Debate: Do God's decrees violate Man's Free Will? with Matt Slick and Skylar Fiction

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So with that, the way we're going to do this tonight, basically the debate that we're going to be having is a formal debate.

So with that said, it's not going to be where they're just having a discussion.

The topic is, do God's decrees violate man's free will?

And the way we're going to do this debate is Skylar's going to start off with a 10 -minute opening, then

Matt's a 10 -minute opening. Skylar's going to do the first of 15 -minute rebuttals, then Matt, then we're going to have two cross -examinations that'll be 20 minutes each.

Each person will be given one minute to ask a question. The other person will have two minutes to answer.

And then a closing 10 minutes each of Skylar, then Matt. So that is the format. Before we get started,

I'm going to first bring in both of our, both the debaters here and let,

I'll start with you, Matt, if you want to go and introduce anything that, introduce yourself and then after, or actually

I should start with Skylar since he's speaking first. That is true. So Skylar, go for it.

And anything that you want to do, I know you've got a YouTube channel or anything that you want to promote or introduce yourself, go for it.

Hey everybody, I'm Skylar Fiction. I'm super excited to be here tonight. I have a

YouTube channel called the Skylar Fiction Show. If you just type Skylar Fiction with an AR, you will certainly find it out there.

I host discussions and debates with theists. We do biblical commentary. I got a cohost named

Dr. Josh Bowen who runs Digital Hammurabi. He's a biblical scholar. He co -hosts the show with me and is my partner in crime.

And of course, all hail Raptor Jesus. So thank you for being on here tonight. I really appreciate the opportunity. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year to all my friends out there.

All right, Matt, you want to introduce yourself? Yeah, I'm Matt Slick, the founder and director of karm .org,

Christian Apologetics Research Ministry. I've been doing it for 24 years. I'm a Christian apologist, do it full time. And websites had over 100 million visitors.

karm .org, C -A -R -M dot O -R -G. We're doing, get this, we're doing radio five days a week,

Monday through Friday for 15 years today. Today's the 15 year anniversary.

And praise God for that. So hopefully we'll have an interesting discussion tonight. We'll see how it goes.

All right, and so, folks, what's going to happen is when they get down to about a minute, you're going to see that clock pop in.

I may, I won't leave it up the whole time. But just so you guys know, that'll give you the idea.

So we don't have a buzzer or anything like that. I think these guys both have been doing enough debates.

They'll stay to time. So, Skylar, you're going to you're going to start. You ready?

Oh, I'm ready to go when you are, yeah. All right, let me get the clock going here. All right, so.

All right, I'm good to go. All right. Go, hold on one sec. No worries here, please.

Yeah, why is the clock not starting? Oh, it's the wrong clock, that's why, hold on.

All right, go for it. So let me say that I am super excited to have this debate tonight, because this is a topic that I've talked with Calvinists quite a bit with on my channel.

Talked a little bit with about with it, I'm sorry, a little bit about it with Matt Slick in our last two debates.

That wasn't, of course, the specific topic we were discussing. But it's been a struggle for me to get a

Calvinist to actually articulate how people have free will with the concept of like God's decree of will.

So one of the things I think what we could start with is, and by the way, everything that I am going to go over and all the information that I'm going to give you definitions wise all come from karm .org.

These are all Matt Slick's definitions. I didn't get them from anywhere else. I didn't go to other Calvinists. I literally took everything off of his website.

So all of my arguments will be focused around those particular definitions. So let's talk a little bit about what about God's decrees, right?

And perhaps I'll just go right into quoting his website. So the decrees of God are his eternal purpose, according to whereby he has foreordained whatever will come to pass.

Now, what does it mean to foreordain something? On Matt Slick's website, it says it is the same as predestination, which means that God ordains what will happen in history and in salvation.

So I think it's very important to start there. So keep in mind that anything that happens throughout history,

I don't, I'm getting a lot of feedback. I don't know if maybe some could mute their mic, but there's a lot I keep hearing feedback from somebody on there. But anyways, it doesn't matter.

The thing is, is there is anything that's ever happened throughout history is preordained by God.

Don't no matter how awful, how good, the fact that I'm having this conversation right now, preordained by God.

And just once again, what is preordained? To be preordained by definition, this is the same as predestination, which means that God ordains whatever will happen in history or salvation.

Now, last conversation I had with Matt, I gave some very explicit questions to Matt.

I said, hey, you know, when children are molested, is that ordained by God? If God decrees a child's going to be molested, let me say it like that.

Will it happen? And he said, yes. But this isn't the only thing. It's any type of terrible, awful thing that's ever going to happen.

9 -11, you name it. You could fill in the blank with whatever awful thing you can think about within human existence.

That's all preordained by God because of his wills. Now, how is it if God, it's easy to think about it.

Let's use an analogy. Either God like a architect or a computer programmer.

All right. God writes out the blueprint or programs the code. Now, people can't go against God's will because he's already preordained it.

I mean, you could use particular scriptures like, and he quotes these on his website.

So let's do like Ephesians 1 -11. All things are done according to God's plan and decision. And God chose to use it to be, sorry,

God chose us to be his own people in union with Christ before, because of his own purpose, based on what he has decided from the very beginning.

So all the things that I had mentioned, 9 -11, child molestation, this is all because this is what

God wanted. Everything's exactly what God wanted. In fact, let's look at a couple other definitions here. What do

I want to get into? Oh, here, let's do the decree of will of God. The decree of will of God is that which

God's sovereign will, that we may or may not know depending on whether or not

God reveals it to us. The decree of will is God's direct will. He causes something to be.

So God causes these things to be. Not only does he cause it, he actually plans it.

So, I mean, well, that makes sense if you were to plan out all of human existence. If you would actually plan out all of human existence, obviously, and people can't go against his will, it's going to happen exactly the way that God's planned, because, you know,

God is sovereign. And what does it mean for God to be sovereign? According to Matt Slick, sovereignty is the right of God to do as he wishes.

This implies that there are no external influences upon him, and that also he has the ability to exercise power control according to his will.

So everything is according to his will. Now, think about it this way. If God wrote the blueprint and everything's going to go along his blueprint, how could it be possible that people could have free will?

Free will, defined by Matt Slick on his website, is the freedom of self -determination. Well, people don't have self -determination under Calvinism.

It's already predetermined. Under predestination, it's the ability to make choices.

A choice is free if it is consistent with a person's desires and nature. Free will, actually, let's leave it right there.

So how can someone freely choose to do something if God has already preordained it?

He wrote the blueprint. Now, what you'll oftentimes hear from Calvinists is this idea that somehow people freely choose to sin.

Now, this is the aspect that I've never actually been able to hear Calvinists articulate, and this is what

I'm going to be looking for in this debate, and I hope that I've proven wrong. I've talked to a lot of them. I had a Calvinist last week, and no one can seem to say how

God can pre -plan something with his decree of will, and he's got a couple different wills, but how

God can preordain everything, and at the same time, someone can freely choose to do something. At best, what you're going to have is some kind of illusion of free will, where the people involved think they are actually committing free choices, especially, once again, because people cannot go against the will of God.

If God decrees something, it will happen, just like the example that I gave and the question

I asked Matt in our last debate. If God decrees a child is going to be molested, it is going to get molested.

Now, Calvinists will oftentimes argue there's indirect decrees and direct decrees, right, but the slight difference is basically with an indirect decree.

Instead of just making man X do something, which I don't know how you would argue that you're not making

X do something, that's basically an indirect decree. We're just setting up the pieces so something would happen.

So how am I going to say this? So that's going to be, I think, the challenge for Matt Slick during this debate, how is he going to articulate freedom away from a blueprint or a computer program?

A computer program can't rewrite the program. A blueprint can't rewrite itself.

Make sure I got everything covered before we keep going here. Decrees of God, sovereignty, decree of will.

Oh, yeah, let me do this here, too. This was a really good part. So this is a part where we kind of go, this is from an article from Karm, or maybe it was a document, exactly.

It talks about predestination and election, right? So what is election? Election is the sovereign act of God where he chooses people or individuals to carry out his purpose in the world.

God's election is not based on the quality, any quality in the individual or groups of people, nor is it based on any foreseen ability in them.

It's not about what they're going to do in the future. It's not about, it's just who he chooses, our group of people, nor is it based on any foreseen ability in them.

God is the one who elects people out of his sovereign will, whatever he wants for his good pleasure. That's basically what sovereign means, as I read earlier.

He is the one who chooses the people. People do not elect themselves. Okay. So right there, actually, let me add this on.

This will really kind of nail it down here, and then I'll probably wrap it up. I'll be probably right about 10 minutes. Let me look at my time here.

Yeah, about a minute and a half. So this is from that paper I was saying on the way. You must note that God's predestined people, as in Ephesians 1 .11,

1 .5, demonstrate that this is, however, a controversy to the nature of predestination. In the Reformed Calvinist camp, predestination includes individuals.

In other words, the Reformed doctrine of predestination is the God predestined whom he wants to be saved, and that without the predestination, none would be saved.

The non -Reformed camp states that God predestines people to salvation, but these people freely choose to follow

God on their own. Now, what is it? So the people who aren't Calvinist, non -Reformed positions say that they would freely choose to follow

God. That sort of sounds like free will there, but that's not what Calvinists believe.

But these people freely choose God. In other words, in the non -Reformed perspective, God is reacting to the will of the individuals.

This is, are they going to accept God? Are they the one who initiates the will?

That would be the choosing, the part where I talked about free will earlier. God is reacting to the will of the individuals and the predestining them only because they chose

God using their will. Whereby contrast, the Reformed position states that people choose

God only because he predestines them first. So certainly, in that sense, people don't have free will in the idea of your election, not election, salvation.

So you don't get to freely be elected. You don't get to freely choose God. God has to elect you.

Part of these wills, actually, part of these wills, funny enough, is that he puts everything, your desire, what's going to happen, all of these things are all built in.

It's all part of the blueprint, exactly what's happening now. Thank you. I appreciate the opening statement. Right on time, too.

Good job. All right. So I will bring Matt in. All right.

I'm looking. Hold on. Please, windows open.

Where am I? Where is it? Where is it? It's right over there to the left. You can see that on the left, right?

Yeah, it's on his left. I don't see it. I thought it was down to the bottom.

