Btw, Molinism & Open Theism are False

Revealed Apologetics

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Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Eli Ayala. And today I am happy to be discussing a very interesting topic, which we'll get into in just a few moments.

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But I do think that this episode will prove useful for a lot of folks who are interested in both of the topics of Molinism and open theism.

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For those who know a little bit about my own theological journey, I did some hopscotching between different perspectives.

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I was never an open theist, which we'll define and explain for those who, when they start listening, maybe they don't know what open theism is, but I never entertained that view.

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But I was a Molinist for some time, a short while, okay?

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So I grew up in a Pentecostal Arminian context. Then when

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I was a little bit older and kind of gotten to some more theology, a little bit more intentionally,

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I became a Calvinist. And then when I was a Calvinist for quite some time, I was introduced to the topic of Molinism.

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And through reading Kenneth Keighley's book, Salvation and Sovereignty, that book really made me question my

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Calvinism and explore this idea of Molinism. And what I appreciated about Keighley's book is that he presented a version of Molinism alongside

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Calvinism. And so this was really something that was important to me. I didn't wanna just learn about Molinism because I was so convinced of Calvinism.

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I wanted to see them side by side. Well, how would a Molinist address this concern, that concern, and this concern?

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And so Dr. Keighley in his book argued quite convincingly, at least to my satisfaction.

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And so when I read that book, I kind of converted to Molinism for a little while and argued for it quite convincingly.

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I was talking to a couple of my Calvinist friends and got them thinking. But through more study conversations with folks,

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I've had some great conversations with Tim Stratton over there at Free. I have to get this straight because Tyler Vela's show sounds very similar to Tim Stratton's show.

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The Free Thinker, okay? Tim Stratton has the Free Thinking Ministry, okay?

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I had some great conversations with him while I was a Molinist and then also when I was a

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Calvinist. So I also had a great discussion with Dr. Kirk McGregor, who is a fine Molinist scholar in general and a good defender of Molinism.

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And so I had a good, a fair share of the Molinist perspective. And at the end of the day, while I disagree,

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I do appreciate my Molinist brothers. They're sharp guys and they definitely give us some food for thought.

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But ultimately I came away with the idea that Molinism doesn't do it for me. I don't think that it is the position that is best defended scripturally.

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And so I was drawn to Calvinism, back to Calvinism. And I was quite convinced that it is what the

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Bible teaches. Now, of course, I know there are gonna be people, obviously, gonna disagree and that's okay. But that's where I was, that was my journey.

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So I'm really excited to talk a little bit about Molinism and then of course, open theism, which I think has real problems.

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And so we'll jump into that in just a moment. All right, well, before I introduce Tyler Vela and invite him on the screen with me,

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I do want to let folks know those who have been asking about my online class that I teach on presuppositional apologetics.

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Class starts on June 1st. So if you still want to sign up for PresuppU, you can go to revealedapologetics .com

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and click on the menu PresuppU, and it walks you through how you can RSVP a spot in the class.

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We'll be meeting once a week to discuss the content of the lectures, the PowerPoints and the outline.

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So you definitely, you want to check that out. I'm very happy with how the courses came out and we've already taught it a couple of months ago and it turned out really well.

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And so I'm looking forward for more people to sign up. So there's that. Now, for those who are wondering, well,

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David Palman, who is a Christian Arminian definitely has lots to say about presuppositional apologetics.

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Those who are wondering if I will be doing a response to a video that he just put out.

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Well, I've actually invited my friend, Chris Bolt, who is a fellow presuppositionalist to take a look at David Palman's main argumentation against presuppositional apologetics.

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And on June 3rd at 9 p .m. Eastern, we will be addressing

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David Palman's arguments there. And so hopefully that will prove helpful for folks who want to see how a presuppositionalist perspective might interact with the criticisms that he raises.

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Lastly, on June 11th, I will be having Anthony Rogers on. If those of you guys who know who Anthony Rogers is, he's an excellent defender of the

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Trinity. He offers wonderful critiques of Islam. I'm gonna have

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Anthony Rogers on my show to discuss presuppositional apologetics applied to Islam.

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And this is kind of an interesting topic. A lot of folks wonder, well, yeah, a presuppositionalist could argue with an atheist and that works fine, but what happens when you come up against another theist?

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How does presuppositionalism interact with a view that has an absolute God, an apparent grounding for logical absolutes and morality, things like that.

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And so I'm really excited to get into that. That's gonna be a June 11th. So I'll remind you guys as the upcoming shows come,

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I'll let you guys know about that. All right, well, all that out of the way, I want to invite

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Tyler Vela on. How's it going, Tyler? Good, how are you? I'm doing wonderful.

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I'm so happy that you're here, man. Yeah, happy to be here. I don't have a cool library background.

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You're coming from Casa de Vela, the kitchen that I have. That's where the magic happens. My library's in a back storage closet at church, so.

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That's where the magic happens for a lot of people in the kitchen. So it's all good. Well, why don't you tell folks a little bit about yourself very briefly, and then we'll jump right into this.

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I want folks to really get a lot out of this episode and whether you agree or disagree, that's okay, as long as you are thinking about these issues and that's a mission accomplished, as I see it.

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So why don't you tell folks a little bit about yourself? Sure, I never know how long or what to say on these.

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I am the host of the FreedThinker Podcast YouTube channel and blog, which really started as kind of a labor of love coming out of my own background.

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I was an atheist until I was about 20 years old when the Lord caught ahold of me and brought me home.

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And from kind of coming out of that naturalistic, atheistic background, I became a

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Christian only about a year and a half, right about a year before 9 -11, which is what spawned all the new atheists writing.

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And so I was kind of like early formative years of growing in the

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Christian faith and reconciling, I was a philosophy major and reconciling what

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I was learning in philosophy classes with my new Christian worldview and all that kind of stuff in the melting pot.

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Now you throw in the new atheists and there was a whole lot of stuff to read and talk about. And so the FreedThinker was born that way.

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It was actually started as just kind of a, it actually started as logical theism. I think someone has taken that since then, but so it really largely focused on dealing with atheism and naturalism and scientism and things like that.

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As I started going through another degree program at Moody and Biblical Studies, and now my master's in Biblical Studies, currently at Reformed Theological Seminary and some other kind of studies and projects in my life, it has turned into a labor of love in other ways.

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And I've kind of divided off the podcast is now dedicated more towards in -house discussions, biblical theology, systematic theology, kind of questions about like this.

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If I did a show like this, this would be on the podcast. We're really dealing with theological things. It's not really evangelistic, that kind of thing.

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Whereas the YouTube channel, really that's where I'm dedicating all of my episodes to questions about naturalism and burden of proof and burden of justification.

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I did have a series on there on my specific interpretation of Genesis 1, but only because that's hugely,

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I think apologetically valuable to have another position, basically saying like, hey guys, stop having the conversation that way.

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So there's some things like that, but that's really what the kind of two pronged approach of the ministry has been.

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And then also recently, I'm not, I think you know this, but I'm not sure if you know this. I also admin a page called

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Sage Stage. Sage Stage is dedicated. There's the way that the admins, the way that we've set it up is

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I think very, very interesting. The Calvinistic admins kind of police the Calvinists and the non -Calvinist police the non -Calvinists.

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And we kind of, we hold the hammer to our own sides. And a lot of times someone will get blocked and they'll be like, oh, the other side's mad.

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And it's like, no, like I blocked you because you're being a jerk. So we actually, so that's been going for a while.

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And one of the admins, Randy Whitman Jr., who I went to Moody with, who's a historic

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Arminian, he and I actually started, and the other admins will come on, but we started the

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Sage Stage YouTube channel. So we've been doing, we're now on, I think we finished episode three now, which is really, the whole point of it is just a discussion about how your theological position and kind of hermeneutical,

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I wanna say presumptions, but just the hermeneutical principles that you hold when you come to a text, how it actually will determine or color the types of interpretations of passages that you'll bring to it.

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So we go to these heavily disputed passages like James 2 and Hebrews 6 and other ones. And we say, okay, well, what are the different views and why do they come to that?

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And is it, what are the hermeneutical considerations and that lead them to read them that way and all that kind of stuff.

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So - And that's called Sage Stage? Sage Stage. The purpose is to de -cage -ify people from all sides.

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Okay, that's awesome. So - All right, well, very good. Thank you for that. I hope folks check that out.

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Well, let's provide some context. If those of you were intrigued by the thumbnail that I put out, yes, it was supposed to somewhat mimic

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Capturing Christianity's color scheme, okay? This episode really is inspired by some comments that were floating around Facebook by Cameron Bertucci of Capturing Christianity, which by the way,

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I highly recommend his channel. Yeah, there's some disagreements I have with him, but I consider him a brother in Christ.

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I've greatly benefited from his content. I'm a subscriber, okay?

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But for those who have been following his ministry, he has been saying some things that I do find concerning.

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And so this episode is not to call him a heretic or to make fun of like, well, he's flirting with this, that or the other thing.

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Really, this episode is inspired by the fact that the things that he posts with respect to Roman Catholicism or open theism, being undecided between Molinism and open theism,

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I think some of the views that he seems to be, I guess, I don't wanna use the word, but I guess flirting with, can

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I use that word? I mean, I don't mean to sound pejorative, but the kind of the ideas that he seems to be kind of interacting with and kind of, well, maybe

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I'll consider this. That seems to be a little concerning to me. And so I do think that these topics are important to talk about.

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And I wanna stick not on Cameron, but on the positions that he's talking about and talk about why it's important for us to know what these positions are and why with respect to at least open theism, why we should avoid open theism.

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Whereas Molinism, I agree with Guillaume Benyam, the French Calvinist philosopher.

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He says, Molinism is my favorite of the false views. So definitely not as bad if I can use that word as open theism, but it's got its issues too.

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And so we're gonna talk about that here in this episode. So hopefully we are gonna do that with respect, but with focus and content.

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And for those who are in the comments, try to keep the disagreements respectful.

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And if you have any questions, as I always do on my shows, we will go through a bunch of these questions.

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As long as Tyler is awake and has energy, we'll go through as many as we possibly can. I want this to be kind of like a super duper episode where people can kind of go to this episode and learn a lot.

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So hopefully we can do that here. All right, how does that sound? Does that sound okay? All right.

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This will be like the hardcore history episode, like the four and a half hour episode. That's right.

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Well, what I've been doing is I've been taking small snippets of my past interviews. So I would definitely, if this episode goes long,

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I definitely wanna take some snippets and put them up as separate videos so people can kind of get right to the specific content that they're interested in.

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So we gotta serve the people, man, right? We gotta give the people what they want. Give them what they want. And people want nothing more than five hour long

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YouTube videos. That's right. Well, you'll be surprised. Theology is a weird world, right? People are like, yeah, five minutes, but theology,

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I mean, you got, people will listen for a while. So at any rate, let's jump right into the issue.

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So I'm gonna flip a coin, okay? What would you like to cover first, Molinism or Open Theism?

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Well, let's go with Molinism because I think it's the, it's the one that we're gonna be probably the nicest with.

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Okay. So let, you know, let's kind of get that one out of the way. Okay, so why don't you define for folks who might be listening for the first time and have no idea what

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Molinism is, why don't you define what Molinism is and then we'll jump right into the issue as to why do you think it's problematic?

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Yeah, so Molinism is hard to distill down into one thing.

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And it's kind of gotten a running start in the past, you know, couple of decades and is, you know, a little bit worse for the wear,

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I think, but we'll get into the reason for that. Molinism is largely the position that attempts to resolve the perceived conflict between kind of the

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God of classical theism, omniscient, omnipotent, you know, it's sovereign, you know, works all things together for the good of those who love him, right?

