William Lane Craig vs. James R. White: Calvinist Philosopher Weighs In

Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Eli Ayala, and today

I have another guest with me, a returning guest, Guillaume Bignon, who is,

I always introduce him as the French Calvinist philosopher. If reincarnation were true, he is the living reincarnation of John Calvin.

I'm just kidding. Yeah, so I have Guillaume Bignon on to address something that is very much related to the discussion that Dr.

White and James White and William Lane Craig had, where on the

Unbelievable show, they discussed the topic of Calvinism and Molinism, which best explains or has a response to the problem of evil, and what happened in that discussion.

Again, it got a lot of attention, and I had Dr. White previously on to talk about his interaction there, and I think folks should check that conversation out as well.

But there was a common complaint about the discussion between Dr. Craig and Dr.

White that I want to help address by having Guillaume on to discuss, and that is that during the discussion,

Dr. White took the offensive and kind of drilled Dr.

Craig on the grounding objection, right? You guys who've listened to that interaction know what

I'm talking about. And while that was happening, there was not much time for Dr.

White to really unpack his own position with respect to how Calvinism answers the problem of evil and why it's a better answer.

So to kind of piggyback off that discussion, I have invited Guillaume Bignon to actually address that specific issue.

So this entire episode, with some minor exceptions, we're gonna try to tackle, or he's gonna tackle, not me,

I'm the interviewer. He's gonna try to tackle the issue of Calvinism.

Does Calvinism make God the author of sin? And so this is a very popular objection, and so hopefully

Guillaume can unpack that for us. And hey, before I invite him on, I want to,

I've been reading a lot of comments. If people wonder why I don't engage in comments, it's not because I'm ignoring people.

I'm super busy. So I have, I'm a father of three little kids. We just moved, my family just moved into our new home.

I'm a full -time school teacher. And so I just, I read comments, but I don't interact as much.

So please don't take that as me not wanting to engage some of the awesome questions that are coming in.

But also what I've observed in some of the comments is really kind of just, how can

I explain this? From both sides, whether it's the Calvinist or the

Molinist or whatever, there's always this idea that the Molinist has this nefarious agenda, or the

Calvinist has this agenda that we're just trying to deceive people. And listen, these are really difficult topics and they're pretty in depth.

And so I hope in the comment section on this video that we show some charity, like, hey,

I'm a Calvinist. I'm not trying to convince everyone that Calvinism is true.

I believe it's true. And I think that there are folks who can explain, give good arguments for the position and answer objections.

And that's it. If you're not a Calvinist, I don't hate you. I love you if you're a brother in Christ. And so let's engage in the comments and the debates with gentleness and respect, as 1

Peter 3, verse 15 tells us, okay? So we need to learn how to disagree charitably.

Otherwise, everyone's just gonna be calling each other heretics and you're not really gonna get anywhere. So I hope that that's the nature of the comments in the comment section of this video, okay?

All right, well, without further ado, let me invite my friend, Guillaume Benyong, on the screen with me.

How are you doing, Guillaume? Hey Eli, good to see you. Doing great. Good to see you as well. I'm happy that you're on and I know that you're a busy guy too.

You have like 20 kids, right? Is that how many kids you have? I don't know. Soon, maybe. No, just five of them, but they can be busy.

Just five, just five. So, okay. So your family's doing good?

Everything's going well? Yes, wonderfully well. So we've also moved out of New York.

So we are a little bit more of a peaceful environment and the kids have been loving it, so. Excellent, excellent.

Well, we did have you on a while ago to do a kind of a two -parter, which were like over two hours,

I think. We're not gonna do that tonight, but where you had interacted with Leighton Flowers, Tim Stratton, and Braxton Hunter over there at Trinity Radio.

And that was very fun. And we got into a lot of issues there and I think you did an excellent job and there was some great feedback from those discussions.

And so I'm really happy to have you on tonight to tackle this really thorny and controversial topic.

So are you ready? As ready as I'll get, so. Okay, okay. So I'm gonna begin by asking this question, okay?

Do you shake in your boots? I don't even know if you wear boots, but do you shake in your boots when a non -Calvinist, whether it's an

Arminian, whether it's a Molinist or whoever, when they say,

Guillaume, Calvinism makes God the author of sin. And so you shouldn't be a

Calvinist because look at the ramifications of your view. Is that something that causes you as a

Calvinist to say, oh my goodness? Or is it kind of like, well, let's talk about that.

How do you respond to something like that? Well, I should be shaking in my boots if the objection comes from Dr.

William Lane Craig, because he's a really smart guy and a very good philosopher. But yeah, no, the objection definitely is something that we should talk about, like you said, let's talk about this.

And I guess that's what we're here for. But the objection in itself doesn't give me great pause.

There are some arguments against Calvinism that are important to be taken seriously. And this is why

I did much of my work on that topic, trying to address some of the most important objections against Calvinist view.

One of those objections is God's involvement in evil. So I'm looking forward to telling you what

I think about the objections. All right, well, what I think is missed in a lot of these discussions is really defining our terms and kind of explaining and expanding what one means when they say that Calvinism makes

God the author of evil. Why don't you, or the author of sin or however they would phrase it.

But what I don't see happening is people stopping and kind of unpacking that, because it's not as simple as just what the phrase kind of appears, right?

How would you unpack and delineate maybe the different senses in which one could understand that phrase, the author of sin?

Yeah, so this is gonna be the very classical response from the philosopher. Do you agree with this?

And the response is always, well, it depends. It depends what you mean. So tell me what you mean, and then we'll be able to dive deep and try to assess in which sense we might be agreeing in which sense we might be disagreeing.

So for the authorship of sin, we're gonna very quickly land on that question of like, does it mean something specific that we need to be told?

Or do we just evaluate that claim at face value? Just does Calvinism make God the author of sin?

So it's gonna be one first stage of analyzing the argument. It's gonna be to say, which sense do we have in view?

And are there acceptable senses of the phrase author of sin? And are there inacceptable senses?

So to assess whether we have a good argument against Calvinism, we're gonna need something, like let me clarify maybe what we need in order to have a successful argument, right?

Let's set the stage. In order to have a successful argument against Calvinism, we're gonna need something like this.

We're gonna need to find a proposition P that's entailed by Calvinism, right?

To say Calvinism entails P, but in fact, P is false. Therefore, Calvinism is false.

That's gonna be the structure that we really want to get in order to have a successful argument. It's a standard form of an argument.

It's called modus tollens. It's Calvinism entails something, but that something is false.

Therefore, Calvinism is false. Okay. Okay, so that's the whole point.

I don't feel very comfortable right now. You're using way too much philosophy. No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.

Hey, philosophy is important. That is important. I'm just messing around. Go ahead. I'm sorry. I'll try not to troll. I don't know.

Is God inappropriately causing you to troll me for the conversation? No, maybe, I'm just a puppet.

I'm just a puppet. That is evil. But anyway, I think, you know, I don't need to use like even lettered propositions or what have you, but basically we need to see that Calvinism entails something and that that something is false and therefore

Calvinism is false. That's what we need. And so the whole game now is going to be, can you find that something, right?

And this setting of the stage is showing you a little bit how heavy the burden is on the proponent of this argument because it's important that we set the conversation in a proper context.

It's an argument against Calvinism, right? So it's a positive argument to establish that Calvinism is false.

And this is how Dr. Craig intended it in the debate as an argument to say, no, the Calvinist view is false.

It's problematic because God is the author of sin on Calvinism, but in fact,

God is not the author of sin. Therefore Calvinism is false. And so in the context of an argument against Calvinism, the burden of proof is squarely on the shoulders of the objector here.

So in order to have a successful argument, it's the objector who's going to need to establish that we have this.

So the arguments as I've laid it out now is logically valid, right? So we have, if Calvinism entails something and that something is false, then it follows that Calvinism is false.

So we have a valid argument, but now we can appreciate just how heavy the burden is going to be on the shoulders of the person who tries to refute

Calvinism, because they're going to have that double burden of showing that they've identified something that showing us that it's following from Calvinism, right?

Like, does this actually follow from anything that we affirm? Like, are we committed to this basically?

And once we've established that, now you need to establish that that in fact is false, right?

So if you do both of those things, then you have a good argument and Calvinism is refuted, but you need to do both of those things.

And so we're going to look at a number of candidates of something that may be found to be problematic with Calvinism.

And in each case, we'll see like, is this actually something that follows from Calvinism? And then if it does, is it something that is shown to be false?

And is it a reason to reject Calvinism basically? So with that framework, we have the pure rules for what would make a good argument.

And then we can see all of the different applications, the different attempts at phrasing this argument.

And I can give you the good, what I take to be really good Calvinist responses to show that there is in fact no successful argument against Calvinism based upon God's authorship of sin or evil.

Now, before we get into that though, I can, I'm using my prophetic giftings.

I was raised in a Pentecostal church, by the way. I don't know if people know my background. I have the gift of prophecy right now, foresight.

I can already anticipate before you made a differentiation between the different ways in which the phrase author of sin can be understood or is

God responsible for sin? And a lot of people, when they hear

Calvinists say that, their antennas go up and they think, oh, here comes the word salad. Here comes the sidestepping of the issue.

Everyone knows when we say that God, Calvinism makes God the author of sin. We all know what that means.

And so here comes the Calvinist, especially the philosopher now is going to use his magical philosophical language so that he can kind of justify.

Before we move into the main gist of your response, how would you address something like that? Because I could anticipate someone saying something along those lines.

Well, I don't know that we all know what is meant by that, but my best response is to say that we're not going to dodge anything here.

On the contrary, I'm not saying it depends what you mean so that we can brush it off and forget about it. Just on the contrary, so that we together can dive in and try to assess, okay, what's the claim here?

What are the possible meanings? What are some of the problems that might be in there? And look at all of those problems squarely in the face.

So it's really not an attempt to dodge anything. It's an attempt to be careful about what the claim is and to see if there are some good response for whichever version of that claim you want to press.

So I don't think there's anything dodgy here. On the contrary, we're going to try to cover all of those.

Okay. All right. Well, thank you for that. I hope folks really get that. I mean, Guillaume doesn't work for me.

I don't work for Guillaume. We don't work for some master Calvinist CEO pulling the strings to make us say stuff so that you could believe what we say.

There's no conspiracy here. I hope that makes sense. We do need to define our terms. This happens a lot too when folks talk about free will.

So we won't get into that just yet. But when someone says, oh, we all know what free will means, or Calvinism says there's no free will.

It's like, well, we need to understand what those terms mean, right? So defining terms I think is super important, especially when we're dealing with the whole author of sin objection.

So why don't you, Guillaume, unpack what you were going to say. How would you respond to this in detail?

Calvinism makes God the author of sin in a way that is reprehensible.

It makes God evil as this was brought up in the discussion. Yeah, exactly. So that's the claim here.

So we're going to look at the structure of the argument and what different meanings that could take and what different articulation of that argument we can find.

Before we do that, I'm gonna be the philosopher who takes just a second to dive a little bit in the

Bible. And I'm not using those biblical texts necessarily as a positive argument in favor of Calvinism.

Although I think that some of them strongly suggest the Calvinist view. But it's just that the exercise we're about to do is to assess is

God inappropriately involved in evil on Calvinism? And I want to have that exercise with a little bit of background in our minds of some of the things that the

Bible says about God's involvement in evil. And I think that it's proper that when we try to distance

God from evil, we don't do a stronger job at this than the

Bible does, right? So I've often said that we philosophers tend to defend

God from his involvement in evil in ways that he's actually quite comfortable talking about his involvement in evil in the

Bible. And we tend to defend him where he might not need much of a defense. So just to put our conversations on the philosophy of the argument in perspective of some of the biblical things that are said,

I just want to read some of the text, if you will allow. So Isaiah 45 verses five to seven say,

I am the Lord and there is no other. Besides me, there is no God. I form light and I create darkness.

I make well -being and I create calamity. I am the Lord who does all these things, right?

In Deuteronomy 32, 39, it says, I kill and make alive. I wound and I heal.

So it says, I do these things, right? In 1 Samuel chapter two, verse six, the

Lord kills and brings to life. He brings down to Sheol and raises up. And then in Amos 3, six, the rhetorical question is asked, does disaster come to a city unless the

Lord has done it? So when we talk about God being the author of something bad or the author of evil, here the language is fairly direct, right?

