Theodicy: A Defense of God's Purposes in Creation

Pastoral Apologetics and the Lengthy Objection

In the first half of the program, I wish to begin providing a response to a very lengthy message I was sent. I am not going to identify the person who sent the message. This is a person who has been raised in a Christian home, and I think once I read the entirety of it to you, and it is long, you will understand why I am going to be taking time to respond to it for 45 minutes today and 45 minutes tomorrow, if I need be, until I finish up the response.

I would call this pastoral apologetics, in essence, because as you listen, I think you will be able to see why we need to respond to it and why I would challenge you, the listener, to as you listen to this, ask yourself the question, how would I respond?

How would I respond if this was a member of my church, a member of my family, asking me these questions? How would I respond? We are going to need to think considerably more deeply than we would if we, for example, had to respond to Brother Jack from last week.

This is on a completely different level, and so listen with me to these questions. When considering the beginning of humanity, it is extremely difficult to comprehend why anyone would refrain from believing in or obeying God if belief and obedience were a rational position in accord with evidence.

It seems clear that they would not. It is claimed that unbelief or rebellion is a result of some arrogant desire to sin over desire to obey. Simply put, we want to do what we want to do. A side issue here involves this very notion Christians like to use the fact that they religions emerge in all cultures as evidence for our God's existence.

The problem is that many of these religions we deem as false also have notions of punishment and reward with similar traits given to the deity or deities of their choice. It does not make any sense for us to have this innate desire to worship and obey a God if that is the very desire we have suppressed since the Fall.

It is certainly unclear why we would create various deities whom we fear and worship to avoid some other deity we are supposed to fear and worship, especially if that deity is purported to be merciful in response to nothing other than faith.

This irrationality will emerge later. Sinful passions, it is said, cause us to reject God. It is obvious that certain actions prohibited by the Bible are enjoyable to humans. There are certain prohibited ways of living that are easy in relation to abstaining from them.

This is primarily because of our animal instinct. Sexual desire is caused directly by the way our bodies are made. They are no different in force than the animal, which can willfully engage in as much rape as they want and never have to get married, disregarding very infrequent instances of animal, social, sexual monogamy.

Other side issues here involve the specifics of the Fall, which is never satisfactorily mentioned in the Bible at all. It is obvious that the entire nature of physical reality must have changed, which you would think might emerge in the story.

Storms, earthquakes, geological formations, the dietary system, venomous animals, sharp teeth in an enormous variety of species, light somehow traveling faster than itself, and all manner of difficulties that clearly suggest something completely different about the origin of the universe, no matter what your presuppositions are.

As Christians, we struggle desperately to come up with answers that strain all scientific and probabilistic credulity. The other cause of most sin is the desire to preserve one's life, which is an offshoot of the sexual act, the desire to preserve one's race or group.

The desire to preserve our lives causes us to lie, steal, cheat, etc. In society today, there are obviously occasions when life is not in jeopardy, when some sinful act is committed, yet this could be nothing more than an evolutionary hangover, an unfortunate residual headache from darker times.

Today we engage in this life preservation behavior in analog form. We struggle against other people and the accumulation of wealth, since need is minimal, with a general surplus of safety and basic necessities in a privileged West.

We were not always in civil society. Most people outside the West still aren't. And life preservation was the main goal of every animal, including humans. These propensities are innate, even if evolution is false.

This innate disposition is, of course, claimed to be a result of a fall in the human race. Adam and Eve willfully engaged in sin, thus forever solidifying this default position in subsequent humans, even if they would perhaps have liked it otherwise, though even desiring it is apparently excluded from our determined nature.

This notion of a fallen nature does not help the story. Given proper information about God and an originally unbroken nature, obedience in rational beings is certain, though a propensity to desire rebellion being present initially suggests brokenness from the beginning anyway.

No matter how strong a natural passion, it is always the rational choice to mortify the body in the way Jesus prescribed in the Sermon on the Mount. Cut off your hands and pluck out your eyes, do whatever is necessary to keep yourself from going against a deity who must have given you this ability to desire what one ought not desire.

