Talking FREE WILL with Michael Preciado

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

Michael Preciado with me. He is a super cool guy. I just recently – well,

I guess – I don't remember the first time I reached out to him, but we've kind of been Facebook messenger friends.

I invited Michael on a while back to talk a little bit about his book on free will, but he was a little busy, and we were able to reschedule, and now he's here today.

So what I want to do is I just want to jump right into introductory material on Michael, and actually, let me rewind.

I want to let people know that there are going to be some upcoming episodes that I think folks are going to find really interesting.

I'm going to have Michael Icona on on May 3rd to talk about the evidence for the resurrection, and again, if you are one of my followers who is a die -in -the -wool presuppositionalist in your apologetic methodology, don't private message me and tell me

Michael Icona is an evidentialist. Yes, I know, okay? I know.

And no, I'm not going to debate him on apologetic methodology. I'm having him on to talk about evidence for the resurrection.

As you guys have heard me say in the past, just because we might disagree on methodological issues does not mean that we cannot learn from those different apologetic perspectives.

And so what I encourage folks, when we do have Dr. Icona on, take what he has to say and contextualize it.

If you're a die -hard presuppositionalist, presuppositionalize the evidence he gives.

But there's still a helpful conversation to be had there. I also am going to have

Scarlett Clay, who is unknown. She's actually a friend on Facebook, and she posted a very interesting article that I found very interesting.

It was an account of her experience at Biola University and how learning apologetics at Biola University actually led her to presuppositional apologetics.

How about that? Biola University is definitely not the center of presuppositional apologetic methodology, but her story was really interesting.

I'm going to have her on to talk a little bit about the article that she shared. And I think it's actually going to be super interesting because it really allows us to highlight the importance of putting

God first in our apologetics. And of course, that's true with respect to everything else in the

Christian life, right? Our relationship with God, our desire to display the holiness of God, the perfection of God, the goodness and greatness of God should be the center of gravity in our lives, in our apologetic, and in everything that we do.

So that's super, super important, all right? Well, all that out of the way,

I think I'm also going to be moderating a discussion between Joshua Pillows and I'm not going to pronounce the other gentleman's name.

He's super nice and I don't have time to look up his name, but it's a very hard to pronounce name. But we're going to talk a little bit about the

Stroudian objection to the transcendental argument. So we're going to get into some details that we have a moderated discussion.

I'll let you guys know the date on that in a future episode. That's going to be super interesting. So if you guys want some background on what the

Stroudian objection to the transcendental argument is, I would highly, highly recommend you listen to a few episodes back where I had

Joshua Pillows on talking about the Stroudian objection. Now, that might sound very abstract and completely impractical, but actually we talk about a whole host of things related to presuppositionalism and kind of details that I think would be helpful for anyone, even a beginner, to take some time and listen to.

So definitely want to check that out. All right. Well, without further ado, let me introduce

Michael Preciado. And apparently I am the first person to properly pronounce his name.

So, huh. OK, there you go. Before I put him on the screen here, he was recommended by Guillaume Bignon, who

I always introduce as the French Calvinist philosopher. You have to mention he's

French because when you think of Calvinism, John Calvin was a, you know, he was a Frenchman. So it just makes his

Calvinism more authentic. But today we're going international here, right? We have the

French Calvinist philosopher today or tonight. Rather, I have the

Mexican Calvinist philosopher. OK, so let me let me invite

Michael Preciado on. How are you doing, Michael? I'm great. Thank you so much.

How do you like that introduction? The Mexican Calvinist philosopher. OK. And that's awesome.

And the interesting thing is Michael and I have something in common. I think we do. You can correct me. But while I'm not a philosopher in that respect,

I have I've never had formal training in philosophy. I am Puerto Rican, but I don't speak

Spanish. And to my knowledge, Michael Preciado is Mexican, but he doesn't speak Spanish. So there you go.

That is true. OK, that's awesome. Now that we have shamed our places of origin, let me give folks a little bit of background on Michael.

Michael Preciado is a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America. He is happily married and the father of two wonderful children.

He holds a B .A. and an M .A. in philosophy, an M .Div from Westminster Seminary C .A. and a

Ph .D. in philosophical theology from the University of Aberdeen. His interests are in the areas of apologetics, philosophy, theology and preaching.

He is a reformed Christian and approaches all these areas from a confessionally reformed perspective.