Does disaster come to a city unless the Lord has done it? Obviously, this is a rhetorical question.

The answer is no, which means that when disaster comes to a city, the Lord has done it.

Lamentations chapter three, verses 37, 38, who has spoken and it came to pass unless the

Lord has commanded it. Is it not from the mouth of the most high that good and bad come?

And then there's the book of Job, which talks about all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him,

Job, right? So Job 42, verse 11. So those scriptures, again, I'm not presenting necessarily here to say, well, if this is said in the

Bible, it follows logically that Calvinism is true. This is not the point that I'm raising here, but just to say, like, keep those in mind.

As we try to defend God's hands from being dirtied by evil, he says all those things in the

Bible that clearly suggest we're not too, let's say that the Calvinist is not in too much of a bad company when he makes strong claims about God's involvement in evil, that God determines evil.

Now, real quick. So Molinist would affirm all of those passages. So, and I like what you said.

I think that was an appropriate thing for you to say that when you state these passages, you're not using that as an argument necessarily.

And this is very important because I think a lot of people run the risk in these debates of engaging in what some refer to as a proof text war, right?

You just throw a proof text at someone. It's like, well, the Bible says this. Well, the Bible says that. Well, the real question is, what does it mean by that?

And we need to kind of unpack that a little bit. So I appreciate your differentiation there between you stating the argument,

I'm sorry, the scripture, so that we can have it in the back of our mind as you formulate your argument in just a moment here.

So I think that's important for folks to keep in mind. Yeah, the Molinist, like you said, has resources in their view to affirm a pretty strong sense of divine providence because they do have both of those pillars of Molinism.

You have libertarian free will on one hand, but you have middle knowledge. So God knows what we would freely do in any circumstances.

And he uses that middle knowledge to bring about lots of things, including things that are evil.

So the Molinist has in that model, resources to affirm some pretty strong things about what

God does. Now, the fact that his model allows for it doesn't mean that every Molinist is going to say those very strong things.

And in that debate between Dr. Craig and Dr. White, Dr. Craig seemed to try to really distance

God from evil by saying he takes a fully hands -off approach. I think that's a direct quote.

God is hands -off on evil. So here again, there's resources in Dr.

Craig's model of Molinism to say that God is not all that hands -off, but depending on what kind of a mood we're going to catch the

Molinist on, he's going to use either libertarian free will or middle knowledge. One of them is going to say, well,

God is really hands -off. The other one says, well, he really controls. So yes,

I think that the best route for a Molinist facing all the texts that I've just read is to lean heavy on the middle knowledge part and a little bit less on the libertarian side.

But those texts are there and I just want them to be in our minds as we discussed God's involvement in evil.

The Bible says God does all those things. Okay, excellent.

Okay, so the Bible says it. Okay, who cares? The Molinist will say,

I know the Bible says it. The real issue is what does the Bible mean by that? So for example, it's kind of like when you have the

Calvinists and the Arminians and the Molinists all claiming that God is sovereign. No, no, no, we hold the proper view of sovereignty.

No, no, no, we hold the proper view of sovereignty. In reality, we all hold to a view of sovereignty. The real issue is what is the content of that term?

So you have the scripture references there. How would you unpack the defending that those scriptures, what they are intending to convey is what you as a

Calvinist think is the case? Well, I don't know that there's a whole lot more than I can say to get you from the plain meaning of the text to the

Calvinist view. I think it's more of a cumulative case to say like, here are some of the things that are said, which model between Calvinism and Molinism best accounts for all of those things.

So I don't know that I can take any one text and tell you, well, this one, if true, logically entails

Calvinism and there is no plausible Molinist interpretation of them. Again, all the ones that I've just cited are very strongly explaining that God is the one bringing about those things.

A smart Molinist is going to simply say, well, look, this is simply God's providential control in light of his middle knowledge.

And despite the fact that humans have libertarian free will, God can have that kind of control. And so I don't know that I can take any of them and bring them home, but I think it's a cumulative case between those and other biblical teachings.

And then I have philosophical arguments against libertarianism itself. So that's the pillar of Molinism that is libertarian free will,

I think can be refuted by pretty solid arguments, biblically and philosophically. It's just that I can't take one of those texts and say, hey,

Molinism is dead in the water because of this one, just one on its own. All right, very good.

So let's address the main question then. Calvinism makes God the author of sin. How is that not the case from our perspective?

Yeah, so the way that I respond to this claim is that I think the argument is half -baked.

So we're gonna be heavy in the cooking language. You know, you're interviewing a French guy, I'm into food, so we're gonna be in the cooking language here.

I think the argument is half -baked and I'm going to suggest a number of different recipes to finish the baking, right?

So if the argument is not fully fleshed out by the critic of Calvinism, I'm gonna try to finish the job for them and then show them in each of the ways that you can do it why that's still failing.

So what I've mapped out in my reading of the literature on this question is that there's really three strategies.

And so I'm gonna be saying that there's gonna be three recipes to complete that baking. And there's one that's gonna be foggy, another one that's ambitious and another one that's timid.

So that's gonna be three recipes to complete the baking of the half -baked arguments from evil against Calvinism.

So let's dive in the first recipe, which is the foggy. And so for me, the foggy recipe is when it's too blurry, like there's no telling really what is meant by the claim.

And it is precisely the one that we had at face value during the Craig White debate, which is

Calvinism makes God the author of sin. And that is foggy because depending on what is meant by the phrase author of sin, the

Calvinist is not even sure which premise of the argument he should deny. Remember there's premise one, we need to know that Calvinism entails this.

Premise two, that this thing is false, therefore Calvinism is false.

And the Calvinist, depending on what is meant by author of sin, doesn't even know which premise one or two he needs to deny.

And so we're gonna need to probe a little bit. Author is clearly a metaphor here, right? So God is not an author typing at his keyboard, writing a story and he's not writing with a pencil.

It's understood, it's uncontroversial that it's a metaphor. It's one that certainly has lots of connotations and we're gonna try to tackle them, but it's a metaphor and we need to be told, okay, what exactly do we have in view here?

And so that's why you find Calvinist a bit divided on addressing the objection that Calvinism makes

God the author of sin. Just to mention a couple of important voices on that question,

Calvin is pretty explicit that he says, no, God is not the author of sin. You find that in his writing.

And so that's why a lot of people say, well, look, he's a Calvinist, he's a determinist. He can't really coherently deny that God is the author of sin.

So that's kind of an inconsistency on the part of Calvin allegedly, but Calvin is clear.

No, he denies that God is the author of sin. Similarly, the Westminster Confession and the language that has been taken into the

London Baptist Confession as well, those very Calvinist confessions of faith, both explicitly say that God is not the author of sin in their statements on providence.

So you have those voices saying, no, he's not. But my approach is gonna be, okay, wait a second.

It depends what you mean. And this is a little bit the answer that Jonathan Edward provides. He says,

I know that the phrase is supposed to mean something really bad, but you need to tell me a little bit. What does it mean?

Because author of sin could be intended to mean something that's pretty mild really.

First of all, it could very well be a fair description of whatever we just read in the

Bible. I mean, some of those that God says I did this. Well, maybe that's what we mean by the author of sin.

He's the author, he's the one who did this. He's the one who created calamity. He's the one who brought disaster into the city.

So if that's what we mean, then the Calvinist says, okay, your problem is not with me, it's with the Bible. But that's just one way of unpacking the phrase that would be innocent, in which case the

Calvinist could say, okay, fine, Calvinism entails that, but that's not a problem, therefore

Calvinism is not false. So that's just one sense. And there are other acceptable senses.

So for example, the author analogy, which is what it is, right? It's an analogy, it's a metaphor for God and his control of what happens in the world.

But the analogy of the author is something that some Calvinists have done quite a bit of work on and to say, yes, it's actually a pretty good metaphor for God.

So you have a Parker staircase who has done his master's thesis on precisely that, the analogy of God as author.

And he's worked with Kevin Van Hooser. And I think that the idea that what they are trying to say here is that there's a sense in which

God is writing the story of the world, right? And the fact that he's authoring it, that he's decreeing everything that happens, is not, doesn't mean that he's sinful.

And the phrase author of sin, we could see a very mild application to a human author writing a story that contains sin, right?

So let's say on this analogy, again, think of J .R .R. Tolkien and the

Lord of the Rings. We would say that J .R .R. Tolkien is the author of Saron's sin, right?

He's written it, but it obviously doesn't follow that Tolkien is himself sinful on that description.

So obviously this is not to say that's all the Calvinist means when he says that God is authoring all that happens, but it's just to show that there's a perfectly innocent use of the phrase author of sin.

And so we need to be told what use do you have that's actually bad so that Calvinists would need to see if they're committed to it.

Okay, so quick question. And I don't want this to get off topic. Hopefully you can answer the question and then get back to the point you were making is that a lot of non -Calvinists are aware of the author writing a book analogy.

What is the common objection to that analogy? So some Calvinists will say, hey, this is a great analogy, right?

And they use it literally the same example you use with J .R .R. Tolkien or whatever.

What is a common objection to that analogy and why doesn't it work? And then I'm gonna grab you back to continue your line of thinking.

I don't wanna get you too off track. Sure, so it depends what you're objecting against, right?

So an analogy is not an argument here. The analogy is just simply saying, hey, look, there are some similarities between two things and it's enlightening.

It's interesting to see those similarities. If that's all you're doing, there's no objection there.

It's just gonna be a matter of taste. Like, do you like the analogy or don't you like it? The way that I just used it, bringing it here is simply to show that the phrase author of sin itself could have a very mild sense.

And if you forget about God for a second and just apply it to Tolkien and Sauron, Tolkien is the author of Sauron's evil, but obviously there's not real evil here and nobody would say that Tolkien is evil for having been the author of evil in that sense.

So all I'm saying is that the use of the phrase author of evil can be mild. Now, immediately the objection could be, well, but the

Calvinist God does much more than what Tolkien does here because he's not writing a fake story.

It's the real world and the Calvinist God is said to determine that people actually do evil in this world.

To which I respond, yes, absolutely. The Calvinist God does much more than Tolkien does on that story.

All I'm doing is saying that the phrase author of sin could mean something that's absolutely unobjectionable.

And so it's not going to do to just brandish, just wave that phrase and say, well, because God is that, then he must be evil.

So we're gonna need to pull up our sleeves and actually find something concrete that God does on Calvinism that is both identified to say, it is in fact entailed by Calvinism that God does that.

And also it's a problem, therefore Calvinism is false. Short of that, that's not gonna give us a good argument.

So that's why the foggy recipe needs to, we need to go beyond this and to unpack a little bit more precisely, what do we mean by God is the author of sin?

And so this is where we're going to land on the two other recipes that I offer, the ambitious and the timid, because it's going to be attempts to provide meanings for the phrase author of sin and try to see if that gives us a good argument.

And basically in the neighborhood of that phrase, the real complaint of the non -Calvinists here is that God is bringing about evil, right?

It's around that. And so there's two ways that we can complain about this, either that he brings about evil or about how he does so.

Right? So, and this is what I'm going to say that the ambitious recipe is the one that complains that the

Calvinist God brings about evil. And the timid one is going to be complaining about how the Calvinist God brings about evil.

And the reason why I'm calling them ambitious and timid is the following. The ambitious recipe is complaining that the

Calvinist God brings about evil. So for you to make an argument out of that, you're going to need to argue on premise one, on Calvinism, God brings about evil in some way, right?

So here we're just saying the fact it's that he brings about evil, that's a problem. So our premise is that on Calvinism, God brings about evil in some way.

But for the argument to work now in premise two, what you need to do is say, but in fact, God does not bring about evil in any way.

Because in order to deny the first one, right? So God brings about evil in some way. The denial is that God does not bring about evil in any way.

Therefore Calvinism is false. So here we have a logically valid argument, right? On Calvinism, God brings about evil in some way.

But in fact, God does not bring about evil in any way. Therefore Calvinism is false. And the problem with this one, it's the ambitious recipe.

It's too ambitious because premise two now is self -refuting for a Molinist. That is that you cannot be claiming that God does not bring about evil in any way because there's a very allegedly milder sense than the

Calvinist, but it's still a very real sense in which the Molinist God is bringing about evil. He's just doing it in an indirect way in which they think alleviates him from any responsibility in some detrimental events.