Yeah. Please, windows open. This is good. Hold on. Skyler, help me bust on Matt.

Like double teaming. Oh, there it is. There it is. Okay. Okay. You ready? Wow. Yeah, I got three large monitors and a bunch of windows open.

I was taking notes. So all right. All right. You can hear me okay? All right.

Well, first of all, thanks, Skyler. I appreciate you going to my website and using it as a resource.

That's good. And I do appreciate that you're seeking to try and build a case.

I will still urge you, and I'll say this again, that you're welcome to sit with me sometimes and I can explain how these things work together better.

It could take more than just 10 minutes in a heated discussion. But nevertheless, I'll just go through my notes from what you said.

How do people have free will along with God's decreed will? Because God decrees that they have free will.

And that may sound like a verbal juxtaposition here, but no, it's what it is.

Free will. You didn't define. Yes, you did. You actually did. You went to my site. Free will is the freedom of self -determination.

So that's good. And that is what it is. And in the Reformed camp, and I believe the biblical camp, we don't deny free will.

We don't say that people are forced to do anything by God. We don't say that he puts their hand on a gun and pulls a trigger and says, see, this is what you did.

So therefore, you're responsible for it. And this is a common objection that Arminians make.

And it's a common objection that atheists make. Atheists and the Arminians frequently argue in the same kind of sense because they're man -centered, not

God -centered. Nevertheless, so you misapplied some stuff.

God's decretive will, where God causes things to be. You misapplied the issue. You quoted decretive will, but misapplied it in the sense that you failed to understand that there is also in the decretive will, there's the permissive will.

God permits people to be able to do things against his, what we call the prescriptive will.

God says, don't lie, don't cheat, don't steal. But he permits them to lie, cheat, and steal. They have their freedom to be able to do this.

He's not forcing them to lie, to cheat, and to steal. He does not want them to in the sense of his prescriptive will.

But in another sense, it is within his will to ordain their permission or give them that ability and freedom to be able to lie, to cheat, and to steal.

This is within God's ordination. And his, what we say, his decrees in that sense to be able to provide the circumstances by which people are freely able to rebel against God.

You may say, well, they're not free if it's decreed. Nothing that you have said means that they cannot have freedom if God has decreed something to be.

If God has decreed a free will choice, it's still free by the very definition of it being decreed to be free will.

So for an example, I can cause you to freely do something. Now, if I can demonstrate that I can cause you to freely do something, and it's still free will, but yet you've been caused to do it, your whole objection fails.

So let me give you an illustration of something. So Skyler, if I was sitting in a room with you, and we were discussing this, and you wear a hat, and I wanted you to take your hat off, and I didn't tell you that I want you to take your hat off, but that's what

I want you to do. I could do a number of things to get you to take your hat off, to cause you to take your hat off freely.

For example, I could say, what the heck is that on top of your hat? I hope that thing's not going to sting you.

You can go grab that thing and look. Now, here's an example. If I were to say that, does it mean then that though I caused you by my action to do something

I wanted you to do, does it mean you did not have free will in the process? Of course not. You freely chose to do what you desired to do in light of the circumstance that I brought into existence and said, this is what

I want you to do. I could do all kinds of things. We'll just call that the take your hat off your head illustration.

But I could cause you to take your hat off of your head, but the causing of it is not forcing you to, but it is causative, in that the actions that I put in place will bring you to your free will choice to be able to do what

I want you to do. Your free will is not violated. You have free will. I have caused you to do what

I want you to do. So you see, it is certainly possible to have someone be caused to freely act.

Your criticism is that God, if he decrees somebody to do something, that it means they're not free to do it.

Well, first of all, you have to understand there's what's called the direct and the indirect decrees of God.

The direct decrees of God are the direct causative decrees of God. Let there be light, et cetera, where when

God decrees and declares certain things to happen because that's what he decides and is by his direct action, that's what occurs.

He can have an indirect decree, for example, in the garden of Adam and Eve, where he allows the enemy, the serpent to come in and deceive

Eve. And by that, Adam and Eve disobeyed him. It was not

God's prescriptive will that they disobey him and that he prescribes them to obedience and moral fidelity to him.

But it was within his permissive will to allow them the freedom to be able to do that. And they certainly freely chose to rebel.

Now, you might come back and say, well, wait a minute. God put all the pieces in place. Yes, he did. Undoubtedly, he put the tree of the knowledge of good and evil there, the tree of life there.

He allowed the serpent to come in. He allowed the discussion to occur. Well, then

God's responsible. No, he's not responsible for the moral failure of Adam and Eve. And the reason he's not responsible for the moral failure of Adam and Eve is because they freely chose to rebel.

God did not force them. If God had done some chemical thing in their brain that forced them to be able to say something and do something, then

God would have been directly responsible for their rebellion. But that's not the case. What we do have there, as the scriptures itself teaches, that God arranged and allowed the circumstances by which

Adam and Eve freely chose to rebel against God. By definition, it was free.

If you say, again, just to reiterate, he put the pieces in there. They had no choice.

Well, there's a sense in which they had a choice. There's a sense in which they don't have a choice. If God foreordains whatever shall come to pass, why is it that is foreordained?

Is it because he knows what they're going to freely choose? Well, that's one position.

The Armenians tend to go with that, and I have problems with that, but that's another discussion. I would say that whatever is potentially existing,

God, out of an infinite number of potential possibilities, brought into existence the actuality that he chose.

And that actuality includes the freewill choices of those individuals. So therefore, he knows exactly what those freewill choices.

And he caused so -and -so to remove the hat. By saying, what's on top of your head?

Because that's what God chose to happen, and yet the freedom of the one who removes the hat is still in place.

God can certainly do this in creation. He is the sovereign king. He is the one who can work all things after the counsel of his will, as Ephesians 1 .11

says. Now, you said the reformed doctrine of predestination.

God predestines those whom he wants to be saved, and without this, none will be saved. That's correct. Jesus says in John 6, 65, you cannot come to me unless it's been granted to you from the father.

That's what Jesus says. Now, if you don't like what Jesus says, you don't like that doctrine, well, then you can just take it up with Jesus.

But that's it. It's not just simply a Calvinist teaching. It's what the scriptures teach. And that's why

I hold to what we call Calvinism, because it agrees with the scriptures. And that's the only reason.

So people who are not Calvinist say that people can freely choose to follow God. All right. Well, that's rather a humanistic idea in that they think that man is somehow free in and of himself in an independent fashion from God's sovereignty and control, in spite of Ephesians 111, which says

God works all things after the counsel of his will. Even the free will choice that the Arminians like to argue on the same side as the atheists about this issue against the

Calvinists and God's sovereignty. They certainly can argue, but they have to argue against the scriptures and with the scriptures.

Now, if you want to have an Arminian discussion, as you brought up, we can discuss that. And I can discuss why their failure to understand the biblical position is apparent.

And I would have, I would invite Arminians to come in and discuss this with me. We can go through the scriptures, but you don't affirm the scriptures,

Skylar. So I have to use logic and scripture as well. So nevertheless,

I don't know how much time I've got left, but I would say this, that I have demonstrated, logically, thank you, a minute left, that God certainly can bring about whatever he desires and still maintain the freedom and the free will of those individuals who are made in his image, just as I can cause you to take off your hat in any number of ways,

Skylar, by saying there's a scorpion, a spider, a bug, whatever it is on your hat, and you take your hat off.

And I can cause you to do that, and yet your free will is not violated. And God, who is a sovereign above all things, can certainly bring about circumstances by which free will individuals will certainly do whatever

God decides and wants them to do. And to call it a computer program is a misrepresentation of the issue.

To call it a blueprint is a misrepresentation of the issue. God allows us our freedom, but he's above our freedom, nonetheless.

And as Proverbs 121 says, God moves the heart of the king where he wishes it to go. God is a sovereign.

This is consistent with Christian theology and the nature of God himself. Amen. All right, that's time.

All right, so bring Skylar in, and we're going to have 15 minutes for rebuttal.

Let me just reset our clock here. All right, are you ready?

Skylar, are you ready? I don't know if you muted yourself. Hold on.

Unmute. Sorry about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did. Yeah, no, I'm good. Yeah, I don't want you talking for 10 minutes, and on your rebuttal, no one hears it.

No, that wouldn't be good. All right, you got the floor.

All right, my man. All right, so I guess now, so far, I haven't actually heard that mechanism yet to how people have free will, and God can preordain everything, right?

Just simply saying, let me see, God decrees they have free will doesn't mean anything, because it contradicts what's actually happening.

Let's once again look at what it means when God predestines things. Predestination is the doctrine that God has foreordained all things that which will come to pass.

Now, what does it mean to foreordain is the same as predestination, which means that God who has ordained what will happen in history, it's a key, and salvation.

He's written like the blueprint. I don't know why I said it's not a good analogy, but it's exactly what it is.

You could say written a book, you could use a computer program, but everything is preordained by God.

Everything that has happened is exactly the way it is supposed to happen. It's not a matter of like him allowing things to happen.

They're going to happen because he used his will to make it come. And his will must, his,

I'm sorry, what he decrees must happen.

People cannot go against his decrees. As I said before, like in the last debate, when

I asked Matt, if God decrees, is a child going to get molested? That child is going to get molested.

It cannot go another way. So what I haven't heard at all during this is how besides just saying people,

God decrees they have free will, which doesn't, it's meaningless because they don't have a way to go against it.

If you don't have a way to go against free will to make another choice, the only thing you have is the illusion that you actually have a choice in this situation.

Because once again, what is free will? The freedom of self -determination. You don't have self -determination.

Things are determined by God, as I read earlier in, let's see here.

Oh, this is my other page. Let me pull this up here. In Ephesians 1 .11, as he quoted, all things are done according to God's plan and decision.

And God chose us to be his own people in union with Christ because of his own purposes based on what he has decided from the very beginning.

He's already decided all this. Now, if you're arguing that people can go against his will, you have an argument, but that's not what you're saying.

You're saying the will has to be followed and according to your website, that's exactly what you're saying. Um, so I'm having really difficulties trying to, like, this is the same thing

I run into all the time when I talk to Calvinists is nobody seems to be able to articulate. This is a different,

I will say that you've given a different answer, but I think it's less satisfactory than the answers that I get.

