Radio Free Geneva: TurretinFan Joins Me to Review More on Molinism

Almighty Fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing.

I don't like Calvinists because they've chosen to follow John Calvin instead of Jesus Christ. I have a problem with them.

They're following men instead of the Word of God. Our helper he amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing.

Standing on top of my feet, standing on a stump and crying out,

He died for all those who elected, were selected. For still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe.

His craft and power are great and armed with cruel hate.

Well, first of all, James, I'm very ignorant of the reformers.

On earth is not his equal. I think

I probably know more about Calvinism than most of the people who call themselves Calvinists.

Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever were not the right man on our side, the man of God's own choosing.

Ladies and gentlemen, James White is a hyper -Calvinist. Now, whatever we do in Baptist life, we don't need to be teaming up with hyper -Calvinists.

Dost ask who that may be? Christ Jesus, it is he.

I said the other day in class that I don't understand the difference between hyper -Calvinism and Calvinism.

It seems to me that Calvin was a hyper -Calvinist. Right, I don't think there is typically any difference between Calvinism and hyper -Calvinism.

Read my book. And now, from our underground bunker hidden deep beneath Liberty University, where no one would think to look, save from those moderate

Calvinists, Dave Hunt fans, and those who've read and re -read George Bryson's book, we are radio -free

Geneva, broadcasting the truth about God's freedom to save through his own eternal glory.

I'm sort of wondering, have we finished the process of moving the bunker? Because it can only be done between 2 and 3 o 'clock in the morning.

Moving the bunker to that new location we found out in the woods underneath the Bruton Parker.

Which is why we had to use the voice synthesizer thing there to hide the identity of the

Bruton Parker employee who is helping us to put the next day headline, entire staff of Bruton Parker purged except for the president.

Large, earth -moving things found behind the library.

Yeah, well, anyways, welcome to the Dividing Line, to radio -free Geneva. My name's James White, and it's 80 degrees in Phoenix today.

That's just for all of those of you who are still shoveling snow or still stuck in your car somewhere in Atlanta.

You know, I mean, it is so weird that those pictures of Atlanta look so much like The Walking Dead.

That it's just, I mean, it's just like, it happened. I told my daughter, I said, well, I'll have to snow them again and start watching for The Walkers.

And that's absolutely amazing. And of course that would happen here, too. Can you imagine if it really snowed here?

I mean, there isn't a snowplow. I mean, how long would it take to get snowplows down from Flagstaff? And there's only five of them up there anyways.

You wouldn't get stuck? Yeah, you've got a four -wheel drive. Big deal. So does everybody else. They'd all be piled on top of each other in the middle of a road someplace in Arizona.

What are you talking about? You forget, I know where all the back roads are. Yeah, well, sure you do.

We need to get back to the review of William Lane Craig and Paul Helm, which we began a long, long, long, long time ago.

And we're also joined by a special guest today. I'll get to all that in just a moment. But I wanted to, before we get started, since we are going to be, well, we have actually started.

So I guess that's actually an appropriate statement, isn't it? I want to direct everybody to an article that was posted.

Let me see here. Yesterday by a former channel rat.

Now, someone even asked me on Twitter recently, just a couple minutes ago, what channel is.

Channel is our IRC, Internet Relay Chat channel. It is ancient technology, which is why it normally keeps working.

Everything else collapses because it's just so simple. But it is a place where a group of rather odd people chat fairly regularly.

Sometimes we don't say anything at all. Sometimes we say lots of things. And sometimes it's sort of in the middle and so on and so forth.

It's called Prasapal Gyan. There's a link on the front page of the website. And we used to have back.

Look, I started that channel in 1996. We are coming. Now we're up to 18 years, coming up on two decades.

And so there have been a lot of people who have come and gone during that period of time. But we used to have a channel rat. Now, channel rat is one of the regulars.

That's one of the people that's there on a regular basis. And he was working on his

Ph .D. at that time, I believe, at the University of Edinburgh. And he has now been exalted to the heights of academia.

And is Dr. James Anderson of RTS Charlotte. And he posted an article yesterday called

The Fallible God of Mullinism. And so if you go to www .progonosko

.com, you will find his article,

The Fallible God of Mullinism, which I thought was very relevant to our subject here.

Let me just read you some sections of this. Because mullinism leaves most people cold and feeling philosophically abused, shall we say.

But William Lane Craig is promoting it as, if you want to be one of the cool kids in philosophy, you need to be a mullinist.

So there are all sorts of people flocking out of Biola and Talbot with pictures with tattoos of Louis de

Molina on their left shoulder. And things like that. So, Dr.

Anderson says, Because mullinists are therefore committed to three key claims. First, God foreordains all things, including the free choices of his creatures.

Craig was quite emphatic about this during the exchange with Helm. He stated that God preordains everything, and quipped that he could affirm almost everything the

Westminster Confession of Faith says about God's eternal decree and God's providence, apart from the Confession's deliberate rejection of mullinism.

Note the final clause in WCF 3 .2. The reason mullinists such as Craig want to affirm this is because they recognize the

Bible as a very strong view of providence. And they should be commended for recognizing this, although, as I'll explain shortly, the biblical view is even stronger than they think.