Exactly. So that claim is too strong for the Molinist because their own model requires that God do that, right?

So again, come back to those biblical scriptures. God does that. He brings about evil in some way.

And then the debate is gonna be like, is this the Calvinist way or the Molinist way? But you can't be arguing that God doesn't bring about evil in any way.

That's the ambitious recipe and that's self -refuting. So you can now qualify what you're saying and not complain that he brings about evil in any way, like in some way, but you can qualify it in what way more specifically does the

Calvinist God bring about evil, right? And so this is what now I've called the timid recipe because now it's arguing

Calvinism entails that God stands behind evil in such a way that evil is divinely determined, right?

That's really the root of the concern here. That's the disagreement between the Calvinist and the

Molinist is that the Calvinist says that our free choices are determined by God.

And so that's now a proposition that the Calvinist is uniquely committed to.

And the Molinist is not touched by this on argument here. He says, he's got the Calvinist in the right target.

The problem is that now for that to make us a sound argument, you're gonna need in premise two, the claim that in fact,

God does not stand behind evil in such a way that evil is divinely determined, right?

That's the denial of the first one. But that claim is simply question begging because that's the very thesis that's debated.

Does determinism entail something bad? So the claim is in premise one is correct.

Now that is that we finally have something that's uniquely entailed by Calvinism, but premise two now is question begging because it's just a denial of determinism.

It's saying determinism, God does not determine evil, right? So, but the

Calvinist says, no, God determines evil and there's nothing wrong with what he's doing there. We haven't really progressed there.

The premise is still question begging. That's still the heart of what we disagree about.

Does God determining what we do, which includes our sin, does that make him inappropriately involved in our sin?

That's really the question before us. So the argument now become questions begging. And so this is the pattern that I see in all the attempts at phrasing an argument against Calvinism on the basis that God determines evil.

It's that it's either foggy and we don't really know what is meant. So we can't even tell you which premise to reject.

Or it's ambitious because it's identifying, it's not precise enough to target only

Calvinism and it ends up refuting Mormonism with it. And the, or it could be the timid recipe that finally targets something specific about Calvinism which is the deterministic view of free will.

But then it's question begging because we need an independent argument for why it's a problem that God determines that human beings actually sin.

So we have those recipe that fail on those grounds. Fail to devise a return, self -refute or question begging.

Now, I think a lot of people who struggle with the Calvinist position, we would define, we would hold to a compatibilist view.

We would say that determinism is compatible with human freedom and responsibility.

But the mechanics of that. So they'll say, yes, okay, you think it's compatibilistic but what is going on there ontologically so that me, if I'm a libertarian free will guy, so that I could understand that your

Calvinist position doesn't entail all the negative things it seems to entail. So like we can say it's compatible but a lot of people are asking the question ontologically, metaphysically, how does that work such that you avoid the charge that we're bringing against you?

Does that make sense? Yeah, sure. And I think we're gonna cover a little bit of that in some of the ways that I can unpack the objection.

I think it's gonna be helpful to discuss what's divine activity in the heart of sinners on the moment of choice.

And we'll get to that when I discuss permission basically. So what I've done now is

I've provided a general framework for evaluating those claims against Calvinism on the basis that God determines evil.

I think there's these three different trends and that when people offer an argument, the Calvinist is really invited to ask the question, which of those three is it?

Is the objector failing to define its term? Is he making claims that are actually incompatible with his own view of free will?

Or is he just begging the question against the deterministic view? And my claim is that without fail, you fall in one of those three categories.

So by way of justification, I use a bold claim to say, well, this is always what happens. We can look at now a number of ways in which this argument has been pressed by non -Calvinists and see what to respond in those more specific formulations.

So what I've tried to map out here is a family of claims in that neighborhood that are attempts to show what's wrong with God's involvement in evil on Calvinism where he determines what we do.

Like what are some of the possible problems? So what I've listed is that some people are objecting that if God determines what we do, then he's responsible for sin, right?

That's the claim that's made. He's responsible for sin. Or some people are saying that God is sinning himself.

Well, that was one of Dr. Craig's view, right? So if, and because Dr. Craig said to Dr.

White, on Calvinism, God moves the will of man to sin and then punishes him for it.

So that is one of the major claims. Yes, so it's in that same neighborhood. It's not quite the one that I have in mind when people say that God is sinning because they tend to say that he's the one doing the sin.

But yes, we'll address that formulation of Dr. Craig about moving the will, moving them to sin.

I think it's gonna be, again, in the discussion of whether or not God permits evil or actively moves it.

We'll see what the Calvinist is committed to here. But yes, that's all in that same neighborhood.

So is God responsible for sin? Is God sinning? Is God manipulating sin? So some people are saying that this is analogous to a manipulator who is just controlling us to sin and a human manipulator would be blameworthy for what he makes somebody else do.

So similarly, God would be inappropriately manipulating us. Some might find problem with the idea that God is causing sin.

So we can talk a little bit about what that entails. Is that demanded by Calvinism and is that a problem?

And then some are saying that now God is willing sin, which would be a problem allegedly that God isn't perfect.

So he cannot be willing sin. And then the final question is, is God permitting sin?

That is that people say that we should use the language of permission to say God is only permitting evil, but he's not actually intending it.

He's really more passive in permitting that evil happens. And Calvinism allegedly doesn't have room to affirm those things.

Therefore we should let go of Calvinism. So here are really from what I could find in the literature, all of the ways in which people are trying to offer a specific argument against Calvinism on the basis of evil.

Is he responsible for sin? Is God sinning? Is he manipulating sin? Is he causing sin?

Is he willing sin? Or can we say that he's only permitting sin? So that's the menu right now.

All right, so let's eat. I'm hungry. Let's jump in and then order some food. So which one do you wanna take?

So, cause those are all the main points that people bring up. How can a

Calvinist respond to that? And by the way, I am reading some comments.

I'm very happy that people are behaving, okay? Although I did read a comment,

I don't know who it was from, but they said you can tell something to the effect that if an apologist has to take their time to answer a simple question, then like boo, you don't talk about like, oh, then they're just trying to get her, something to that effect.

Or you can look at this question more charitably and say we're dealing with a very difficult topic, a very philosophically nuanced topic and it requires what

Guillaume is doing. By the way, you are setting the stage and the context so that your answer makes sense.

Am I correct? Not only that, but arguably I'm working against myself here, right? Yes. If you want a quick answer to that question,

I'll give it to you right away, but it's not gonna be very respectful of your time. The answer is gonna be, is

God the author of sin? It depends. If you mean something bad with it, he's not and Calvinism doesn't commit me to it.

And if you mean something innocent with it, then yes, maybe he is, but then that's not a problem. And then turn off the camera and then everyone's gonna complain that he didn't go into it.

And then you go into it. So I think my response here actually successfully refused the argument, right?

That's all that was said. There was not much more said if you look at the Craig White's debate. Dr. Craig didn't really elaborate on the question.

It was just Calvinism makes God the author of sin, end of the story. And well, there was the qualification that he moves sinners to sin, right?

But those two things are the only articulation he gave. So I could just say, well, no, here's my response super quickly.

But I think I'm trying to give all sorts of different possible ways in which the objection can be phrased.

And these are all ammunition against myself that I'm leading up so that I can now tell you, okay, here's what

I would respond to each of those. So the fact that there's so many of them is not really something that's criticizable about what

I'm doing here. On the contrary, I'm not giving ammunition against myself. People criticize even the fact that this has to be laid out.

But what you're doing is you're setting up the stack against yourself so that you can give your reason why you don't think those are good.

And at the end of the day, you lay out your argument and someone, they turn off the YouTube video and they say,

I don't agree, and that's okay. But you need to set that context so you kind of know what we're saying.

So I think that's important. So I think you're doing an excellent job despite that comment, but that's okay. If they honestly feel that way, that's okay as well.

So go ahead. Let's - All right, so let's tackle all of them. I mean, this is quite a big deal. I don't know how much time we're gonna take for each of those, but I wanna give serious answers to those accusations, which

I think some of them are very serious. So let's take the first one. So is God responsible for sin on Calvinism?

So let me just quote Anthony Kenney, who was a good philosopher who presented that objection against the deterministic view of free will.

Anthony Kenney said, if an agent freely and knowingly sets in motion a deterministic process with a certain upshot, it seems that he must be responsible for that upshot.

Calvin argued rightly that the truth of determinism would not make everything that happens in the world happen by God's intention.

Only some of the events of history would be chosen by God as ends or means. Other could be merely consequences of his choices, but that would not suffice to acquit

God of responsibility for sin. For moral agents are responsible not only for their intentional actions, but also for the consequences of their actions.

For states of affairs, which they bring about voluntarily, but not intentionally. So it's a little bit of a mouthful, but it's giving you an example of a serious philosopher bringing this objection that God would be responsible for what he's bringing about.

So he would be responsible for evil. So my brief answer to this objection is that it's equivocating on the word responsibility, because there are two different things that we mean by responsibility.

Here, there's the causal responsibility and moral responsibility. That is, we can say that God is causally responsible, that is just an explanation of the retracing of why something happened, right?

So it's causally responsible for those things that happen. And the Calvinist who affirms determinism is going to be quite happy to say, yeah,

I think that God is causally responsible. He's the one who brings about everything that happens. He's the one who determined that this happens, but that doesn't mean that he's morally responsible for the evil that was included in his decree.

At least it doesn't mean that he's morally guilty, right? That's the Calvinist view. He says that God is bringing about this evil, but God himself is not evil.

And here again, the important difference between the evil committed by the human being and God's purpose in bringing about evil is that God intends for the greater good.

And this is the common Christian answer to the problem of evil, that God has a greater good in view that justifies all the evil that he allows in this world.

Allow, permit, decree. We'll get into that language controversy in just a moment, but the common

Christian answer is that God has morally sufficient reasons because he's got a greater good and he wants that greater good, so his intention is good.

He's not himself guilty. But this issue that God being responsible commits us to saying, no, he's causally responsible.

It doesn't mean that he's blameworthy. And the fact that moral responsibility does not follow from causal responsibility is something that should not be controversial.

Even the libertarians are fully aware of that fact because that's precisely some of the things that they argue against the

Calvinist view of free will when they say that, for example, God determining our choices is analogous to coercion or manipulation or mental illness or that we're pets or puppets.

All of those analogies that are traditionally brought by the libertarians are cases in which something is causally responsible but not morally responsible, right?

The person who's coerced is causally responsible. That's the question. People say, that doesn't make sense to me.

If he's causally responsible, how is he not morally responsible? That's the key issue that the libertarian is getting at.

Yeah, and so here we can see that causal responsibility does not entail moral responsibility as proven by counter examples, which are ironically very classic arguments used by libertarians against Calvinists because they say, look, you have a coerced person who's gonna be causally responsible for what they do but they're not blameworthy because they were forced, they were coerced, they were under duress.

So you can see a distanciation between causal responsibility and moral responsibility.

Similarly, cases of manipulation by the mad scientist. If you have electrodes in your mind and you're controlled by a mad scientist, you're bringing about some things, you're causally responsible for the things that are happening but you're not morally responsible because you're under this overriding manipulation.

So these classic arguments against Calvinism show you that the libertarian agrees that causal responsibility does not entail moral responsibility.

So just tracing the causal chain from the sin that was committed by the human being back to the activity of the

Calvinist God bringing this about doesn't tell you that God is thereby blameworthy for what he's doing.

That just doesn't follow. So we're gonna see if there are some different claims, different approaches that the non -Calvinist can take to try to establish that what

God just did is wrong. Like, is he really involved? But just to say that he's causally, that he's responsible without qualification doesn't work.

And we see that there could be a distinguishing between the fact that he's causally responsible and the fact that he'd be morally responsible.

Quick question, and then you can kind of dispense of what I'm about to ask and get into what you're saying. Causal responsibility does not entail moral responsibility.

Is that the same when we're talking about human beings or is that just relevant to God since he relates metaphysically in a different way to the physical world than say a physical person and another physical person and those sorts of things?

Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. The answer is both. So the claim that causal responsibility does not entail moral responsibility is true of human beings.

And this is shown true by the counter examples I've just given you. Coercion, manipulation, these are things about human beings that show you that causal responsibility does not entail moral responsibility.