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This kind of, you know, predestinarian type of view. I mean, a lot of people don't realize that Molina had a very actually kind of Calvinistic reading of Romans nine with at the same time, this concern to uphold human freedom such that people are actually responsible for their actions, right?

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So it's an attempt to resolve how that can be, how those two things can be reconciled, right?

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How can you have a God who is absolutely sovereign, who knows everything about the future, and yet when that future comes providentially in time, we still are making free decisions that are not, you know, mechanistically determined where we're robots, and so therefore we're still free.

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So basically it tries to reconcile human freedom and a very strong sense of divine sovereignty while preserving kind of a libertarian free will perspective.

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Yeah, there's a very strong kind of Calvinistic misunderstanding of Molinism, really of historic

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Arminianism and other views too, that they're somehow like dismissive of sovereignty. Molinists are actually keenly aware and want to maintain a rather high view of sovereignty actually.

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So, which I commend them for, I think they just get it wrong. Which is one of the reasons why

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Tyler, some Calvinists who flirt with Molinism are attracted to Molinism.

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Yeah. It really does, I think it really does a good job, right? A good job doing justice to a high view of divine sovereignty but in our estimation,

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I guess not high enough and not in a way that we think is reflective of how the Bible presents the sovereignty of God.

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But go ahead. Yeah, so one of the ways that, not one of the ways, kind of initial starting point that it works out is that it wants to say, okay, well, it bases its kind of interaction between God and creation on this thing called middle knowledge.

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And to understand what middle knowledge is, you have to understand what free knowledge and natural knowledge are. I guess I should say natural knowledge and free knowledge because that's the direction it goes.

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Natural knowledge is God's knowledge of himself, right?

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It is his kind of necessary knowledge, right?

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Knowledge of himself and knowledge of necessary truths. It's his knowledge that could not be any other way than it possibly could be.

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So it's his knowledge of his own omnipotence, his own omniscience, the father's love for the son, right?

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All of those types of things, that's part of his natural knowledge. God's free knowledge is his knowledge of what is actually true in the real world, right?

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So it is his kind of, I don't wanna say contingent knowledge but it is his knowledge about contingent facts is what

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I should say, right? So it's his knowledge that the sky is blue, right? He could have made creation and light refract in such a way through a moisturized atmosphere that the sky would appear to us to be red, right?

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That could have been the case, but he knows that in his creation on the planet earth, the sky appears blue under normal conditions, right?

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So that's a piece of his free knowledge. Okay, yeah.

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Well, I like how when I was learning Molinism and I was confused as to how

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Molinists kind of understand the moments of God's knowledge in kind of these three ways, I liked how Kenneth Keithley phrased it, whereas God's natural knowledge is his could knowledge.

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He knows everything that could be. God's middle knowledge, he knows everything that would be.

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And then there's his divine decree and then God has his free knowledge, his knowledge of what will in fact be in light of his decree.

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So you've got that could, the would and the will knowledge of God. I think that's kind of a helpful way of framing the - It's helpful.

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It's not exactly right. Because again, his knowledge of himself is part of that necessary knowledge.

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And so it doesn't quite fall under the could category. See folks, what

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Tyler did there, he disagreed with me and expressed that disagreement very respectfully and nicely.

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He was like, you heretic, I'm hanging out with you. He's like, not quite, Eli, but - Not quite.

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All right, man, I'm just close, bro. Keep going, go ahead. But close. So middle knowledge, it's called middle knowledge, not because it's like from middle earth or something, but because it's the knowledge that's sandwiched between those two things.

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It is actually that would knowledge. It's his knowledge of the way the world...

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See, this is where I like actually could or would, it doesn't really matter for middle knowledge. It's what could have been or would have been if conditions had been different and if he had created a different world.

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Right, some people would say God's middle knowledge is his counterfactual knowledge, but even that needs to be very qualified because even

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Calvinists believe, for example, you do not demonstrate middle knowledge in scripture by simply pointing to counterfactual statements in scripture because Calvinists can affirm counterfactuals.

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It gets more technical than that. But go ahead, why don't you continue where you left off? So that's where I was gonna actually,

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I was gonna get there, right? Because middle knowledge is not specifically, and I was actually gonna make the exact point you just made and give an example of why, it's not identical with counterfactual knowledge.

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The reason is because on Calvinism, on one kind of reformed epistemology, there's a few of them.

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This is the one that I hold to, so I'm just gonna present it because if anyone wants to attack it, they can actually attack my view then.

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And that is that God's decrees ground his knowledge, right? And so he has that natural knowledge about himself, right?

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So God has this natural knowledge that whatever I decree to be true in the actual world will be true, right?

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So he has this knowledge of had I decreed, let's say the sky to be red, right?

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Then the sky would be red. God has that counterfactual knowledge, but it's not the case that it's middle knowledge because middle knowledge is specifically knowledge that's based on what libertarianly free creatures would do in different circumstances, right?

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So it's not merely counterfactual knowledge. It's a very specific kind of counterfactual knowledge that really has to do with the type of free decisions that libertarian, and this is gonna be important, that libertarianly free agents would do in different circumstances than what's in the actual world, right?

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So it's not correct. This is one of the rejoinders, Molinus was like, oh, Calvinists deny counterfactuals.

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No, we don't. Or they'll be like, oh, well, if you affirm counterfactuals, you affirm middle knowledge. No, we don't.

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So those two things, there is not a direct equivocation. Those are not kind of synthetically identical concepts.

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So they are different. So Molinism then says, okay, God kind of has, he knows what all of these libertarianly free creatures would do given any circumstances.

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And he, this is also gonna be bizarre, he weakly actualizes a specific world, right?

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Which means God is not the kind of the tinkering God where he's strongly actualizing and making every single thing in that world come to pass, right?

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He's actualizing this set such that, and I think - Would you say, Tyler, that weak actualization is

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God actualizing something passively? Because he, in other words, he sets up the circumstances and allows them to play out, and so it actualizes it.

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So that's weak actualization, whereas a strong actualization is when God actually exerts power to bring something about.

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Correct. Okay. And I actually, I go back and forth on this. I think there's one, I think there's some sense to which

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God strongly actualizes the world because he speaks and it comes into being. But I think in other ways, we can, as Calvinists can say, that I understand what they mean when they say he weakly actualizes also, because it's not the case,

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I think, that God is the direct efficient cause of every single thing that comes to pass as a true fact in the actual world either.

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So he strongly actualizes the set, but he can kind of weakly actualize what true propositions are within that set, right?

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So I understand both ways. Ideas have consequences. Some people can press me on that a little bit, but I understand kind of how it could be.

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Okay, so Molanism is a view of God's omniscience that seeks to also reconcile this idea of a strong sense of divine sovereignty and human freedom and responsibility.

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It tries to do that while preserving kind of a libertarian free will perspective, okay?

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And here's a question then, so we can kind of get to a critique of it. So, okay, so Molanism simply defined is a view of God's omniscience where they understand

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God having kind of these three moments in his knowledge, God's natural knowledge, God's middle knowledge, and God's free knowledge.

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And that what you have sandwiched between God's natural knowledge and free knowledge, you have his middle knowledge, but what you have sandwiched in between his middle knowledge and his free knowledge is that divine decree, okay?

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Now, the purpose of Molanism is to solve what people have understood as a theological and philosophical conundrum.

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How do you reconcile this idea of freedom and sovereignty? In your estimation, and here's where we get into the critique, for example, why don't you think

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Molina and all other versions that were birthed out of Molina's Molanism, why do you think it doesn't do the job?

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And why is the view actually more concerning, not simply false and unsuccessful, but why is it concerning in terms of why

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Christians should be aware of this perspective? Yeah, yeah, so one of the things, and we're gonna, a bunch of Molanists are gonna start throwing like lettuce and tomatoes at us very quickly for this.

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One of the things that I found is that in order to avoid a ton of objections to Molanism, right?

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Molanism gets objections, like it's not like, I had someone today tell me that, well, Molanism is true because Calvinism is false.

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And it's like, well, that doesn't follow at all. There are critiques of Molanism from other libertarian incompatibilists, right?

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There are critiques of Molanism from sourcehood incompatibilists like Kevin Tempe, right?

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There are so many objections to Molanism. There are ones that are objections purely for philosophical, right, the grounding objection that has to do with God's omniscience and how he even knows these libertarian, like what's the truth maker of these things?

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How is it that God knows these kind of, these counterfactuals of libertarianly free creatures if they're not even real, like if they're not actual choices and God hasn't decreed them and nothing exists outside of God, like what is there for God to even know at that point, right?

26:17

So there's this, that's a very simplistic version of the grounding objection, but there's all of these problems and they have nothing to do with Calvinism, right?

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So there are so many, and actually most of my objections to Molanism, I could give some that are

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Calvinistic. Most of my objection to Molanism have nothing to do with my

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Calvinism. I just have fundamental, I mean, actually most of my objections have to do with really problematic views of omniscience and from my commitment to classical theism where I think there's lots of problems, right?

26:53

So let me give a couple examples. I can run what's called a reductio ad absurdum.

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A reductio ad absurdum is a type of objection. It's an internal critique where I say, okay, let's assume this position is true.

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Let's push it to its logical ends and see what happens. There's kind of a hard reductio ad absurdum, which is that when you push it to its logical ends, a contradiction pops out.

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And if a contradiction pops out, it has to be false, right? If something entails a logical contradiction, it's false.

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And it's kind of a weaker version of a reductio. And William Lane Craig does this all the time. He's like, look, let's push it to a point where it entails something that nobody wants to be true.

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Maybe it's not a contradiction, but like nobody who affirms the view ever wants to affirm that that's true, right?

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There's a really funny story I told you I was gonna tell. When I was in college at Sonoma State and I was a philosophy major and I had a really good friend of mine named

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Ben. I'm not gonna call him out now because he actually is like a professional philosopher. He teaches philosophy now.

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But we were in this debate and I don't even remember what it was about. But it got to a certain point where he had made so many ad hoc adjustments to avoid criticisms and avoid just admitting he's wrong that I finally was like, okay, look, you either have to admit that your position is wrong or you have to accept pantheism because that was the logical entailment.

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And he looks at me and he goes, well, I guess pantheism is looking pretty good right about now.

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He was joking. He actually ended up going back and kind of reworking. But that's an example of kind of a weak reductio where it's like, okay, but the consequence, the price tag,

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William and Craig says, the price tag is too high, right? You're not gonna be willing to shoulder that price to maintain the original thesis, right?

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I can do a bunch of those for Molinism, right? So one of them is that Molinism ostensibly starts with this presumption of libertarian freedom.

28:53

Now it's gone through a bunch of iterations. I'm gonna stop you right there. Now I've heard a knowledgeable Molinist say, let's let that go.

29:01

Okay, well, I mean, I know a couple of knowledgeable Molinists but they would say, yes, they hold to libertarian freedom but really

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Molinism is just a particular view of God's omniscience. So the reason at that point,

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I'm just gonna, maybe I would have to hear them out but my skeptical meter just like goes off the rail because in order, the meaningful difference, right?

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Is specifically, remember when we talked about middle knowledge, it's specifically knowledge of the counterfactuals of libertarian freedom, right?

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Because imagine I say, okay, well, my reformed view, not epistemology of myself but my reformed view of how omniscience is grounded is that God, remember that he has his natural knowledge.

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He knows whatever he decrees would be the case. He knows what he's going to decree. And so therefore he just knows by elimination had

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I decreed this, then it would be the case. That solves all the problems of Molinism.