No rational being, when given a certain amount of information requisite for some future culpability in action, would ever deny a supreme infinite being. This is not to claim that we are completely rational beings, it is clear that we are not.

We engage in all sorts of nonsensical behavior, yet how in our perfect pre-fallen state could we ever engage in this most irrational of all acts? Adam and Eve must have been borderline retarded to believe in a talking snake's wily suggestions.

They could never have properly understood their position in relation to God. Adam supposedly named all creatures, so they knew all the animals and were aware that God had created them. What is this ridiculous subordinate snake saying?

What does he know? Perhaps we should check with that incredibly enormous being who made all this appear from nowhere, including this tree and us. We know he purposely put it here and told us not to touch it.

Why would he create a tree that somehow made us become like him? Something is amiss. The snake said, you will not surely die, as a means of enticing them after God told them that they would. What in the world is death to them?

It's an absurd notion. They had never witnessed it, and a full explanation must have been required. Wait, says Eve, you mean we will no longer exist like we did not exist a few days ago? Okay. What would that matter?

But if threatened with more than death, it would again be ludicrous to go against the knowledge they must have possessed. They were given one command, do not eat from the tree. So they already had within themselves an understanding of what to do and what not to do, a direct knowledge of good and evil.

They were allowed to do whatever they wanted, except this one thing. If a snake talked to you, aside from merely seeking psychiatric attention, it might be a good idea to check his facts, if it went against that one command.

This act of disobedience, if rationality is to be saved, eliminates the possibility that they possess the necessary knowledge to make a decision for which they could be condemned. It will be objected that ignorance does not preclude us from obedience, but that is only in societal law of a purely human construction, which is developed in response to imperfect information.

A legal system could not function without that stipulation, as everyone would obviously claim that they did not know a certain action was illegal. With God, this is not valid. He knows what they know and has perfect information.

The Roman church must have seen all this ridiculousness and tried to save it early on by claiming we have free will, along with some proper knowledge necessary for culpability. This was a valiant but futile effort.

Free will, for these purposes, broadly means we have the ability to do what we want within certain physical or spiritual restraints. Originally, we must also have had the freedom to do what we ought. But why would the want ever be in discord with the ought, when full knowledge of the incredible power of God is clearly seen, not only seen generally, but with a special certainty of its origin?

No one in the entire world has been more certain of the existence of God than Adam and Eve must have been. It even says God walked with them in the Garden of Eden. If they were not fully aware of God's power or position in relation to them, this must be a function of God keeping it from them purposefully, or their own mental faculties were of an extremely inferior constitution, which was obviously also a design of God.

They must have been completely capable of irrationality, the most contrary trait imaginable in the classical deity. Therefore, that deity must have constructed the existence of irrationality in humans.

Even if some open-ended ability of freedom were granted without the clear logical necessity of having been created with this flaw, which permitted their excursion into unreason, what caused the emergence of irrationality in the serpent?

Unreason must permeate reality, a reality that God created. If we are to save the literal veracity of this story, something in Christian belief has to give. Either God is not of the omnipotent sort, which logically leads to everything being determined, or human suffering, not to mention enormous amounts of animal suffering, which many very confused people claim does not really exist without human levels of consciousness, does not actually matter in any humanly conceivable sense of the word.

To us, love cannot exist, or be defined, in any remotely transcendentally factual way. Neither can judgment. It is claimed that those without the knowledge of Christ, or their need of redemption, will be judged less harshly than those with greater knowledge of the law and redemptive plan.

It is uncertain what this differing judgment could mean, though I tremble to venture at the difference between one infinite horror in comparison to double that horror. These people, apart from the knowledge of Christ, are said to disobey the law within them, and will be condemned according to their refusal of conscience.

But they are incapable of performing in accordance with this conscience. How can somebody be condemned for something they are absolutely incapable of accomplishing by the very constitution given them by the condemner?