Maybe we'll ask him a little bit about that. His first book, A Reformed View of Freedom, The Compatibility of Guidance, Control and Reformed Theology is due to be released.

And that is false because it's already released and has been released. But I'm reading from from his blog here.

So welcome. It is a pleasure to have you. Would you like to add a little bit to that basic introduction?

Yeah, well, thanks, first of all, for having me on. I really appreciate it. I've been able to watch a few episodes of your show, and I think you do a great job.

And I really appreciate what you're doing. A couple of things. I recently came into the

Orthodox Presbyterian Church, so I'm no longer part of the PCA. And yes, as you noticed, it said in that blog that the book is due to come out.

So that was obviously written a long time ago. And if you go to my website, you'll notice that I've done absolutely nothing with my website.

I've had it for a number of years now, and I just haven't had the time to do what

I wanted to do. So that's why it said that the book was coming out soon when it, in fact, has been out for, oh, goodness, maybe a year now,

I think. Yeah, it has been. It has been. I remember purchasing it a while back. Let me get let me give folks the title of that book again, just in case they're interested.

The book is called A Reformed View of Freedom, The Compatibility of Guidance, Control, and Reformed Theology.

To my knowledge, Michael comes from a more analytic philosophical tradition in his philosophy.

And so the book does come. You can correct me. It comes from that perspective in addressing that specific issue.

Yes, that's true. All right. All right. All right. Very good. So if someone was in a bookstore and they found your book and they said,

I like free will stuff and I like Reformed Theology. And, you know, you happen to be there at Barnes and Noble.

Actually, that's my book. I wrote it. They're like, oh, great. What is it about? How would you kind of summarize what your book is about for someone who's never heard of you?

Or maybe they have a passing interest in the topic? Yeah, it's a great question. There are a number of things that I'm trying to accomplish in the book.

One of them is to establish that there is compatibility between traditional

Reformed Theology and a lot of the work, contemporary work, over the past 60 years in analytic philosophy that has been done on the free will and moral responsibility question, particularly with regards to the compatibilist or the semi -compatibilist views.

So the idea is to alert Reformed theologians that there's nothing bad about this, that it's something that actually will be very helpful for them to use these resources and to mind them in order to start addressing issues that, you know, come up with the whole free will question.

Another purpose is that of late, maybe the past 10 years, there have been certain debates going on within Reformed Theology as to what

Reformed Theology is with regards to free will. Is it theological determinism?

Is it compatibilism? Did Jonathan Edwards depart from the Reformed tradition?

So I address those questions as well. And then thirdly, this is – oh,

I'm sorry, go ahead. Nope, go for it. You finish your thought there. I was just going to say that this is kind of like the first step in a larger project.

The next book, Lord Willing, is going to be coming up with a model of Reformed view of freedom so that I can then apply that eventually to a third volume,

Lord Willing, that would be addressing things like the problem of evil. Is God the author of sin?

So this is very much a foundational level book that is going to be, Lord Willing, built upon.

Yeah. Well, what I appreciate about what you just mentioned there, you spoke about a free will.

You spoke about Jonathan Edwards. These discussions on free will have such a broader context, right?

You have philosophy in there. You have theology in there. You have church history, right, surveying what people have said.

Why is it important to know the background music of the debates on free will?

Yeah, there's a number of ways to approach that. If you're in the Reformed tradition, you'll want to know what your forefathers taught and what that looks like in terms of what is going on in the contemporary scene.

But also it's important to recognize just that our views today didn't just pop up today, right?

They have a history. And there are lots of many, many theologians in the past that have parsed out these issues that are also great resources for a

Calvinist or a Reformed theologian or a Reformed philosopher. And another aspect of my book is

I'm trying to turn people back to that and say, look, these are things that we could use to mine from this and mine from modern day analytic philosophy and kind of bring these things together and hopefully come up with a very powerful defense of a

Reformed view of freedom. So those would be a couple reasons why I think that's important. Now, the issue of free will always comes up in discussions on Calvinism, Arminianism, Molinism, and all the isms that are associated with this topic.

I think one common misconception from a lot of people, there are a lot of misconceptions about what

Calvinism is, but one main misconception that I see is that Calvinists don't believe in free will. We typically are described as those guys who, oh, yeah, those guys over there don't believe in free will.

What would you say to someone who says you're a Calvinist, so you don't believe in free will? How would you address that issue from your

Reformed perspective? So if it was an Arminian that was asking me that, I would just do the same trick.