30:02

Why don't Molinism take that much more parsimonious position because that's not libertarian freedom, right?

30:10

So in order for them to have this middle knowledge in a way that they think is meaningful, it requires some type of libertarian freedom.

30:23

So would you say that the twin pillars of Molinism is middle knowledge and libertarian free will?

30:28

Those are the two pillars. Yeah, so, and really, I don't even like, I know like mere

30:34

Molinism, I don't even like calling those two pillars because one of them is just entailed by the other, right? So if you have middle knowledge, it's just entailed that you have -

30:41

It's just one pillar. Yeah, so - The middle knowledge and libertarian free will is the one unified pillar of Molinism.

30:51

It's the substance dualist single pillar. How about that? There's two strings, I don't know.

30:56

So, okay, so let's deal with that. So let's jump right in then. If middle knowledge and libertarian free will are essential features of Molinism, then a way to demonstrate that Molinism is false is you need to attack various aspects of either middle knowledge, libertarian, or at least an attack that deals with both of them and shows them to be false.

31:20

How would you do that? That's one strategy. So the strategy, that's one that I take, and actually I'll show some objections to libertarian.

31:25

If libertarianism is false, Molinism can't be true, right? That's one tactic. The other one though is, oh, say, okay, well, let's imagine that's the case.

31:33

That's the starting point. But let's push the entire Molinistic metaphysic, right?

31:38

Let's push it to its logical conclusion. What pops out? Well, it turns out that compatibilism pops out at the other end, right?

31:45

So what it means is that if Molinism starts, if my argument is successful, right?

31:51

You're gonna have a bunch of people be like, oh, you need to demonstrate that's the case. I know, I know. I have the burden to demonstrate that claim. I understand.

31:56

But I'm saying the structure of the argument, right? I don't know if we're gonna get in that, and we do wanna leave most of the time for open theism.

32:02

That's why I wanted to get straight to the, if I have Molinism is false on the thumbnail, we need to address why

32:08

Molinism is false. So go to my channel. If anyone wants a link, I can go to a link. I have a whole bunch of stuff on kind of these metaphysical problems of Molinism, right?

32:18

If the argument, and it's not even, I mean, I have a version of it, but I'm not the only one that makes these types of arguments, right?

32:23

So again, one of my favorite arguments against Molinism is from an incompatibilist. Anyways, so, but if the argument goes through and shows that compatibilism is entailed, well, that means that Molinism starts by the assumption of incompatibilism and entails the truth of compatibilism, which means it affirms incompatibilism and compatibilism, which is a contradiction, right?

32:49

So I don't even need to go through and prove that libertarianism is false. I don't need to prove that Molinism is, or that middle knowledge is false.

32:55

I just need to show that the conjunction of those two things, held as the

33:00

Molinist holds it, entails it affirming contradictory positions, right?

33:06

And very quickly, the thumbnail version of that argument is this, right? And I give lots of different kinds of examples of this, and that is, when we talk about possible worlds, your audience needs to understand that we're not talking about some type of like sci -fi parallel universe types of things.

33:22

We're talking about ways that the world could be there. They are sets of true propositions, right?

33:29

So if in W1, in world one, let's just, for sake of argument, all propositions,

33:37

A1, A2, A3, A4, all the way down to A, all the A propositions are true, right? In world two, all the

33:43

B propositions are true. World three, all the C propositions are true, right? You can mix and match them all, but like no world has an identical set of true propositions.

33:53

The question is, even if it's by God's middle knowledge, right, does the

33:59

Christian understanding, whether weak actualization or strong actualization, does

34:05

God determine by his creative decree? Again, I don't even need to be reformed to run this.

34:11

Every Orthodox Christian has an understanding of God's creative decree, right? God chose to create this world and not some other world.

34:21

Right, so you can imagine a world, two worlds that are identical in every single proposition, except for one proposition at T1, at time

34:30

T1, in world one is X, and in world two is not X, and they have no causal implications prior or after, they're identical in every other way, right?

34:40

Let's say one of those is the actual world. If God decreed, I am going to create that world, that set of true propositions, right?

34:51

God is causally determining the truth value in the actual world of that proposition at that time, right?

35:00

Which means, which entails that God is determining the truth value of all the propositions. He's not, you know, strongly actualizing, he's not tinkering, he's not efficiently causing and making every single thing to be true, right?

35:13

It's not hard determinism, but God is determining the truth value of all those, even if it's a free choice, right?

35:23

Now, I almost said libertarian free choice, because the problem is the Molinus is gonna wanna say, oh, well, that's determined based on his middle knowledge of libertarianly free choices.

35:32

Okay, but once God has actualized the world, God's determined the truth value.

35:39

So now the truth value of my choice at T1 is a determined fact in that set of propositions.

35:48

God has determined that to be true, but it's determined based on my, was it my libertarian free choice?

35:57

But in the moment, I don't have libertarian freedom because it's determined, right? It's not incompatible anymore.

36:03

So you get this kind of negative feedback loop of my free choice in the actual world is dependent on my non -existent libertarian choice, such that in the actual world, it's not a libertarian choice.

36:16

So the causal condition that made it true, that made

36:21

God declare it to determine it to be true actually isn't the choice that I made, because the choice that I made in the actual world is a compatibilistic choice, right?

36:32

Because it was determined and I freely chose it, but the truth maker condition was a libertarian choice, right?

36:39

So you have this problem now of just by, again, I don't have to resort to any type of Calvinism or reform theology, just by the sheer metaphysics of what's happening in Molinism, you can derive this contradiction that libertarian freedom entails, libertarian incompatibilism entails compatibilistic determinism, right?

37:00

So it just entails a contradiction. Can I ask you a quick question? Then this is a clarifying question for some folks who are trying to follow along.

37:08

Again, this discussion presupposes that you have some knowledge on these sorts of discussions.

37:13

So those who are just chiming in and being like, what the heck are they talking about? I do apologize, but someone is asking if you can define libertarian free will real quick.

37:23

Yeah, so I'm gonna try to do it as quick as I can. Okay. Sure. Because I love

37:28

Tim Stratton. I love Eric Hernandez. I love these guys. They strangely get some of these things very weirdly wrong, right?

37:36

Okay. You have two fundamental positions when it comes to reconciling the relationship between determinism and freedom sufficient for moral responsibility, right?

37:50

Those two positions are not libertarian freedom and determinism. They are, excuse me, compatibilism and incompatibilism.

38:00

Let me start with compatibilism first. Compatibilism just is the position that there is a kind of determinism that is compatible with freedom that's sufficient enough to convey moral responsibility, either praise or blame, right?

38:17

That's all that it is. It's just saying that there is such a thing, sorry, that there is no principled incompatibility between those two things, right?

38:31

It doesn't commit someone to a certain view of determinism. It doesn't commit someone to a certain view of freedom.

38:36

It just says that there is no principled incompatibility between those two things.

38:42

Okay. Incompatibilism is the position that there is a principled incompatibility between those two things.

38:50

There is no possible scenario. There's no possible type of determinism that is compatible with any type of freedom sufficient to grant moral responsibility.

39:00

They are in principle incompatible. Libertarianism is a kind of hard incompatibilism.

39:10

Libertarianism comes down to the position, and you're gonna have people riot when you say this, but again, if you read the literature, right?

39:17

If you read Kane, if you read Tempe, if you read any of the actual philosophers, libertarianism runs, it absolutely has to run on an assumption of what's called the principle of alternative possibility.

39:32

It has to. You have to be at liberty to choose

39:37

A or not A. There has to be this principle of these different possible.

39:43

You have to have this power of contradiction, not contradiction in the logical sense, but power to choose

39:50

A or the contradiction of A, right? In order to have libertarian freedom.

39:56

Now you have some people like Stratton who will say, oh, well, we don't actually need, even though he still thinks it's true,

40:03

I think, but he'll say, oh, we don't need it to be libertarians. As long as you're the source.

40:10

And I'm just gonna say, okay, but sourcehood incompatibilism is not libertarianism.

40:15

That's a different view, right? So you may want to try to salvage

40:22

Molinism by saying, okay, well, let's not have it as libertarian incompatibilism.

40:28

Now let's try to ground middle knowledge on this kind of sourcehood incompatibilism, which some have tried to do, but it's disastrous effects.

40:36

It doesn't really work. This is one of the reasons why Tempe, who is a sourcehood incompatibilist, right? Says, well, you know,

40:42

Molinism would be cool if it was true, it's just not, right? And largely for reasons like that, right?

40:48

So libertarianism is the position that you only have freedom, a sufficient condition, sorry, a necessary condition for freedom is that you have this power to choose from alternative possibilities.

41:04

Even if that possibility, maybe it's not a range of possibilities, even if it's the possibility of choosing or not choosing, right, even if it's that bare bone act or not act.

41:13

Okay, you have to have some type of even a weak principle of alternative possibility. Okay, so in my desire to move on to open theism, let's summarize this.

41:22

So, you know, you and I are trapped in a room. I'm a Molinist, you're a

41:27

Calvinist, and you're gonna leave the room, we both have to leave the room and end our conversation in like three to five minutes.

41:36

How would you demonstrate to me as a Molinist in this room with this limited time, why you think my position's false?

41:45

Yeah, one is the argument that I gave, right? That it just entails a contradiction.

41:51

If you push the metaphysics where it goes, it entails a contradiction. Okay. Another one is all of the problems with libertarian freedom, which this is what will transition into our conversation about open theism.

42:04

Okay. Libertarian freedom has massive problems. There's a reason why it's a radical minority within the philosophical community, right?

42:12

People don't realize this and they're like, oh - Of libertarian freedom? Yeah, libertarian freedom is just a radical minority.

42:18

It's something like - Oh, I wasn't aware of that, okay. It's something like 14 % of professional philosophers are libertarians.

42:27

What are most - Are actually, and I think it's actually, sorry, like 14 % are incompatibilists. And again, not all incompatibilists are libertarian.

42:35

So what is the, I mean, do you have statistics on that? Yeah, compatibilism is something like 60 something percent of professional philosophers are compatibilists.

42:44

Okay, yeah, I mean, okay. Largely because of Frankfurt examples. Okay, we don't have to get into that.

42:49

That'll do. Yes, yes, okay, I got you. So I would go back to molism.

42:54

And again, I would go back and say, okay, the only thing that we need to show that libertarianism is false, right?

43:01

Because libertarianism is the principle position that any type of determinism and any type of freedom sufficient for responsibility are in principle incompatibilism.

43:11

You cannot have both of those be true, right? Which means it's a very fragile position.

43:19

I'm not saying it's fragile because it's libertarian. I'm saying it's fragile because it's a principled position. All principled positions are fragile because you only need one exception to falsify it, right?

43:28

In the Bible, we have countless exceptions to it, right? The biggest of which is the crucifixion of Jesus, right?

43:36

So in Acts 2, we have Peter saying that it is probably the predetermined and definite plan of God that you, the

43:47

Jews, pardon me, Pontius Pilate, crucify Jesus, right? So it is by God's definite, the term is his orizzo, his ordination, right?

43:57

It is he is the ordination, orizzo is the term you would use when you would establish a plot of land, right?

44:05

When you would mark out the boundaries of land, you would create that as a plot of land. You're orizzo -ing it.

44:11

So it is by God's establishment. It is by his orizzo, his definite plan.

44:17

I could picture a libertarian freewheeler saying, well, just because God determined that doesn't mean everything's determined, but we don't have to respond to that.

44:24

I would imagine somebody could say that. I know that there's more back and forth that happens there. That's true.