The pat answer is that this is all part of a pure and unknowable plan, a demonstration of infinite wisdom, mercy, and judgment. What terror and feverish sorrow I feel for any creature subjected to the negative side of this determination.

Could there not be any way to complete this plan by saving just one of those people in the hills of the Himalayas by preventing their birth? Or just one Aborigine? Or just one poor child off the streets of Compton?

How supposedly precious is an eternal human soul, and how terrible these tortures which are effected against them. Oh, that just one be prevented from being born. How this would save them from immeasurable pain.

To me, this is the most important idea in all of Christian thought, yet even Paul did little more than completely ignore it. When he said, Who are you, O man, to bring a charge against God, and then simply states God can do what he wants, he can create people whose sole purpose is eternal destruction and people who would get eternal bliss, all these people had sin projected on them from oblivion and a complete inability to obey.

It is insanely difficult, if not completely impossible, to understand how anyone is culpable in any humanly definable sense of the word. I have no problem with what Paul said. An infinite being can obviously do whatever he wants, there is no doubt about it.

My contention is there is no possible way for humans to define characteristics of a God who creates feeling, dreadfully minuscule beings simply to destroy them. Not just a few either. It is highly likely that the roughly 30 of the world that claims to be Christian actually have what we describe as saving faith, is highly unlikely the roughly 30 of the world that claims to be Christian actually have what we describe as saving faith.

That means billions upon billions of people are going to incur infinite misery simply because they live with no possibility of anything else. At least 70 of humanity is created to be torn limb from limb, tortured in indescribably brutal ways for all of eternity.

This is obviously an enormous problem for any human being with even a modicum of empathy or feeling. It is obvious why most Christians don't believe what the Bible clearly teaches about predestination and is really, whether in scripture or not, nothing but a logical consequence of an omniscient God.

I would even say most people that do believe in predestination never really think about what it really means. It is unbelievably unsatisfying to hear Paul's response. Like I said, not because an omnipotent deity could not do as he wishes, but simply because due to the fact our entire faith is based upon words like love, sacrifice, mercy, goodness, righteousness, evil, judgment, etc. and none of these can be properly understood or defined in any meaningful sense with what we know about eternal predestination and culpability from conception.

Our foundation of belief simply cannot be laid without understanding this incredibly important question. Everything is based on it alone. And then there were a few comments afterwards about recognizing it was a long email and did not expect me to answer immediately.

I got this just a few days ago and as I listened to it, as I read it, I actually listened to it on my ride today. I mp3'd it so I could have it fresh in my mind, listened to it a couple times. But when I read it, I had some choices to make.

It would be a long process to respond to everything in writing and only one person would benefit from that. We have heard many of these objections before in different contexts, but this seemed to me a unique context again because we're talking about a person who has been raised in a Christian family is asking these questions.

Now, I am operating on the assumption that all of these words are this individual's words, that these aren't quotes. This is an argument from an atheist webpage or something like that. And I'm going to function on that basis in attempting to provide a response and to do so within the context of, like I said, what I guess would be described as pastoral apologetics.

The issue in this email, in this series of objections, is fundamentally an objection against the idea that God can hold anyone accountable if he truly is the sovereign creator of all things. It is based upon what I believe would be some highly questionable conclusions drawn from speculative thinking about the nature of Adam and Eve that I think goes against what we know and certainly against scriptural teaching.

But it is a fundamental attack upon not just the concept of predestination, because quite honestly, though many of our Arminian friends seek to avoid these very questions by constructing systems like Molinism and all their ways of avoiding the tough questions, they don't actually succeed in doing so.

As we will see as we examine the debate later on in the program, one of the issues that comes up is the position of Molinism, and it's just a way to try to get around these difficult questions. These are difficult questions for the concept of God as God.

It just so happens that the Reformed understanding of these things is just upfront in being consistent with what the Bible says. And so I'd like to go back through this and seek to provide some kind of meaningful response.

But again, I would ask you as you listen to that, I hope you listen to it and ask yourself the question, if I was sitting on a plane, a bus, a train, and reading my Bible and someone with these issues, these questions, maybe someone who sat down next to you said, you know, I used to believe like you.