But you're quite right to point out that the Calvinist has an additional resource here when applied to God is the fact that God is also a very specific kind of causal elements, right?

So the way that God brings about things is fundamentally different than the way that we bring about things.

So there's room here for the Calvinist to say, look, there's plenty of things that are not analogous here, which means that even if we grant, like I do, that some manipulations, let's say the mad scientist would be blameworthy for whatever he's doing, he's making the patient do, that doesn't commit us to saying that God also similarly would need to be blameworthy for what he's doing.

Especially since, once again, the Calvinist is saying that God has good intentions. He's going after the greater good behind the evil that he brings about.

So what we intend for evil, God intends for good, and that sets him differently and therefore he's not morally responsible for what he makes us do on the

Calvinist view. Just a little encouragement, Converse Contender says the accent helps his argument. That's good.

So if - Great, so I'll lean on it heavily then. That sounds great. You should just go full out

French and we'll get subtitles, you know? It'll make you sound like John Calvin. That'll be better.

All right, so go for it. Yeah, so that's the, is God responsible for sin? Before we move on to the next one,

I should point out that this argument might also be a case of the ambitious recipe. It might actually be self -refuting as well because God is responsible, that's the claim here.

We can actually make a case that this equally applies to Molinism.

And here I have in view a very fun paper by Greg Welty called

Molinist Gunslingers. And Greg Welty has argued that Molinists and Calvinists tend to be in the same boat when we talk about what

God is doing to bring about evil in such a way that some of the claims of the Molinists tend to refute themselves.

And this is the pattern I was trying to put under the ambitious recipe. And Greg Welty's illustration is that of Bullet Bill, which is the bullets of the

Mario Brothers. And he's saying, imagine that there's a bullet that has free will, right? So they imagine that the bullet itself could decide to avoid the target, right?

It could decide to do otherwise freely, indeterministically, it still remains that the person was firing the bullet.

If that bullet goes where it was intended, and not only that, but the person was firing the bullet knew that the bullet would not in fact choose to avoid the target, then we have all the ingredients to say that the shooter is responsible.

So even if it's not deterministic, there's a strong case to say that he's responsible.

So if the problem is just God is responsible, then even the Molinist God could be touched by that problem.

And that's a really, that's the takeaway from this interesting paper by Greg Welty to say, yes, you have indeterminism on Molinism, but don't forget you have middle knowledge and God knows what you would have done.

And he decided to actualize that thing. So he really brought it about in Molinist term, we would say that he weakly actualized this world.

So as opposed to strongly actualizing if God determines what happens, but he still weakly actualizes it.

He does it knowing full well what would have happened. So you can say that all of these ingredients for responsibility are there.

And therefore, if God being responsible for evil in that sense is a problem, then that's a problem for the

Molinist as well. So the, is God responsible for sin could be a claim that it could be under the ambitious recipe and also refute

Molinism in the same time. So that's for the claim that God is responsible for sin.

The second one that I'd mentioned is, is God sinning? So that's a claim that we can probably dispose rapidly because it's not all that sophisticated, but you find it sometime.

Okay, so this is wrapped up in what Dr. Craig brought up that if God moves men to do evil, moves their will to do evil, then

God would have to be evil because it's evil to move people to do evil. So how would you respond to that specific point there?

Yeah, so I will address that. Remind me to talk about that specific phrasing when we talk about God's permission, because my challenge here is going to be to say, no, it's not quite right to say that God moves the will of the sinner to sin, but I'll tell you why

I don't really accept that. And I'll give you a model that explains why it's consistent to reject it.

Right now, this objection is actually a bit more naive than this. It's the one that says, well, when

God is causing us to sin, that's his sin. Like that action itself, that's his sin.

He's the only sinner. And so you find that objection by Roger Olson, who says that for Arminian, divine control of every choice and action, and I quote, makes

God at least morally ambiguous and at worst, the only sinner. So he's the only sinner that is that the action itself is his sin.

And that objection can't be right, right? So we can see that there's something that bothers the non -Calvinist in that neighborhood, and we can try to identify it in one of my options.

Hopefully we tackle what they mean, but this one just isn't right. From the fact that God brings about that we sin, doesn't mean that he's committing that sin himself, right?

So here, I think the proper answer is given by Calvinist James Anderson. He says that creatures commit evil acts, but God never commits evil acts, even though he foreordains the evil acts of creatures, which is not the same thing at all.

So you want to make a distinction here between decreeing the evil act of human beings and actually committing the evil act yourself.

And that's a distinction that Calvinist thing matters greatly. So I understand that the non -Calvinist are gonna say, well, no, you can't even decree the sin that stains you.

Right, that's fine. That's the very debate we're engaged in. But the claim that therefore it's God's sin, that just won't hold water.

So we can dispense of that phrasing and move on to the next one. So the next one that I mentioned is whether or not

God's involvement in evil is analogous to human manipulation. Yes, this is a big one for a lot of people.

This is where you get into the whole puppets and all that sort of stuff, right?

So I want you to unpack that, but I want to phrase it in kind of how most

Calvinists hear it so that it would be helpful for if someone gets lost in the depth of this discussion.

So someone says, hey, if God is in control the way the Calvinist says, and that just makes people puppets response.

Yeah, so, well, it's not just that it makes them puppets is that it's analogous to manipulation.

So there's hours worth of things to say about manipulation. And I've actually said a couple of hours worth of that material.

I'll point the listener to a podcast that I've done with Parker Sederkes on his podcast called

Parker's Pensies, which is by the way, really a good podcast. And so there, my interview with Parker Sederkes, we've covered the manipulation arguments in great detail.

And I can't reproduce this material quickly here. What I will say is - Why don't you tell folks about your book?

Yeah, sure. So, yeah, so you can, yeah, indeed find all of that material in my book as well. That's called

Excusing Sinners and Blaming God. And that's tackling all of the arguments against Calvinism as a compatibilist view.

So that's the claim that more responsibility is compatible with free will. And that, sorry, that determinism is compatible with free will and moral responsibility, which is the

Calvinist claim. And I respond against all those arguments that say this is incoherent.

And one of those arguments is the manipulation argument. It's the claim that when God determines what we do, it's analogous to a human mad scientist or otherwise controlling, manipulating a patient and thereby removing his moral responsibility.

That's usually the manipulation argument. Here, it's applied a bit differently because it's no longer focusing on the patient and whether or not manipulation removes his moral responsibility.

Now it's focusing on God and whether that makes him evil, right? So that there's a transfer of responsibility from the manipulated agent to the manipulator.

And so here, the answer to that argument in the context of an argument from sin's authorship, right?

The authorship of evil is simply going to say that we have, we can refute the manipulation argument by identifying relevant differences between the human manipulator and God who determines a free choice on Calvinism.

So the argument would need to show that there is no relevant difference between the two. And since the burden of proof is still squarely on the shoulders of the incompatible is here on the shoulders of the non -Calvinist, we need to be told, okay, what is the alleged similar, like relevant similarity between the two?

And if you tell us there's no relevant difference, we need an argument for this. And not only that, but we can actually refute the argument by offering what we think is a relevant difference between God and the human manipulator.

So that's what I do in my book. That's where I'm going to point the reader, but basically - Well, on Amazon Kindle for, check this out guys.

It's on Kindle right now. You can download it on your phone for $2 and 99 cents.

Yes, that's the heavy reward of your years of research right there. So that's right.

So you can get it right now. See, there are a couple of people say they already bought it. They just bought it now. So excellent. Definitely, he definitely unpacks all of this in detail and you can kind of take your time and plow through that in more depth, but go ahead.

Yep, there's another guy. So that's really the gist of the answer to the claim that God is manipulating us. What we can say is that there are relevant differences between the human manipulator and God, right?

So God is bringing about things for the sake of the greater good against the intentions matter greatly here that God is fully omnipotent.

He's all powerful. He knows exactly all of the good outcomes of the situation. So in ways that if we do the same thing, that's inappropriate because we, and this is ironic because in English language, there's a popular phrase for this.

We say that this human being is playing God, right? When you bring about evil so that good may come, you're charged with playing

God, right, in the process. And so this is interesting because I think that reflects correctly the fact that God is in a position to do that and we're not.

Right. So if God is in a position to do that well, that is he knows fully what are all the greater goods that can come out of the evil that he brings about, then he can intend those squarely.

He can guarantee that they will happen. And he's the proper creator and ruler of the universe. I mean, he's fundamentally different from the human manipulator.

So if any of those matters is relevantly, is a relevant difference, then we cannot take the sinfulness of the human manipulator and transfer it onto allegedly the sinfulness of the

Calvinist God because the property just doesn't transfer. There's relevant differences so that the analogy doesn't work.

Okay. Are you gonna be moving on to the, is God causing sin or you still have some more points on the manipulation?

So I don't have any more points, but just to illustrate, I have actually a couple of quotes. Well, actually

I have one quote, William Lane Craig is one who offers this manipulation argument in the literature.

So I have a quote by William Lane Craig. He says, the deterministic view holds that even the movement of the human will is caused by God.

So that's again, that's the claim that we saw surface in the debate. And then he says, God moves people to choose evil and they cannot do otherwise.

All right. So again, standard claims against Calvinism that's allegedly we don't have the ability to do otherwise. And that's a problem.

And then he says, God determines their choices and makes them do wrong. And then here's the argument.

If it is evil to make another person do wrong, then in this view,

God not only is the cause of sin and evil, but he becomes evil himself, which is absurd, end quote.

So that's Craig's formulation there. So there's a couple of the different ways of phrasing the argument that are in there, right?

There's the moving of the wheel, there's the question of causing to which we're about to turn. And then there's this big claim that if it's evil to make another human being do wrong, then

God is evil on that sense. And my answer is that no, we cannot buy this if statement unconditionally for everything that exists, including

God, because even if it's evil for a human being to make another person do wrong for the reasons that I've stated, right?

Where we are playing God, we are not guaranteeing the evil. We don't control it fully. This is inappropriate for us and we are commanded not to do that.

God finds himself in a very different situation. And so for God, it's perfectly fine to do things that for us would be wrong.

And once again, to prime this intuition, keep in mind there's already lots of things that we say are like that, right?

So killing someone is one such thing that is wrong for any human being to do and is just fine for God.

That's right. And when you say just fine for God, God's not just arbitrarily like zap, you're dead.

He's not an arbitrary being. No, not arbitrary, but it seems prerogative to take your life.

He's the author of life. He's given you your life. And if he decides to kill me right now, I mean, some of the ways that God kills people are justice bearing, right?

So there are retributions for things that they've done. All right, you're gone. And there are examples in the

Bible of God doing that, but without it being like righteousness or justice like condemnation, if God wants to take my life this very moment, it's his prerogative, right?

He can strike me dead right now, either in ways that make it obvious that he's the one who did it or simply in ways that don't appear to anybody that God is involved.

I'm just gonna drop dead. That happens. So the fact that God does that is obviously a tough experience really, right?

It's a difficult situation emotionally to deal with, but intellectually speaking, the Christian is committed to saying this is absolutely fine for God to do that.

Once again, with good reasons, justifying his permission of that event, but this is the case and there's nothing wrong with God doing that.

So I'm bringing this example to show that it's not very counterintuitive what the Calvinist is saying with respect to manipulation.

God is fundamentally different than the human manipulator. And in his prerogative, it's not arbitrary for us to say it's okay for God and not for manipulators because God is just very different.

He's the creator and there is a very strong creator, creature distinction.

Sure. So that's how I dispose of the manipulation argument here. That's not a reason to think that God is evil just because he makes us do bad things, right?

In the way that maybe manipulators would be evil. So now when you say makes though, look at that,

I mean, see the nature of this discussion is that everything must be defined.

So does Calvinism make God the author of sin? What do you mean by author of sin? Does Calvinism make

God responsible for evil? Well, what do you mean by responsible? These are not throw away like we're trying to avoid.

These are huge. So when you say he makes us, what do you mean by that?

Maybe you can say we're gonna get to that in just a bit, but I really think that's really the key point that a lot of people who don't hold to our position would say, well, what does that look like?

And how does that not make God responsible for sin in kind of the reprehensible way? Yeah, so in that last sentence,

I meant make us do evil, I meant determines us to do evil because I was talking about the

Calvinist view in which I grant that he makes us do evil in that sense. He determines us to do sin.