44:29

But again, I don't need to do that. Remember, in order to falsify libertarian incompatibilism, I just need one example where something is determined and free sufficient for responsibility.

44:41

That's it. The instant I can prove, we can demonstrate that that's a plausible thing that has happened, libertarian incompatibilism is false, right?

44:49

Other compatibilist, well, actually incompatibilism is false because it says they're in principle incompatible, right?

44:54

So we have God saying it's by his definite plan, by his decree, by his definite foreknowledge, right?

45:02

That he has determined the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. It's also the case,

45:08

I don't think anyone's gonna say, that the Jews who shouted crucify him, crucify him, and Pontius Pilate who crucified him didn't do something morally evil.

45:18

They weren't morally repugnant, right? They did it in such a way that they were free, sufficient for their own moral responsibility.

45:26

And so we have a biblical case where God has determined that something be the case and the actors who make the decision to crucify

45:34

Jesus are morally responsible and do it because they do it in a free way, right? So we have this case where something is determined and free.

45:43

And so if that's the case, which I think there's a strong, there are a bunch of other ones that we can go to, but I think that's a strong case where something is determined and free such that incompatibilism has to be false because it's not in principle the case that if something is determined, it can't be free.

45:58

The other one, if you can indulge me for one more. Okay. Real quick, real quick, because I really wanna get focused on the open case.

46:05

The other one is just we're Protestants. We hold a view of scripture such that God has divinely inspired and determined his own word in a way that it's his words to us in a way that war and peace is not, right?

46:26

Because it is his God breathed word. He has determined the content of his word. It's also the case that Paul in writing

46:34

Romans and first Corinthians can use first person pronouns, speaking of himself. It's also the case that I can say that the author of the book of Judges, I think is one of the most masterful literary minds that has ever graced the human race.

46:47

I can praise him for that because I think he was just an artist. If you don't appreciate the artwork of Judges, like go home, you don't know how to read.

46:55

Judges is just a masterpiece of literature, but God has determined the content of that word, especially if you're a

47:04

Protestant and you hold to something like verbal plenary inspiration. Sure. Where God has inspired the every verbal, not verbal, but verbal having to do with all every single word, plenary, the fullness of every single word.

47:18

If you affirm something like that, right? But at the same time, you think the biblical authors, their personalities came out in it.

47:26

They freely wrote it. Paul freely wrote Romans in the context of dealing with the Roman church and all that kind of stuff.

47:32

You have this example of God determining the content of his word and Paul freely writing the content of the word such that both of them can be said to be authors of the exact same words.

47:43

Sure. And when you say freely, you're not talking libertarianly free.

47:49

So there's another thing where people say, oh, freedom, well, see how, you know, the Molinist explains that fine. Well, that assumes that libertarian freedom is the one that's in view there and that one could sufficiently defend that.

48:00

Yeah, and my argument is that that can't be libertarian freedom because God is determining the content of his own word, right?

48:06

It cannot be libertarian freedom if it's determined and Paul is free because libertarianism is an incompatible as position.

48:15

So the instant you have something determined and something free in a praise or blame worthy way where we can praise

48:24

God, we can praise Paul for his literary, you know, genius and for his insightful and all that kind of stuff.

48:32

You just have a case that incompatibilism is false. And so it can't, whatever it is, again, whatever it is.

48:38

Yeah, we have something here. I just caught my eye. We're not gonna go to questions just yet, but someone says, what on earth does inspiration of scripture have to do with Molinism?

48:46

God can inspire scripture and it doesn't affect Molinism at all. This is honestly painful to watch.

48:52

Well, I definitely don't wanna cause you pain, but we wanna address that. How is this related? How are you tying this issue of inspiration of scripture with this kind of issue of Molinism and let's end the

49:01

Molinism section here and then go to the open theism portion. Yeah, I mean, I would encourage

49:06

Beowulf to just go back and listen to the lead into this because the whole point of it was, you asked me, how would

49:14

I tell someone, how would I show to someone that Molinism is false? Well, one of the ways was again, with some of those internal inconsistencies where it actually advanced contradictions.

49:24

The other one is that certain assumptions that it comes with a la libertarianism are false.

49:30

And if I can give arguments to show that libertarian incompatibilism is false, then it falsifies

49:35

Molinism because Molinism necessarily relies on that, right? So if I can knock the legs out from underneath it, then it's falsified, right?

49:44

So that's why that - Right, and the person could disagree with your analysis, but that's how it's related.

49:51

So you're not just completely talking about something, completely and utterly unrelated. So, all right, thank you for that.

49:57

All right, so James White, Dr. White has said often that Arminianism, the only consistent

50:05

Arminianism is open theism. And we're not gonna get into Arminianism at this point, but I've heard you say that a consistent

50:13

Molinism leads to our open theism. So let's use this as a segue to talk about open theism.

50:20

What is open theism? You don't have to necessarily draw that connection. So if you think a consistent

50:27

Molinism leads to open theism, we're not gonna address that here. I'm just kind of expressing, some people think there's a connection there, okay?

50:34

You take that for what it is. But let's move into open theism. What is open theism? Perhaps you can mention a few noted people who hold to the position, and then let's jump right into why you think there are real problems with open theism.

50:46

People should be concerned about this position and should adequately be able to respond to it biblically, philosophically.

50:52

So let's take it from there. Go ahead. What is open theism? Yeah, really, really quick. I wanna say for the audience,

50:59

I'm gonna throw a bone. I don't agree with White about Arminianism that way. So I do think that -

51:05

I'm quoting from memory. I might be, maybe he hasn't said that. Maybe he did. He probably has. He has, you know,

51:11

Calvinists get a lot of things about Arminianism wrong, because a lot of times Calvinists confuse historic

51:16

Arminianism with Wesleyanism, with evangelical Arminianism, with provisionism, right? And a lot of times they confuse their own position.

51:24

I've had people be like, I'm an Arminian, and you talk to me like, you're a provisionist. You're not an Arminian. Anyways, so open theism is, whereas I think

51:36

Molinism is simply unbiblical and just wrong, I don't think that it's, I'm not that concerned about it, although I think it has negative entailments.

51:46

One of them is I think it opens wide the door because of its view of libertarianism.

51:51

I think it opens wide the door to open theism. And I think that's one of the reasons why we're seeing people like, you know, again,

52:00

I don't wanna name all the names. We see people who are basically saying, you know, hop, skip and jump. Well, I'm a Molinist.

52:07

Well, you know, now let me kind of just, let me just go like dabble in this and like see what it's about.

52:12

And like my inclination is like, hey, if the church has considered something a heresy for 2000 years, maybe we don't just go like kick it around.

52:24

Let's just like, let, you know, dead dogs be dead. So, you know, there's that little bit of, you know, kind of impulse in me, which

52:31

I understand not everyone shares that same impulse, but, you know, I'd rather not cuddle with wolves.

52:37

So there's a certain sense where that's my, that's kind of where my leading problem with it is.

52:45

Open theism is the position that's built on kind of a hard incompatibilism, like libertarianism on steroids usually has to do with the kind, when you talk to someone who's an open theist, they usually can't even, they can't even fathom any other concept of freedom outside of libertarian incompatibilism.

53:05

It's just, if that's not it, then, you know, you're just redefining words or you're a fatalist or you're, you know, all that kind of stuff, right?

53:12

So, which is very problematic, right? So open theism is built on that assumption and it says, because on incompatibilism, on libertarianism, there is nothing that is a causal predetermining condition, right?

53:30

Nothing causally determines our choices, right? And if nothing causally determines our choices, then our choices are indeterminate.

53:43

So that means, let's say you come to situation, you know, C at time T1. It means C is indeterminate with respect to decision

53:51

X or not X. C does not determine. There's nothing in C, in context

53:57

C at T1 that determines the choice that the agent will make either to X or not

54:03

X. Okay. Can you say that? Now, I understand what you're saying. Can you say that more simply? So I think for folks who are tracking, but once you start using the

54:12

C and the T1 and that might be confusing, why don't you say that in kind of a, like if you were just talking to someone on the street saying, hey,

54:19

I heard about this thing, open theism, like what is it? How would you define it for somebody? Yeah, so open theism is the view that God, the future is open to God.

54:28

He doesn't know it. He doesn't know with certainty, right?

54:34

He has some, yes, you know, he's a good guesser. He's a good strategist. He takes some risks, he takes some gambles, but he doesn't know the future because the future is open, right?

54:45

Because all of those free choices are indeterminate. Nothing previously causes those things.

54:52

And since you cannot infer the outcome from any prior cause, nothing is determining it.

54:58

So there's nothing to be known. The open theist, so to kind of draw an analogy, maybe this will help.

55:05

A lot of people are familiar that omnipotence is not the view that God can do anything, you know, logic be damned, right?

55:14

Omnipotence is not the view that God can make square circles. It's not the view that God can make merry bachelors, although some voluntarists think that that's the case, right?

55:23

Most Orthodox people will say that omnipotence means that God can do whatever God wants to do. And since God's nature is the grounding of logic, that includes, that means that he is constrained by his own nature, such that he can only do logically possible things, right?

55:36

So God can do anything he wants to do, but he can't make a square circle because that's not a thing, right?

55:43

That's, he can't make a merry bachelor. That's not a thing to make, right? That's like saying he can make a swivel swarp, like that's just not a thing.

55:52

So, or like he knows like what the color seven tastes like.

55:58

It's just meaningless, right? So those types of things. So we're gonna say that given omnipotence, it's not that God can, it's that God can do anything, but it's not that any conjunction of words is a thing, right?

56:13

The open theist is gonna say in a very similar way, God can know all things that can be known. It's just that these, it's just that the future is not the type of thing that can be known.

56:24

So a known future is like, is to them like a square circle. Or like a merry bachelor.

56:30

So an open, I heard in popular circles, people say, well, open theism is the view that denies that God knows the future.

56:38

What could you say that, or they deny God's omniscience.

56:44

Could you say that open theists don't deny God's omniscience? They believe he knows all things, but as you said, the future is not a thing that can be known.

56:54

Yeah. Okay. In a very, very, very loose way, they affirm a version of omniscience.

57:02

Yes. The thing is, is that they just don't affirm a biblical view of omniscience. They just don't affirm anything that has to do with how omniscience has been understood for the entirety of,

57:15

I mean, I'm not even gonna say church history. I mean, I'm gonna go all the way back to like, you know, the instant that we have a concept of God as God under classical theism, you have an omniscient

57:25

God who knows all things, including the future, right? Can make true prophecies. So they just deny that.

57:33

So it is to deny a fundamental attribute that is the case under classical theism.

57:39

Okay. Okay. Yeah. So, okay. So that's open theism.

57:45

Why is this something we should be concerned about and why do you think it's wrong? And I want you to go as deep as you can to kind of pick this view apart and why we think it's false.

57:55

So Christians shouldn't hold to it and why it's problematic biblically and why

58:00

Christians shouldn't hold to it for that reason. And so why don't you take this time to really go in deep? I know that you also have some slides you wanna share as well and perhaps -

58:07

Yeah, I'll get to those in a second. So I would start again, the same arguments that I gave against Molinism about libertarian freedom apply here because if libertarian freedom isn't true, open theism falls apart.

58:18

Okay. Right? So all of those same problems that incompatibilism has, specifically libertarian incompatibilism has, open theism has.

58:28

So if those go through already, open theism is already a non -starter. Sure. The biblical data is very clear.

58:37

God knows all things, right? God can declare the ends from the beginning. God makes certain decrees, certain determinations before the foundations of the world or at the very least before the events happen, right?