Most people with Calvinists will just point to Romans 9 and say, hey, you know, who are you, the clay to tell the potter, uh, basically how to, what to do with it.

Um, and there's, and once again, like we, we talk about free will listen. Yeah, of course I'm not an Arminian.

I don't believe in your religion. I'm a raptor bait, you know, all hail raptor Jesus. But the thing is, uh, I can still show how, what you're saying.

You're saying that the difference between an Arminian and a, uh, a

Calvinist is that people freely choose to accept Jesus and that they on their own volition can make that choice under Calvinism.

They can't make that choice. The only way that they can come to God is if God offers that grace.

And it isn't based on anything. It's not based on he going to act or anything that they've done. It's just predetermined before they're even born.

Right. Of course, God knows what's going to happen in the future because he, he wrote out exactly what was going to happen in the future.

Let's talk about the hat thing, right? If God preordains that my hat is going to come off my head, it's going to come off my head under your belief system.

It doesn't matter the methodology, how you choose to do it. Right. The point is, is he's the ultimate cause.

He's the one who caused it to come off my head. And there's no way I could have kept it on there.

It doesn't matter if it's whether you like you're trying to take it off, you, you know, lying to me and pretending there's a bug on top of it, whatever you said there, uh, which guy we know

God wouldn't lie, of course. But, uh, the, the point is, is that he preordains the hat will come off and there's nothing

I can do to stop it. You'll now I could have yelled, but I'm, I'm really,

I said, I'm not, I'm looking for the mechanism here. And just telling me that somehow that you've got to decrease free will, but then free will is not actually happening.

It's confusing. And it's frankly, I don't think a satisfactory answer by any means. Uh, so now you said something and I'll be interested later on when we get to the back and forth about in, in one sense, they have a choice.

And in one sense, they don't. So I'll be instant. I'm interested to see what the choice in what sense they have a choice and what's the sense they don't,

I'm going to imagine the sense they don't have is they can't go against the will of God. Um, what else

I got here? Freely choose to do something. Oh, I was going to hit on your permissive will.

Let's go. And I have the, let me pull up these. That was something I did not have up for your, the remissive will of God is that which

God does not decree to occur, nor is it, uh, his will, since it is not in accordance with his law,

God's permissive will is his will to permit sin to occur. Now, this is once again, a contradiction, how are you going to say that God permits something to happen, but God plans it out because as your website said, once again, he has planned out all of human history.

Everything that has ever happened is because this is exactly the way that God wanted it.

So how is, how can one permit something to happen? Well, I mean, I guess in the sense you could write out the plan, the blueprint or the computer program, whatever's going on here, he could write it out and then he could sit back and let his plan go through.

Like in that sense, he could permit it to happen. But in the context and what we would use, like I permitted my child to play video games or I permitted, uh,

I don't know my dog to go outside. We wouldn't use permit within that kind of context here. So I, I, it doesn't really saying that he permits something was permissive.

Well, I really, I actually think this is just a direct contradiction. Frankly, I mean, that's not the topic of the debate. I'd love to debate that another time, but it's, it's frankly, just, it is a contradiction.

Uh, let's go back. Let me just make sure I haven't missed anything here. Uh, I mean, one more second.

Let me just make sure I got everything that I want to see here. Like for instance, if people could do otherwise, then

God's plan would be contingent on mankind's decisions and mankind would have to get some kind of glory for God's plan and succeeding.

God would be depending on mankind. So it's obviously not up to their decision. This is, you know, this is

God's plan here. So the God's plan would be contingent. If it was up to them, it would be contingent on them.

And obviously under your theology, you guys don't believe that. What else do I want to hit here?

I, and I'm just going to, once again, I'm sure to go over some of these terms once again, just so it's very clear for the audience. What is the decree of will? Decree of will of God is that which is

God's sovereign will, uh, that we may or may not know depending on the, on whether or not

God reveals it to us. God's decree of will is his direct will where he causes something to be.

He is causing, uh, everything to be. He is the ultimate cause.

He is the one who planned it out. Once again, what does it mean to be sovereign? Sovereign is the right of God to do as he pleases.

That implies that there is no external influence. Humans aren't influencing. There are no external influences on him.

This is all part of God's plan. Uh, the decrees of God are his eternal purpose.

Everything that is happening throughout history is his eternal purpose according to his will, whereby he foreordained whatever will come to pass.

Foreordained, which means that God ordains what will happen in history and in salvation, not just salvation, in history, the

Holocaust, 9 -11, whatever. Think about whatever awful thing he planned it out for his glory.

And then he holds people responsible for the way they can't go against.

Uh, so I would just say that these are some things we really need to think about. And once again, what is free will? Free will is the freedom of self -determination.

Human beings don't have self -determinations and, and actions independent of external causes. Well, how are your actions independent of external causes?

If God's decree was for you to do action X, how could, how could anything human beings do be independent of external causes?

If from the very beginning, God has planned out everything. Now, the reason God knows what's going to happen is because he wrote the plan.

So I think that there are quite a bit of problems when we get into this idea of free will and predestination, election and Calvinism.

I'll admit that I think biblically, I think that it's more consistent, the Calvinist theology that I think some

Arminian positions are, but it's a whole separate topic, I guess. Uh, what else do

I want to go here? Oh, let's talk about, so sin.

Let's talk about what sin is. Sin is that that is contrary to the law or will of God. Okay.

So if sin is that what is contrary to the will of God, how is God causing, as we see with the decree of will, which says

God caused, how is it that God is able to cause people to sin? Now on Matt's website, to be fair, he says that he'll basically add within these contexts.

Well, it doesn't mean that he's causing the sin, but how could you say that he's not causing people to sin when he predestined everything that was going to happen in history from the very beginning?

It's another contradiction. So I, you know, I think we could wrap it up.

I'll concede the rest of my time. I'll give you like the last four minutes. I think I've said everything I want to say. Uh, thank you.

I appreciate it. All right. I'll bring Matt in. All right.

Let me reset the clock here, Matt. Okay. You ready?

Yeah, I guess so. Go ahead. I could use some ice cream right now.

A little chocolate would be nice. Oh, that's my time, isn't it? I better get going. Um, so Skyler said that I have not revealed the mechanism of how people can have free will and God can ordain everything.

Well, actually I did. I gave you an illustration, the remove your hat illustration, that I can, um,

I can cause, directly cause you to free, freely do something.

I can predetermine that you will freely do something. If you and I were to ever meet, you probably would make sure your hat was on real tight and you never remove it in my presence.

Who knows? But I could certainly cause you to do certain things. Say, you know, I met for coffee.

Um, like I did to a friend of mine once. I did this. I had a bowl of,

I said, what's some ice cream? He says, yeah, let's get some ice cream. I go in the kitchen. I get a plastic bowl. I had vanilla ice cream and I put a white napkin in it.

And what I wanted to do was to cause him to react with a mild panic when

I dumped it on him. And so I came out there and, and, uh, I was, this is my desire for him.

And he's a good friend of mine. And so what I did was I, right where I had it to, I tripped and this bowl of ice cream comes tumbling into his lap and he literally flinched backwards and tried to crawl backwards up in the seat.

And I'm laughing and he called me a couple of, of names and stuff like that. And we both laughed about it. We were done. I directly caused him to do something

I wanted him to do. I didn't make him, uh, I didn't violate his free will.

He freely chose to do what he did. Just as if I were to say, what's that on your hat? That thing is really interesting on your hat.

Uh, you might very well, you know, just take a look at all that. What is all that? So whatever. It's not a problem.

It's a mechanism that God can certainly bring circumstances to bear by which people do those things, which

God wants them to do freely. Just as I can cause you to bring your, to take your hat off in the circumstances.

There's your mechanism. You say no mechanism. There it is. And you didn't refute this by saying that, yes,

I can certainly bring a circumstances to bear to cause you to do certain things, but you're doing it freely.

You have not refuted that. Anyway. So my notes, uh, yes, everything that's supposed to happen will happen just as God decides will happen.

Yes, that's true. Just as God, as I said in the opening statement can work circumstances by which a person can freely do what

God desires him to do. Just like I illustrated with you. I did. Um, and yes, if God desires a child get molested, it will occur.

But you see the problem with that kind of a statement is what it is, is a half truth kind of statement that has these things attached to it.

You're not being very clear. And so when we say that, that, uh, God decrees it, well, what do we mean that he directly causes it by what he wants?

I really want that child to be raped or molested. No, but in another sense, which you went in later, the indirect decree, which

God says, I'm going to permit to allow people their sin and rebellion to be atheist, to be agnostic, to be

Muslims, to be whatever in their rebellion, it gets a truth of what he has revealed. And so it is his desire to do that.

And his decree is to desire to do that as well, but he's not causing them to do it.

Nor does he cause people to be molested. Now, yesterday I did a, no, two days ago,

I did a, um, a Patreon video on the issue of suffering.

And I've been thinking about this. Why does God allow so many Christians through the centuries to suffer unspeakable horrors, burned alive, skin ripped from their flesh, ripped and torn apart by animals, put out on frozen lakes, naked to freeze to death.

And they pray for deliverance and God decides not to. Well, he decides not to, and I could give various reasons why that might be the case, but it is the will of God that they suffer.

Why would it be the will of God that they suffer? To glorify his name, to receive greater reward in heaven, to demonstrate the sacrificial nature of love, to emulate the sacrificial nature of the sacrifice of Christ himself as he submitted humbly to others.

There could be a multitude of reasons by which God allows bad things to happen.

And by him allowing them doesn't mean that in his prescriptive will, he desires evil to occur, but in his permissive will, he does.

And his permissive and his prescriptive will both work within the sovereign will of God, his sovereign predestination and decree to allow these things to happen by the free will of these people who choose to rebel and act in a manner contrary to what he has revealed he wants for them morally.

And then you repeated that I did not present the mechanism. Yes, I did. The force you to remove your hat analogy is that, and you said that we don't have self -determination if God determines it.

Well, let me ask you, if I determine that you do something like remove your hat by saying something and you remove the hat, does it mean that you did not determine it yourself?

Does it mean that if we just say determination is that thing which we want to occur, if I want you to remove your hat and you freely do because I say something's on it or I pour something on it, or I do something, whatever, you know, a whole host of things that could cause you to freely do that.

I have determined that you do that. I have in that loose sense of the word ordain that you do it, very loose sense.