But if we give pushback thinking from their perspective, but what does that mean?

Okay, so make means determine, but in what sense does he determine? I mean, is he moving my will?

Is he metaphysically, that's where they're pushing and saying, I wanna know metaphysically, how is this working?

Because it seems as though this makes him the author of sin in the bad way. Yes, and I promise

I will deliver on my description of what God actually does on the moment of sin when we get to a permission.

I think that's gonna be - I just wanna make sure that I'm representing our libertarian brothers. I know that people are gonna say, yeah, but you need to explain this detail.

So I'm happy, that's where you're headed and that's fine. Okay. Yeah, sure. But yeah, so here, this was not intended to be controversial when

I said God makes us do that on determinism, like on Calvinism, God determines that we will do that.

And I think it's a proper use of the phrase, he makes us do that. I should point out that God making us do things is also something that's appropriate to say on Molinism.

Once again, if God has middle knowledge, he knows what we would freely do and places us in those very circumstances, then there's a real sense in which we can say

God made us do those things. The Molinists would say, well, yeah, he made us do it freely, but he still made us do it.

He brought this about that we are doing those things in his providential control. So there's nothing prejudicial about God making us do those things.

And I'm bringing you back to those biblical texts I've read at the beginning of this show. God says that he's making those things happen.

He's saying, I'm the Lord who does all those things. So I think the Calvinist and the Molinist are on the same boat here.

And God making us do evil is not itself prejudicial. And that's why we again find the person who wants to use this as an argument against Calvinism is once again going to find himself stuck between a rock and a hard place.

The rock being that he's going to be either refuting his own view if he's going too strong because he's arguing against things that he also must affirm as a

Molinist, or he's going to be question begging because now he finally targets just Calvinism. But then we are asking, okay, well, that's determinism.

That's what you mean, that's what you target, but that's what we affirm, and that's what we disagree about. So now you're begging the question.

So once again, the arguer is stuck between self refuting or question begging, neither of which is awesome for an argument.

Okay, all right. So let's move then to the, we're moving from the manipulation.

You spoke about the causing, right? No, but not yet. So now causing that came up in the quote by William Lane Craig, but that's another way in which the objector can complain about Calvinism to say, well, you know, on Calvinism, this is different.

God causes us to sin, and that would be wrong. So a couple of examples of people phrasing this objection, you have a philosopher,

Leigh Vickens, who says if God causes humans to commit sin, that is to act in ways that deserve condemnation, then he is morally blameworthy, even if he does not actually condemn human sin.

And similarly, you have Ken Keithley, who's a moralist, who's written, if determinism is true, then

God is the first cause of sin. However, since God is not the cause of sin, then causal determinism cannot be true.

So you can see the straightforward syllogism here. If Calvinism is true, then God causes sin, but in fact,

God does not cause sin, therefore Calvinism is false. So my response to this one here is that you're gonna see two of the classic recipes pop up again.

The first one is that it may very well be an instance of the foggy recipe here, because causation itself is a very complex idea.

And once again, we're gonna find ourselves asking, well, what in the world does that mean, right? What does it mean to cause a human being to sin?

Philosophically, in the philosophical literature, there's tons of controversy about what it means to cause. What is a cause?

What types of causes? And I'm gonna quote a non -Calvinist, a very famous libertarian philosopher,

Peter van Inwagen, who said that causation is a morass in which I refuse to step foot, not unless I am pushed.

So it's extremely difficult to use causation meaningfully, especially in a controversial argument, because people are gonna be having very different notions of what that means.

So that might well be the case of the foggy, like, okay, God causes sin. What do you mean by that?

And if once again, you clarify by saying, well, causing just is determining, then you're back onto the ambitious recipe and you're self -refuting because, sorry, no, you're on the timid recipe, because you're saying, well, the problem is determinism, and that's the very issue that we disagree about.

That's the very issue that's debated. So now you're begging the question if you say this is false. So if you clarify the foggy here by saying causation just is determinism, then you're in the timid recipe and you're question begging.

And then alternatively, you could also use causation in an argument that now is in the ambitious recipe, and that's gonna be self -refuting.

And the reason for that is that cause doesn't have to be deterministic, right? So it's frequent in the popular circles to have people describe causation as being just determinism, right?

God causes us, he determines that we do something. As a matter of fact, the phrasing of causation is meaningful also for things that are not necessarily determined.

And here we're back to talking about what the Molinist God does when he actualizes a world in which he knew that we would do something.

It's perfectly appropriate to say that he caused us to do that. He just indeterministically caused, but he still caused.

So the use of that word here, if we don't mean to exclude determinism, could well be that it applies to the

Molinist view, in which case, if causing evil is a problem on that sense, then Molinism is also refuted by that argument.

So you'll find yourself once again, refuting your own view if you try to avoid begging the question on the argument.

Okay, all right. That is - So that's for causing sin. So is

God causing sin? That's the responses that we'd give. All right, now I am going to use my executive powers.

If we can move quickly through the last two points so that we can get to some questions, because Guillaume, I don't know if you see this, but there are a lot of people watching and there are a lot of excellent questions.

And so if we can move through those last points, I mean, say what you need to say, of course. I mean, I don't wanna rush you if you need to kind of lay things out, but then

I just basically want to bombard you with questions that people are, you're asking.

Now, again, I wanna encourage folks to write the word question in front of your question so that I could differentiate them from the comments.

Of course, super chats, there are a couple of them. So they're the easiest to see cause they're bright neon on my screen.

So I might run to those first, but I'm gonna try to get to a bunch of them until Guillaume passes out.

And then we know we should stop. So I'm just kidding.

So why don't you run through those last two points and then we'll move on to the question because I don't wanna take too long cause other than the people watching now,

I'm not sure if anyone else will watch two hours when we're all done. Some people might. All right, we shall see.

I mean, we're trying to be thorough here. I think that's exhaustiveness is a virtue for this question that we'll be able to say we've done really a deep dive and we've covered all of the bases.

So let me cover the last two bases as quickly as I can. I think the next one is, is

God willing sin? That's another way in which the argument has been offered to say if Calvinism is true, then

God is willing that we sin. But in fact, God does not will that we sin.

He really wills that we don't sin. Therefore Calvinism is false. And this argument, for example, is offered by Catherine Rogers, which is a very serious philosopher.

And she says, if Calvinism is true, God wills that we sin, but sin is by definition that which

God does not will, therefore Calvinism is false. That's really the gist of the argument here.

And my response here is fairly standard. It's simply to say that there's an equivocation between those two premises.

That there's a sense of the will of God that is perfectly distinguishable between God's prescriptive will and God's decretive will.

So the prescriptive will is what God commends to us. He's what he prescribes that we do.

It's really his prescription for our lives. And that's his will in a very real sense. He wants us to do those things.

He commends them, he wants us to do them. And then his decretive will is simply his ultimate will for what in fact happens in the world, right?

So that's a very meaningful sense of God's will as well. But we can see that those two senses can at times differ because there are sometimes, plenty of times on the

Calvinist view, at which what God most desires, most wills happens, his highest will, his decretive will actually involves the breaking of his prescriptions.

And once again, it's because he's going for a greater good. He has morally sufficient reasons to prefer that the evil happens.

But it's obvious that there are, it's coherent to say that in the prescriptive sense, he wills that we don't sin, even if in the decretive sense, he decrees that this is gonna happen.

And this should not be uniquely affirmed by a Calvinist because even the Armenians or the

Molinists, like the libertarians are committed to saying that there are different degrees of God's will.

And that when that happens, he gives preference to his highest desire and very much extending libertarian free will is just one case where, just one such case where God has conflicting wills, right?

On the non -Calvinist views. On the libertarian views, God wants, let's say,

God wants everyone to be saved, but he also wants to give us libertarian free will.

And by giving us libertarian free will, it follows, it turns out that people, not everybody is saved because we misuse our free will.

And so no, it says, that's a fully Armenian proposition here. And on that view, it's correct that God wants something and he also wants something more.

And therefore he brings about that other thing. So the fact that God has a permissive will is also something that Molinists should be affirming that God wants, he wills that everyone be saved, but he has a permissive will that we are not in fact all saved because it's more important to him to give us libertarian free will.

And Dr. Craig affirmed the two wills in the discussion. If you remember, right? Maybe not the same way, but did he not affirm that there was a kind of a decretive and prescriptive?

Yeah, I don't remember if that was affirmed by Dr. Craig. I think that Dr. White presented this, which is really a standard reform.

Sure, I could have heard Dr. Craig say something that was along those lines. And if he did, that's great.

That means that he recognizes that you cannot just say, well, God doesn't will sin because that's against his will.

You need to clarify which sense of the will and therefore there's an equivocation and the argument doesn't work.

There are some non -libertarians, sorry, some libertarians, so non -Calvinists, who do criticize this distinction between God's wills, saying that it makes

God duplicitous or that two willed, I think those criticism is really misguided because they don't realize that distinction is fully coherent and it's necessary for their own non -Calvinist worldview.

So I think that the argument just doesn't work for the reasons I've laid out here. Okay, all right. Okay, so that's for God willing sin.

And then the last one is the interesting one, I think, where we get to dive in a little bit about what really happens when there's a sinning that's happening.

Like what is God doing? And it's the question of whether God is permitting sin. So it's said that we don't want to say that God intends sins or that he actively determines that it's happening.

We want to say that God is permitting sin. And so when Calvinists start to talk about permission, you can see the comment section multiplying the objection, saying, well, how can you use that word permission?

Well, what does that permit? That's not coherent with determinism. Is he permitting his own determinations?

I hear that one often. Exactly, so you're familiar with that. So the objection here is that language of divine permission is not accessible to the

Calvinist. So what I've done in my writing is to try to defend a model that's very intuitively granting the right to the

Calvinist to use this permission language. And you have to understand the context of the argument.

It is an argument against Calvinism. So maybe let's read it from a very prominent

Molinist philosopher, Thomas Flint. He says this, if God is perfectly good, then we cannot have him directly causing evil, especially the morally evil actions which his free beings all too often perform.

Evil is permitted, but not intended by God. Hence, we cannot have him predetermining it via interestingly efficacious concurrent activity.

That's a mouthful. It's another way of saying you cannot have God determining what's going on because then you can say that he permits the evil.

And you can read it in a bit more accessible way by Roger Olson, who says, if it is logical for Calvinists to say

God permits or allows evil, they can only mean that in a highly attenuated and unusual sense of permits and allows, one that falls outside the ordinary language of most people.

So the objection is laid out here. Can you coherently, like without twisting words, actually use the word of permission for God with respect to evil?

And this is really related to Craig's points, the one that you've been bringing a couple of times, that God allegedly moves the will of the creature to do evil.

And I think that Dr. White did respond to that claim after a few back and forth.

He took a couple of times mentioning the objection on the side. Dr. White finally had the time to respond.

And he's saying, it's not like the human being is just sitting here still not doing anything, minding his own business.

And then God actively comes and messes up his will on the moment of choice so that now he's going to will something that's evil that he wouldn't have done otherwise.

And I think that's along those lines that my model is going to defend the view. So I think that Dr. White was quite right in protesting with that wording.

But let me give you a little bit of a model for how that actually works. So what's important here is to understand what is the nature of the concern?

The concern is that there is not an asymmetry in what

God does in the case of human doing evil and humans doing good, right?

So this is really a question of whether we have something that's affirmable when

God makes us do bad, that's not affirmable when God makes us do good or vice versa.

Okay. So there's an asymmetry, right? The two are not symmetrical. And the goal here is to maintain that with permission language, to say that in the case of doing evil,

God permits evil. And whatever we mean by that, like whatever activity of God is being described here, this is not something that we would say of the good, right?

So that's the goal is this asymmetry. And that's exactly what Dr. Craig actually affirms in The Only Wise God.

He says that if God foreordains and brings about evil thoughts and deeds, it seems impossible to give an adequate account of this biblical asymmetry, right?

So it's the asymmetry, is God doing something specific, like is he actively engaged in bringing in when we bring the good and then we bring out the good and in a way that he's passively permitting that we do the evil, right?

So that's the question before us. And so the Calvinist, it's now argued, doesn't have the resources to do that because God determines everything.