58:53

There are things that are true prophecies. So we have,

58:59

I don't know, what is it? 300 something prophecies about Jesus. If you take like the really substantive ones, sometimes

59:04

I agree with our skeptics. Sometimes I hear those and I'm like, eh, that's kind of a stretch. But there are some ones that are like -

59:11

That's an interesting topic for another episode. But things like Isaiah 53, very clearly a prophecy about Jesus.

59:17

The fact that he would come from Bethlehem, very clear that, you know, born of a virgin, right?

59:24

Well, born of an Alma, right? So all of those types of thing, I think are very, very clear that they are true biblical prophecies.

59:33

Now, a lot of them are hundreds of years in advance, right? Here's the thing.

59:40

In order for God to make a true prophecy, for example, about Jesus being born in Bethlehem, right?

59:50

Think of all the astronomical number of other, now you're gonna get into open theism, libertarianly free choices that God cannot know that have to be in that case in order for that to happen, right?

01:00:07

Because just think of all the choices that you have to get so that everybody meets everybody, marries everybody, have the kids that they are gonna have, have those specific kids make the choices that they're gonna move, they're gonna live in a certain place, they're gonna do this.

01:00:20

And again, you not only have to have those, you have to have inconsequential choices, right? Imagine all the choices that they made that prevented them from, as a child, putting that one rock that has that disease into their mouth that would kill them, right?

01:00:36

So you have actually all of these kind of blockage cases of where they choose something other than what would, again,

01:00:45

I mean, the mortality rate in that timeframe, astronaut, the things that kids put in their mouth, you would die.

01:00:51

So you have to think of all the free will, libertarianly free will choices that God cannot know the billions upon billions and billions and trillions of choices in order to even get to the place where Mary and Joseph ride into Bethlehem for Jesus to be born, right?

01:01:13

God can't know any of those and yet somehow he has this true prediction, even though he can't know anything about that, right?

01:01:19

So you have all of these problems when it comes to true prophecies. My biggest,

01:01:25

I mean, there's too many to go into and I'll talk about some of the hermeneutics and some of the things that are entailed by it, but my biggest biblical objection, and this is where the slides come in, if you wanna bring up the slides.

01:01:35

Sure, absolutely. Let me bring them up on the screen here. If you see me smiling, folks are asking me to smile more.

01:01:44

I look really serious when I'm concentrating. I'm trying to listen to what you're saying. This isn't elementary stuff.

01:01:50

I'm kind of like, so I'm in a good mood. So I'm gonna make sure I smile for folks. I don't wanna, hey, by the way, guys, there are questions, but if you have any questions, please preface your question with a

01:02:03

Q or the word question and we'll address them. And I'm a little insulted.

01:02:08

I have, there are a lot of people watching, a lot of great comments, only 10 likes. Come on, man, come on, give me some more likes there.

01:02:15

I think this conversation is going really well and there's a lot of helpful information here. So hook a brother up. All right, so let me, there we go.

01:02:22

Okay, so my biggest objection is gonna come is that open theism fails the test of a true

01:02:31

God given by Yahweh in the Old Testament against the prophets of Baal, right?

01:02:37

So there is, let me click over here. So there's these two passages, right?

01:02:44

And I'm gonna go through the first one really, really quick because that one's really, I think, an argument against libertarianism.

01:02:49

The second one is the major problem. But there's these two passages in Isaiah 41 and 46 where God is giving these tests to what is a true and a false

01:03:00

God, right? So in Isaiah 41 verses 21, 24, he's,

01:03:06

Yahweh is kind of antagonizing these prophets. And he says, present your case, the Lord says, bring forward your strong arguments, the

01:03:14

King of Jacob says, right? That's Yahweh. Let them bring forth and declare to us what is going to take place.

01:03:21

As for the former events, declare what they were that we may consider them and know their outcome or announce to us what is coming.

01:03:31

Declare the things that are going to come afterward that we may know that you are gods. Indeed, do good or evil, that we may anxiously look about us and fear together.

01:03:41

Behold, you are of no account and your work amounts to nothing. He who chooses you is an abomination, right?

01:03:47

I'll go to a syllogism here in a second. The other one is gonna be the foundation for the second argument and these transfer to the other slide.

01:03:53

So they're there for reference. Isaiah 46, nine to 10, remember the former things long past for I am

01:03:59

Yahweh and there is no other. I am Yahweh and there is none like me declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times, the things that have not yet been done saying my purpose will be established and I will accomplish my pleasure.

01:04:16

Okay, so here's the argument. The first one is against libertarian free will but it really is going to strongly attack open theism, right?

01:04:25

And that is, this is gonna go through the premises. If God is, if a God is not a true

01:04:30

God, then they cannot declare the future as causally inferred from past events.

01:04:35

So notice in 21 to 23, that it says, let them bring forth and declare to us what is going to take place as for the former things, declare what they were that we may consider them and know their outcome or announce to us what is coming.

01:04:49

That is, tell us what happened in the past so that we can know what will happen in the future, right?

01:04:56

It just is the case that we should, that a true God should be able to look at the past, consider them and know what will come in the future.

01:05:06

Well, if open theism is the case and our decisions are indeterminate, that cannot be the case, right?

01:05:16

So that goes on. So number two, Yahweh can declare the future as causally inferred from the past, that's later on.

01:05:22

Therefore by modus tollens, Yahweh is a true God from one and two. Premise four, all other gods cannot declare the future as causally inferred from the past.

01:05:32

Premise five, from modus ponens from one and four, all other gods are not true gods. Implication of three and five is that Yahweh therefore is the only true

01:05:41

God. Number seven, if a future event can be known as causally inferred from the past by a true

01:05:47

God, then libertarian free will cannot be true, right? Because remember, libertarian freedom has to have that causally indeterminate principle of alternative possibilities built in, right?

01:05:58

Future events can be known as causally inferred in the past by a true God. That's the implication of two and seven.

01:06:03

And therefore by modus pollens, libertarian free will cannot be true. Number 10 should be, therefore open theism is false, right?

01:06:12

Therefore the test that Yahweh establishes, the note on the bottom, in testing of gods of Babylon assumes a metaphysics of causality, whatever that is.

01:06:22

Again, you don't have to pick what type of determinism or capitalism, whatever it is, it's not libertarian freedom, right?

01:06:29

And so therefore libertarian freedom is false, right? The more substantive, the more relevant one for open theism, although I think that's devastating open theism is this one from the second verse, right?

01:06:39

If a God is not a true God, they cannot declare the future as they can the past. Yahweh can declare the future as he can the past.

01:06:48

Therefore Yahweh is a true God. And again, the whole point is the same way that God can exhaustively tell us all past events.

01:06:57

If you're a true God, you should be able to exhaustively tell us all the future events. You should be able to tell us from the beginning to the end everything that's gonna happen.

01:07:06

Yahweh can do that, therefore Yahweh is a true God. All other gods cannot declare the future as they can the past.

01:07:12

Therefore all other gods are not true gods. Yahweh therefore is the only true God, right? So the outcome of this is that therefore the view of God, the

01:07:21

God, little G of open theism would not pass the test that the true

01:07:27

God Yahweh established in testing the gods of Babylon. And therefore the concept of God in inherent open theism is a false concept of God, it's an idol.

01:07:38

Okay, so Tyler, so, okay. So surely open theists have read this passage and heard these arguments.

01:07:43

What are some of the things that open theists say in response to the account you just gave, the argument you just gave?

01:07:49

Yeah, it's all over the map because we can talk about this, they're hermeneutic.

01:07:55

Well, they don't have a hermeneutics, right? Their hermeneutic is so all over the board and we can talk about some of that, right?

01:08:02

Because they're gonna wanna go to passages where Yahweh, they say he changes his mind or he repents or he learns new things, right?

01:08:09

The hermeneutic to get to those interpretations is just like mind numbingly all over the place. But here they're gonna come back and they're gonna say, okay, but this isn't talking about any type of causal inference, right?

01:08:22

This is, is God able to kind of read the tea leaves of what's happening, right?

01:08:28

So when Jesus, think of the funny thing is they make the exact same argument that like the hypercritical scholars do of Jesus predicting the fall of Jerusalem, right?

01:08:37

It's not that he knew, right? It's that he could read the tea leaves.

01:08:43

He could read the times. Yeah, he could read that. He knew what was probably gonna be the case and then he would place his bet on black, right?

01:08:51

And he just happens to be a very good guesser. And so therefore he's a very good gambler. But again, the whole point of the passage is, well, these other gods, it's not about gambling.

01:09:03

It's not, are these other gods just good at gambling? It's no, can they declare to us the future in the same way that they can declare to us the past, which is to tell us everything about the past and their outcome and so we can know what's coming and all that, right?

01:09:20

So it's this very robust, if God cannot know the past or sorry, if God cannot know the future like he can know the past, then he's not a true

01:09:31

God. Well, the God of open theism can't know the future like he knows the past and so therefore he fails, that their concept of God fails the test of what it means to be a true

01:09:40

God. Okay, all right. Well, is that it for your slides there? That's all the slides.

01:09:46

So one of my biggest objections against open theism is simply that it fails the test that God gives to us about himself compared to false gods.

01:09:58

Okay, all right. And when you say they're all over the map in responding to this, I mean, do you only mean that they just use kind of the sporadic use of these passages that we would understand as kind of anthropomorphic?

01:10:11

I mean, how would you respond to an open theist who says, well, listen, Tyler, I'm taking scripture at face value and it's you who has to do all these jumping jacks and cartwheels to avoid what the text seems to be clearly saying.

01:10:27

How would you respond to something like that? Yeah, I mean, at that point I would say, okay, well then exegete the passage, right?

01:10:32

Let's go through and let's exegete the passage and let's use good hermeneutical principles. One of the principles, I can stop sharing this, but one of the principles that we use in hermeneutics is called the analogy of faith or the rule of faith.

01:10:44

And that is that the clear, we use the clear to interpret the less clear, right?

01:10:50

So we don't say, okay, well, there's this really weird, unclear, we don't know what's happening in the book of Revelation and we're gonna turn that around and we're gonna use that, our weird, we don't exactly know what's happening and we're gonna read

01:11:02

Romans through that. Like we're gonna interpret Revelation first and then we're gonna take that and we're gonna take that position and then try to read it back into and understand

01:11:10

Romans. Okay. Right, because Romans is a didactic letter. It's not using, there is symbolism, but it's not using prophecy, it's not using apocalypse, it's not heavy on symbolism, right?

01:11:24

It's a very straightforward, very didactic letter, right? It's just telling you the way things are, right?

01:11:30

Again, it doesn't mean there's no symbolism. I'm not trying to say that, but you're right. I mean, we have

01:11:35

Paul using allegory in Galatians, right? So we're not saying that, but we use the clear to interpret the less clear.

01:11:42

We use, we don't, and this is our problem with certain brothers, we don't use parables to interpret the book of Romans, right?

01:11:53

We don't get our systematic theology from reading every jot and tittle and kicking every single tire and turning over every single stone of the parable of the prodigal son.

01:12:04

Sure. So, sorry, but that's, we use good hermeneutics, right?

01:12:12

There are examples where they're gonna say, okay, well, if we look to passages, let me see if I can get, if I have them up, right?

01:12:19

So we have examples where it seems like God has repented, right, or relented of something, right?