I would say you're an Arminian. You don't believe in free will. Right? Because basically the whole point is you're defining free will differently.

And there's no reason to prefer one definition over another just from the get go. And that's what typically

Arminians do in my experience, is they are assuming a libertarian view of freedom and then saying you

Calvinist, you don't believe in free will. Well, why can't we do the same? Why can't we assume a compatibilist view of freedom and say you

Arminian, you don't believe in free will. Right? Those kinds of things aren't productive. Sure.

Well, Michael, when I believe in free will from my

Arminian perspective, it seems to be the face. It's what everyone assumes when you think of free will.

Right? You know, you're the one that has the idiosyncratic understanding of free will.

It's not really free. What the average person thinks of as free will. That's what we mean.

Right? The average person is on our side. Right? How would you address? I mean, we hear these things all the time.

How would you address someone who's coming from that perspective? Two ways. First, I would ask, well, how do you know that the average person believes that?

I mean, have you surveyed every single average person in the world and come to this conclusion? And the typical answer is going to be no, they haven't.

Second, there is this whole field, and I'm going off the top of my head here, so I might not get all the details right.

There's this whole field called experimental philosophy. These are guys that go out into the world and do, like, surveys and empirical studies and stuff on what people believe, what are people's intuitions.

And one of the things that they found was that when you ask certain questions in a certain way, people's intuitions are predominantly compatibilist, not libertarian.

And here's an example of that. If you make it very concrete, like, so if you make it abstract and you say, okay, you live in a determined universe, and Joe Schmo does

X, is that guy responsible? You're going to typically get more of a libertarian intuition.

But if you say, look, you live in a determined universe, and some guy, Joe Schmo, came and murdered your kids, is that guy responsible?

And the typical response is yes, he is responsible. So those are compatibilist intuitions.

Now, I would have to cite the studies and all that, of course, to justify all that, but that's basically what they found.

And so that challenges just this whole idea that libertarian view of freedom is the common sense view.

Now, okay, so this is primarily an apologetics channel, but we're talking about a theological and philosophical topic, which

I think has apologetic import. And if you're Reformed and you're defending Reformed theology, that's, in a sense, apologetics.

You don't always do apologetics to unbelievers. Sometimes you could do apologetics to other believers, kind of those in -house discussions.

That being said, an important aspect of doing apologetics is defining our terms, right? If anyone is familiar with Walter Martin's Kingdom of the

Cults, one of the first chapters in that book deals with scaling the language barrier.

So, for example, when we speak with the Mormon, we might utilize or they might utilize the language of Trinity.

And we use the language of Trinity or salvation, but we don't mean the same things by them.

So defining terms is vitally important, and that's no different when we're speaking theology, philosophy.

So with that said, how would you define? I mean, you threw some terms around here, libertarian free will, compatibilist free will.

What is free will? What is libertarian free will? And what is compatibilism?

So that it can provide kind of an intellectual context for people who are listening. Yeah, great, great question.

So one of the things you want to do when you engage in these debates is you don't want to beg the question from the beginning, right?

So I don't start off by defining free will in a compatibilist loaded manner.

I would basically just say, look, free will is the control condition of moral responsibility.

Pretty much everybody would agree that control is vital to being morally responsible, and control is vital to free will.

So I would start there so that we have a point of entry so as not to beg the question from the beginning.

Now that said, given the taxonomy of the different views out there with regards to free will, a compatibilist is just saying that determinism, defined as conditional or hypothetical necessity, is compatible with free will and moral responsibility.

A libertarian is a species of incompatibilist. So an incompatibilist says determinism is not compatible with free will and moral responsibility.

Now, in the category of incompatibilism, you have libertarians and you have hard determinists.

A libertarian says free will and – I'm sorry, determinism and moral responsibility are not compatible.

Free will is true, therefore determinism is false. A hard incompatibilist or a hard determinist is going to say free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism.

Determinism is true, therefore we are not – we don't have free will and moral responsibility.

And typically what they mean by moral responsibility is moral responsibility in the basic dessert way.

Okay. What does that mean? So there are different ways of holding people responsible.

One is called a consequentialist way, which is you try to deter behavior.

So I would put someone in prison or a state would put someone in prison for the purpose of deterring future behavior.

So that's a more consequentialist view of moral responsibility, and a hard determinist would basically hold that view.

A basic dessert view is saying you put someone in prison just because they deserve to be in prison for what they did.