So he cannot distinguish between the good and the evil. Even the evil must be such that you cannot say it's permitted, like, well,

God determines it. So he doesn't just permit it. He actually actively brings it about, actively causes it, whatever you want to say, intends it, but he does not just permit it.

And so are we clear on the objection here? Now, I think it's perfectly understood and framed and we're looking for this asymmetry.

So the first thing that I want to point out here as I respond and offer a model that satisfies this is that we're all on the same boat actually.

And the Molinist fails to see that often, but the asymmetry is not gonna be brought about by simply bringing in libertarian free will because libertarianism is bringing in indeterminism, right?

It's saying that our free choices are not causally determined, they're not determined by God and that's the libertarian view, but that's applying to all free choices, good or bad, right?

So when the Molinist is looking at the Calvinist model and saying, well, look, you're determining, you're having

God determine human choices, that's our evil choices, he's determining them. So we can't say that he permits them.

So you need to cut that with indeterminism in the chain, right? So you need to bring in indeterminism in order to be able to say he only permits evil.

Well, if indeterminism is what cuts this link in such a way that you say that God permits things, then this is applicable to both good and evil.

So now all of a sudden, whatever you were trying to affirm of evil, that God only permits it, is immediately affirmed of the good as well.

And now you find yourself saying that God only permits the good as well. So you lose the asymmetry immediately if all you're bringing about is libertarian free will, that's applicable to both the good and the bad.

And so just like a bump in the carpet, you remove the causation on one side, it's gonna apply to the other side.

So the problem of permission is now popping up on the good instead of the bad. So what

I'm trying to show here is that the problem of the asymmetry between God permitting evil and God intending the good is not gonna be secured by the

Molinist simply by saying we have libertarian free will, therefore God can do that. So what

I'm saying is that it shouldn't be a disagreement between Calvinist and Molinist. On the contrary, what

I'm going to suggest is a good model for this asymmetry is going to be accessible to the

Calvinist, right? I'm trying to save my own boat here, but I'm gonna say the Molinist is on that boat because that model is the same thing that the

Molinist should affirm in order to have this asymmetry between the good and the bad, okay?

So here's what I suggest now. So the model that I think works here is one where let me give you an example of a perfectly meaningful description of language of permission in a use case that is uncontroversially deterministic.

So this is what the libertarian is asking me, right? I have my determinist model of God's providence and they're asking me, well, how can you speak about permission when your model is deterministic?

So let me give you an illustration that's removing the human choices. So let's shelf the controversy for a second.

I'll give you a fully deterministic event and show you that it's perfectly meaningful to speak of permission language.

And my example is that of a bobsled on a snowy track. Okay. So think of the bobsled on the track.

The activity of the bobsled itself is purely determined by the laws of physics, right?

So it's the forces that are driving it down the track. But so you put the bobsled on that track that's slanted.

And once the bobsled is on the track, you want to consider the activities that are necessary for the bobsled to continue going and accelerating or to stop.

What you need to do now at this point, if you're the driver in the bobsled, is to do something that's very different if you want it to accelerate or stop.

There's ones that's gonna be very passive and the other one's gonna be very active. So if you want to just go down, then all you have to do is do nothing.

You'll let it slide and it's going to accelerate. But if you want it to stop, you need to actively put on the brakes and stop it, right?

So here in this case, I think it's very meaningful to say that the driver of the bobsled must actively engage the brake if he wants to stop, but can passively permit the bobsled to go down.

If he just withholds his activity, he doesn't intervene, just let it slide. Then he permits the bobsled to slide whereas there's the asymmetry, right?

It's a different activity where it's much more active if he wants to brake. So on that model here, you can see there are asymmetry and it's perfectly meaningful to speak of permission in the case of letting it slide and yet it's fully deterministic, right?

So you can see that it's coherent to speak of permission language when it's fully deterministic.

If you have that feature that I'm going to highlight, which is that you need the initial slant, right?

That's on the case of the bobsled. This is what makes the asymmetry work with the active or passive involvement of the driver is that there's an initial slant such that the normal course of action from that slant is that it's going to go down if you don't do anything.

And in order to stop it, you need to actively intervene. How do other people use the example of like dropping a book?

Like the person holds the book, they can let it go and they can catch it. So like gravity will do naturally what it does but then you have this intervention to, okay.

Yeah, so there's an intervention needed to stop it but there's a permission of letting it happen.

And once again, it's fully deterministic. So we can see that the determinism of the Calvinist view is not the problem here.

We can affirm on determinism that there is an asymmetry with a language of permission for something.

And now what I'm going to suggest and is satisfied. So you need to identify that slant, right?

So what is that slant and what's the active or passive involvement on the moment of choice?

And what I'm going to suggest is fully available to the Molinist just as much as the Calvinist. So I'm saying

Molinist don't shoot me here. I'm giving you what you are looking for and both you and I can affirm this.

And that initial slant, I think on the Christian view is original sin. That is that original sin has in it the teaching that human beings are not neutral, right?

We are born sinful and we have that slant that bent towards evil.

We are inclined to do evil. We are inclined to do bad things.

Basically when given the opportunities we will do bad things. This is a propensity to evil that is baked into original sin.

So just to clarify what part of original sin I have in view, I'm not even using some of the stronger things that reform folks like me tend to see in original sin.

So we can clarify sometimes original sin is in fact as original guilt or original inclination.

So original guilt is the idea that because of what Adam did then we are blameworthy. That is that we have a moral ledger that is not neutral and that we are guilty before God for Adam's sin.

That's a very strong piece that's sometimes understood. That's not even the one I'm appealing to here.

So you don't even need to affirm that in order to affirm what I'm proposing. And the other thing that sometimes is backed into original sin is original inclination.

And sometimes people mean by that the idea that because of Adam's sin, we are now inclined to our sinning in such a way that we are incapable of living a fully sinless life.

That's sometimes what is meant by original inclination, the inability to live a sinless life. We are so sinful now that when given the chance, we will sin and therefore we cannot go through this life without sinning, that's original inclination.

Even that is a bit stronger than what I'm appealing to. The only thing that I'm appealing to here is simply a bent towards sin, right?

And propensity, I think in the Catholic traditions they call it concupiscence. It's just the fact that we're gonna be bent towards sinning.

Now, if that's true, and I think that Christians should affirm this, that this mild of an understanding of original sin should be part of a more lenient view of original sin.

So if we have that initial slant, then now it becomes perfectly meaningful to say that this is gonna be our tendency on any given situation.

That if God lets us just unfold naturally this appetite for sin, then we're gonna naturally sin.

It's like the gravity. Exactly. The gravity is total gravity. And for God to prevent that, right?

This is, again, Dr. White was saying a lot during the debate, God restrains our sin. And I'm sure that's the

Molinists were saying, well, what do you mean? He restrains our sin. He's the one who caused it, right? He's the one who brought it about. Yes, but as part of original sin.

So it's not what's happening on the moment of the sin that is God just pushing us to sin.

That's why I reject Dr. Craig's characterization that on the moment of sin, God moves the will to sin.

No, the will is inclined to sin under God's providence because of original sin in the way that he's wired us as descendants of Adam, we are sinners.

Sure. Yes, so that's tilted towards sin. But now with those sinners inclined towards sin on the moment of choice, we can see a proper asymmetry for God to intervene or not.

One is gonna be active. The other one's gonna be passive. He can actively work against our original sin in order to incline us to do something good, or he can more passively let that inclination express itself and therefore permitting that we sin.

So I think that model makes perfect sense of permission language for God about what we do that's evil, even though I affirm that we are fully determined.

And notice once again that this is a model that's really affirmable by Molinist as well. Because really, if you pay attention, it really rests on the truth of counterfactuals, on the fact that if God were to intervene, we would not sin.

But if he were to passively let us do it, then we would sin, right?

So you have a pair of counterfactuals here, one in which God actively intervenes, the other one in which he passively permits us to sin.

And so those counterfactuals are affirmable by Calvinists or by Molinists. Sure. Molinists affirm those counterfactuals.

So if you have those two counterfactuals, then you've rescued successfully the asymmetry, and it's perfectly meaningful to say that God permits our sin, but actively brings about our good.

All right, very good. That's a lot to unpack. I'm glad you were able to get it out. I know that's kind of long for people.

They want to get to their questions, but I want this video to survive as kind of like filled with content for people to kind of chew on.

So thank you for tracking with us, everyone who's listening in. And at the end of the day, you don't agree?

Okay, don't agree. Hey, you argue, you give your reasons and you interact, and that's how the cookie crumbles.

But let's take it from here, though. Let's take some questions. Guillaume, if we can do kind of a rapid fire. Don't feel obligated to unpack all the details.

Just kind of quick, concise, as best as we can. And we'll see if we can tackle a bunch of these.

First question is not going to be popping up on the screen. It was the first person who sent in a question, and then it disappeared.

And so they sent it to me through a private message. So I'm gonna ask the question here. This is from John Cranman. He says,

Dr. Binyong, on your view, God determines everything. So how does God determine something without actually causing it?

If you say via secondary causes, keep in mind, puppet strings are secondary causes for the puppeteer.

So how do you show that determinism does not collapse into causalism? Yeah, so I don't have to do that, basically.

I said, I don't have a problem with saying that God causes the evil that's happening in this world, because I think that the idea of causation is quite complex, and it can very properly be used to describe a deterministic view of free will.

So I won't be shying away from saying that God causes that evil happen, right? He causes the evil that's there.

And I think it's pretty much in the lines of some of the biblical teachings we've read, right?

I mean, I am the Lord who does all those things. So it's not far -fetched to say, well, it's causing, what do you mean by that?

Well, he's the one who brings it about, he's doing it. So on the deterministic view, I don't have a problem with that, just as I wouldn't have a problem as a

Molinist to say that God causes the evil that happens, but he does so in a non -deterministic way.

So I think it boils down to what you want to mean by causation here. There's a range of meanings, some of which are even consistent with the

Molinist view, but the Calvinist is not going to be bothered with it until we're told what exactly is in view, and is that really a problem?

So I don't think it's a problem that God causes sin, as long as we maintain that God is not himself bad by doing that, so.

Okay, excellent. Thank you for the super chat, writer John Buck. Thanks for the $5. The question for Binyong, does

Calvinism require the rejection of ought implies can, as in there are some things we ought to do that we can't do?

Yes, I think that's, well, so once again, the philosopher's answer is going to be, it depends on what you mean by can.

And so the full discussion of the ought implies can is again in my book, Excusing Sinners and Blaming God, and you'll find all of your answers there.

But in just a second, I think, yes, that the Calvinist should reject ought implies can, and not only that, but use that as an argument against libertarianism, because very plausibly, and this is what

I argue in my book, this principle ought implies can is a logical consequence of incompatibilism, which is an ingredient of libertarianism, that the view that moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism.

If that's the case, then it means we cannot be morally responsible unless we have this libertarian ability to do otherwise, right, that's the incompatibilities view.

And we have a strong counter argument here by pointing out both an argument by Martin Luther, which says that if free will can do one thing, then it can do everything.

That is that if we need to be able to do that, which we ought to do, then it follows that Pelagianism is true, right?

He says that if the inference, and he's talking about that inference, ought implies can, he says, if the inference stands good, then the

Pelagians have won the day. And the reason for that is because we ought to live a sinless life, but we cannot live a sinless life.

So you ought to live absolutely free of sin, but you cannot do that in virtue of original sin.

So you ought to do something that you cannot do. That's one counter example right there.

And the other is that the ought implies can maxim is actually logically equivalent in my interpretation of the relevant words.

I can, so it's gonna take a little bit of unpacking, but it's equivalent to the libertarian claim that moral responsibility requires the ability to do otherwise, right?

And that principle itself, when it's taken as a categorical ability to do otherwise, which is what the libertarian free will requires, then that principle is refuted by the existence of God or Jesus as an impeccable human being.

He is still morally responsible for what he's doing. So here you have another counter example, and that's an argument that I think

Luther also offers, but certainly Jonathan Edwards, that Jesus as an impeccable human being or God as an impeccable being, they are still morally responsible because they are praiseworthy for what they do.

And yet they don't have the ability to sin, to do something less than praiseworthy. So you have another counter example to the idea that moral responsibility requires the ability to do otherwise, or that ought implies can.