01:12:32

I think, is it Genesis 22, 12, right? Where after Abraham sacrifices, or agree, you know, basically tries to sacrifice his son,

01:12:45

Yahweh says, for now that now, for now

01:12:51

I know. Now I know, yes. God, right? And the open theist is gonna go to that and then say, oh, well, see,

01:12:57

God learned something, right? He didn't know that before. Now he knows that Abraham fears

01:13:04

God. Right, implying that he didn't know before. So that's why he did the test. Right, there's a couple of problems with this.

01:13:11

Okay. In Hebrews, we're told repeatedly that Abraham was faithful and trusted the

01:13:20

Lord and was justified by faith way back at the original covenant, right? God knew that Abraham was faithful.

01:13:26

We're told didactically way before that, like decades before, right?

01:13:34

So it's just not the case that God didn't know this before, right? It also doesn't say that he now knows that Abraham would choose to sacrifice his son.

01:13:46

It says, I now know that you fear God since you have not withheld your son.

01:13:53

Okay, so it's not that God, so they're gonna wanna read it and say, okay, well, God didn't know that Abraham would actually go through with it, right?

01:14:02

But notice, God isn't saying, now I know what your decision's gonna be. It's now

01:14:07

I know what your heart is. It's now I know that you fear the Lord. Well, was that not the case in the heart of Abraham before the incident?

01:14:19

So is it not the case that God didn't have present knowledge about Abraham's heart prior to the decision?

01:14:26

So now you have, if you actually take their view, you have this problem where God now doesn't even have certain presence.

01:14:33

Okay, I see what you're getting at there. So God would have, the open theist says that God knows all present things.

01:14:41

And so that would include the state of every person's heart at the present moment. And so what you're saying is, based on their understanding, that would entail that God doesn't have present knowledge of their heart because it says, now

01:14:53

I know, you know, that's interesting. Okay, all right, very good, I like that. That's clear. There are other examples where, like in Kings, I think it's,

01:15:05

I don't have all my, I thought I pulled it up, but anyways, I'll keep looking for it.

01:15:12

But where in second Kings, it's in second Kings, where it talks about how

01:15:19

God relents. Sure. Right, and they're gonna say, ah, see God changes his mind, right?

01:15:25

The problem is that in the exact same chapter, we're told that God is not a man that he should change his mind, relent, it's the exact same

01:15:33

Hebrew term, or lie, right? So it says, because God's not a man like us, he can't do these two things, right?

01:15:44

He can't change his mind, he can't, you know, he can't change his mind and he can't lie, right?

01:15:49

Well, the open theist wants to say, well, God can change his mind, but he can't lie. And it's like, okay, but God just said he can't, the prophet just said he can't do either of those things because he's not a man like us.

01:16:04

So what's happening in the narrative, when it appears that God is changing his mind, it's not that he's actually like,

01:16:11

God's like, oh, I learned something new. Now I'm gonna change my mind and do something else.

01:16:16

It's no, it's dealing with these in anthropomorphic language, where it appears from our perspective, that kind of a shift has happened in God's interactions with us.

01:16:29

So from our perspective, it looks like God was going towards destroying this village, right?

01:16:36

They repented, God's not gonna destroy them, he must have changed his mind. Well, no,

01:16:42

God knew that they were gonna repent just because he goes one direction and decrees that if they repent, he will not, he will relent.

01:16:52

He knows he's gonna relent. He doesn't change his mind just because there's a shift in program doesn't mean that God changes his mind because he's not a man like us, that he should change his mind.

01:17:03

But they're gonna wanna say, okay, well, in the narrative, God changes his mind.

01:17:08

So now they're gonna, cause now they're gonna take the narrative, they're gonna take the less clear and they're gonna read it back into the didactic statement about God.

01:17:17

And they're gonna say, well, we have to interpret the didactic statement in light of the narrative, which is just exactly backwards, right?

01:17:24

That's just the exact reverse of how the analogy of the rule of faith, that's just not good hermeneutics, right?

01:17:31

And if we follow that, again, we follow their same thing. That means that I think about all the times where it appears like God is learning something like Genesis three,

01:17:42

Adam, where are you? Does that mean that God doesn't know where Adam is?

01:17:48

And he learned - That would have to be part of his present knowledge. So his - That's exactly right. So his

01:17:54

Adam, where are you? He shouldn't be asked in that question if open theism is true because God should already know where he is.

01:18:00

He should already know. So what happens though, is they say, okay, well, if we have this narratival thing where God asks a question or is learning something, then he's learning something, he doesn't know it.

01:18:13

But here we have an example where narrativally that happens, but it's actually about a present reality.

01:18:19

So now if we follow their hermeneutic consistently, it's another example where God doesn't have present knowledge.

01:18:25

But what they do is they say, oh, well, that question is asked in instructive irony.

01:18:33

It's for a pedagogical purpose to teach something important.

01:18:40

So my question is, okay, but that's exactly how the rest of the world reads those other narratives, right?

01:18:47

So why is it the case that when it's convenient for you to now read it this way, the rest of us read these passages about God in anthropomorphic terms, you say, no, that has to be literal, he's learning something.

01:19:04

But when - An inconsistent standard at that point. Because they don't have a consistent hermeneutics.

01:19:09

Sure. It's all over the place. Okay. So you have that problem. Any questions?

01:19:15

I have one more like major criticism of open theists. Why don't you go for it? And then what I wanna do at this point is

01:19:20

I wanna move to the Q &A because there are a lot of questions and I wanna make sure that we get to cover them.

01:19:26

And if there are any open theists in the chat or anyone who's a Molinist, you have a specific question or you think something

01:19:33

Tyler glossed over too quickly, you know, more than happy to address them. So please send those questions in if you have them.

01:19:41

And all right, Tyler, why don't you take it away with that last point you wanted to make? Yeah, so the last point is, and this is,

01:19:48

I admit, this is a slippery slope argument.

01:19:53

Okay. I thought I'd admit it from the beginning. But as I've said, my concern is simply the fact that ideas have consequences.

01:20:02

There are these slippery slopes that happen. I have not found any open theist who started as kind of a, well, simply because free things are indeterminate, they don't stay that way, right?

01:20:24

Because that certain view has implications. It has implications for whether or not

01:20:32

God is timeless, right? Because if God learned something, then it changes. But if something is timeless, it doesn't change, right?

01:20:39

So now they're gonna say, well, God isn't timeless, right? So, and if God's not timeless, that means he's changing in response to his creation, which means now

01:20:50

God is no longer a say, nor is he immutable, right? And if those go,

01:20:56

God is no longer simple, right? So what happens is the instant, I find that the instant someone starts going into open theism, everything else collapses, right?

01:21:08

Because, and it's precisely because on classical theism, God is simple, right? To deny one attribute really is to deny all the incommutable attributes, right?

01:21:17

So you start having these major, major problems where if you start pulling at the thread, right?

01:21:24

Well, there's just one ball of thread, right? It's not a bunch of little threads. You can pull one out and discard it, and it's fine. You're unweaving the entire ball of thread as you go, the more and more you dig.

01:21:33

And so I found that open theists tend to get back into what is, and again, they're gonna hate this, but it gets into this kind of very, very, very, very big and powerful

01:21:43

Zeus, right? It's this God, he doesn't know everything. He tries really, really hard.

01:21:49

He's a really, really good gambler. He's very loving. He's not a malevolent like Zeus is sometimes, right?

01:21:54

He's good, but he doesn't always get his way. And he's not simple.

01:22:02

He's not a say. He's not immutable. He's not timeless, right? All these kind of things, to the point where now you start getting into someone like Chris Fisher, where God is literally on a podium, literally up there looking down on us because he has to observe what's happening to know what's happening, right?

01:22:22

So you start getting into all of these positions simply because they cracked open the door of open theism and said, oh, well, maybe

01:22:31

God doesn't know the future, right? Ideas have consequences and those types of radical consequences follow when you open that door.

01:22:40

All right, well, thank you for that. That was a lot of information and I think it's good. Actually, someone earlier on commented that they were grateful that there's so much information packed just in this one episode.

01:22:52

So definitely there are things that need to be unpacked a little bit more, but hopefully this provides kind of a foundation for folks to kind of dig a little deeper into this topic.

01:23:03

I do have one book, I have never read it, by John Frame, where he addresses open theism.

01:23:08

And I don't know if you've read it, you think it's a good book. John Frame, No Other God, A Response to Open Theism.

01:23:14

Is this a good book for folks to check out? That one's a really good book and Bruce Ware's interactions with open theism.

01:23:21

John Frame, Bruce Ware and DA Carson give some of the best takedowns of open theism that are available.

01:23:28

I did want to add one more thing, right? We're Christians here. The important thing about the gospel is,

01:23:37

I don't know how many people saw the video where Pine Creek made fun of me, right?

01:23:43

For being beaker, because I kept saying me, right? Me, me, me. That's pretty funny, come on.

01:23:50

I actually, you know, Doug, thank you. Thank you for helping me get the gospel out. You know, I think it has like seven or 8 ,000 views.

01:23:56

Sure. Thanks, I was talking about the gospel. I was talking about Jesus's love for me personally, right?

01:24:02

So what follows is, and if you press open theist, open theist, because God can't know the future, again, of all those, think of all those things that had to happen when

01:24:10

God created the universe or 2000 years ago at the crucifixion, all of the things that had to happen for me to be here, for you to be here, right?

01:24:19

It means no matter, and again, this isn't even a Calvinist. This is just, it doesn't matter what you're,

01:24:25

I don't care if you have a limited view or a universal view, it does not matter, right?

01:24:31

Whatever your view is, we believe that whoever Christ was dying for, he was dying because he loved them personally, right?

01:24:41

So when Christ died on the cross, whether, again, I'm not saying this as a Calvinist, he loved me.

01:24:48

He loved Tyler Vela, right? He loved me redemptively and he loved me in Christ. And he took my sin and died for my sin so that I might live a life of eternity and I might share the gospel with others and I might, you know, and I might glorify him, right?

01:25:04

All the other things, all the other benefits of Christianity, all the other imperatives of Christianity, all that kind of stuff is because God in Christ loved me personally.

01:25:15

If open theism is true, God did not know that I would exist, right?

01:25:21

So when Christ died on the cross, he did not die for me. He died for his love of faceless humanity, right?

01:25:28

But he did not die because he loved me. He did not die because he loved you. He did not die because he loved me. It makes the atonement impersonal.

01:25:36

It makes it loving in a sense that it's not meaningful, right?

01:25:43

You could say it's loving in the sense like, you know, Armageddon where Bruce Willis like dies on the asteroid to save humanity, right?

01:25:52

I haven't seen that movie in a while. Great movie. But when we understand the atonement and we, you know, again, if you're an

01:26:01

Arminian, if you're a provisionist, I give provisionists the business all the time, right? I will stand shoulder to shoulder with provisionists and Arminians and Catholics and Ethan Ortho, like we all stand against open theism on this.

01:26:13

And that is that whoever Christ was dying for, whether you think it's limited, whether you think it's universal, whether you think it's universal insufficiency, limited scope,

01:26:21

I don't care what your view is. We all disagree with the open theist because we all believe that God loves individuals on the cross.

01:26:33

That is not the case on open theism. It completely declaws the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ because he didn't do it for anybody specific, except maybe the people that he knew in his real life.

01:26:47

Yeah. Right, that's it. And so I think it's a radical undermining, not only of basic Christian orthodoxy, not only of classical theism, not only of anything like that, it just radically undermines the gospel itself because God didn't do it because he loved anybody in specific.

01:27:08

Okay. All right, thank you so much for that. I think you did a great job. There's a lot of information there. So folks could go back and listen to this discussion.

01:27:15

And hopefully folks will find it very useful. What I wanna do now is I wanna go all the way back to the beginning here and see if we can plow through some questions.