So a hard determinist is going to not affirm a basic dessert sense of moral responsibility.

Okay. Does that make any sense? Yes. When you say compatible – so what view would you say you hold or what is the standard reform perspective on that out of that spectrum that you just provided for us?

So in my book I make the argument that basically the standard reform view is a compatibilist view, and I even make it a little bit more specific, and this might be a little bit more controversial.

I mean we can discuss this, but I would argue that it's even a semi -compatibilist view.

Now, semi -compatibilism, if you want me to kind of discuss that a little bit. Yeah, go for it.

Okay, so semi -compatibilism is the view that if you define free will as a libertarian, then that is incompatible with determinism.

And so a semi -compatibilist is going to say, okay, fine, just take that. You can have the term. Go ahead. Run with it.

But determinism is compatible with moral responsibility. Okay, I'm going to stop right there.

Okay, so that's a subtle – that's a very subtle understanding. Can you say that one more time?

So you said that the semi -compatibilist will say, fine,

Mr. Libertarian, free will is – would you say – can you just repeat what you said before when you made the distinction there?

In order to kind of get to the heart of what really matters, because what really matters here is moral responsibility.

Not that free will does not matter, but I mean one of the reasons why people say you must have free will is so that you can be held morally responsible.

So a semi -compatibilist oftentimes will just say, look, I don't want to get distracted with these kinds of things.

Go ahead. If you want to define free will as a libertarian, fine. You can take that term, and I will say

I agree with you. Libertarian free will is not compatible with determinism. But the real issue is, is determinism compatible with moral responsibility?

And a semi -compatibilist is going to say, okay, take the free will, but determinism is compatible with moral responsibility.

Now, when you say take the free will, you're just granting them – that's okay, that's okay.

But you're granting them the definition, not the hypothetical truth like, fine, even if that's true, this is true over here.

Which one are you doing? Are you just giving them the definition? Okay, fine, I understand what you're saying. Or are you granting that even if that's true, it doesn't touch this other important area?

Yeah, so I'm saying basically if you're going to insist that free will must be defined in a libertarian way,

I agree with you. Libertarianism is not compatible with determinism.

And I could give the compatibilist definition of freedom, which I believe in.

I mean I think there is a compatibilist definition of freedom. But instead of arguing over the definition, let's just get to the heart of the matter.

Let's talk about moral responsibility. Determinism is compatible with moral responsibility.

So let's just cut to the chase and do that. Okay, that's very helpful. Yes, that's very helpful.

And again, it highlights the importance of defining our terms, right? Because especially when we're defending the reform position, sometimes our interlocutors use terminology in a very sloppy way.

And if we don't ask them to define their terms, we can kind of accept or reject something that we don't necessarily have to accept or reject.

So I think that's a very important distinction you made there. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about compatibilism.

So I'm not a strong determinist. I'm not a hard determinist, right? And determinism would be a form of – well, it's determinism.

Compatibilism would say that determinism is compatible with moral responsibility.

Is that what you said? I couldn't catch what you said. Can you repeat that? So you said compatibilism is the idea that free will is compatible with moral responsibility.

Yeah, well, compatibilism is the idea that free will is compatible – I'm sorry. Compatibilism is the idea that determinism is compatible with free will and with moral responsibility.

Okay, all right. And so, okay, so when you speak to the Arminian or some flavor of libertarian free will, one who's familiar with compatibilism.

Yeah, I know that's what you believe, Michael. But when I ask you how do you explain that compatibility, you guys always punt to mystery, right?

It's always a great mystery. And what will they do? They'll go straight to Chosen by God and quote R .C.

Sproul saying, I don't know how it works together, right? It's like two tracks, right, that meet in the horizon or these pillars that somehow they look separate here but in heaven they'll make.

You know, they look like the – and I'm not saying that it's not mysterious. I mean we are – I mean the

Arminian who disagrees or the Molinist or the libertarian who disagrees with the

Calvinist position, go a little easy on us. Not that we don't have answers to these questions and explanations, but you are touching on a topic that is profoundly complicated as to how the transcendent

God interacts with creation as it relates to his decree, our choices, and his plan.

It's not – it's a difficult topic, okay? But in their defense, I do think that sometimes we can be too quick to punt to mystery.

And I'm not saying there isn't a mystery there. But how would you make sense? When someone says, okay, fine, you think that determinism and moral – freedom and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism.