And then I started thinking about these things and no one could answer my questions. How comfortable would you feel in giving a response? That is a question that I would ask you to consider because I do believe that we should think through these things as difficult as it may be, as uncomfortable as it may be.

I do believe that we should think through these things and face them straight up. That's what we try to do here on this program, as challenging as it might be. When considering the beginning of humanity, it is extremely difficult to comprehend why anyone would refrain from believing in obeying God if belief or obedience were a rational position in accord with evidence.

It seems clear they would not. It is claimed that unbelief rebellion is a result of some arrogant desire to sin over a desire to obey. Simply put, we want to do what we want to do. Here's the ground of the objection is this.

The ground of the objection is no one had better evidence of the existence of God than Adam and Eve, our first parents. And therefore it would be irrational for them to act in any way that would be in opposition to God because they knew that God exists.

So therefore the idea basically is that there is a corollary, there's a direct connection between the more certain your knowledge of the existence of God and evidently your obedience to Him. Now, many things need to be addressed immediately.

First of all, we have very little knowledge of the nature of Adam and Eve, their conversations with God, the time frames in which they lived as far as how long was it from the creation until the fall.

We have two and a half chapters and very little of it narrates for us the precious information we would like to have to be able to answer all the speculative questions that we might have concerning Adam and Eve.

What we can tell from that initial record and then from the assumptions made by Scripture throughout in regards to the culpability of Adam and Eve and our relationship to Adam and Eve, it really forms the basis of our theology concerning who they were and what their capacities were.

The whole concept seems to be that Adam and Eve were either stupid or created in such a way they could not be held accountable because they just weren't smart enough to figure out that it's really dumb to sin against God.

Well, you're not going to get me to argue that it's not really dumb to sin against God. It is. Sin is stupid. There's no question about that. But the question, of course, brings us to recognizing that we live in a fallen state and they did not.

There's no one that we can look to other than there's only been one unfallen person since Adam and Eve initially, and that, of course, is Jesus, and he was rather unique. We're not Pelagians. Pelagianism clearly is not a biblical position.

And so we have to be very, very careful in extrapolating from our experience back before the fall because we have really no means to do that. The information becomes quite tenuous at that point. And we can assume certain things.

We can assume that that Adam was a perfectly rational being, but human beings are not merely rational beings. We have the ability to be rational, but it is all of our experience that there are certain people who are more and certain people who are less dedicated to the pursuit of rationality, the application of the laws of logic.

There are many people who are extremely emotional and considerably less rational than others of us, and they tend to drive those of us who seek to be somewhat rational right up a tree. But the argument here, basically, is that if they had sufficient knowledge of God's existence, it seems to be that they would never have sinned, because if you really knew that the real God exists, you would never do something that would result in your being separated from Him.

Now some of the questions we'll get into as we read them, but some of them were, you know, how could they have known what death was and God would have to explain all these things, and it's not explained.

Well, we aren't given that information, but there are a lot of assumptions that have been stuck into these objections. The fact that God said, you shall surely die, and Adam and Eve's response is not, what, would indicate to us that if we're going to err on one side or the other, we might want to err on the side that Adam and Eve knew a whole lot more than we might want to give them credit for.

Nothing is recorded about an objection. Nothing is recorded about a question. I think we're pretty safe in recognizing that they knew that the penalty for breaking this one rule, this one law expressed by God's holy word to them directly was extremely significant.

Did they need to understand the entire ramification of spiritual death, physical death, their offspring, and so on and so forth? I question that. I don't know what basis would be given for saying that they had to have a full and complete knowledge of all of the possible ramifications so as to be able to make a fully informed decision for the rest of their posterity and everything else.

But this is the argument, and that is, it is extremely difficult to comprehend why anyone would refrain from believing in or obeying God if belief and obedience were a rational position in accord with evidence.

There's the argument, and I simply say to you, as is noted by the writer himself, men do not simply function as logic machines. Men do not, I mean, even in looking at the fall itself, is not Eve's intentions and purposes fundamentally different than Adam's?