So I think the Calvinist should reject that, but I'm also saying that the libertarian should reject that and therefore reject his own view of incompatibilism in the process.

This is an argument against non -Calvinist views here. Excellent. Dylan asks, please ask

Binyong his opinion on Dr. Muller's view of determinism. Maybe some passing comments there. If you agree with it, don't agree with it, maybe an illustration real quick, and then we'll move to the next one.

Yeah, so here, I mean, there's, I don't know what they have in mind when they say his view of determinism.

The big idea is that Dr. Muller's work is usually brought about to say, look, even within the

Calvinist camp, within the reform tradition, there are people who can affirm libertarianism. That if just because you're a

Calvinist doesn't mean you have to be a determinist. And so this is typically the argument that is made there.

And I disagree. I think that the Calvinist view should be seen as deterministic.

So then you're gonna get into debates as to, well, who gets to define Calvinism, right?

So maybe if you want to define Calvinism more loosely in such a way that you include libertarian views, then you can use the word

Calvinism for non -deterministic views. But then in that case, I would say that you will likely land on Molinist views.

If you affirm libertarianism and you also affirm a very strong view of divine providence over human choices, that's the

Molinist model. So it's easier to say there's Calvinist determinism on one side and Molinism on a distinct side, rather than to say that the word

Calvinism could cover both of those to the exclusion of maybe open theism. So I find that better use of the word

Calvinism to talk about the deterministic view. And additionally, I would say that even by the own standards of some of the folks who claim that Calvinists can be libertarians, you can actually make a case that even their own standard excludes non -deterministic views.

So for example, they tend to look at the reformed confessions, like the Westminster Confession of Faith. I think that Oliver Crisp is one who takes that.

He says, well, if you just look at the confession, you can still try to show in some libertarianism somewhere.

So you don't have to be a determinist if you're a Calvinist. And I disagree with that because the

Westminster Confession, as I said, it has very strong statement on divine providence that explicitly deny that this providence of God is based on what

God knows will happen or would happen. Like this is super explicit. It's not what he foreknows in the future and it's not what he knows hypothetically with the word.

So you have a fairly explicit denial of counterfactuals of libertarian free will as the basis for God's determining action.

And so I don't think that the Westminster Confession can be reconciled with a Molinist view or a non -determinist view.

And there's a paper by Paul Mineta and James Anderson that kind of makes that case that no,

Calvinism is not compatible with libertarianism. All right, thank you so much for that. Martin Luther, not the

Martin Luther, but he asks, please clarify what you mean by evil.

Most non -philosophers think evil means sin. So when we say God's not the author of evil, what do we mean by evil?

Yeah, so every bad things that happens. So that's right, there's some distinction that can be made. Sometimes we make differences between moral evil and natural evil.

That's the wording in the philosophical literature. And moral evil is all the bad things, the evil things that people do, right?

So there's this, I'm making a choice, I'm sinful, selfish, murderous, hateful.

All of those choices that are gonna be evil, that's moral evil from human being, or not just humans, that can be also demons, right?

That's free agents doing more bad. And then there's natural evil.

That's the phrase that's usually referring to catastrophes, sicknesses. So just the things that are not involving moral agents, but simply some pain and suffering that's happening caused by natural causes.

And so I don't think it's the best use of the word evil there. So I would be fine with using the word evil just for moral evil, but that's what we've been meaning.

Now, mind you, on the field of natural evil, I think that, again, at the beginning of the debate between William Lane Craig and James White, I think

Dr. Craig granted this, that on natural evil, both the Calvinist and Moralist should be agreeing that there's virtually no difference.

God is fully in control of that. And it is arguably deterministic, right? So there's no libertarian free will of the tornado to freely destroy the boat.

There's not the libertarian free will of the earthquake. So the cancer cells don't have libertarian free will.

So the providence of God over all of that natural evil is the same on the Moralist and the Calvinist view.

All right, very good. John Buck, thanks again for the $5 super chat. He says, do you think that God has libertarian free will, as in he could have refrained from creating the world given the same set of antecedent conditions?

So that's a good question. So I would say not libertarian free will because libertarianism is both the thesis that we are not determined and that determinism is incompatible with moral responsibility, right?

So if you affirm libertarian free will, you're affirming libertarianism, which is incompatibilism plus the thesis that some of our actions are free.

So you cannot leave that be as a Calvinist. You cannot say that libertarianism is true because that means that incompatibilism is true and that's directly contradictory to compatibilism.

So as a compatibilist, I am committed to saying that libertarianism is false. That is that incompatibilism is false.

Now the question is, could God have refrained from creating the world given the same set of antecedent conditions?

My answer is, I'm not too sure what to say there. I have given it a little bit of thought but not done tremendous research on that.

So there's two options here for the Calvinist. You can say that God could have done some other things given exactly same sets of circumstances, which means that God is not determined in some of those decisions that he's made.

And that rescues that God could have brought about a different world. So there are several different possible worlds and he just picked one.

And what you would need to say is that that kind of freedom on God's part is not the same that we have as human beings.

That's one option for the Calvinist. The other is to say, no, God is actually like, what to say?

So no, God is in fact, there's only one thing that is the best in this case.

And that's therefore what God must necessarily do that God being the best being in that situation, there's one best thing to do.

And that's the only thing that he really could have done all things being just the way that you were. Now that view entails all sorts of different interesting things.

One thing is called the modal collapse. That is that now all of a sudden, if God is the one, if God in all circumstances only has one outcome possible, that means that there are no alternate possible worlds that all truth become necessary, given all the antecedents and all the reasons that God has, then all truth become necessary truths.

And so there's questions about whether that's bad. I don't even know that it's bad. Usually it's kind of used as a boogeyman.

Like, oh, if you're from that, then now that's modal collapse, game over. And I'm not sure that this is game over with modal collapse.

I think you can still meaningfully speak about possible worlds by refining a little bit your analysis there.

So I don't think it's a huge deal, but I'm not too sure which of those two scenarios to affirm. I haven't really committed to either of them, but I just know these are the options for a

Calvinist on the question of God's free will. Okay, excellent. Scott says, this can't be, thanks for the super chat, this can't be a

Calvinist podcast. There aren't any books in the background. Yeah. There are books right there in the closet, but there are books on fashion design because I share an office with my wife who is a fashion designer.

So my books are in the library now. So we move. Now, if I'm skipping people's questions, that's because you did not preface your question with the word question.

So I'm not going to try too hard to look for the ones from people who did not follow directions.

So let's see here. Moving, moving quickly, quickly, quickly. You're doing a great job, by the way,

Guillaume. Sorry, for some reason I couldn't pronounce your name. What's up with that?

For some reason. For some reason. Let's see here.

Okay, this is from Pine Creek. He is our resident atheist or agnostic, however he'd like to identify himself.

He always comes with these interesting kind of scenarios. So I hope you have fun with this one. If I give my child a gun and know with a hundred percent certainty that my child will kill his sister, am

I responsible at least partially? All right, so this is actually a good use case to say a couple of interesting things.

So the first piece is that the, am I responsible? And so we've discussed a little bit this question of, is

God responsible for when he brings about the evil on Calvinism? And we've said there's the equivocation on moral responsibility and causal responsibility.

So you're clearly at least partially causally responsible. Yes. And are you also morally responsible?

In this case, I would say, yes. You're also guilty of negligence, reckless endangerment or whatever you want to phrase it.

There is something wrong that you did there. The question is, can this case be relevantly compared to God bringing about evil when there are some really key relevant differences?

One of which being that God is the creator and proper ruler of the universe, who has the prerogative of controlling everything that happens.

And he's also intended for the evil to serve a greater good. Now, obviously,

Guillaume Bignon does not know what the greater good is behind all these situations, but God knows full well what good will come out of evil.

And so we can say that on the coherent Christian model, God intends for that greater good, rather than just for the evil as an end in itself.

So God has all of these relevant dissimilarity with the human reckless father who gives the child a gun.

God is controlling everything that happens, knows full well the good that would come out of it. And he's after that.

So you can't really make an argument against that. Now, last thing I would say about this interesting use case is thank you very much,

Pine Creek. This is actually ammunition against the modernist view as well, right? If just giving a child a gun, knowing full well what would happen when he does that, makes the person guilty, then this is applicable to a modernist view as well, because on modernism, the

God of modernism knows full well what would happen given certain circumstances in which he places us.

Once again, if we think that's a problem, then that's refuting modernism just as much as it's refuting

Calvinism. Thankfully, I don't think that's a problem and modernists should join me with that. All right,

Canadian Catholic, thank you for your $2 super chat. It's been young and pretty suppositional. Are you trying to start a fight here?

I can answer that one for you. This is fantastic. So my answer is this, and I love to phrase it like that.

I agree with James Anderson about absolutely everything he says about apologetics, except that he calls himself a presuppositionalist and I don't.

So I endorse everything that he says. I just don't think... So there's many things that presuppositionalists say that sound to me like they're the only ones saying it, and those,

I think, are dead wrong. And then there's lots of things that I hear presuppositionalists say that I think are perfectly fine, but then

I don't think that people on the classical side disagree with that. So I'm fully happy to defend -

So basically, Guillaume, you think presuppositionalists, good presuppositionalists are just closet classicalists.

But I think that presuppositionalism is just a different way of phrasing things, right? So I mean, that's a fully separate debate, but I think that presupposition is not...

It's just an important belief that you have that's foundational to your worldview. So it's not a presupposition of a premise in an argument that you thereby beg.

So I think that presuppositionalism understood like that is fine, but there's lots of claims that are made by folks like Seytenberg and Kate and other popular level presuppositionalists that sound very strange to me and that sound like they're the only ones who make those claims, and I think they're dead wrong.

So that's for my assessment of presuppositionalism. Now, I've had plenty of conversations with James Anderson, who is a very ardent defender of presuppositionalism.

I agree with him on everything he says about apologetics and philosophy, and somehow I don't think

I'm a presuppositionalist and he thinks he is. So I'll cut for a non -answer.

Thank you so much for that, Guillaume. John Buck, again, thanks for your super chat. If God restrained the brothers of Joseph by keeping them from killing

Joseph, would there be a counterfactual of creaturely freedom there? Yeah, I think so. But there's not just one, there's two, and these are the two that I was trying to highlight, that there is the active counterfactual and passive counterfactual.

It is that the brothers of Joseph have this bent towards doing the sinful thing because of their sinful inclination they inherited in original sin, and in light of that inclination towards sinning, you have a counterfactual on each side that says, if God actively worked on their hearts to refrain them, they would not kill

Joseph. And that's the counterfactual that turned out to be factual. And then there's the passive counterfactual, which says if God had passively permitted them to do the inclination of their hearts, to follow the inclination of their hearts, they would have killed

Joseph. So I think you have those two counterfactuals, and they are the reason why we can say that God permitted, well, no, here he didn't permit them to kill

Joseph, but he permitted them to sell him into slavery, right? So it was a sin involved here that I think is meaningfully said to be permitted by God, but, and that's, again, on the same grounds for Molinists and Calvinists, but the

Calvinists are gonna say, yeah, God determined that this would happen. It's a very strong sense. God meant it for good, and they meant it for evil.

Excellent. Aguero says, is Guillaume using deductive reasoning or abductive reasoning with the Bible to arrive at Calvinism?

Well, it depends. I would say abductive in any one given case.

So if you take any one text, I probably will say, well, it doesn't logically follow from this text that Calvinism is true, but yes,

Calvinism makes the best sense of that text, so it's more abductive like that. But I don't know, if you stack enough of them and you fill all the gaps by all of those biblical texts, maybe from all of those, it logically follows that Calvinism is true.

So I'm not too sure how to assess that, frankly. I think that it's a cumulative case. There's biblical texts that teach strongly that God is, again, lots of different languages.

He's bringing about, he's doing, he's involved in changing our hearts and making us do the things that we do that strongly lean towards the

Calvinist view. And then there are still a couple of things. Now, wait a second. Let me say something a bit more stronger here.

There are some biblical texts that give you support for the premises of a deductive argument for Calvinism, and these are the ones that I mentioned earlier.

That's Martin Luther and Jonathan Edwards' arguments against the principle of alternate possibility. I think there's biblical texts that teach that we cannot live a sinless life, right?