Well, that's for sure. I have often said that the mullinist commitment to that is somewhat of a charade. Anyway, secondly, by affirming a libertarian view of free will, mullinists are committed to the idea that if a person

S freely chooses A in specific circumstances C, then it must have been possible for S not to have chosen

A. It may be more likely, perhaps even overwhelmingly so, that S will choose

A over not A, but it must be possible for S to have chosen otherwise. Here I'm glossing over the distinction some libertarians make between derivatively and non -derivatively free choices.

In what follows, for simplicity's sake, I'm going to ignore derivatively free choices. I don't think the distinction affects my argument.

Mullinists are therefore committed to the following. And he actualizes C because he plans for S to choose

A. In other words, he looks at these possible worlds. And so he wants you to do X, he wants you to do this thing, and so he actualizes the world situation that would cause you to choose

A. It is nonetheless possible for S not to choose

A in C, given that context. Craig clearly affirms this point a couple of times in his exchange with Helm.

In other words, there are possible worlds in which God actualizes C so that C will choose A, but S doesn't choose

A. There are possible worlds in which God's eternal decree doesn't come to pass because libertarian free agents do otherwise than he had planned.

The upshot is this. On the Mullinist view, there are some possible worlds in which God is fallible. Indeed, there are many, many such worlds.

Any world in which God's plans fail is a world in which God is fallible. It seems to me that this conclusion is built into the

Mullinist system. So, what could a Mullinist say in response? Well, if we could ever get

Dr. Craig to debate, we might be able to ask directly. One reply would be to concede the point and to say that God isn't necessarily infallible.

He isn't infallible in every possible world, but he's infallible in this world at least. God is contingently infallible.

But I think there are several serious problems with this response. In the first place, the very notion of contingent infallibility is logically suspect.

On the face of it, infallibility is a modal concept. It's concerned with possible failure, not merely actual failure.

Infallible means not fallible. Infallible means capable of failure. If a person is fallible, it's not because he has failed or because he will fail, but because he could fail.

After all, there's nothing logically inconsistent in saying that S is fallible, but S didn't or won't actually fail. What would be flatly inconsistent would be to say that S is fallible, but S cannot fail.

Hence, we wouldn't describe someone as infallible simply because he actually succeeds in every case, even though he might have failed at any point.

Infallibility surely entails that one cannot fail even in principle, so it's not clear that the notion of contingent infallibility is even coherent.

But I will simply say in passing that obviously Dr. Anderson has not dialogued with many Roman Catholic apologists who are defending papal infallibility, which is utterly incoherent anyways.

Anyway, if I'm right about this, then Molinus shouldn't say that God is infallible. For if God isn't infallible in every possible world, then he isn't infallible in any possible world, including the actual world.

I note for the record that this argument presupposes some widely held modal principles, which I'm not going to defend here precisely because they're widely held.

Secondly, these divine failure worlds present a problem for Molinus who are committed to perfect being theology, which is most of them,

I would guess. If God is only contingently infallible, it follows that God doesn't possess maximal greatness.

For a being who is necessarily infallible is greater than a being who is contingently infallible. A being who is infallible in all possible worlds is greater than a being who is infallible in only some possible worlds.

It's noteworthy that Alvin Plantinga, who introduced the notion of maximal greatness in his defense of the ontological argument, is one of the most prominent advocates of Molinism.

And so he goes on to say some more about that. I would highly recommend the reading of this.

I think it raises some very interesting questions. And basically toward the end, what he says,

As I see it, this tension at the center of Molinism rises because it aspires to be deterministic indeterminism.

Indeterminism because of its commitment to libertarian free will, deterministic because God's decree somehow, we know not how, determines in advance that its creatures will make certain choices.

It may not be causal determinism, but it's deterministic nonetheless, as many non -Molinist Arminians such as Roger Olson can clearly see.

If preordaining that S chooses A doesn't mean predetermining that S chooses A, then what on earth does it mean?

Molinism is certainly an impressive theory, but it's only impressive in the way that a slick cup -and -ball trick is impressive.

Its philosophical sleight of hand par excellence. Molinists have to be skilled in the art of misdirection.

Now you see the determinism, now you don't. Well, well said by Dr.

Anderson, who again, our only claim to fame as Channel Rats is that he was once one of us.

And maybe, maybe someday he'll come back and visit us and come back and slum around with us little people for a little while in the future.

I'm sure he's going to hear this and may actually pop in and go, Hey, hey, I didn't say that you all were slumming or anything like that.

It's just, I'm a busy man. I have responsibilities and I'm not sure that Dr. Kruger would want me in channel anyways.

So with that said, I am joined off camera today by a voice that we have heard before by the great

Reverend Dr. Turretin fan. Hello, Dr. Turretin fan, sir. Thanks for having me on. It's good to have you on.

Now we've had you on the phone before. Have we had you on my Skype? I think only phone.

Only phone. Okay. But now we are blessed to have the gentleman right here in the studio.