Explain that to me because it's a mess in my head. I can't possibly see how these things are compatible. Yeah, and it's great that you brought up the whole issue of mystery because when – if I have an opportunity in talking to somebody to do this in a systematic way where I start here and end here,

I always begin with mystery. Because the truth of the matter is God is infinite, and we are finite.

So every single thing that we know from revelation in scripture is ultimately shrouded in mystery.

God reveals – I mean, to put it sloppily, God reveals certain propositions that have a systematic coherence, but we don't know everything else, right?

So we must begin with mystery. I always would like to begin with mystery because I sometimes think these debates end up sounding a little bit too rationalistic as though we're saying we have everything figured out when, in fact, we don't.

There's no way. God being infinite means that there's so much more, an infinite amount of knowledge more that we don't know that stands behind what he reveals.

Can I cut in? Yeah, go ahead. Can I cut in? Is that sort of like the

Bible reveals to us that Jesus Christ is the God -man? He is truly God, truly man.

There are biblical propositions that we can use to make this fit together. But ultimately, ultimately,

I cannot explain to you specifically how that ontologically works out.

How is it that there is this one person, Jesus Christ, and who housed in his person are these two distinct natures?

So we can know what those doctrines are, give biblical support, show that it's not logically contradictory, but we can't actually tell you the ends.

Is that what you're saying, that there's a revelation there, but there's a mystery behind it in a sense? Yes, yes.

Essentially, what I'm saying is God, to use John Calvin's language,

God is speaking baby talk to us in Scripture in a sense. So it's kind of like if I have a three -year -old daughter, for instance, right?

If I were to sit here and try to describe to her what guidance control is or what is super lapsarianism, she's just going to kind of be,

I don't even get what you're talking about, right? So you necessarily have to,

I don't want to say dumb down, but accommodate your language to your child.

And the distance between me and my daughter is far closer than the distance between me and God.

There's an infinite distance between me and God. So God accommodates, he speaks in baby talk to us so that we can know what his will is and what he has revealed.

But there's far more mystery beyond that. So in other words,

I mean, I lost track of your original question, but I just wanted to make the point that I always start with mystery.

Right, and I think that's important. Let me just say this really quickly too. So does the Armenian, so does everybody else.

Nobody believes that they completely comprehend God, right? So there's going to be appeals to mystery in every theological tradition.

The question is where precisely do you locate the mystery? Where does the

Bible locate the mystery? Yes, and there's the disagreement and hence the different positions.

So we all hold to some aspects of mystery. We disagree as to where that mystery is placed. Now, my original question was when you postulate compatibilism, free will is compatible with determinism or free will and moral responsibility is compatible with determinism.

The question was how? I see. I know that's what you believe, Michael. How do you make sense of it?

Because in my mind, it sounds like a contradiction. How would you begin to unpack that for someone the best that you can? So you do basically by starting with defining terms.

When you say free will, what do you mean? If you mean libertarian free will, and by libertarian free will, like a rough definition would basically be, excuse me, it would basically be that you are able to do

A or B given whatever, how can

I put this? So you can do, you can have alternative possibilities regardless of what your internal state is and the whole facts of the world are, right?

So in other words, let's put it this way. It is a really good, interesting way of illustrating this. Peter van

Inwagen, it's called the rollback argument. And so basically the idea is this.

Eli's eating French fries at T1, right? So T1 just means time slice one, right?

It's just trying to identify a moment in time. So Eli is doing that. Now, imagine if God were to roll back the entire history of the universe and then let it go again back to T1.

What would Eli do? And you do that over and over and over again like a thousand times.

A libertarian is basically going to say that there's going to be a percentage of times when Eli doesn't eat

French fries. There's going to be a percentage of time when Eli does eat French fries, right? So there's nothing about Eli's state that determines for him that he will eat

French fries, right? And that's why when you roll things back, you get different results. Would that be related to the categorical and conditional distinctions of ability?

So that if the libertarian, for example, will hold with respect to the ability, they would hold to a categorical ability.

So that all things being equal, they can do a different thing than they actually in fact do.

Whereas the conditional ability to do otherwise would say that if the conditions were different, had he wanted to eat

French fries or not to eat French fries, then he could have. But reality, he didn't want to, so he didn't. Is that kind of what you're touching on?

In part, yes. So the categorical ability is an ability that the libertarian affirms.

The question is, does the compatibilist affirm a conditional ability? Some do, some don't.

