections folks have made to such stories as that, but I have never heard anyone complain that, by his mere appearance in the past with his knowledge intact, that Sisko has somehow magically removed Kirk’s will, Kirk now acting as a puppet in all those actions he takes that Sisko has “prior” knowledge of.

I personally think it goes to show that no one seems to really object to the idea of foreknowledge as destroying free will in practice (if such practice were in fact possible).

This should be neither a surprise, nor objection, for any Christ-follower:

On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

However, I’m guessing you are speaking about people that are in every conceivable sense true “believers”, who know Christ, have repented of their sins in the deepest way possible, have trusted Christ alone for salvation, who deeply know and love him, and have committed to living for him and serving him with their lives… but who will find out their names were never on some “secret list,” therefore they will be damned regardless of anything they could possibly do?

If so, I must say, as humbly and kindly, but as firmly as I can, you have radically misunderstood Calvinism.

If it is I that has misunderstood you, I bet your pardon and ask you to correct my misunderstanding.

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Precisely how I understand it, well stated.

Now, I will humbly challenge you to give me any philosophy or world-view where that kind of free will in humans can possibly exist?

Arminian? Atheistic/Materialist? Open-Theist? Buddhist? Hindu?

C S Lewis was addressing a slightly different topic - that of us being “free” (in the libertarian sense) to construct our own morality… his insight I think is extremely, um, insightful…

Supposing we can enter the vacuum and view all Ethical Systems from the outside, what sort of motives can we then expect to find for entering any one of them? One thing is immediately clear. We can have no ethical motives for adopting any of these systems. It cannot, while we are in the vacuum, be our duty to emerge from it. An act of duty is an act of obedience to the moral law. But by definition we are standing outside all codes of moral law. A man with no ethical allegiance can have no ethical motive for adopting one.

it follows from God’s absolute sovereignty

if something outside God can originate His actions, such as logical necessit, then God is not absolutely sovereign

therefore, if God is absolutely sovereign, and He exists, then there is at least one entity in existence that is the fundamental originator of their choices. in other words, if God is absolutely sovereign, He must have libertarian free will

now, can God create other beings with lfw? if not, that is again a limitation on God’s capabilities, which is not a logical contradiction, making Him not absolutely sovereign

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Well, that didn’t exactly answer my question… my challenge was to give me any world view in which “libertarian free will” in humans can exist. I would be interested your answer?

And, if you think it a significant critique to say that, if God is sovereign, there are some things he “cannot do,” I’ll remind you that I also firmly believe that my absolutely sovereign God cannot make square circles, nor rocks too big for him to move.

So my point remains: is libertarian free will in humans (or any contingent creature) a conceivable or rational possibility in any conceivable state if affairs? Or is the very concept, indeed, a logical contradiction?

If so, then neither you nor I should even think twice about happily affirming that creating libertarian free will in humans (just like any other logical contradiction) is something that an absolutely sovereign God cannot do.

The question is does God have libertarian free will, or is He constrained by logical necessity in all His decisions?

Depends on our definitions… according to the definition you proposed earlier…

Then yes, God, as self-existent, and as the very ground of his own existence and being, is the fundamental originator of his own choices. There was no precedent cause or determining factor that Gave God his attributes that determines his choices. He as self-existent is by definition the originator if his own choices.

However, if you mean that God is somehow bound or constrained by logic, this idea I would dispute. Saying that God “cannot” lift a rock too big for him to move is just a nonsensical, meaningless Statement, as the words don’t actually have any meaning.

If you can first actually explain to me what a square circle is, or what a married bachelor is, then I will explain why God can’t make one. But the words are simply nonsense. The words don’t convey anything meaningful.

To say that God cannot create a “square circle”‘is logically equivalent to saying that God cannot create a krpewbbjdifirrjh.” They words are simply meaningless. They don’t convey anything either meaningful or conceivable.

To borrow again from my chief mentor…

His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say, ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,’ you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words, ‘God can.’ It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.

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would you say then that God has libertarian free will?