And it seems fitting that you would be here on a day when we're going to be continuing our review of William Lane Craig. Because if I recall correctly,

I asked, I'm not sure how many years ago it was now, and you don't have a computer in front of you to look, but I actually asked you to do a series on Turretin's response to the concept of middle knowledge.

Do you remember how many years ago that was? You may be better at that than I am. It was probably 2008, 2009.

Somewhere around there, yeah. And then didn't you do some YouTube videos, audios? That's correct. So those of you who would like to know how the real

Turretin, who's been departed for quite some time, responded to the subject of middle knowledge, those are still up on YouTube, aren't they?

That's correct, yeah. You could do a search for TurretinFan's channel and look at those, because he attempted to take what's found in the

Institutes of Atlantic Theology and sort of make that understandable for those of us who don't necessarily plow through Latin all that well, which sometimes can get in the way.

But then again, it gets in the way of reading Hodge, too, as well as a little bit of German and everything else that sometimes gets thrown in the way.

But it does seem appropriate, because we had just gotten into the discussion of the definition of Molinism.

And by the way, one more thing before we get started. We have some new toys on the program today.

Now, some of you who are dedicated podcast listeners are not going to necessarily appreciate this.

And I'm sorry, but it's sort of like when we went from Real Audio to MP3.

It left a few people behind, but you just have to keep pressing forward.

And by the way, I was not the one pushing for this stuff. It's the man behind the glass over there, the bodiless voice that every once in a while pops in and says things and makes comments.

I was perfectly happy. Yeah, there were people who used to be on dial -up. Yeah, dial -up. People had dial -up disease and things like that.

So we're just moving along here. And we can now, on the YouTube feed, show what is on my screen.

I can now show you things. And what I'd like to start off with is I'd like to show you what I'm playing you.

Because I've been telling you folks for at least a year now that I have the coolest program in the world for playing these audio files, starting and stopping, marking things out, etc.,

etc. And it's a program that I am not paid any type of kickbacks on, but it's called

Audio Notetaker. And so we can take a look at what I see.

Here is my Audio Notetaker screen. And what I've done is I've gone through, and what it does is it breaks an audio file up into chunks.

And I have gone through and colored these chunks. Normally, in fact, let me show you this one here.

I'm not sure. Did that still come up? Did that come up? Okay. Here is, for example, Dr. Allen's thing on the atonement.

You can see over on the side, like right here. Here's a pink section here, and over here it says, Hodge comment.

And so there's a section on Hodge. And then here's the green section. It says, alleged logical fallacy with really bad illustration.

Love of life. So here's my notes over here, and then here's the section over here. And I can just click on that and then play that.

I don't have as many notes in this one because it's all color, as you can see. There's definition of Mullenism.

But right there, start here. So I knew where I was. I was actually halfway through this.

This blue section right here is where you need to start. But I wanted to replay where we were at before. So there's Audio Notetaker.

And for those of you who are in school, you have to listen to lectures and stuff like that.

Man, there's just nothing. You combine this with a Livescribe pen.

Wow. I mean, that is ultra geekdom right there. You know, ultra geekdom. And that's just really awesome.

What is Mutato talking about? Please don't squeeze the garment. Oh. That man's mind just functions on a level that's not like most of the rest of us.

There's a little something wrong there. There really is. Of course, you and he have this odd habit of baking cookies in channel.

Baking cookies. Watching birds. Reading patristics. Reading patristics. Yes, that's right. Which is all,

I think, code word for playing a game called Lexialist, isn't it? In certain contexts.

And have you all kept score? Yes. There's full statistics and everything. Really? Oh, I think.

Are you ahead, I think? I'd rather not say. I actually happen to know that you are.

In fact, wasn't there one game where he was way, way ahead and you stormed back at the end and just stomped the life out of the man?

That's basically what you did. It's a friendly competition. He was depressed for weeks.

What are you talking about? It's a friendly competition. Oh, anyways. Okay. But we have had

Mutato on the program, too. So I try to be even, though I don't think you have any

CDs to sell. Not yet, anyways. He clobbers me, is what he just said.

So there you go. All right. We need to get to this. People in the audience are starting to get upset. So let's listen in.

We got to this point before. If you didn't hear that, then you have to go back. Mutato just said,

I win about as often as Italy does. Anyways, we're picking up with William Lane Craig here.

Well, if I might address that issue, how does God know how free agents would act in any circumstances?

I think it's because there are these subjunctive hypothetical propositions, which are true or false.

You'll have to explain that. These are if -then statements in the subjunctive mood, grammatically.

Like, if I were rich, I would buy a Mercedes. Now, I may not be rich, and so I don't buy one.

But that's a subjunctive conditional. Okay. And I think we use these all the time in planning.

If I were to ask the boss for a raise, he'd tear my head off. If I were to pull out into traffic now,

I would make it. If we were to send the army around the left flank, we would prevail. These kinds of subjunctive conditionals are inherent to rational planning and activity.

And more importantly, I think, Justin, for our purposes today, the Scripture is full of these kinds of subjunctive conditional statements.

So anybody who believes in verbal plenary inspiration has to affirm that these are true or false.