I think there are other ways of articulating what it means to have an ability than the conditional analysis of ability.

Okay, so okay. Go ahead. No, no, I was just going to say, but substantially,

I agree that there is an ability to do otherwise. The question is, how do we best analyze that?

And the conditional analysis is one way of doing that. Okay. Now, real quick,

I just want to tell people in the comments, if you have any questions that you'd like Michael to address, leave them in the comments.

And as we usually do at the back end of the episode, we'll go through the questions. And if they look hard and Michael signals,

I don't want to answer that one, we'll just skip over that one. He's like, no, no, I don't do that one.

That's too hard. Okay, so let's get back to the original question then.

So when I say explain to me how free will, moral responsibility is compatible with determinism, you made the point, well, what do we mean by free will?

And so you would make a distinction there. Well, are you talking about libertarian freedom? Are you talking about compatibilistic freedom?

So the person defines their terms. And if they're not defining free will adequately, then you need to kind of rest the conversation on getting those definitions straight.

Is that what you're saying? Yeah, yeah. I mean, so I don't mean to make this too unnecessarily complicated, so I apologize.

But there are a lot of distinctions to draw here because in the compatibilist camp, we don't all define freedom in exactly the same way.

We have different nuances. I'm going to give a basic definition of it or understanding of it, but that doesn't mean

I wouldn't want to nuance it if we were in some kind of debate or something. So I would say if you define things in a compatibilist way, so that determinism means hypothetical necessity and freedom means reason and responsiveness.

And I can unpack that, but if you do unpack that, then you see how there is no contradiction.

But if you define determinism as hypothetical necessity and then you define freedom as libertarianism with, as you mentioned, the unconditional ability definition, then there is a contradiction.

So I would define it as a more reasons -responsive freedom, as a reasons -responsive in a reasons -responsive manner.

And so then you can see that there's no contradiction there. Now, the libertarian is not going to be happy with that, of course, but that's how you show the coherence between determinism and free will.

Okay, so suppose you've ironed out the definition. So someone says, how can free will, moral responsibility be consistent with determinism?

Well, easy. If you hold to a compatibilistic view of freedom as defined within the reform tradition, right?

If you understand free will within the libertarian context, then yeah, there's an inconsistency. So as a

Calvinist, I hold to compatibilism. Okay. They'll be like, okay, well, fine. Let's continue down that route then.

So if God decrees, we'll throw in this idea of God decreeing.

Now, if God decrees that I will eat chocolate ice cream, I can't do anything other than eat the ice cream.

How is that freedom? It just seems like determinism, bro. I'm trying to make it sound like, say that again?

It is determinism. Yes. Okay. Okay. Okay. But so then how am I free in any meaningful way?

It seems like there's just not. And forget about ice cream. Salvation. God decreed

I'm going to heaven or hell based upon a decision that was made before the foundation of the world.

How is that fair? How is that give me a chance to accept? All these sorts of questions go into it.

How would you respond to that? Here's two questions. How would you respond to that as a philosopher? And then how would you respond to that as a pastor?

I think those are two important questions. Yeah. The pastoral question is the most important question, of course.

So I would want to start by saying I want to distinguish between salvation and between everything else.

Right. Okay. Now, it is true, of course, that God, according to the reformed theologian,

God elects us. And because we are elect, we therefore in history embrace the gospel and are saved.

And God passes over the reprobate. And because he passes them over, they don't embrace the gospel in history and are not saved.

That's related, but a little bit different from other questions as to everyday life. If I do a morally responsible act, does

God determine that also? Well, I would say yes, but it's not in the same way. Okay.

So I want to distinguish those two things. Now, if we're talking about determinism and the relation to free will and all this, we have to really define what that means.

And then this is where I think, at least in my book, Richard Muller and another group that you haven't mentioned, but I mentioned in my book called the

Utrecht School. They define determinism in a way that it is not used in contemporary philosophy.

They define basically determinism. Well, first of all, they don't really give a clear definition of determinism.

They really just use the word, and it's almost like they use the word to kind of tar you, right?

Determinism, according to Robert Kane and many other people who define these things in contemporary philosophy, is just a type of conditional necessity.

So let's back up and say there are many different types of determinism.

There's like a theological determinist. There's a causal determinist. There's a psychological determinist.

There are many, many types. But what Kane says, and he's right in analyzing this concept, is that what unites them all is that there's a certain type of necessity, and he calls it a conditional necessity.