They are. You have the dynamic of Adam and Eve, and you immediately see Adam trying to shluff it off on Eve immediately. Does that not reflect a difference in how both of them approach this particular act?

It seems almost mechanistic of our writer to reduce Adam and Eve to a calculator that goes, well, I am perfectly rational, and here are the facts, and therefore you run the computations, and this is what you do.

I don't believe man has ever been created in that way. I don't believe that even Adam and Eve were created in that way, because there would have been differences between Adam and Eve, between man and woman, even pre-fall, not just physical differences, but I would imagine that what we see today in the fundamental differences that exist in outlook between men and women is not something that developed after the fall.

And so, keeping those things in mind, a side issue that is then introduced in the next paragraph, Christians like to use the fact that religions emerge in all cultures as evidence for our God's existence.

Okay, I've heard it said that the universal religiosity of man needs to be explained. I would not say that the existence of religions in all cultures is evidence of God's existence. It is consistent with what God has said in Scripture, because God has created man in his image, he is a worshipping creature, and therefore if he refuses to worship the one true God, he will find other outlets for his worship, which includes the creation of false gods, gods that he can control, gods that are not sovereign, gods that, you know, man's religions creates mechanisms, sacramentalism, whether it be a high church sacramentalism or the gross, simplistic sacramentalism of animism.

It's all the same thing. Religion exists to provide you with means by which you control God's grace. And so all forms of idolatry, whether it be atheism, whether it be secular humanism, whether it be false religions, all of it is a mechanism whereby the worshipping man twists the creator-creation relationship, defines what he is going to allow as worship, and redefines the object of his worship in accordance with his own desires.

And so this paragraph I did not find to be founded rationally or biblically, because it says, the problem is that many of these religions we deem as false also have notions of punishment and reward, with similar traits given to the deity or deities of their choice.

It does not make any sense for us to have this innate desire to worship and obey a God if that is the very desire we have suppressed since the fall. Well, of course, the desire, it's not a desire that we have suppressed.

That's not what Romans 1 says, is it? We don't suppress a desire. We suppress the knowledge of the one true God and twist that into the worship of false gods. And so it's not a desire that is suppressed.

It is the knowledge of the one true God that is suppressed. It is certain and clear why we would create various deities whom we fear and worship to avoid some other deity we are supposed to fear and worship.

No, it makes perfect sense. As long as you get to control the access, you get to define things, you get to, I've said many, many times, people desire the benefits of God without dealing with the one true and holy God.

It's always easy to create an edited version. And so when it says this irrationality will emerge later, well, we haven't found an irrationality. We have found an error in understanding in our writer about what is suppressed.

And things like that. But we have not yet found any of this irrationality. Continue on. Sinful passions, it is said, cause us to reject God. It is obvious that certain actions prohibited by the Bible are enjoyable to humans.

By the way, sinful passions, it is said, cause us to reject God. I'm not sure I understand what that means. Our rejection of the one true God is part and parcel of our fallen nature. It is the nature of the person.

What was Jesus' teaching? What is fundamentally descriptive of a person who is not in right relationship with God? He does not like the light. He craves darkness. He wants to be away from the probing, searching sight of God.

And so sinful passions are the result of our rejection of God, not the foundation of our rejection of God. It is obvious that certain actions prohibited by the Bible are enjoyable to humans. Well, enjoyable in the short term, but it's also painfully obvious that those actions prohibited by the Bible that are briefly enjoyable to humans frequently bring massive pain and suffering as well and separate us from life and often lead to death itself.

There are certain prohibited ways of living that are easy in relation to abstaining from them. This is primarily because of our animal instinct. Well, I don't happen to believe in something called animal instinct.

I think that while we are created to live in this world and therefore must be able to respond to the universe around us, the created world around us, it does seem that some of the statements in this letter indicate a rather complete embracing of a secular viewpoint as to man's nature, which I do not share.