Let me just give one example, 2 Corinthians 2 .8. Paul says, if the rulers of this world had understood this, they would not have crucified the

Lord of glory. Now, that is a subjunctive conditional that I think, as Christians, we want to say is true.

And if that's true, then God must know it, because God is omniscient and he knows all true propositions.

Let's come back to that. Okay, let me stop right there. So we have these subjunctive conditionals.

And he quotes from Paul's passage that if the rulers of this world had known, they would not have crucified the

Lord of glory. Obviously, my immediate question is, all right, is that because God knows who these rulers are?

Or is that because there is some other mechanism that allows him to have this middle knowledge that is separate from his decree to create those rulers, and to use those rulers, and to determine what those rulers are going to be like, and so on and so forth.

But this, again, brings us back to the fundamental issue of the grounding of this middle knowledge, this knowledge which is between God's exhaustive knowledge of himself, and then his knowledge of what he's going to do in creation, which is just so utterly troubling to me.

Because I still have yet to hear from a Molinist exactly where the substance of this knowledge comes from.

If it doesn't come from God himself, what's its origin? Where does it come from? Did you want to comment on Craig's statement?

Yes, it seems as though he's treating these propositions as though they exist as brute facts.

But we know that's not how they exist. When he gave his example, if I went in and asked for a raise, my boss would turn my head off.

That's not just true because it's true. It's true because my boss is a very angry man or a very thrifty man.

Or I've been a really bad employee. Yes, and the same thing with the traffic. It's because my body's not resistant to trucks hitting it.

That's why that statement's true. But in the situation before creation, there's nothing to ground the truth of these statements, these propositions.

So Craig hasn't really addressed the question. He's just pushed it back a level. He's just saying the statements can be true, and God knows all true things.

Therefore, God knows it. But he hasn't answered how does God know it. Right, right. The grounding is still the main issue. And God could have made it so that we wouldn't have to worry about traffic.

We could get run over by a truck and just keep on going. It wouldn't make any difference. It all comes back to what God's purposes in creation are.

And to have knowledge of things outside of God's creative purpose, that's what continues to me to be the most troubling statement.

And it's the statement that has bothered so many other people. And that is, God has to deal with the cards.

He's been dealt. Now, he didn't say that on this. And I'm sort of wondering if he will ever say that again, because there was such an appropriately strident response by,

I would think, almost any Orthodox theist to such a concept. But he said it. And the concept is still there in his speech.

Where did these cards come from? This, to me, is really the most important aspect of this whole system.

Because, as I keep saying to people, if there's a card dealer, we need to find him, because he's the one we need to be worshipping.

Because he's the one that's in control of all this stuff anyways. Which, of course, leads us to some polytheistic issues.

But be that as it may. Paul gave another verse, which he believes kind of suggested the opposite. You started off with that verse about that Jesus' crucifixion was foreordained, foreknowledge, and so on.

And so we've obviously got verses that could be applied in both directions here, haven't we? Now, what concerns me about that is the same concern

I had in Spain just a few days ago. And that is, when people say, well, there are verses that go both directions, what's the natural understanding of most postmoderns at that point?

Well, then the Bible doesn't really give us a consistent teaching on this subject. And unfortunately, I think a lot of people, especially when faced with complicated systems, default back to the, well, no one can really know, so let's not worry about it, mere

Christianity concept. Rather than recognizing that just because there are seeming contradictions doesn't mean that they're real contradictions, and that frequently the very marrow of biblical revelation is discovered when you push past the surface level to a deeper level.

And unfortunately, a lot of people are just not willing to do that. I'm not denying, no one would deny, that there are such things as subjunctive conditionals.

As Bill says, the world is full of subjective conditions, things we might have done, things we would have done, things we had not had if we had that, and so on.

The question is, how are they to be interpreted? And what gives them their truth value? Is their truth value dependent upon this very strong sense of freedom that Bill espouses?

And that's what makes it difficult, I think, for a Calvinist. If they're so free, how does God know that what they're going to do, or what he thinks they're going to do, at some time in eternity or some time in the past, will actually take place?

And why don't they have the power to choose the alternative and indeed exercise that power on occasions?

And that is the question. And evidently, this is where the cake -and -eating -cake controversy comes in with the

Molinists. This is the deterministic indeterminism, or, you know, it's starting to sound like Norman Geisler.

What was his foreknowingly predetermining or predeterminately foreknowing?

That's what it was. Again, what do any of these phrases mean? Unless you can flesh them out.

Is the cool thing over there starting to freak you out a little bit? Just to hypnotize me.

I thought it was hypnotizing you there for a second, because they are very colorful, aren't they? They're more colorful in real life than they are on the video.

I can justify that. Thank you. This is fun.

All right, we press forward anyway. As I've said, this reconciles the issue of human freedom and God's foreknowledge.

And foreordination. I want to make it clear, just unless I'm being misunderstood, I think God does preordain everything.

Molinism has a strong sense of sovereignty. You can't deny biblically preordination. It's in the

New Testament. God has foreordained. But the Molinist perspective is that his foreordaining things takes account of human freedom and what he ordains.