I have free will chosen to have you do something by your free will to do what I want you to do.

You've not refuted that. You have not refuted that ability and that reality and that illustration right there.

If you can refute that, then we can move on. But if you can't refute it, then the mechanism which you are asking for has been laid out before you in the sense of an illustration.

I have shown you that logic allows someone to cause another person to do something freely without forcing them to do it, but yet they're caused to do it.

I've demonstrated how that's the case. You've not refuted it. Nor have you given me, and I'd like to see if you could.

I don't believe you can do it right now, and I don't believe it's fair for me to ask you to do it right now because I think these kinds of things

I'm going to ask you about take a little bit of time to think about on your own, but I could say to you, could you please give me premise one, premise two, or premise three with a conclusion demonstrating the illogic of why decree does not work with our free will.

Now, I'm not asking you to do that right now. I honestly don't believe that's a fair thing for me to do because it takes time to work those things out, but if you would be so kind as to do that, if you said, yeah,

I'm going to try that and I'll email it to you, okay, and if you don't want to, that's okay as well, but I think that what's necessary is that you present some logical problem.

Just saying it doesn't work doesn't mean it doesn't work, but nothing in God's self -determination means that we cannot also be determined.

Nothing in God's self -determination doesn't mean that we can't also accomplish what we desire. Just as I have shown you repeatedly with the force you to remove your hat analogy, let's call it now just the hat illustration.

I've shown this to you and you've not refuted it. You just have continued to say it's not possible.

And the reason we Calvinists only or believe, oh, my notes are correct here. The reason we Calvinists believe that we can freely choose

God is because we believe that God first regenerates us. See, a lot of our minions get this wrong, and this is just a theological point, is to say that God changes us internally, makes us born again, and we freely choose him.

He can certainly, in this logic, bring anybody to freely choose and trust in him by his regenerative work, his regenerative, gracious work upon their souls.

As he causes us to be born again, 1 Peter 1 .3, we're born again, not of our own will, John 1 .13, and we are changed, 2

Corinthians 5 .17, made new creatures, et cetera. I can go through the scriptures on this, but that's mainly for the Armenians if they want to discuss that with me.

But the idea here within the biblical perspective, and particularly the Calvinist one, is that regeneration precedes faith, the free will ability to choose

God, which is enabled by God's freely acting upon us, freely changing us, and then that change results in our free will ability to choose him.

Now, you may not understand that. I don't mean that in a derogatory sense. Please understand, I'm not saying, you don't get that, you're stupid,

I don't believe that. But sometimes concepts just take a little bit to understand, and I've had debates with people where I don't understand the concept they're getting at, and I ask them to repeat it to me.

So I don't mean anything condescending to you whatsoever in that. But if it is confusing, we can go over it again and again.

And so, let's see, I'll go through my notes. In one sense, people have free will to do something, and in another sense, they don't.

It's kind of a thing. That's not the exact wording I want to go with, but I'll use it as a springboard.

One of the discussions I remember hearing or reading about was the man who nailed Christ's wrist to the cross.

Did he have the free will to say no? In one sense, yes, in one sense, no, but it has to be yes.

And the reason it has to be yes is because he was freely doing it, but yet God ordained that he'd do it.

Well, God certainly ordained all the circumstances by which he would freely act, and that's the thing you've got to understand.

That God can certainly ordain the circumstances, knowing all outcomes and possible outcomes of any individual.

I'm not going to go Molinistic here, but he could certainly do that and bring about whatever he desires, and he can certainly bring people into a place of having a free will desire and action based on something he knows about them.

It's certainly possible. I'm not saying all these things are how things are doing. I don't want Molinists to get in here and use this because that's another discussion from their time.

I have reasons against Molinism, but for now, I'm going to use this illustration here. God can certainly bring certain things about.

You know, I don't like clowns, for example. I do not like clowns. They scare me. I don't know why.

I think I got an idea why. So my friends know this, and if they were to bring a clown into my house,

I'm going to react negatively, and they would get a big joke out of it. I'm out the back door. I don't like them.

They're freaky. I don't watch clown movies. I don't watch clown horror, this and that. It's just the way I am.

Now, God knows that. Can he cause me to walk left instead of right by bringing a clown down the street?

Yes. Does it mean that I have not acted freely? Of course I have acted freely.

Could God have ordained that clown to be where he is at that certain place and time?

Of course. Or a picture of a clown to move? Yeah, there's a thousand ways which

God can bring me to walk left rather than right. Maybe he can bring some

Mormon missionaries to my left, and I'm going to go that way because I'm going to go talk to them. You see, there's lots of ways.

If he were to bring Mormon missionaries by on a couple of bikes, he knows I'm going to go talk to them because that's the way

I'm put together. Yeah, I'm not scared of clowns. That's right, Frank. And so, you know, he knows

I'm going to do that. He could certainly ordain my turning left, my turning right, my saying yes, my saying no, and a countless number of ways of bringing circumstances to bear in which

I will freely act according to his ultimate desire. You've not refuted that, and that certainly is a mechanism by which

God can do that. So you've not demonstrated logically that God's decrees means we're not free within those decrees.

You've just simply stated it. You've implied that we're not free because he decrees. I'm showing you how you can decree and we can be free.

You've not shown your case. How much time do we have left? Just incidentally. I don't know how much time.

Two minutes. Oh, okay. And so let's see. Looking through some of my notes.

Okay, you may not like the idea of the, he asked, how could any human being do?

He says, how could anything human beings do be independent of external causes if from the very beginning,

God planned out everything? That was an interesting statement. And I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt,

Skylar, in that I don't believe you worded it properly. You know, when we're talking, we don't often don't say things perfectly, but that statement doesn't make any sense because we never, we as Christians do not say that human beings can act independently of external causes because all things that we choose are dependent some way to some effect on the external cause.

For one thing, God brought us into existence. We're not eternally independent of him.

So there are eternal external causes, but the very nature of God's decrees is redeeming us, is creating us, et cetera.

It's a poor choice of words, but I'm not going to harp on you on that. I think you could do it better. As I said, you know, we, we often will say things that we,

I'm going to rephrase that and that's okay. And, oh, and by the way, to predestine everything doesn't mean he directly causes everything.

To predestine people to do something bad doesn't mean he's causing them to do something bad. This is something you have to understand.

And, uh, you have the, you made the mistake of thinking that predestination means, uh, in every case, direct causation.

And no, it doesn't. And I can give you verses that show the revelation of God where people are predestined by God, yet they're responsible.

Acts 4 .27, respectively with Acts 2 .23. I guess my time's up. There you go.

Oh, I've got a minute. A minute. Hey, I'm good. That's all right. Okay. All right.

We'll reset the clock to, uh, 20 minutes, uh, for the rebuttal section.

And just give me one second to get the clock set. All right.

So, uh, I'm going to put myself out. I'll come in when it gets close to the 20 minutes.

Skylar, you have 20 minutes. Uh, again, this is, uh, you will get one minute to ask a question.

Matt gets two minutes to answer. If you feel Matt does not answer, uh, just let me know.

We re, we stop the clock and we give you a chance to re -ask the question. All right. So your turn, your time starts now.

You're muted. I'll reset the clock. All right. Sorry about that.

I keep muting. I don't want to make any noise when Matt's talking. No, you don't have to worry about that because I just put you in the, in the timeout.

So. Oh, okay. Perfect. You call the timeout. Yeah, I did. That's true. All right.

I'll reset the clock. Go. Thank you. Uh, okay. Is there anything decreed by God that won't happen?

No. Okay. Uh, does God, as, uh, as in predestination, uh, it's, uh, actually, uh, uh,

I'm sorry. For ordained, it says is the same as predestination, which means that God ordains what will happen in history and in salvation is everything that has happened throughout all of human history, uh, preordained by God.

Yes. Okay. Can anybody go against God's will?

Which kind of will? Oh, I'm supposed to. Yeah. You can't. Yes. You got to ask your questions.

Okay. Uh, I can't answer the question properly unless you define your terms more, uh, precisely.

Any will. Can people go against any will of God's? Can they go against his prescriptive will?

Any will. Any will. That was my question. Can they go against any will? Yes. Okay.

Which will can they go against? The prescriptive will of God. Uh, was the, was the prescriptive will is the sin, if I recall, uh, that for the action.

So, uh, can you explain how can, uh, oh, actually, let me ask you this question.

Is human desire decreed by God? So what I desire is that part of the predestination?

What is already preordained. So the desire to sin is preordained by God.

Uh, in the broad sense of God, allowing both the direct and the indirect causation of those things.

Yes. Okay. So God, we've already, we've already said God already plans out everything throughout history.

Everything's exactly the way it's supposed to happen. According to his will, your desire to do something like I'm desiring to hold my phone right now.

Uh, that desire to hold my phone is because of God's will. Correct. Uh, in the broad sense.

Yes. You're being too broad, but okay. Can I, is there a possibility that I won't hold this phone right now?

Yes. Yes. How could I, if it is ordained and I can't go against God's will, how is it possible if it's the will of God for me to hold this phone right now, how could

I go against his will? It would be, um, possible if God ordained that you go against his will.

But that would be going with his will because his will would be to have me hold the phone. It wouldn't be me going against his will.

His will would be me for me to hold the phone. Isn't that correct? Well, if God has a prescriptive will in a moral sense, then he can certainly allow you to act in a manner consistent with your own immorality and, uh, and work against God.

If God desires that you hold the phone, then he, what he'll do is when he desires that you don't hold the phone, he will arrange it so you don't hold the phone, but he will do all of those, uh, according to the freedom that you desire and you want in your rebellion against him and that trying to demonstrate, uh, how his sovereignty isn't true.

Is my desire to sin part of God's plan? Yes. It's part of God's plan.

Uh, is, uh, can I go against God's plan? Uh, yes and no, depending how we define our terms.

As I said, what your problem is, you're not being specific. You're being general and far too general.

And you're trying to imply certain things without specificity. So you need to be more specific.

You just say his decreative will, his direct will, his indirect will, prescriptive will, because this is where the, the issues need to be discussed, which is why in our past discussions,

I've brought these up in our discussion here tonight. I've brought these up. You have, uh, understood to some degree, some of them having defined them.

And now what you're doing is abandoning them and you need to use them. What will, uh, is what, what will is, uh, falls into predestination?