01:27:23

Now, Tyler, I don't wanna control the nature of how you answer the question, but let's try and go through them as quickly as we're able to.

01:27:32

I mean, if you think you need more time to expand on something, go for it. I mean, do it. But I know a lot of these can be kind of rabbit trail -y sort of things, and we can spend too much time on a question.

01:27:41

So let's go through this here. I mean, you have to give me a moment here. I just have to scroll through here.

01:27:48

Okay. Tyler already defined libertarian free will before, so.

01:27:56

Okay, so here's a question from Michael Faber. He says, Molinism is positing a different compatibility than Calvinists.

01:28:03

That doesn't make it an incompatibilist system. What would you say to that? So I would just say that, and I know

01:28:10

Michael Faber, he is not a fan of mine. I could tell from the comments. He's simply wrong.

01:28:18

So because Molinism, because middle knowledge is grounded, I mean, Tim Stratton says that one of the pillars of Molinism is libertarian freedom, right?

01:28:28

So libertarian freedom just is an incompatibilistic system. So it is not the case that Molinism is a different type of compatibility.

01:28:40

Again, that's my, my argument actually is that it entails a different type of compatibility, but it starts with the presumption of incompatibility.

01:28:48

And so it entails this contradiction. And if you don't start with the presumption of incompatibility, then

01:28:53

Molinism just becomes, you just don't need it. It just becomes superfluous, right? There are, if you're not an incompatibilist, you don't need

01:29:00

Molinism. Okay, thank you. This, Mr. C asks a question, but this is a comment here, but it's in the form of a question later that I saw.

01:29:09

So maybe you could address this, because he seems to say this a lot in some of my videos, but I don't think he understands the whole author of confusion context where it's found in scripture.

01:29:18

So he says, funny, both these guys would agree that God is not the author of confusion. And I, and he's suggesting that because this is an issue that is debated, you know, there's just so much confusion.

01:29:27

How can God be the author of all this sort of stuff? What's wrong with that statement suggesting that because this is a hotly debated topic that, you know, you know,

01:29:36

God's not the author of confusion. So I don't know what you guys are talking about. How would you address that? Yeah, I mean, the simple answer is

01:29:42

God's not the one that's confused. We are. We are the author of our own confusion. We're the ones that don't always get it and disagree about it.

01:29:49

So yeah, God's not the other confusion, just because we disagree. So it just doesn't fall.

01:29:55

Again, it's like the author of sin. Sure. God can agree that something's the case, but it doesn't mean that he is the cause of it, right?

01:30:03

It doesn't mean he's the efficient cause of it. He can be the deficient cause of it, but he's not the efficient cause of it, right? So just because we're confused and I don't actually think

01:30:11

I'm that confused about it, right? Even if I'm wrong, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm confused. I don't feel confused about it.

01:30:17

Maybe someone can demonstrate that I'm wrong. Go for it. But I don't, you know,

01:30:23

God isn't the author of confusion. Great, we agree. That's right. And that passage has nothing to do with whether we can be confused over certain things.

01:30:31

By the way, the same God that we believe is not the author of confusion is the same God that confuses the tongues of the people of the

01:30:37

Tower of Babel. So there's a context for these things. You don't just get to say God's not the author of confusion and then just have an understanding, an a -contextual understanding of that.

01:30:46

Yeah, God's also not the author of lies, but people lie. That's right, that's right. That's just not a non -sequitur, it just doesn't follow.

01:30:54

Okay. Quinn Soleil says, "'Libertarian free will' is false.

01:31:00

What does Tyler think about Bosserman's view on grounding free will and divine sovereignty paradoxically in the

01:31:06

Trinity alone?" If you're familiar with Bosserman's view there. I'm not that familiar with Bosserman. I watched your interview with him.

01:31:13

I'm not, so I've gotten in some disagreements with some people about Bosserman's view.

01:31:20

From what I understand, I don't think he's successful. Okay. But I've been told by some people that I really respect that I don't understand

01:31:29

Bosserman well enough. Okay. I will take that. Maybe I don't understand him well enough. I don't think that he's successful in grounding anything in the

01:31:37

Trinity the way that he tries. I have some reservations about that, but I'm gonna hold them to myself because they're kind of based on only what

01:31:47

I've seen interviews on YouTube and a couple excerpts from his book. I haven't read his book. Yeah, you definitely, on a complete side note, you definitely want to read his book.

01:31:54

I mean, whether you come out agreeing or disagreeing, it's an excellent book, and he brings up some really interesting stuff.

01:32:00

I happen to agree with Bosserman's conclusion, but you should read the book if you ever catch the time.

01:32:06

It's a good book there. Let's see here. So again, Michael Faber says, "'Tyler's argument is basically assume

01:32:13

Calvinism "'and of course declare heretics.'" Now, I could skip this over, but I actually want to come to your defense here.

01:32:21

If anyone knows Tyler and has listened to his debates and his discussions, it's just silly to say that he simply assumes

01:32:29

Calvinism. Now, you could disagree with Calvinism. You can think that Tyler's defense of Calvinism is not good, but he doesn't simply assume it.

01:32:36

He does go through great lengths in trying to defend it both scripturally and philosophically, so I don't think that's the case at all, and I don't think we've done any name -calling just sitting here calling anyone heretics or anything like that, even if we believe a view is heretical.

01:32:50

We tried to deal with the issues. Tyler jumped into the specific content, and I think this comment here is unwarranted, but I think we should have addressed that here, so is that all you do?

01:33:01

You just assume Calvinism? Is that what you're doing? Well, obviously. I mean, I would just go back and show the number of times where I've actually showed that my

01:33:09

Calvinism is actually completely irrelevant to the objection that I'm making to Molinism or to open theism, that it's actually my understanding of classical theism that undergirds

01:33:22

Orthodox Christianity that grounds a lot of these objections, and so, I mean,

01:33:30

I can't think of an argument, actually, where I've done a reductio argument where I said, okay, let's assume their position is true and show what follows.

01:33:38

That's not assuming my position is the case, and I've done philosophical rejoinders that have nothing to do with Calvinism and biblical rejoinders have nothing to do with it, so I don't know where I would have assumed

01:33:47

Calvinism. Now, even, I mean, comments like that just is interesting.

01:33:54

You know, I'll drop it there. I don't wanna get too much into it, but at any rate, so Beowulf says, "'Molinism explains the crucifixion fully.

01:34:00

"'Compatibilism does nothing to explain it. "'It just creates an illogical mess "'and makes God the author of sin.'"

01:34:06

How would you respond? I mean, I would have to ask a bunch more questions, right?

01:34:13

Because it says, "'Molinism fully explains the crucifixion.'" Well, the problem is that I showed that it didn't, right?

01:34:20

Because Molinism requires libertarian incompatibilism. As we see in Acts, the crucifixion was determined and free, and so it simply cannot be the case that any incompatible system can explain the crucifixion, whereas compatibilism just is the position that determinism and freedom, sufficient responsibility are compatible, which we see in the crucifixion.

01:34:41

So, and I'm not sure what you mean by explains it, right? So, compatibilism isn't trying to explain it.

01:34:47

It's not explaining why it happened. It's just giving an example where something is determined and free, right?

01:34:54

So, I'm not exactly sure that's the case. And the makes God the author of sin, I mean, that's your claim.

01:35:02

I'm not sure how that would follow without begging the question of some type of incompatibilism, because in order for you to say that God is the author of sin, you need to assume that if God determined something, it illegitimately makes him the cause of that thing, which just is the incompatibilist position, right?

01:35:23

So, the objection, so if you're gonna say, okay, well, the author of sin objection is a valid objection against compatibilism, then what you're saying is if I assume incompatibilism, then therefore compatibilism is false, which

01:35:40

I'm just saying, okay, well, that's just trivially true if you assume the falsity of something that it follows that it's false, but why should we go along with the assumption of the falsity of the thing to begin with?

01:35:50

So, I just don't find that, I don't know how that's a meaningful objection. Sure, all right.

01:35:57

Quinn Soleil asks, does libertarian free will ultimately lead to impersonalism which undermines the very nature of God's being and rule?

01:36:06

If I understand this question correctly, Quinn Soleil, correct us if I'm wrong, there's an objection to libertarianism that because it is causally indeterminate, it means that there's nothing actually even about the agent that determines the choice, right?

01:36:25

So, now it's the case that I'm not even causally determinate of my decisions, right?

01:36:34

So, you have this weird thing where it is the case that I'm the one choosing, but there's nothing about me that's determining what

01:36:42

I choose. And so, I'm choosing, but I'm not even determining my own choices. And so, it actually makes it almost random or entirely arbitrary.

01:36:52

It actually becomes very much like rolling a dice where nothing in the prior conditions, including myself, my desires, my thoughts, my beliefs, my context, nothing determines what

01:37:04

I choose. And so, it just becomes opaque. Again, on hard libertarianism, right?

01:37:11

If you're like a source incompatibilist, you have some answers to this, right? But libertarianism, it's really hard to understand how it's not just reducible to kind of arbitrary rolls of the die because the prior causal conditions are indeterminate to the choices.

01:37:30

But if I'm the prior causal condition, but I'm indeterminate, like then it just means, does that make sense?

01:37:37

Sure, sure, I gotcha. I think that's what he means, which means that it undermines the very nature.

01:37:44

And then if it undermines the very nature of God's rule, I don't know if this is where he's going about God's rule.

01:37:51

My friend, Jimmy Stevens makes this very interesting argument that basically is in the Bible, people are morally blameworthy and praiseworthy and do good or bad things because of the stuff that they are.

01:38:06

So people do wicked things because they are wicked, right? So your nature is the thing that determines the type of decisions that you make, right?

01:38:17

You'll, by their fruit, you'll know their tree, right? So Jimmy Stevens goes through and he says, okay, but if libertarian freedom is true and the causal condition is indeterminate with respect to it, it means that being wicked is causally indeterminate with choosing the wicked or the good, right?

01:38:36

So it's no longer the case that the wicked is blameworthy for their wicked or good actions because their nature is not determinate of the type of things that they, the types of choices that they make.

01:38:48

So he makes this very interesting biblical kind of, the kind of the anthropology in the Bible that were presented where the type of tree determines the type of fruit.

01:38:57

But if libertarianism is true, it seems to be that the type of tree is indeterminate to the type of fruit, so.

01:39:05

All right, very good. Michael Faber asks another question. This is with respect to your comments, something to the effect saying that open theism was heretical at some level.

01:39:15

So the question is, could Tyler tell us what ecumenical counsel open theism contradicts to make it a heresy?

01:39:22

Yeah, so this is just the mistaken view that in order to be a heresy, it has to be something within the ecumenical counsel.

01:39:29

I'm not sure that I necessarily agree with that. I think we can do, if it's condemned at an ecumenical counsel, it's heresy, or if it contradicts the universal testimony of the church.

01:39:41

Right, and as I pointed out, everybody stands against open theists. Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Armenians, Calvinists, Provisionists, everybody disagrees with the open theist, right?

01:39:56

In very, very strong ways, in saying that it's the wrong God, right?

01:40:01

So there's kind of a trivial way where you could say, oh, well, everybody disagrees with Calvinists.

01:40:06

That's what it means to be a non -Calvinist is that you're not a Calvinist, okay? But not everybody disagrees with Calvinism and says, oh, well,

01:40:13

Calvinism just is a different God, right? We disagree on certain biblical passages.

01:40:19

We disagree on certain theological implications, right? And you do have some people who say that, but it - There are some, but it's not the universal testimony of the church.