And therefore, his foreordination doesn't annihilate human freedom. So in other words, because this is between the knowledge that God has of himself and,

I guess in a logical sense, prior to—not temporal, but logically prior to—the decree to create, the decree to create becomes, in my perspective, radically different in Molinism than it is from a biblical perspective.

Because rather than being a free, sovereign, self -glorifying choice, it is an act of God that has been constrained and determined by the content of middle knowledge that does not derive from God.

Am I explaining—do you understand where I'm going with that? Did that make any sense to you? Yes, I follow. Okay.

So I see a huge difference between a God who decrees and creates specifically for the glorification of the triune

God, and a God who, on the basis of middle knowledge, has to examine all these possibilities, and then if you say he still freely chooses to create, the range of his choice is not limited by his own self -glorification, it's limited by the data provided to him by this middle knowledge as to what would happen if he puts these certain free creatures in, and these certain free creatures here, and how they interact with one another, and what they're going to do in this situation, and all these other worlds where his plans fail, but these worlds where they succeed, and you finally—even

Bill Craig can't tell you exactly why he has chosen the parameters that he chooses, as to the idea of a maximal number of people saved over against the people lost, etc.,

etc. Why is that the highest goal, or whatever else it might be? But on the basis of all these things that constrain his choice, then he makes the choice of this particular world.

That's totally different than freely choosing to create out of his own sovereignty for his own purposes.

I think that's why we had 1 ,600 years, basically, of church history, and people reflecting upon the

Word of God, and nobody coming up with this idea until it was put into the context of, well, this

Reformation thing needs to be stopped, and its power is found in the sovereignty of God, so we need to find a way to rehabilitate a system that would allow for sacramental control over the grace of God, and that's really what

Molina was all about. Isn't it weird, though, that it's not the Jesuits and the high sacramentarians who are promoting this?

I don't get the feeling that Bill Craig's church is really overly sacramentally oriented. I actually don't know where he goes to church, but I assume you're right.

It's a standard sort of Baptist evangelical church, and yet, who's promoting

Molinism today? It's not the people who—the purpose of the creation of this system by Molina is gone, and yet—

I know this is going to make a few people mad, but you know what Molinism is? I just realized what

Molinism is. Molinism is a philosophical walker. It's a philosophical walker, and I'm talking about The Walking Dead.

It's a zombie that's still walking along even after its entire purpose is gone.

It has no purpose. I mean, what is the purpose of a walker? It just keeps on going eating things, and that's pretty much what

Molinism is doing, is it just keeps on going and eating things. I'm not going to ask you to comment on that. I have too much respect for you.

I wouldn't want folks to think I don't believe in foreordination. Sure, sure. And for you, that presents a problem, because the issue concerns whether God is the author of evil, for instance, whether human sin is something that is chosen by us, or we're not actually ultimately responsible.

These are the big problems that Calvinism for you throws up, is that correct, Bill? Justin! I'm going to step on his toes the next time

I see him for that particular comment. And he'll hear me say this, so he'll probably stay a little bit farther away from me when we meet,

Lord willing, next month. Speaking of which, by the way, I need to remember to put that link back into the program today.

We still could use your help in paying for that little extra cost of popping into London so that we might do some unbelievable radio broadcasts if you enjoy those and think it might be a good idea over there in Europe to have a conservative voice addressing important issues both inside and outside the

Church, and that's certainly what I try to do. When I have the opportunity being on, we have that opportunity. When I say next month, it's literally in two, well, three weeks for London, but two weeks when

I leave, because I've got a big trip coming up. I mean, half of February I'm gone. Half the entire month

I'm gone. And that includes Fredericksburg, Virginia, and then off to Kiev.

And all of you who are sending in all the notes about everything's falling apart over there, I've talked to my friends over there, and they say it's about three square blocks.

The media is blowing it out of proportion, and don't worry about it. And then coming back from Kiev through London to meet with Justin and record some programs on some hopefully very useful topics as well.

So if you'd like to help to make that a possibility, that's not a part of the reimbursement that we're getting for going to Kiev, because I'm teaching

Church history there, please link on through and help us to do that.

But how did I get from what he was saying to that? Anyways, I totally skipped it here. The nice thing is,

I just click back a little bit, and I can catch the context. The big problems that Calvinism for you throws up.

Yes, Justin was making the statement as soon as I heard it. If God is sovereign, then we don't have a choice, and so on and so forth.

And obviously we do choose. And the whole ground of why our choice is real is found in the sovereign decree of God.

That's what so bothers me about so many people's objections, is they hear what others are saying rather than hearing what we're saying.

Or, let's be honest, there are some times that Calvinists don't do a really good job in explaining their positions either,

I suppose. I suppose so. These are sort of the street objections to Calvinism.

And I guess we'll hear the response, but Mullinism runs into roughly the same problem from a street level.

On Mullinism, it's absolutely certain that the bank robber is going to rob the bank, and there's not some percent chance that it's not going to turn out that way.

It definitely will. Now, there is a possible world where God wanted them to rob the bank, and then they chose not to, but everything goes off the rails, and that's why it didn't get actuated anyways.