Uh, I'm not sure I understand the question. So you're saying there's, there's different wills, right?

You have permissive will, creative will, right? When God, what, so if God predetermines that I'm going to sin, predestination, because he plans it out from the very beginning, what will is that falling under?

When God predetermines that you sin, what he's doing in the, what you're talking about, what he's doing is predetermining that you have the freedom within his sovereign decrees.

You have that freedom to rebel against him. That's what that means by that.

So you can answer my question. I'd like you to answer my question. What will

I know? Well, my question was what will, uh, when God decrees that I'm going to sin, that I'm going to act against him, what will would that fall under?

That would be his, uh, uh, permissive will. So, well, what isn't the permissible that he allows me to sin.

But I was saying that he directly, uh, he wrote that I would sin. So he actually preordained that I would sin.

Okay. Now that's an extra, what you're doing is you're kind of adding something here. You're saying, well, also you're freely sinning, but I'm, what

I'm trying to understand is how, uh, I can freely do something. How can I freely do something if I can't go against his will?

Okay. Um, we're having a problem here. And the problem is that what you're doing is you're conflating predestination decree, free will, permissive will, decretive will.

Answer to my question. You're not answering my question, sir. I'm, uh, trying to get you to ask a question that is answerable.

Well, you can try, but that's not the point of what you're doing here. You're here to answer my questions at this point, just like I'll be there to answer your questions in just a moment.

Now, I think you're very much aware. What now it's, is it the decretive will that causes everything to be?

What part, what will is under predestination? Decretive will, correct? There are different senses in which we can say decretive will and predestine will.

So I'm not able to answer your question. Okay. I'll leave that up for the audience. Um, with my hat analogy, uh, in your scenario, would

I have the ability to keep my hat on if I wanted to keep the hat on? If, if God had decreed that my hat would come off, is there any way that I could keep that hat on?

Except for God decreeing that I would keep my hat on. Uh, if God decreed, you keep the hat on and you would freely keep it on because he decreed you would freely keep it on.

Well, I mean, adding the word freely to it doesn't actually mean anything. I mean, you're just using, hold on, hold on.

This isn't for you to, I didn't ask you. I'm saying what I want to say here. Feel free to say as much as you want to say when you're asking me questions here.

Uh, so, uh, saying something like, uh, I, I have freedom, but you're not actually articulating what the freedom is because the problem with what you're arguing is that people can't go against God's will.

They can't go against God's will. What God has already predestined will happen. You've already admitted to that.

So I'm asking how I could, if it's predestined, if it's

God's will, and I can read, I could read what predestined means. Once again, uh, predestination is the doctrine that God is foreordained.

Foreordained is the same as predestination, which means God ordains what will happen in history and salvation. People cannot go against his, uh, his predestination.

So when, if God ordains that my hat will come off, how can I get my hat off?

Keep my hat on. I'm sorry. Unless, uh, God says the only thing you could say is that unless God tells me

I can get my hat off, I can keep my hat on. So I'm trying to understand what is the, what is the mechanism of which

I could go against God's will? I'm not sure

I understand your question. It was a long question. What is the mechanism in which

I could go against God's will, uh, to take my hat off?

If it is willed by God that my hat will be removed, what is the mechanism in which, besides just saying that, well, the mechanism would be

God allowing you to take it off because he's not allowing me that the, what he's predestined is that my hat will come off.

What is the mechanism in which I could keep my hat on if I willed it? You cannot go against God's will if he has decreed that you take your hat off.

Exactly. So I don't have free will in that situation. Uh, am

I allowed to respond to that statement? No, no, actually, no, I just want to, no, I'll just tell you, I mean, I mean, sure.

Articulate how I have free will in that situation. Free will is the ability to make choices that are not coerced.

So you have not established how God is coercing you to do anything. Okay, that's good.

Uh, well, I'm forced to, I can't go against God's will. So how do

I have the choice to do something? If I can't go against God's will, I am being coerced.

I am being, I am following exactly, literally everything that I'm doing. Every word that I'm saying is exactly as God has planned it out and exactly what he's wanted for his good pleasure.

So I'm asking you how I could go against you. Well, you actually answered my question.

You said I can't go against his will. So I'm trying to figure out how I have free will if I can't go against his will.

Well, you don't want me to explain the problem you have. You only want me to answer questions in a certain form.

So if you give me the freedom to explain it as I did before, we could go over it again.

It's up to you. I just like to know how I could have free will if I can't go against his will.

I'm not allowed to ask you questions, so I can't answer that. That's my question. That's my question. How can

I have free will if I can? Which, and you define, let me just define free will again for everybody.

Free will, this is your website. This is your definition. Freedom, free will is the freedom of self -determination and action independent of external causes.

God is the external cause of me taking off my hat if God decrees it. God is the ultimate cause of everything.

He wrote out everything. So how is it that I could have self -determination and actions independent of his external causes if I can't go against his will?

I'm not sure which will you're talking about since they're the decretive, prescriptive, and permissive. So I'm not sure how to respond to your question.

I'm not talking about the permissive will. I'm talking about the will. Like I said, you said, I believe it was the decretive will is what you said in which everything is preordained.

Actually, let me just look real quick. The decretive will is that which God's sovereign will that we may or may not know depending on whether or not

God reveals it to us. The decretive will is God's direct will where he causes something to happen. Is it the decretive?

Actually, you answered earlier. You told me that it was the decretive will that causes everything to happen. So I'm talking about the decretive will.

Okay. So decretive will, how is it that you can have self -determination if he exercises his decretive will?

Yes, because part of his decretive will is his sovereignty. Sovereignty is the right to do what he wishes.

And it is what he has preordained. So what I'm asking is how, if I can't go against his decretive will, which is to take off my hat, how can

I keep my hat on if he's preordained that I will take it off?

The decretive will examples that I gave you were such things as God saying, let there be light.

And he directly causes a direct action by his will.

So when you say taking off your hat, this is an issue of your free will. I believe that you are misapplying the issue of his decretive will to something else and making an error in so doing.

When God says don't murder, is that his prescriptive will or his prescriptive will?

It's called the prescriptive. It's what it really is supposed to be. I may have mistyped it someplace, but it's his prescription.

Don't lie. Don't murder, etc. So his prescription, okay. Let's see here.

Would there be sin in the world had not, would there be sin in the world if God had not planned out the world exactly as he had planned it out now?

Of course not. So God is the author of sin. Nope.

How is God, if God planned everything out, how did he not plan out that people would sin?

How did he not create sin? If sin is that, that, well, we don't have to get into the definition of that, but if God preordained that people would sin and he actually created these sinful mechanisms like child molestation, rape, genocide, how is he not responsible for it if people who commit genocide, rape children, things like that, can't go against his will?

If he's already, can't go against what he's preordained. Let me put it that way. If God has preordained, which he has, everything that's happened throughout history,

God has preordained that people will molest children, commit genocide, how is it that people can go against what he preordains or can they go against what he preordains?

You kind of switch back and forth between terms demonstrating that you are not using them properly and in so doing, you're failing to understand the argument.

And what you were doing is - Can I ask you a question, sir? Yes, I am. No, that's not, actually, you're talking about me and what

I'm confusing. What I want to, I'll repeat the question for you. If God has, if God has foreordained everything, and I'm going to read the definition foreordained again, once again, it says, is the same as predestination, which means that God is ordained what will happen in history and in salvation.

Can human beings, can any human being do otherwise than what

God has preordained? No, I've already answered that. Okay, so exactly. So God is, so people can't go against what

God has preordained. What is preordained is that which has happened throughout history. So people are only doing what

God has ordained them to do. Is that correct?

In one sense, yes. In another sense, no. Can you explain in one sense how it is what they're doing?

And in the other sense, please? Depends on what you mean by preordination. If you mean -

Hold on, I'll give you the definition once again, because I read it, that's why I gave you it. In the same as predestination, which means that God ordained what will happen in history and in salvation.

So whatever happens in human history is preordained by God. That's the sense in which

I mean, which it is planned out. Please. So as I was about to say, before I was interrupted yet again, was that in God's foreordination, there are direct causations and indirect causations.

And so we can have the indirect causation within God's permissive will. So when we say that God ordains whichever shall come to pass,

Ephesians 1 .11, it does not mean that he causes people to sin, but that the ordination that he has and he has allowed, allows people in the freedom of their will to rebel against him.

That's the whole thing. And you keep misrepresenting that when you're questioning. Okay, so God has preordained all that's happening.

He preordained people would sin. I'm still trying to figure out how, if people can't go against what

God has preordained, if what people do is preordained to God, it's written by God.

I'm still trying to figure out how there is some type of way that they could do some difference.

And your definition of free will is the freedom to self -determination and actions independent of external causes.

Well, would you disagree that God's wills are external causes?

God's wills are external causes? Let me reword it. Is God's, how do

I want to say this? Things that are foreordained by God, those are, how do

I want to say this? Those are external causes. If you foreordain something, he foreordained the whole world, everything that was going to happen.

The reason people are doing it is because God caused it. Is that correct?

In one sense, yes. In another sense, no. There's direct and indirect causes. So all you mean when you say indirect and direct causes is just one, which

I don't even know how you can make honestly a distinction here, to be frank, because he wrote out exactly what was going to happen like a book or blueprint.

All you're talking about indirect, direct is just methodology. It's going to happen either way exactly as he will.

How he does it is actually somewhat irrelevant because what we're talking about is in the end, no matter what the methodology is, people can't go with what he's already foreordained.

He's written exactly what's going to happen within human history. So I find it difficult to try to understand how you're, why you're even making the distinction because it really doesn't matter the methodology, whether he's personally causing it or sets up the pieces.

I mean, whether he makes a person molest a child or he sets up the environment to where a child will get molested,

I think in the end, it doesn't really make much of a difference now, does it? That's a question.

That was a long question. It is. Well, it wasn't all a question. It was somewhat of a statement at the beginning, but the end of it was my question.

Mike, could you rephrase the question, please? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It doesn't really make a difference whether he directly causes something or indirectly causes something if the outcome is exactly the way that he wanted it to happen.

In the end, whether he indirectly causes something or directly causes it, the people involved can't go against what he's preordained.