Sexual desire is caused directly by the way our bodies are made. Well, on a certain level, on a certain level. It's sad, though, that someone raised in a Christian family would not see that that is a woeful limitation of a biblical view of sexual desire, especially between a husband and a wife as they are united together in Christ.

They are no different in force than the animal, which can willfully engage in as much rape as they want and never have to get married, disregarding very infrequent instances of animal, social, sexual monogamy.

Well, they are very different in force. They're very different in force. Again, you can identify, if you wish, the hormonal foundations of some of these things that, ah, see, it's similar over in this animal here or something over there.

But again, that is confusing the fact that as we have learned more about our physical creation, we see the connections that we have with the physical creation and the mechanisms that God has instituted.

But that does not mean that that is the extent, the limit of these things and the very fact that we have sexual morality in Scripture and that when we follow that sexual morality, we experience fulfillment that an animal can never even begin to think of is demonstration of that fact.

And so I completely reject the phrase, they are no different in force than the animal, if what that means is they're just the same thing. No, they're not. They may have similar foundations physically, but we transcend the mere physicality that is ours, and we go far beyond that.

Other side issues here involve the specifics of the fall, which is never satisfactorily mentioned in the Bible at all. Well, satisfactorily, hmm. Satisfactorily to whom? Evidently, it's satisfactory to God.

How exactly? Let's say we had 20 chapters narrating for us the specifics of pre-fall man. How can we even understand some of these things? What kind of language would be used to describe pre-fall man when we don't have any experience with it?

Would that really, would 20 chapters be enough or would someone be saying, well, that's not enough? That's not satisfactory. I become concerned when someone says, well, that just doesn't satisfy me. Well, why?

Who gets to determine what's satisfactory? I mean, I have lots of people who, well, the Bible is just not clear enough for me on this or the other thing. Well, okay. It is obvious that the entire nature of physical reality must have changed, which you would think might emerge in the story.

Possibly. I can certainly see that the argument goes on, storms, earthquakes, geological formations, a dietary system, venomous animals, sharp teeth, an enormous variety of species, light somehow traveling faster than itself, and all manner of difficulties that clearly suggest something completely different about the origin of the universe, no matter what your presuppositions are.

So in other words, there is a result of the fall in regards to death. I don't buy into this light traveling faster than itself thing. I assume that that is some reference to one of the mechanisms of explaining the age of the earth stuff.

I think it's significantly simpler to simply ask the question, does Scripture describe creation as having been made functional with a purpose, the demonstration of the glory of God, and functional in regards to the story of redemption played out upon this little speck of dust called planet earth?

The answer is yes, it very clearly presents it in that way. Therefore, it had to be created in such a way that it was functional. If you reject that assumption, then the results of your examination of the universe are going to be completely disconnected from reality, because you're going to start with assumptions of chaos, disorder, and end up with completely different conclusions than you would need to have if you actually looked at the universe and said, wow, there's order here.

It must be a purpose. And yes, God has communicated his purpose. I have a feeling that's what's being spoken of there. But evidently, there needs to, on our writer's part, be some extensive discussion of the fall outside of its spiritual ramifications on a mechanical and scientific level.

Problem being, that really wouldn't be able to be done until modern times, because we wouldn't have the language to actually express it, would we? And so if it's God's purpose to bring about redemption at an earlier period of time, to bring about the coming of the Messiah and things like that before there could be a meaningful discussion of plate tectonics or anything else in regards to the nature of the fall and a switch from a peaceful coexistence of animals, if that's what the assumption is.

I don't even know why that has to be a necessary assumption, but how would anybody have understood any of that would be the question. So as Christians, we struggle desperately to come up with answers that strain all scientific and probabilistic credulity.

May I challenge my writer back? If you want to see straining all scientific and probabilistic credulity, pick up any major biological textbook today and listen to them attempt to explain something like the F1 ATPase mechanism in the mitochondria of living cells and listen to them use creation language.

They cannot avoid doing it. They cannot avoid doing it. And then turn around saying, but we all know this wasn't created. This is just random. You want to hear scientific and probabilistic credulity strained?