If we're going back to Anderson's article, I think a Mullinist might try to argue that he's proposing an incompossible world.

In other words, the world where God both foreknew such and such would occur and it doesn't occur, those two things aren't possible, but only the individual act without the previous knowledge.

But I'm not sure that's a solid objection. But anyway, to make a long story short, these are kind of lay objections, and a

Calvinist is going to answer them actually quite similarly to a Mullinist in the sense that man is free, man freely makes these choices.

It's just that Dr. Craig's view of freedom is incorrect. And derived from certainly non -biblical considerations, which is why having not only a biblical doctrine of God, but a biblical doctrine of man is so vitally important.

Is that correct, Bill? Yes, I think that's right, and particularly for me, an anguishing— Now, I didn't try to play him saying, yes,

I think that's right, right after me, just simply try to make it sound like he was doing that. And by the way,

I don't know why I'm so concerned about this, but I am. Yes, I have sped it up to 1 .2.

I guess it's because of the Cantor stuff and people saying, we edited videos, which means you didn't play the whole stinking video.

It actually wasn't changing anything. It's not changing what anybody's saying. It's actually making everybody I play sound smarter because they're talking faster.

But it also allows us to get through more on the dividing line. Is that correct, Bill? Yes, I think that's right, and particularly for me, an anguishing difficulty would be that I take at face value the passages in the

New Testament about the universal, salvific will of God. That is to say, that God really does want all persons to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth.

Now, we played a portion from his Sunday school class on this subject that was just a couple weeks ago, and I've never heard

Bill Craig interact in a meaningful fashion with the exegesis of the key text that I have provided. But again, for a

Mullenist, this is a desire that God cannot fulfill.

And it's a conflicting desire because he desired to instantiate this world, which now conflicts with his desire to save everyone.

But he could continue having that desire, but he can't fulfill it because, from what

Craig says, there was no possible world where everybody was saved in the first place. So God actually chooses to actuate a world where he is going to be eternally bummed.

But then again, any world, it's just beyond his control. We can blame the card dealer.

I guess that's how Mullenism gets away with it. You eventually move the responsibility to whoever it was that dealt

God the cards. I guess that's the hidden escape hatch for blame. You can put all middle knowledge and, well,

God couldn't do that because there wasn't any possible world where everybody could have been saved.

So it's just not a possibility. And I guess a lot of people go, oh, that sounds good that I don't have to blame God for it.

And you're still left going, is that really satisfying? I don't find it satisfying. I actually don't think most people who embrace

Mullenism ever really thought through those particular issues anyways. I suppose not. It's particularly troubling when you bring in concepts which are not necessarily universal to Mullenism, but things that Dr.

Craig has talked about, like the idea that some people would go to hell in every possible universe because, in his view, they would reject the gospel in every universe.

It's unclear how someone who would, in every possible universe, do something can really be said to be free.

Oh, yeah. What's the word even mean there? And what determined that that person would be so utterly closed to his creator outside of something about the way he's been created and the context?

I mean, if you say that man is just sort of this putty that is determined by the context he's put in, there's no context that could have possibly made this person open to the proclamation, the demonstration of God's love or something like that.

Where does that come from? Again, we have the card dealer up there that somehow has put this into the cards, but it's like I don't see any other source for that kind of totally shutting down the possibility of this person being saved.

It's an odd perspective. As Paul says, and I think that the, that is the apostle

Paul, I think that if we take these passages at face value, it either leads to universalism, which we know isn't true, or it means there's something that impedes

God's perfect will being done because all persons aren't saved. And that seems to me to be human freedom, that God will not coerce or overpower someone in order to save them.

He will respect their freedom of choice as an individual, and some persons freely choose to separate themselves from God forever, despite his will that they be saved and his every effort to save them.

So once again, I would, one of the reasons that I believe the students at Biola and Talbot or people gathering in a debate in Atlanta, Georgia, or whatever else it might be, and certainly with the recordings, people all over the place, would find a debate between myself and Dr.

Craig useful is because those very texts I have yet to hear

Bill Craig pressed upon. And maybe he just does not ever want to put himself in a position of having to exegetically engage the text that he himself is saying on face value.

What does on face value mean? I mean, frequently when I hear someone say on face value, when it's talking about a biblical text, they're saying on first reading.

But I would like to suggest that using the phrase on face value in this context would mean as the text clearly indicates, properly exegeted, contextually exegeted.

And that's where I think he's completely wrong, and would like to engage him on that.

But this is where your anthropology is vitally important. And of course, I've made this accusation before.

I'll make it again. I don't believe that Bill Craig creates his theology primarily based upon biblical exegesis.

The biblical exegesis comes from the philosophical pre -considerations that override everything else. He would say that's not the case.

I understand that. I think we've demonstrated that to be the case numerous times. I would hone in on his expression that God makes every effort to save them.

There's two problems with that statement. Number one, if this is a truly free decision by the person, it's not determined by anything external, then what good is effort in the first place?

And why does it even matter whether God exerts effort if it's truly indetermined, and it's not determined from outside?