So that original sin is fully a biblical teaching, and in that light, we are not able to live a sinless life, and yet we are morally responsible for that.

So there's biblical teachings there that are used in premises for this argument, which now logically entails that incompatibilism must be false because moral responsibility does not, in fact, require the ability to do otherwise, and therefore, compatibilism follows.

So you have a deductive argument there with a premise that's biblical. Similarly, for God's impeccability, you have an impeccable

God who's morally praiseworthy for doing the good, and so those things are biblically taught, right?

That God is praiseworthy, that's biblically taught, and the fact that God cannot sin, that's also biblically taught, and those two together form the premises of this deductive argument that says, therefore, the principle of alternate possibilities is false from which it follows that compatibilism is true.

So you do have deductive reasoning there, but probably a bit weaker on the texts that simply affirm that God brings about all the things that happen in this world.

All right, James West says, you don't understand Molinism, Guillaume. Knowing X is not the same as causing

X. We are not on the same boat. Did you assume that at all? I'm not aware that I ever did that, so no,

I don't think that. So I agree, let's affirm here. Yes, knowing X is not the same as causing X.

Yes, we're on the same boat here. Okay, there you go. Let's see here.

No, that question, I don't think you're gonna want because it will make you take sides on what you thought about the

James White and let's see here. Okay, Scott Terry, thanks again for the super chat.

He says, does Molinism via libertarianism need what is called existential inertia?

If so, doesn't that commit them to a radically unorthodox metaphysic? I'm not sure if you're familiar with that. So I haven't seen that phrase existential inertia.

I think that Molinism has, let's say, this might be referring to the problem of arbitrariness in the libertarian choice, right?

So if you say that a free choice must be categorically open that you can do one thing or the other, given all things being just as they are on the moment of choice, there's a classic problem that's raised by Calvinists now against the libertarian view that says, look, if all things being just as they are, you can do one or the other, then whichever you do is arbitrary.

It seems like a fluke rather than really an expression of who you are on the moment of choice. So if that's the problem of arbitrariness or randomness, then maybe, yeah, that's a problem that can be raised against Molinism for their libertarianism.

But if what we are saying here is simply this idea that the person is not inclined one way or the other in such a way that God would need to come and bring about one or the other,

I'm guessing that here, this is where the Calvinist and the Molinist are on the same boat, and they want to affirm what

I was giving. That is that there's an initial bent. And I think that the Molinist can say that, right?

That the initial inclination, the propensity to sin is compatible with libertarianism.

You just want to make sure that... So the libertarian is going to say that this influences our choice.

It just doesn't determine it. So I think that, yes, Molinist should affirm something very strongly in that direction.

Now, I'll still have some grief with that because I'll say, well, given all things, despite all of the influences and your sinful nature, you are still trying to say that we can refrain from sin, right?

That it's really metaphysically open, that it's possible for us to avoid the sin. And that, again, can be aggregated over all of the events of a given person's life.

And if that aggregates, which I think I show successfully in my book, Excusing Sinners and Me Blaming God, you can provide an argument by recurrence or recursion, where you say, if you take the first choice, okay, does the person have the ability to avoid the sin?

So if libertarianism is true, then yes, they have it. Let's imagine that therefore there's the possible world in which they refrain from sinning.

Let's jump to their next sin, do we still have the ability? Yes, we have the ability to avoid the sin and so on.

And you jump from opportunity from free choice to free choice, and you go through the entire life of the person, and it aggregates to the fact that they now can live a sinless life despite original sin.

So you land in Pelagianism, which is really the denial that salvation by grace is necessary because you have to affirm that you cannot be blamed unless you have the categorical ability to avoid the sin and original sin in the orthodox sense would not permit that.

Okay, there's a biblical question here. How do you understand

Matthew 23, 37? Can God not accomplish his goals in a deterministic model?

So let me get Matthew. Yeah, it's the wailing against Jerusalem, Jerusalem and your leaders.

Yes, so let me see. Let me just get the passage here so that we can read it. Okay, so yeah.

So, oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it. How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings and you are not willing?

How would you respond to that? Yeah, so I think that here the articulation is again between the difference between the prescriptive will and the decretive will.

So that God's ultimate will is done, but that it's consistent with saying that there are some things that he wishes were different, right?

But it's just things in isolation. So just like saying that he wishes that the crucifixion hadn't taken place, right?

It's a bad thing that people killed Jesus. So in that sense, like God would have avoided that, but he had a greater purpose.

And so therefore his highest will was that, but it's the same tension that we have when the

Bible says that he didn't want this to happen. It doesn't please him when the death of people, the death of the wicked doesn't even please

God, let alone the death of his righteous son. And yet the Bible says that it pleased the Lord to bruise him, right?

So the pleasing here is just a different sense. There's one that says it's a general desire, it's a prescription.

And the other one is the highest will because God has more insufficient reasons. So I think that this is the application

I would do for a text like this, like I would do for any text that says that God doesn't get what he wants, that he doesn't get what he willed.

It's just the will of the prescription. It's his general good benevolent will for the world, but he has sometimes a purpose for not bringing it about.

And again, once again, I don't know that the Molinist is going to be much easier off the hook on this one, because also for plenty of evil things that are happening,

I think it's coherent for the Molinist to say, God doesn't really want this to happen, but he still brings this about through his middle knowledge.

So the only thing is that the Molinist will have some instances where the only reason why

God doesn't bring about the action is because of free will, right? So on the Molinist view, you have possible worlds that are filtered out by libertarian free will to leave a smaller subset of world that are the feasible world.

So that filtering means that God's options are a little bit limited by free will.

And so there are some bad things that happen only because of that filtering out by libertarianism.

And so for those, yes, the Molinist will be able to say, no, God really wishes that things had been different, but free will is the only reason why he can't do that.

But what I'm saying is that the Molinist shouldn't say that about all evil. I think that the Molinist has the resources and should use those resources to be as close to the

Calvinist position on this to say plenty of God, plenty of bad things that are happening in this world are fully in the providence of God for a higher purpose that justifies

God wanting this to happen. So this is where, again, the Molinist is gonna come in ranges, right?

How well do they use the resources of Molinism to affirm God's providence over evil?

I would say some Molinist can get really close to the Calvinist view on this, and they have a much stronger view in my sense of God's providence over evil.

If I can plug, I think Kirk MacGregor, I've heard make some very strong statements in that direction, and I've clapped every time.

I think that when you have a Molinist who fully uses middle knowledge to make God fully in control of evil like that,

I think it's great existentially, at least experientially. In practice, he's going to really affirm things that are close to what the

Calvinist is saying about evil, and that's music to my ears. Now, obviously, he's still within a libertarian framework, and I think that's false, but on the range of false views, this is as close as it gets to what

I take to be true. All right, I'm going to just take two more questions because you've been going for a while, and I want to,

I can't even say I want to respect your time because I think I've disrespected your time. I'm sorry.

We can go all night. This is fine. All right, so how about three more questions? Is that okay?

Yeah. Okay, I don't know how this question, I can't get this on the screen, but someone is asking, this is a super chat.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it, by Jono. Why did no early church father from Justin Martyr until the early

Augustine teach determinism, but rather condemned it as heresy? That's their question.

Yeah, I don't know that they condemned it as heresy. Why did they not? I mean, even

Augustine, it's not obvious that he was teaching determinism, right? The word determinism is a modern philosophical term.

We've just come to put some careful, rigorous language onto concepts that were not necessarily super clear in everybody's mind.

So obviously the church fathers had all sorts of different views. Why is it that the question of, again,

I don't know that determinism was already discussed with Augustine. I think his view is entailing determinism, right?

So I do count Augustine, at least the late Augustine in my camp. And this is what

Calvin does by quoting him like all throughout the day in the institutes, there's

Augustine here and there, everywhere. But I don't think that determinism really is a debated philosophical question in Augustine.

What is one reason why it may not have come into sharp focus until then? That might well be because the controversy didn't really arise as much.

And it was occasioned by the writings of Pelagius. I think that this is oftentimes it kind of gets like that.

You only focus on defending the truth and affirming the truth when it's being challenged by the heretics.

And I think you can see that a lot in conversations on Christology, on the Trinity. What we take to be the

Orthodox side becomes really vocal when the people denying it are becoming vocal. So I think this is a plausible explanation for the chronology of when things really got serious with Augustine because Pelagius showed up.

That's my take. Now, I'm not a historian. So I'll leave that to students of church history.

I'm a philosopher and I'm focusing on their ideas rather than when they come from. Okay, thank you for that.

Irresistible truth. Thank you for the $5 super chat. For those who argue God causing evil takes evil intent to do so, is it fair to argue that God by definition can't transgress himself or transgress against himself or sin?

Let's see. So for those who argue God causing evil takes evil intent to do so, is it fair to argue that God by definition can't transgress against himself?

I see those two as two different questions and I'm not sure how to connect them. So let me just take one part after another.

So God causing evil takes evil intent to do. I think that's false.

And I think that's something that we've discussed in this show, that you can cause something that's evil.

That is like you can cause human beings to do some evil without yourself being evil if you have a good intent and you're

God and you know full well that that good intent will come about and you have only those good intentions in view.

So you have two different intentions. The sinful men are doing it for their evil purposes.

God is bringing it about for his good. So I think that that's a correct explanation for why

God is not evil even though we may say that he causes the evil to do. Once again, causation doesn't have to be deterministic.

So this might be something fully affirmed by the Molinist God, that God is not necessarily evil just because he brings about or weakly actualizes a state of affair that contains evil.

It's just that he's after the good and there's nothing wrong with that. So now is it fair to argue that God by definition can't transgress against himself?

Yeah, that's what all Christians are gonna say. He cannot transgress against himself and there are some things that are metaphysically impossible for God to do.

So you wanna be careful about what you put in that category as a Christian because there's lots of things that seem like they're wrong when we do them but not for God, right?

So again, killing, like taking the life of a human being is not something that's wrong for God to do but it's wrong for us to do.

So you wanna be careful about what you put in the bag of things that are impossible for God to do given his own goodness.

But yes, I would think that there are some plenty of things that we can put in there that we would say are categorically impossible for God to do.

All right, very good. And this is the last question. There are some, but again, I can't differentiate them because there's just so many comments here.

So can you be forced and free? Okay, so it's gonna depend on what we mean by forced.

Typically what we have in view is coercion. That is that it's either physical force or maybe threats.

That's what usually is used for coercion. And I have taken the position that coercion does exclude moral responsibility so that the answer here would be no.

You cannot be forced in that sense of coercion like as having physical force while at the same time being free.

So I agree that coercion removes moral responsibility. And then obviously I say that coercion is not relevantly similar to God's determination of the human will.

So I don't think that God uses physical force or threats in order to bring about what we freely do.

And therefore there's no relevant similarity between the case of coercion and the normal case of God determining what we do.

All right, I need to give you a round of applause. Whether folks agree with you or not, that was a lot of information.

We are up at two hours and 11 minutes. Again, like you Guillaume, I can talk about this stuff or even just listen to you talk about it forever.

But I think this, like the other two times you came on, there's just a lot of content that people wanna dig in and maybe they hear certain terms that they wanna dig into more and they can kind of do their own studying.

So thank you so much. This was excellent. And guys who are listening in, thank you so much for the super chats, the questions.

And thank you for just being here and benefiting from the channel.

So I do appreciate. If you haven't subscribed yet to Revealed Apologetics, please do so. Share the content if you find it helpful and go over to Amazon and check out

Guillaume's book if you want a more in -depth analysis of this topic. And again, at the end of the day, if you agree, disagree, make sure you're doing so with gentleness and respect, representing

Christ in the midst of these interesting and vigorous debates. That's all for this episode.

Guillaume, is there anything you'd like to say before we wrap this up? No, thank you very much, Eli. This was great. I'm glad that we were able to put this material out there because we were very thorough here.

So this has been a good opportunity to tackle, like, does Calvinism mean that God is the author of sin? I think we've really unpacked the question and I'm hoping this helps people to engage in this argument themselves.

Excellent. And this, folks who follow the podcast, I will be posting this along with my interview with Dr.

White, his post -debate interview that I had with him the other day. And do be a solid.

If you follow the podcast, write a positive review. That totally helps. And I love to hear what you guys have to say, especially if folks are benefiting from the material.