So really just telling me that, hey, it's indirect or direct decrees isn't really, it's not dealing with the issue, and that's what

I'm trying to get you to understand. You can just comment on that if you'd like. I've already gone over it.

That wasn't a question. Okay, I'd like you to answer my question. It wasn't a question.

You made a statement. You said it doesn't make any difference if the cause of his sin, people can't go against it. Does it make a difference?

Does what make a difference? If the outcome is going to be the same, does it, talking about the difference between direct and indirect decrees doesn't really make a difference if the outcome is the same because all you're doing is talking about methodology.

Actually, don't even worry about answering the question. I'll just talk for 19 seconds. All you're saying is about methodology, right?

You're not actually dealing with the idea that people can't go against what God preordains.

All you're talking about is how God gets it done and how God gets it done is irrelevant to the actual issue.

Thank you. Okay. Did you want to ask the one last question? Oh, no,

I'm good. Okay. All right, Matt, your turn whenever you're ready.

Well, let's see. Are you able to lay out a premise and premise logically on why

God's decrees that work within the permissive will of God means you can't freely choose to do something?

Within the minute or two I have to answer no, it would take me some time to be able to lay out that premises.

I think you've made that clear too. Would you be willing to do that and email it to me? Sure.

Yeah, I can do that for you. Absolutely. Good. Could you do it by the, say, next week, Friday next week, a week from tomorrow?

I can try. I'm starting a new job this week, Matt, but I'll definitely put an attempt in to kind of put them in premises for you. I just got a lot of things going on, to be honest with you.

Okay. So do you understand or, okay, could you please explain the difference between direct and indirect cause?

Yeah. So this is actually, I tried to look it up on your website, actually. I didn't find the point. It said indirect, indirect.

I found the direct cause. But direct would be, as you put on your website, that which God's sovereign will may or may not be known depending on whether God reveals it to us.

The decree of will is God's direct will where he causes something to be. He decrees it, for example, God has caused the universe to exist as well as Christ's incarnation.

An indirect decree would be basically sets up the pieces to where something will happen. He sets the environment up to where a particular will will come to fruition.

That's my understanding of it. In the indirect decree of God, are people still responsible for what they do?

I don't believe in Calvinism. So are you asking me under your position? Like, do you guys believe that?

We're going with what has been stated so far, the definitions you're giving in God's indirect decree where he can bring things about by using circumstances and various things.

Is he causing people to sin by his indirect means? I don't have a definition of indirect decree up here.

It wasn't on your website, or at least I didn't find it. I will say that I would say that you would say no. That's what you've told me before.

I didn't ask you to say what I said. I asked you to say what, you know, what the issue was.

My position. No, you are arguing against my position. I asked you a question about logic, and I asked you to demonstrate something.

So you didn't answer the question. I don't understand it. Say the question. Can you explain, okay, can in the indirect cause, which means that God is not directly causing something, but allowing people to freely act in that free act and they sin, is it

God's fault or their own? My opinion is it's God's fault. So you're saying it's

God's fault when people freely choose to do what they want to do. I don't believe they freely choose to do what they're doing according to your definitions.

You say that God preordains everybody to do what they're going to do. They don't have a choice. God wrote it out ahead of time. In my definition,

I said that they do freely do this. I said this specifically. I said God indirectly brings about their free will choices.

I stated this before. God brings about circumstances. They freely do something. I said they freely do something.

Is God then responsible for their sin in their free will? In my opinion, yes, but under your opinion, no.

I asked you is, not an opinion. You need to show me the logic of how it is that such that God who ordains that someone freely does something by definition means it's their own will that they're choosing it.

That means that God's responsible. Can you explain how that's possible? What I'm saying is what's being articulated.

They aren't freely doing it. That's what I'm saying. Like you could ask me that, but you could say they are, but that's not what's actually happening.

Well, that's what you're asserting. This is what the debate is about. I've already shown you as an example of the hat analogy that I can cause you,

I can directly cause you to do something freely. Let me ask you, if we were sitting in the same room and you were unaware of this line of reasoning about your hat and I said, hey, what's it on top of your hat?

You took your hat off to look at it. Have I forced you against your will to do anything?

In that specific scenario where a human being is tricking me into taking my hat? No, but this is a different type of scenario than God.

So the answer is no. So have I violated your free will? No, but you're not

God and that's not the answer. No, no, no. I'm just giving you my elaboration. The answer is, well, when

I try to elaborate, you cut me off. Oh, no, it's fine. You cut me off. So let me hear you. So in other words, you're saying that I can, as an illustration, cause you to freely do something.

Now, if I cause you to freely remove your hat, who's the one responsible for removing the hat? You or me?

Sure. In a human scenario that you're giving, it would be me. Okay. Well, you are the cause to some degree.

Actually, you would be the cause because you basically tricked me into removing my hat. Now, on my own free will in that situation,

I removed the hat. But this is a human scenario, just to be clear. So you admit it. It's of your own free will.

So you're admitting that I can cause you to freely act. In a human scenario.

Oh, yeah. And since we're humans and God, Jesus is also human in his sovereignty and the human thing of God and his knowledge, he can certainly work circumstances and cause you to do something.

So let's just say that you didn't know that it was Jesus, according to Christian theology, that Jesus himself is the one sitting across from you.

You don't know that. I don't know if you're listening to me or not. I'm listening to you. And if Jesus were sitting directly...

I don't know what you're doing. I'm just taking notes is what you're saying. And if Jesus were sitting directly across from you, he said, what's that on your hat?

And he's God in flesh who ordains what shall come to pass. If he were to have done that, would you have freely removed your hat?

No, because he would have decreed that I removed my hat if he was Jesus. Oh, so in the exact same circumstance, when the exact same sentence is offered, if Jesus does it, you don't have free will.

But if I do it, you have free will. Would you like to know why? Please.

Yes, I would like to know why. Because with human beings, we have free will towards each other. Under God's theology, as I've articulated and read your website, we don't have free will.

So whatever God decrees, Jesus decrees. That's not correct. That's not correct.

I did not say we don't have free will on my website. I never say that. No, I'm saying that you don't have free will.

No, you said on my website, I said I don't have free will. That's not correct. If I said that, then I misspoke. No, you did.

So in other words, if I say to you, what's that on top of your hat? You remove your hat.

That's your free will. If Jesus is sitting there and he says, what's that on top of your hat? And you remove it, that's not free will.

That's what you're saying. Because you'd be talking with Jesus remotely. Well, yes, because Jesus would be decreeing that I would take off my hat.

I could not go against God, Jesus' decrees. It would be preordained that I would take off my, yeah, the decree.

In that sense, what does it mean? That would fall under, well, it would fall under, let me say it like this.

It would fall under foreordaining something. If God, if Jesus had foreordained

I was going to take my hat off, I don't know exactly what will it would fall under, but if he foreordained that I would take my hat off, there's no way

I could not take my hat off. I mean, there's no way I can keep my hat on. I'm sorry. So as I have explained before, the decree to the will of God is such things as let there be light, the direct causation of God.

If Jesus were sitting in front of you and said, what's that on top of your hat? Is that a direct decree?

If he asked me, is that a direct, no, he's just asking me what's on top of my hat. And so it's not a direct decree.

So you should not say that it's a direct decree. Is it an indirect decree if he asks you what's on top of your hat?

Well, it's not a decree at all. He's just asking me a question. Very good. So it's not a decree. It's a question.

So if he's asking you a question, is he forcing you to do anything by asking you a question? Since it's not a decree.

I mean, if you're just asking if someone says there's something on my hat, no, it's not a decree. So you said it's not a decree if he were to ask you a question and yet he asked you the question and because of it, you took off your hat, but yet you said it's not a decree.

So therefore, without God's decree, have you been by his will caused to freely take your hat off?

What we're in the realm of is we're not talking about decrees right now. You're just talking about a hypothetical where Jesus tells me to take off my hat.

This has nothing to do with our actual topic. Yes, it does. I just disagree with you. Hold on.

I'm asking the questions. I'm asking the questions. You've already stated that the question is not a direct or indirect decree.

You've also stated that if I were to ask you the exact same question, your free will is not violated and you have been implying that since it's by God's decree that that violates our free will.

Since you further said that it's not a decree to ask you the question and you freely do it, then logically you are the one supporting my case by saying such a question which would bring you to the place of taking off your hat is not by the direct or indirect decree of God but is in fact your own free will, yet God has required it of you at the same time.

By your admission of these things, you have inadvertently supported my position. If you want to refute this,

I'm going to ask you right now. Please refute it from what you have already said, that it's not a decree of God if a question is asked and you take your hat off, where when

I ask it, it's your free will, but if Jesus asks you, it suddenly is not your free will.

Explain how that all works, please. Sure. Yeah, so when we're talking about human beings in analogy, God's out of the picture.

We're not talking about some kind of ultimate purpose that's planned out. There's no kind of predestination.

None of that's included when we're talking about human beings tricking somebody into taking off a hat. Now, if we're talking about God getting me to take off the hat, he's preordaining that I'll take off the hat and I can't go against what

God preordains because he already planned it out from the beginning. Uh, and you've admitted to that earlier that I can't go against what

God has already preordained, uh, because that's exactly what's going to happen step by step. So that's why

I would say these analogies that you're making doesn't, it doesn't connect because it's completely two different scenarios. One of them doesn't involve any type of predestination, any type of wills at all.

It's just talking about a human being, tricking somebody in the talk, taking off their hat. So you admit then that you fully took off the hat.

Under which scenario? Whether I was preordained to take off the hat in God's scenario or under a human scenario.

If I ask you, what's on top of your hat and I get you to take off your hat, you freely have taken off your hat.

So if Jesus asks you to take off your hat and you take, you know, what's on your head and you take off your hat, you're the one saying it's not your free will.

But the situation, the questions are exactly the same. Since you have already stated it's not by his decree, which you've earlier stated, if I remember correctly, that his decree is the same as predestination and you've hinted it's the same as his foreordination.

That he's the one who brings all this by his foreordination, by his predestination, by his decree.

But you yourself have said, if he were sitting there and asking you, it's not a decree. Therefore, it's not predestined in that sense that you're using it, nor is it foreordained in that sense.

It's just a question. Isn't that correct? No, I think where maybe

I misspoke or maybe what I was trying to get across didn't come up as clear. What I'm talking about when

I was saying Jesus asking me to take off my hat is not necessarily a decree.