And in fact, that's contrary to our intuition. I mean, the whole reason we preach the gospel is because we believe that there is, that people don't believe without hearing and so forth.

Now God doesn't, on the other hand, when you start taking it as a deterministic factor,

God doesn't, in fact, reveal the gospel clearly to every person to the maximum extent that God could.

God could show each person how bad hell really will be and how wonderful heaven really would be and make the choice between the two much easier for every single person.

There's many things that God could do, which he doesn't. And God's power is infinite. I have very limited imagination about what things

God could do. But the idea that some people go through life and hardly seem to hear the gospel at all, especially not so much in the

United States, but in many places in the world, they rarely hear the gospel. They may hear about Jesus through Islam, which is such a distorted picture that they won't hear the gospel in that situation.

So I suppose there's other aspects of his theology which may come into play in those cases, but that's not

God making an effort to save them. Right, right. I think he expressed it here, and he certainly has expressed it in other places.

He does seem to hold to a crypto form of inclusivism, the idea that people will be judged on what they would have done had there been a proclamation of the gospel.

That opens up a whole different can of worms that I really don't know fits his situation, because if that's the case, then why does

God actuate this particular world where he would have to judge people based upon that? Why not actuate a world where they actually did hear the gospel?

Again, it's just so—there's so many back doors to this system that you eventually get to the point of saying— in fact, someone on TriBlog today actually posted something basically saying, you know, are there just so many ways of propping this up that it's really not a falsifiable system?

You can just keep patching it together. It reminds me a little bit of my Roman Catholic friends with the papacy.

When it comes to infallibility or all the rest of the stuff, you can just blow holes through it, but that's not really what we're saying anyways.

What we mean is this over here, and it reminds me a lot of that same kind of I'm going to believe this, and it really doesn't matter what you throw at me in the process.

I'm still going to keep believing it. And that's not an example of God making any— inclusivism is God just judging people based on their character or their agency, but it has nothing to do with God making any efforts at all.

I mean it would be exactly the same if everybody was left in the darkness or if everyone's given the full light.

The same people—exactly the same people would be saved on that premise. So his statement, I don't think—and that's part of the problem with this idea that God has this universal desire for salvation, and he says he makes efforts to accomplish it, but it doesn't appear to be the case that God does.

God appears to save the elect. That does seem to be what's taking place out there.

Okay, just feel free to chip in at this point, Paul. What's your response to the way that Bill sees salvation and people's free choice?

One thing, multitudes of people don't have the opportunity to hear the gospel. It isn't as if the gospel sounds to everybody, and each person has an opportunity in a kind of clear -headed and deliberate way to say yea or nay.

Now you're not actually Paul Helm, right? Yes, I'm not. That isn't our world. Our world is one in which there are millions of people who have never heard of Christ, so I don't see that description, as it were, to begin with.

And the other is, of course, that the Calvinist, equally with Bill, wants to affirm the wickedness of people under certain circumstances.

It is by wicked men that Jesus was crucified, as Peter says. He didn't say, he didn't say, oh, well, because God has foreordained this, these people were not wicked.

He holds together both the foreordination of God and the wickedness of people.

So there you have compatibilism, obviously, being announced by Dr. Helm, and trying to deal with the street -level objection of dividing, saying men cannot be guilty of evil if there is a divine decree.

It's certainly something all of us who defend reformed faith encounter over and over and over. Can it be wicked if the person, as it were, didn't ultimately choose?

It was actually something that they were always going to do because God had foreordained. Well, they were the choosers.

I mean, it was not God who chose that in the sense in which the wicked men chose it. Bill uses the phrase, you've used the phrase,

I think, perhaps it was you, God is the author of sin, and I've never really been able to understand what that phrase means.

I mean, does it mean God is a sinner? Does it mean that God has somehow the malevolent wishes of a sinner, that he's somehow selfish in some way which is despicable?

I don't understand what the phrase means to begin with, so I don't see there's a charge, as it were, to be resistant to that particular.

Now, at that point, that's where I would have probably responded differently. I mean,

I agree with what was said, but my automatic instinct is to go to Scripture at that point and force the objector to recognize that they're objecting to some pretty basic biblical concepts.

And everybody knows where I go, you know, Genesis 50, Isaiah 10, Acts 4. If I've only got a short period of time, which is what

I'm going to have in a radio interview, I'm probably going to go to Acts chapter 4. I'm going to use the people that are laid out there and the fact that they had all sorts of different motivations.

You've got Pilate and you've got the Romans and you've got the Jewish leaders, you've got Herod. They all had different motivations in the crucifixion, yet what they did is what

God's hand had predestined to occur. And each one of them is held accountable. Each one of them is held accountable for acting upon their desires.

We have in the story of Joseph, God even restraining the brothers from killing him, and hence keeping them from committing sin, so much for the concept of autonomy at that particular point in time.

That's where I would have tried to have gone in that type of a context, to try to emphasize that this really is an objection to a biblical perspective.

You recall that Craig said that God ultimately respects human freedom and doesn't try to coerce anyone.

Let me suggest that threatening someone with going to hell is far more coercive than threatening their life.