Listen to someone try to explain the clear evidence of design without mentioning the designer. I would say that's a whole lot more along those lines. The other cause of most sin, and we, I guess the preceding one, we've already challenged that one.

The other cause of most sin is the desire to preserve one's life, which is an offshoot of the sexual act, the desire to preserve one's race or group. I don't believe that for a moment. I don't even really understand what it's saying.

The desire to preserve our lives causes us to lie, steal, cheat, etc. Really? No examples were given, and I would go, I don't think so. Most of the times I've lied and, well, I really, I did steal something once when I was in first grade because it was very colorful, but had nothing to do with keep myself alive.

I don't, I just don't see the connection here at all. In society today, there are obviously occasions when life is not in jeopardy, when some sinful act is committed. I would say, yeah, about 99 .998 of the time.

Yet this could be nothing more than an evolutionary hangover, an unfortunate residual headache from darker times, or it could be exactly what the Bible describes it as, that we have a sinful nature and we are selfish and we are willing to use others and so on and so forth.

Today, we engage in this life preservation behavior in analog form. We struggle against other people and the accumulation of wealth, since need is minimal, with a general surplus of safety and basic necessities in a privileged West.

I have never thought of my life as a struggle against others for the accumulation of wealth. I don't even begin to understand that. It doesn't enter into my thinking, my experience. I don't even understand it.

We were not always in civil society. Most people outside the West still aren't. And life preservation was the main goal of every animal, including humans. Well, again, from a good Darwinist perspective, yes, but I'm not a Darwinist and I don't see any reason to look back at history and see all the self-sacrifice and all the things that people did that had no sense in a Darwinian evolutionary perspective as if that's somehow not relevant.

These propensities are innate, even if evolution is false. No, I would say that what is innate is we're creating the image of God and therefore, by the grace of God, the common grace of God, capable of doing many things that go against this very kind of paradigm that is being promoted here.

And we see that often in history. This innate disposition is, of course, claimed to be a result of a fall in the human race. Now, we haven't agreed about what this innate disposition actually is as yet.

That's going to come up later on, I think. But the perspective of mankind and the behavior of mankind is the result of a fall. And what is really the target, really, in this email is the concept of federal headship, the ability or freedom of God to treat Adam and his posterity as one group and have one person representing the other.

We know this is what Jesus does with his people. This is what Adam does with those who are in him. And this is the fundamental objection. God, that's not right. God can't do that. That's not fair. That's the fundamental objection.

Adam and Eve willfully engaged in sin, thus forever solidifying this result position and subsequent humans, who I might add, likewise willfully engage in sin and love sin and love selfishness and do not by nature love to do what is good for others.

Even if they would perhaps have liked it otherwise, though even desiring it is apparently excluded from our determined nature, from our determined nature. Here's where you start really, again, getting into the main issue.

And that is, well, if if God determined this to be my nature, then he can't condemn me for that, even if it's what I love. He made me to love it. You always have in the back of this, this idea of this poor, innocent creature with this big, nasty God behind him with a gun in his hand saying, be evil, be evil, rather than the reality of this rebel creature who has to be constantly restrained by God to not do more evil than he does.

That's normative in my experience in reading these kinds of objections. And questions. This notion of a fallen nature does not help the story. Given proper information about God and an originally unbroken nature, obedience in rational beings is certain.

I reject that. This is where we part company. Because this assumes that God created mankind as a calculator. It's a computer. If you put in the right data, out comes the right response. It works every time because it's just a mechanism.

That's what rationality is. Is good data in, good data out, junk in, junk out. This is too low and mechanistic a view of man. I'm sorry. It is. Because it says, though a propensity to desire rebellion being present initially suggests brokenness from the beginning anyway.

Why? Why? This is where you've got to catch hidden presuppositions and assumptions. The assumption here is God should have created Adam and Eve in such a way that they could not fall. It cannot be a part of God's purpose that the fall take place because, you know, this idea of God glorifying himself, the demonstration of all of his attributes and the incarnation and all that.