What I'm talking about is the bigger picture is the decree, right? The preordaining something would be that it was preordained that Jesus would, what

I would not use the word trick, would get me to take my hat off. It would be preordained by God and his plan that Jesus would get me to take my hat off.

And because God preordained it, therefore, I have no option but to take my hat off.

That's what I was trying to articulate. And I may have misspoke there, but to be a little clearer, that's what I'm saying. And that's the difference between the two scenarios.

A human being has nothing to do with God. One, it's preordained. The other, we're just talking about a hypothetical of human beings tricking each other.

If a person does something according to his will that is not forced, is it a free will action?

Like what kind of scenario? Are we talking within the Calvinistic worldview? Are we talking about like how I would define free will within like a secular type free will?

I'm supposed to be the one asking you the question. I'm just trying to understand. I don't understand your question. We haven't got into a secular free will view.

So it's not germane to the topic here. You're talking about Christian theology,

Christian decrees. I ask you, if a person does something according to his own will, it is not forced, is it a free will decision?

I don't believe so under Calvinism. No, I don't think that you have free will. I don't believe. Well, no, the no is the answer.

The questions aren't for you to answer for a different position. It's you got to answer what your position is.

Well, that's what he just told me not to use my position, the secular position. I thought he told me to use the Calvinistic position. No, so we're okay.

We're arguing within what we have been discussing. So your answer is no. So what you're saying then is you are denying that if a person does something of their own will, it's not forced.

That is not a free will decision. That's what you just said. So is that correct? That you're saying it's not free will if a person does something according to what he or she desires.

That's not forced. Well, it is forced because God, as you said earlier, causes the desires for people to do those things.

So they didn't freely choose the desires. No, but that is answering the question. No, it's not. They desire it because God foreordained they would desire it.

There's nothing free about if the desires they have or have. You didn't answer the question. Ask the question again.

No, if a person does something according to his will, that's not forced. His will or God's will?

I said his will. Schuyler, if you do something according to your own will, it's not forced.

Is it a free will decision that you've made? Without a God, yes. Okay, so you admit then that free will is simply to be able to make a choice that's not forced.

Well, I went by your definition. Free will is the freedom of self -determination and action is independent of external causes and nothing is external without external causes within your worldview.

I'm asking you a question. I'm trying to determine what you understand free will to be. You understand, for I understand, writing down what you say.

It's free will to simply build and make a choice that's not forced out of your own will.

That's what free will is. I'm using your definition of free will. The free will is the freedom of self -determination and action is independent of external causes.

In a cross -examination, he's asking you, you have to give what you believe, not... Oh, you're asking my definition of free will.

I keep asking you the same question. I think you're stalling. So let me ask you this again. If you,

Skyler, that's why I said you, Skyler, remember? If you do something according to your will that's not forced, is it free will?

Yeah, sure. I would go under that definition of free will would be... Actually, let me think that out for a second.

Would I consider it free will? I would consider free will uncoerced.

I would consider free will having the ability to do otherwise. I have the actual ability to do as I will.

It's not predetermined from the beginning. I have a choice in the matter. I can go against God's will.

That would be what I consider free will. So, okay, you're answering my question. If you,

Skyler, do something according to your will that no one's forcing you to do, is it free will? Yes or no?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Under my position, it's free will, sure. Yeah, well, that's what we agree. We agree that's what free will is.

I agree, even as a Calvinist, even as a Christian, that is what free will is. I agree with that.

So now we have the same definition. Can you please explain to me how

God, when he allows you, Skyler, to rebel against him by your own free will, is causing you to rebel against him?

I think that's what the issue is, is I don't agree that you have free will the way you're defining it.

I'm saying - Excuse me, you need to stop for a second because you are wrong. I just went with your definition.

I said it's the same definition we have. And then from that definition, no, I said it's the same one.

I said it's the same definition. Yeah, so what I was saying, to answer the question,

I have a minute to answer this. What I'm saying to you is that the way you were defining free will, the error and where there's a problem is that in my definition of free will,

I actually have a choice. In your definition of free will, even though you say that you have a choice, what

I'm articulating is you actually don't because God has foreordained that whatever is going to happen is going to happen.

So if God foreordains that I'm going to punch somebody in the face, I don't have a choice on whether I can punch somebody in the face.

I might feel like I have a choice, but there is no actual way I can go against God's foreordination.

I resent that you took so long to answer, eating up my time. You can resent it all you want.

Yeah, I do. Now look, I went with what you already agreed free will was, and then you say that's not what it is, so you're being inconsistent.

Free will definition that you gave me is that you make a choice that is not forced.

That's what it is. I said that's exactly what we teach as Calvinists. That's what we teach as biblical theologians, as Christians.

That's what we teach. And then I asked you, I asked you questions regarding that.

How is it that if God ordains that you freely take off your hat because you freely choose to by asking you a question, that it somehow means you're not free since you're the one freely doing it?

Any answer? I don't know. I don't know what the question is. I thought that was a statement. I asked you the question.

We're out of time, so. I mean, if you ask me just to show the contradiction real quick, once again, people can't go against what

God has preordained. So you have to be able to go against what is preordained in order for you to actually have a choice in the matter.

That's how I would answer that question. That's what I said in my statements. Okay. That's time. All right.

I'll reset the clock for a closing of 10 minutes. Let's see.

And Skylar, you'll go first. Absolutely. Give me a sec to get this.

All right. Whenever you're ready. All right. Yeah. So I think it's been pretty clear here.

I mean, the only answer Matt has throughout this whole debate is that God gives us free will. But then when we look at the definition of free will he's giving, it doesn't apply to what's happening.

If we can, you know, let's give his definition of free will again. This is the freedom of self -determination and action independent of external causes.

Well, how is it possible that I can do any action without the presence of external causes?

God has written it out like a book, folks. He wrote the blueprint. Everything, beholden this phone, me saying,

God bless rapture Jesus. Like that's all preordained by God. There's nothing I can do according to Calvinism to go against what is preordained.

Now over and over and over and keep saying, well, they're freely choosing it.

But the idea of having a freedom or a certain type of free will includes the idea that you have to be able to make another choice and you can't make another choice.

Because if you were able to make another choice, you would be going against what God has already preordained.

You know, I find it funny. I don't, you know, I think one of the things in good charity, we shouldn't try to think that what people are trying to run out the clock or things like that.

I think it's just kind of bad debate and to get so frustrated and upset with me. I've been very,

I admit that I've cut you off because I wanted direct answers to my questions, but I didn't really appreciate that. But whatever, it's a debate.

Things get heated. It was much better than our older one, our last debate. So like I said, exactly what

I thought would happen, this debate happened. There was no articulation of how I have the ability to freely choose something.

And the ability to be able to freely choose something means that I have the ability to go against it.

I can't go against God's, what he has preordained.

And what he preordains is through his wills. Everything that has happened from the very beginning, and I'll say it again, because I think it's just so important.

Like what is predestination? The doctrine that God has foreordained all things which will come to pass.

When I sin, it's because God has foreordained it. Now, how do

I have the ability to not sin if I can't go against what

God has foreordained? How is that possible? All Matt Slick's doing is just saying, well, he gave you the way to freely choose it.

Now, you notice with this hat analogy, it's conflating two different completely topics.

Talking about what human beings can do and trick each other in this idea within a worldview that human beings have an idea of free will, and what he's articulating is completely different within Calvinism.

In the human scenario with the hat, things aren't written from the very beginning.

These things weren't foreordained by God in the scenario with the humans. This is why

I made a point to actually ask, why are you... When Matt goes into asking me questions about things in my secular worldview, it's completely irrelevant.

It doesn't matter my secular worldview, how I view things. He's the one who's making the argument that people have free will.

My idea of free will or my definition of free will, hey, I could be someone who doesn't even believe in free will.

Matt might argue that I'm just chemicals in my brain. I'm just chemical reactions happening.

Everything, it's just determinism because of the way that we're made. I'm not saying I agree with that, but I don't even have to believe in free will in this scenario.

But what this is, is a tactic to distract from Matt having to actually articulate the mechanism in which somebody can freely choose to do something while at the same time not be able to go against it.

What Matt's saying really is that within the blueprint, God created the desire for me to sin.

I can't go against that desire. I have in the blueprint,

God said that I would commit sin. I cannot not sin because I can't go against the blueprint.

And then he wants to throw on top of that, but you freely choose to do so. So the only thing

I can translate that to that would at all kind of make sense would be the concept that I just feel like I'm making a choice.

Because if all of my desires and choices are predetermined, how is that, as he defines free will, the freedom of self -determination and actions independent of external causes.

If he creates my desire, how is that independent of external causes?

He's the one who caused me to desire to sin. How is it if God caused me to sin, how is it that if I don't have self -determination,

I'm not determining my future. I'm not determining what I'm going to do. Everything is written out.

And frankly, I don't understand how Calvinism thinks this is at all rational.

This is at least at the bare minimum contradictory. Oh, what else do

I want to talk about here? Dun -dun -dun -dun. Predestination, decree of will, freedom of will, compatibilism, election.

You know, I think we have a moment. I have got more minutes. I'll talk about election a little bit because this goes in the idea of free will also.

So I don't have the free will to choose to worship God. God has to give me that grace.

God has to offer me that grace. He has to write it in to the blueprint.

He has to predestine me in order for me to choose to accept

Jesus. I can't do it on my own. This is the whole thing I was reading earlier with the Arminian and Calvinism thing.

Let's read it again because I want it really to be clear. There is however controversy as the nature of predestination in the reformed

Calvinist camp. Predestination includes individuals, in other words, that reformed, sorry, I'll read that again.

In the reformed Calvinist camp, predestination includes individuals.

In other words, the reformed doctrine of predestination is not predestined and that without his predestination, none would be saved.

The non -reformed camp says that God predestines people to salvation. I'm sorry, the non -reformed camp states that God predestines people to salvation, but they freely choose to follow

God. So under Calvinism, I'm not freely choosing to follow God.

In fact, what you guys believe as Calvinists, but these people freely choose to follow

God. In other words, in a non -reformed perspective, God is reacting to the will, the free will of the individuals and predestine him only because they choose

God. Whereby contrast, the reformed position states that people choose God only because he predestines them to.

And what does it mean to predestine? I'm going to just nail this down as many times as possible because it's so important.