In fact, Jesus himself uses that. He says, don't fear the one who can threaten to kill you.

Threaten the one who can send you to hell. So it's highly coercive in that sense.

It's not simply, you know, decide whatever you like. I'm cool with it either way. Yeah, don't tell the

Apostle Paul about God not being coercive. I imagine the ground was pretty hard when he hit it, and the light was so bright he was blinded.

Don't give me the non -coercive part. We need coercive. We should thank God for coercive.

The bones in the Valley of Dry Bones, they needed coercive, and so did you and I. That's where you need a biblical anthropology, to be sure.

A couple of points to pick up on that, then. Right. Let me respond first to the problem of the geographical expanse of the

Gospel over the 20 centuries of Christian movement. I think this is where he actually enunciates what

I just said earlier. It seems to me that here middle knowledge and Molinism provides a very attractive understanding of this, namely that God has so providentially ordered the world that persons who would respond to the

Gospel if they heard it are born at times and places at which they do hear it, so that those who fail to hear it are only persons who wouldn't have responded to it even if they had heard it.

Now let's think about that racially for a moment. I mean, think about that. I mean, again,

I don't know how this middle knowledge deals with the issue of race and things like that.

But there are some pretty disturbing conclusions you could draw from that idea.

In other words, saying that the places where there has been no Gospel proclamation is where God chose to put the people who, according to middle knowledge, wouldn't have accepted the

Gospel in the first place. Yes, it's kind of surprising that there's so many generations of people all in the same place who coincidentally happen to have this, on Molinism, where Molinism treats each individual as individually deterministic.

So the idea of a person having these parents would not in any possible world receive the

Gospel is a very strange and puzzling assertion, but the Scriptures don't say anything about that.

No, and it certainly makes you wonder then why we do missions work in the way we do. Because if those...

Shouldn't we just be concerned about the places where the Gospel is thriving rather than where it isn't in light of this?

I mean, why should we try to change that? Why should we think that going into those places... And think about the missionaries who go into lands and they work for ten years before they have one person who converts.

Why not put that effort into places where they could have 100 people who convert rather than just one?

It just... I don't know, it seems a little creepy to me. And thus no one is lost because of historical or geographical accident.

And I find that this view is very biblical because in chapter 17 of the book of Acts, Paul says that from one man

God made every nation of men that they should inhabit the face of the whole earth.

And he determined the exact times and places that they should live.

He did this that men might seek after God and reach out for him and find him because he is not far from every one of us.

For in him we live and move and have our being. That to me is consonant with a Molinist perspective.

By contrast, in the Calvinist view, you have to say that God has just elected for most of Christian history so far people living in Western Europe or the

United States and just overlooked the rest of these folks. And so I find Molinism, again, to provide an answer to this question that is difficult for all of us as Christians.

Just overlook these... Again, the whole idea of God's wrath, justice, so on and so forth, also missed the fact that the church has flourished in, for example,

Eastern countries for periods of time. And then, interestingly enough, and this is something that I'm studying as part of my preparation for teaching church history in just a couple of weeks, very interesting that there have been times when the church has thrived in some

Eastern countries and then vanishes at an incredible rate of speed. And there's a lot we can learn from that.

A lot we can learn from that. Of course, there's a lot we can learn from looking at the seven churches in Revelation and looking at those places now.

That's, I think, somewhat important as well. And I don't think he's properly exegeting the passage.

I think the passage is saying God is the creator. God is the provider.

Therefore, men should worship God. He's not saying... The text isn't saying

God put people in places where the right people will hear the gospel.

That's not the point in the passage. No, it's certainly not. I mean, certainly God does have the right to divide men into the nations and peoples that he has.

But the whole point there is that men everywhere should repent. That's the whole emphasis that is placed upon it.

Well, the next section will go too long for us in the time frame that we have because the time, the program today went by so very, very fast.

I am... While the camera hasn't seen you today,

I just discovered that they pulled the blog graphic and put it up next to me.

So you've got the blog graphic of you, the angels' tunes, which you've used on your videos anyways.

Yes, I assume they didn't animate it. That's true. He was trying to, but he couldn't pull it off.

So they've been playing with the toys in the other rooms. So we appreciate that. But Terrence and Van, thank you for coming in.

This is the first time you've seen our humble abodes, so thanks for coming by and then hopping on.

I'm glad that the topic is one that we could join in together on. My pleasure.

Thanks for having me on. And hopefully the folks in the audience found it that way too. They always have in the past, especially after the,

I think the last, was the last time, no, the last, was the last time you were on when we did the post -mortem on the

Roman Catholic debate? Remember the faux Augustine quote and stuff like that?

I think so, or perhaps to discuss Stellman. Oh, Stellman was since then.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, you're correct. It's hard for me to keep up with all these things. But anyways, folks, thanks for listening to The Dividing Line.

Next week's schedule should be pretty normal, as far as I can tell. The week after that, things start falling apart when we start heading for a long, long trip, not only across the country, but also overseas.

So keep us in prayers and also help, if you can, get us to London so we can do some more unbelievable programs as well.