01:40:27

It's the universal testimony of the church that open theism is out of bounds and that it is a denial of the uniform view of all of these different traditions that God knows all things, right?

01:40:45

So again, there are people, it is the case that everybody who's not a Calvinist is not a Calvinist, but guess what?

01:40:52

The way that people are Calvinist is different, right? Armenians are not non -Calvinist for the same reason that Catholics are not non -Calvinist, right?

01:40:59

So they all kind of disagree differently. There's not a universal united front against Calvinism for the same thing.

01:41:06

Sure. That just is not the case when it comes to open theism. All right. This next question is from a former student of mine.

01:41:13

It has nothing to do with the topic, but it might be a quick one you'd be able to address just so that I could, yeah.

01:41:19

Okay. So David asked the question, can one use Satan's name in vain? For example, I say, damn

01:41:25

Satan. So instead of using God's name in vain, is it inappropriate to, you know, someone use

01:41:33

Satan's name in vain? I don't know because my guess would be no, because normally when we think of using

01:41:42

God's name in vain, we think that we're profaning something that shouldn't be used that way.

01:41:48

It's not clear that Satan's name shouldn't be used that way. Okay.

01:41:55

I mean, I don't know. So if I stubbed my toe, there's nothing wrong with me saying, you know, devil damn.

01:42:04

I don't think, but I would go back and say, well, I mean his personal name. Well, okay. Caveat, I think our

01:42:11

Satanology and demonology in evangelical Christianity way overdeveloped and way beyond what scriptures actually tell us.

01:42:20

But if you kind of go with the historical, you know, development of Satanology, well, I mean,

01:42:26

Satan isn't his name. Lucifer would be his name. Maybe I don't, you know, but yeah.

01:42:34

Cause Satan is his office. That's the accuser. Sure, sure, sure. I got you. Tate says, where's

01:42:39

William Lane Craig in this convo? I'd love to interview. I almost had the opportunity to interview

01:42:44

Dr. Craig. I had Kevin Harris on from Reasonable Faith who interviews Dr. Craig to talk about Dr.

01:42:51

Craig's influence and contributions. And it was almost set up, but you know, these gentlemen are very difficult to find cause they're very busy.

01:42:59

So maybe one day I'll be able to have the pleasure of interviewing William Lane Craig. Let's see here.

01:43:06

Let's move down the list where you're doing a great job. By the way, I do have a couple of articles, again, not on the topic.

01:43:12

I have a couple of articles where I show that I took a cue from our friend, Tim Stratton.

01:43:17

I said, I showed that William Lane Craig is a mere presuppositionalist. Okay, there you go.

01:43:25

That's awesome. Let's see here. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. I'm just trying to go through quickly here.

01:43:37

Okay, let's Michael Faber makes a couple of comments here. Maybe you could address them here.

01:43:43

And I tend to get this a lot. When people disagree with the person I'm interviewing, the person, you know, calls the person dishonest, a liar.

01:43:53

Why can't we just say he's wrong? He's incorrect there. I mean, why it doesn't necessarily, I don't think Tyler is lying about anything, but Michael Faber says,

01:44:01

Tyler is lying when he says that open theists don't have a hermeneutic. He is lying when he says that open theists say, you know,

01:44:08

God is a very good guesser. His whole argument is intellectually dishonest. How would you engage that a little bit?

01:44:14

Yeah, well, a couple of things. I don't think, maybe I misspoke. I don't mean that they have no hermeneutic. I believe what

01:44:20

I said was that they have no consistent or no good hermeneutic. Yes, I think that's what you said, yeah. Which, well, that's just true.

01:44:26

I mean, I gave numerous examples of that's the case. So again, if you can argue back and you can, you know, convince me or you can convince others, or you can make a good case, then maybe

01:44:34

I'm wrong, but that's not, again, that's not lying. I'm also not lying when I say that God is a very good guesser.

01:44:40

I actually got that from Boyd, right? I mean, Boyd and others are the ones that say God, it's a

01:44:46

God who risks. God's the one who gambles. God is, he's making very, very, very good guesses.

01:44:52

And yes, he wins at roulette a lot. I got that from open theists.

01:44:57

So that's kind of like, I don't know how it's intellectually dishonest for me to say that about open theism when

01:45:06

I get that from open theists. So maybe that wouldn't be how Mr. Faber would say it, but.

01:45:14

Right, okay, that's a good point here. Richard Suttles says, it's possible everything collapses because there are no logical ways to make all those qualities work.

01:45:23

And I think he's referring to the various attributes you were speaking about before that seem to be denied on the open theist perspective.

01:45:32

Yeah, here's the thing. I think that it is the case that every view that we have is probably a little wrong.

01:45:44

I'm totally okay with that, right? I don't think that everything about Calvinism that I think is true is true.

01:45:53

I'm gonna get to heaven. I mean, this is why I like George Whitfield's statement about Wesley, right,

01:46:00

Charles Wesley. I forget which Wesley brother. I think it was Charles Wesley. And he said, no,

01:46:07

I'm not gonna see Wesley when I get to heaven. He's gonna be so much closer to God than me, right?

01:46:12

So I'm not there imagining that my view, I understand that my view about the scriptures is still my view about the scriptures and I'm not that great.

01:46:25

I'm wrong about all kinds of things. Now, in order for me to think that I'm wrong, someone should try to convince me that I'm wrong with good arguments, right?

01:46:34

Kind of a Luther, unless I'm convinced by the clear teaching of scripture or sound reason, I have no reason to think that I'm wrong when

01:46:41

I've had these kind of well thought out positions. But I agree that there's a certain degree where everything has certain falsehoods.

01:46:48

Where I disagree is where everything collapses. I don't think that's the case, right?

01:46:53

It may be the case that a bunch of views have barnacles and we have to scrape off the barnacles and we have to take off some dry rot.

01:47:00

We have to do all that kind of stuff, but we still have a sail worthy ship. Sure. That's not the case on open theism.

01:47:06

On open theism, you literally are like taking off the keel that keeps it all together and expecting the ship to float.

01:47:13

Okay. Right, it's just not the case. It's an entire, it just completely makes the entire thing collapse.

01:47:19

All right, thank you for that. Beowulf makes a good point here with respect to the question about using the devil's name.

01:47:26

He says, when the Archangel Michael contending with the devil was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said, the

01:47:35

Lord rebuke you. And so he says here in another comment, so I would refrain from saying damn

01:47:41

Satan, but rather the Lord rebuke you, which is more in line with kind of the biblical phraseology there, but that was interesting.

01:47:47

So that's from the book of Jude. I'm not exactly sure that I would agree with how he's interpreting that.

01:47:53

Okay. But this is one of those very, very, very interesting,

01:47:58

I wrote a book called Canonical Exclusion or Embrace. Not a book, sorry,

01:48:03

I wrote an article. And there are weird things that happen in the book of Jude, because something like half of the book of Jude, it's not a long epistle.

01:48:14

It's less than, I mean, it's 19 verses or something. Like half of the verses are citations of non -biblical and extra canonical books.

01:48:24

This is one of them, right? So it's not entirely clear, I think.

01:48:32

Let me just say, Jude is one of the books that I just like put my hand on the Bible and I swear, I don't know what's happening.

01:48:39

Okay, you believe it's inspired. It's supposed to be there. You're just confused as to what's going on there.

01:48:44

I can say, I generally know what's happening. Like I know generally, start to finish, the argument that's being made.

01:48:51

But if you get into the minutia of exactly what's happening in the way that Jude is citing the book of Enoch, for example, which is largely, there's a citation of the book of Enoch that I deal with in the paper.

01:49:05

Okay. I don't exactly know what to do with it. Because, and it gets very, very complicated because it seems to cite this extra canonical book as if it's scripture, but it's clearly not scripture.

01:49:23

It gets wild. Couldn't he be quoting something that's true in a non -canonical book so that the non -canonical book is non -canonical, but the non -canonical book gets something right.

01:49:34

And so the author seems, sees fit to mention it in his letter. I will send you my paper.

01:49:40

Cause it's, once you start getting into the actually like the graphite formulas and stuff, it gets so much more complicated.

01:49:46

Cause a lot of people are like, oh, well like, Paul cites the Stoics and it's like, okay, but Paul doesn't actually use a graphite formula equating it with scripture.

01:49:54

Jude does. So it gets, it just gets, the end of my paper was kind of like, hey, so that can't be true and that can't be true.

01:50:06

But for the rest of these 15 options. Okay. I gotcha. I gotcha.

01:50:11

All right. Well, that was the last point there. I think this was an excellent discussion.

01:50:17

And again, for those who agree and find this information helpful, you know, use it for what it is and share it with others.

01:50:25

If you disagree, you disagree. That's just the nature of the beast. You know, we don't, we don't hate you. We disagree with your disagreement.

01:50:33

That's okay. It's normal. But I do encourage folks, regardless of how strongly you feel against open theisms, more specifically, more seriously, and Molinism in a less serious sense.

01:50:46

I think Molinism is not as problematic as open theism, of course. Always be sure, and I say this in every show, if you're going to have disagreements, okay, you need to do it in a way that is itself consistent with scripture, right?

01:51:00

And so we want to show gentleness, love, and respect to those with whom we disagree. And, you know, please don't message me about, well,

01:51:08

Jesus tipped the, you know, tossed over the money changers tables.

01:51:14

Like stop using that as an example to be jerks to other people, okay? That has a specific - Can I use the example where Paul told the

01:51:20

Judaizers to go and circumcise themselves? Yes, but, yeah, there you go.

01:51:26

But you see, a lot of what we do is, you know, people in general, they're not doing it in a way that is in line with those biblical guidelines.

01:51:35

So I do encourage people, if you want to make a point and support your position, you'll go much further if you respect the other person in the midst of your disagreement.

01:51:43

I think that opens up lines of communications and that's important. If Cameron happens to watch this,

01:51:49

I have no idea if he ever watches anything on this show, but I'm sure he's familiar with these various points.

01:51:55

And so I do just want to let him know that we, at least I've been, and I'm sure you have, been greatly blessed by his content.

01:52:03

And we do know how theology and philosophy works. For a lot of us, it's a journey. We're working through difficult concepts.

01:52:11

And I don't say this condescendingly, and I don't say this as though I am, you know, the best at this, but I want to encourage

01:52:18

Cameron that you need to be immersed in scripture.

01:52:24

The philosophy is important. We all do it. We're all trying to make sense out of things, but we want to be grounded in the word of God.

01:52:31

And me personally, when I read the word of God, the God of open theism is not what emerges.

01:52:36

And I suppose that's the reason why it's so vigorously opposed by the majority of Christendom.

01:52:43

So as you're struggling through those ideas, you know, really, really take into consideration, you know, what the

01:52:51

Bible says and consider what the church has said throughout the past with respect to this topic or related issues.

01:52:57

So I'll be praying for you. And, you know, I really appreciate what you're doing. And hopefully one day

01:53:03

I'll get Cameron on here. I'd love to get Cameron on here just to talk about some general topic and maybe share a little bit more of his thoughts on, you know, what he's grappling with and things like that.

01:53:12

So we'll see. But at any rate, was there anything you'd like to say before we close off this episode, Tyler? No, I think you covered all of it.

01:53:19

All right. Well, real quick, I just want to remind people to remember June 1st is when Precept University starts our online course.

01:53:26

And so if folks are interested in signing up, you still have time to do that and there's still space for signup. So other than that, please like the videos, share, subscribe if you haven't already.

01:53:36

And thank you so much for being respectful in the comments and thank you for listening in. That's all for this episode.