It means, which is the same as preordained, make sure

I get this, is the same as which means that God ordains what will happen. So God just basically ordains that they'll, he basically, what was the preordination?

He chooses that they'll have grace. And once again, doesn't have to do with what they do, their choices. But what they do doesn't matter anyways, because God already written it out.

Do I want to hit anything else? I think now I'll wrap it up here. I just want to say thank you for hosting the debate tonight.

This was a fun time. I had a good time. Thank you for hosting. It was pleasant, respectful. And I think that we had a good conversation.

So thank you. All hail Raptor Jesus. Matt, I'll reset the clock and you can start whenever you're ready.

You're muted. There, there we go. All right.

So this is it. We're done after this? Yeah. Okay. Schuyler has a better than average understanding of a lot of atheists might have of predestination, fortunation, election, things like that.

And I will say that because he's gone to my website and done some homework. But there are other issues worth discussing and worth going through, which

I've repeatedly brought out in our debate, which he has repeatedly failed to really differentiate in them sufficiently.

When we talk about the issue of free will, I specifically asked him in our conversation if free will was that unforced choice that a person just does.

He said, yes, that's what we Calvinists teach is free will. What's interesting is to say that me, a

Calvinist who defends Calvinism, that's what we teach as Calvinists, that it is free. We have a freedom. We act according to our nature, according to our will.

And we act in a manner that's consistent with our nature. We're not being forced to do things. But that's what it is.

That's what he says it is. I say, that's what we say it is. We also say as Calvinists that God ordains our freedom.

And God can certainly work within circumstances to bring about what he desires. And I gave illustrations on how this kind of a thing could be done.

I talked about the removing of the hat illustration. I talked about making me walk left or right. There are various things that God can do to bring about the will that he desires by freely working within, or working,

I should say, within my freedom of will in order to bring me to do what he desires. There's no logical impossibility there.

There's no logical contradiction there. Not a problem. This kind of illustration is what we use when we discuss the issues with God.

Certainly, God knows all things. And he knows exactly what circumstances to bring to bear in which certain people will do exactly what he desires them to do.

And in so doing, it's freely done, just as God could ordain that I turn left or right by bringing something to bear in a certain position.

Knowing this is how I'm going to be. This is how I'm going to react. This is what he will do. And he can do that.

There is no problem there. And this is something that Schuyler has repeatedly abandoned and repeatedly ignored and repeatedly just basically,

I think once or twice, just basically dismissed. For the most part, he's ignored it. Well, God has the ability to ordain what we do.

And he does because in the Christian economy, the Christian theological perspective, God works all things after the counsel of his will.

All things by logical necessity within Christianity means that God is able to bring about even our free will choices to the ultimate end of what he desires will occur.

Only if you think in a less than Christian perspective regarding the nature of God, the omniscience of God, the sovereignty of God, the will of God, as it respects the ability of God to ordain what we do in our freedom.

Only if you fail to see those issues as they relate also to the creative, prescriptive, permissive wills of God and direct and indirect causation that God can have.

When you fail to see these, then you have these problems. And I'll admit that there are people

I have to discuss this with at length in order to get them to understand certain things because they don't have the expertise and the training to be able to go and see how these things work.

But it does simply work like this. By definition, a choice is free if it's not coerced, if it's consistent with a person's nature, his essence, consistent with his desires, not forced.

Schuyler has admitted that and I've admitted that. That's what we hold to. And it's certainly possible that God can arrange the circumstances by which a person freely chooses to do whatever he freely chooses to do.

And it's because God has ordained that the person freely chooses to do it. And here's the catch. God freely ordained that they freely do what he wants them to do.

Is that possible? Yes. Is it a contradiction? No, it's not. Because nothing in logic says that God can't bring to bear what he wants me to do freely.

As I've illustrated with the hat, with the turning left, with various things, it's certainly possible that it can be done.

And Schuyler has not presented anything to refute the logic of the position.

He says there's problems and hopefully what he'll do is present a logical premise to me in an email to which

I will then respond. Maybe I'll even publish it on CARM. So I'd hope that he would take this very seriously.

And let me see my notes. So when you say that God has foreordained, he has foreordained that you will really rebel against him in his prescriptive will.

Well, yeah, God foreordains that people will rebel against him, against his prescriptive will.

But foreordination does not mean direct causation. It means that God is foreordained by giving permission to people to act and decide and to will to do things in a manner inconsistent with his revealed will morally, his prescriptive will.

God says, don't lie. He permits people to lie. So he ordains that they lie.

But the ordination does not mean causation. And this is where Schuyler really misses the issue because he conflates the issue of causation in one sense with indirect and not causation in another and tries to imply that one means the other.

And that's not the case. And as I've had many discussions with this, some very competent theologians and read many, many pages on this, this is differentiation that we repeatedly see and are bringing up, which he repeatedly fails to bring into the conversation.

And I know why. It's because he has an agenda. And the agenda is to demonstrate or try to demonstrate that the idea of Christian theology is incoherent and that God, who knows all things, decrees all things, ultimately, in a broad sense, as I said earlier, is the one who does these things and that we are so freely able to do that.

And we see this in Acts 4, 27, 28, where God's predestined people to bring Jesus to the cross.

And they did this. And yet in Acts 2, 23, it clearly tells us that they are the ones who are responsible for the actions that they did.

Now, we can understand their culpability in their own actions if their actions are free.

Now, when Schuyler says, well, they weren't free to choose contrary. Well, that's not really the issue.

The issue is this is what they freely chose to do. If they don't choose to do something contrary, it's because in their own free will, they choose not to do something contrary.

It's not that they would have a desire to do something contrary and then they couldn't. That's not how it works.

They freely chose to do this. That's what free will is. If they want to freely do something else, they would freely choose to do that.

And when to say they're ordained to freely choose left, that means they can't choose right is the wrong question.

It means that they're freely choosing to do left. This is what God knows in the circumstances, situations, let's work it that way, that they will choose.

They will freely choose. If they're going to freely choose something else, that's how that's going to work too. So what

Schuyler is doing is actually failing to understand the true issue and making it what's called a non sequitur and building something that refutes itself ultimately.

Now, if he wants to articulate it, uh, I'm trying to read my notes here and, uh, how much time have we got left?

Also two minutes. Okay. So Schuyler has failed to demonstrate how one issue of God's sovereignty is contradictory to man's freedom.

He has not demonstrated that one logical statement or one statement of truth means another statement of truth is not possible.

And I'm going to really stress this, that I'm going to ask Schuyler to lay this out, not an opinion, but logically the best he can step -by -step why this is.

And I'll offer to publish that on my website with my responses and you can respond to those and then

I'll respond to those. We can do it a couple, three times if you're so interested in it to do that. But I want to see the logic of what it is that you say.

I've demonstrated from to you what free will is. You've agreed to it. I've also demonstrated how

God can work in our freedom and that our free will is not denied or violated in God's sovereign work.

Someone's, I'm hearing voices coming in and you have not answered that challenge.

You've not shown how that's not possible. And I, I'm going to say this, I believe you have failed to understand the proper relationship between predestination, election, ordination, and decree.

I think you've given it a good shot, but I don't think you have done a very sufficient job, particularly in this kind of a level.

And without God's predestination, none will be saved. That is correct because it means that God predestines the elect into salvation by granting them belief.

And he does this, Philippians 129, but he also does it by regenerating them, which is

God's free act to work upon them, which changes them internally, whereupon they freely choose to believe and trust in God.

This is not a violation of free will. It's a sovereign work of God where he works with people, changes them, and then they act in a manner consistent with their nature and they freely choose to believe and trust in Christ.

Otherwise, they could not be held culpable for anything whether they do right or wrong. We're out of time.

I hope that was sufficient. All right. I will bring

Skylar back in. I want to thank both you guys. If you have any other closing comments that you want to make, as far as anything you guys are working on you want to promote.

I just want to thank everybody for just the good debate and having me on, Andrew. It was a pleasure. No, that's it.

Under is close. I appreciate it. I'm sorry. I was reading somebody.

What if the Russians hack God's elect? Sorry, it made me laugh. It'd be preordained to.

Yes, it would be. That's right. So that was May They Freely Did It.

So anyway, yeah, thanks for the debate. And I appreciate it. And I got a lot more stuff going on this month. I'm supposed to debate somebody else, a

Calvinist later this month on free will, if we really have it. It'll be interesting. So anyway, thanks.

It was fun. It was enjoyable. All right. So let folks know next week.

Don't know. Matt and I are probably going to be. Well, I know I will be out in Pennsylvania with Justin Peters.

So I'll probably be bringing him in. So don't know what we'll figure out this week, what the topic will be.

Matt, I should do give a review we got. I should have done this at the beginning, but someone had given a review for the podcast

Five Stars. Love this so much. Thank you, guys. Hope you guys will be around for a long time.

Love how you're striving for eternity. That's from Ethel 14,

I think. So give that again. We just want to thank everyone for or thank

Matt and Skylar for doing the debate. Hope this was helpful for folks. I know that Skylar is probably going to be doing a response on his channel.

Matt, I don't know if you want to do one on this channel. We could do that maybe next week or afterwards if anyone wants to do a

I don't know if anyone from the council wants to do an after show. But just to let folks know, go to CARM .org,

C -A -R -M .org. And that's where you're seeing most of the information for this show was coming from.

And again, I'll remind you guys about the contest that we have going. So if you want to get in on that contest, just go to bit .ly

.com slash CPC contest and subscribe to this channel so that you can get more of these.

We do these every week. If you want to come in, give challenges. If you're interested in a formal debate, we can try to set those up as well.

And that is something we look to do. But we're here Thursday nights, two hours, answering any questions, challenges that you may have.

And so that's something for you. Check out my podcast, The Wrap Report, this week.

It's going to be a good one with responding to Ben Shapiro, Gloria Aldridge.

Also be listening to Matt Slick Live five days a week, Monday through Friday. And that's actually a podcast that you can just go search for Christian Apologetics Research Ministry or search for Matt Slick.

You will find those. And so that is what we got for this week. I hope that you'll join us next week.

I don't know what we'll do. We might do an open Q &A, which means you can ask anything and we'll see if we can answer it.

I'm sure we can. And we, again, just wanted to thank Matt and Skylar for this.