And the Reformed Orthodox would call it a hypothetical necessity, and this is what that means. It means that given certain antecedent conditions, a person's action or the consequent of the antecedent conditions follows necessarily.

But it's not an absolute necessity. An absolute necessity would basically say that there's no other possibility.

A hypothetical necessity is saying that if the antecedent conditions are different, then the action would be different.

So the conclusion is just as certain in all of the situations, but it's not – right.

But there is a sense in which there were other possibilities. And that sense needs to be carefully drawn out.

Now, real quick, before you unpack a little bit more, folks who don't have kind of a philosophical training or perhaps knowledge of some of these philosophical issues don't get so frustrated.

I know a lot of people might think, well, wait a minute. This is just too philosophical. Man, free will is just simple.

No, it's not. Like you said at the beginning, these discussions and these terms have a history, and it takes work to unpack that history to get a sharper and clearer understanding of how we should understand these issues.

So I want to – if people think this is a little too abstract for them, have patience. You could always read his book, or you could listen to this episode again and take some notes.

But these are very important. Defining terms, laying these things out, it's not as simple as some people think it should be.

But go ahead. What were you going to say as you were unpacking? I interrupted you there. Oh, no, no.

I was basically finished. I just want to echo what you were saying, and I can certainly understand how frustrating it can kind of be listening to a dumb philosopher giving all these definitions and all that.

But it is necessary. We do want to be clear, and we can bring it to a more practical level at some point, of course.

Ultimately, we want to have in our minds cemented a very clear way of thinking about this, because pastorally speaking, when you go through things like suffering, when you go through tragedies that happen in life, it is immensely practically helpful to have these things thought out already.

Because then you're not flailing in the wind trying to figure out how to make sense out of this. So there is, as abstract as this is, and, of course, everyone doesn't have to be a philosopher, but as abstract as this is, there is a practical cash value to it in the life of the believer.

And hopefully we'll get to that at some point in this discussion. Sure. Sure. Well, I want to shift things a little bit to kind of an apologetics context, because we can do apologetics.

We could talk to the unbeliever. And then when they learn, well, wait a minute. You're a Calvinist? Oh, I have a whole bunch of other things to say.

That actually happened to me one time. I was talking to someone. I was giving kind of Calvinistic types of responses, like, wait, you're

Reformed? Okay, well, that changes everything. How would you respond to the idea that, okay,

God has decreed everything that comes to pass, whatsoever comes to pass. And it's easy for the

Reformed person to say, that's right. You know, God ordains these things. And that's why history has purpose and meaning.

And we can talk about it in very encouraging and pastoral ways. But typically that's done with generalities.

But when you're in that apologetic context and the unbelievers say, well, wait a minute. So you're telling me that your

God ordained child molestation, rape, murder, genocide.

And you could just add to the list every single evil thing that is repugnant to the person who even considers it in their mind.

You're telling me that your loving God has ordained these things. How do you untie yourself from that knot,

Mr. Calvinist? How would you respond to something like that, perhaps giving a foundation for people who want to look at this from an apologetic standpoint?

Yeah, okay. So we're talking strictly apologetically. And so I don't have someone in my congregation that's approaching me with a really sad story of what happened.

I mean, I'm not going to start launching into philosophical arguments. So we're talking in an apologetic context.

Yes. So I would first point out that nobody escapes this problem.

So if you're a Molinist, for instance, God foresaw via his middle knowledge a world where one agent molested a child and he chose to actualize that when he didn't have to choose to actualize that.

See, they inherit the same kind of problem. They inherit the same kind of difficulty. Even if you are not a

Molinist, even if you're like an open theist, right, God could still predict an open theism to a pretty high level that this agent is going to commit some horrendous crime, and he could just kill him and stop him.

But he doesn't. Okay, so everybody has to deal with this issue of evil.

It's not unique to the Calvinist, right? Now, does the unbeliever have to deal with it now?

In my opinion, someone would just be like, well, I don't believe in your God, so I don't have to deal with that.

I would say to him first, you're even worse off than anyone in Christianity, because how do you have anything be evil to begin with?

Evil, for something to be objectively evil, it presupposes an objective moral standard that only makes sense if God exists.

An atheist cannot make sense of an objective moral standard, and I understand there's lots of arguments that need to go in to establish that, but that would be the gist of it.

I would say if you're an atheist, and if you're going to raise the problem of evil against a theist, you're on worse ground than we are.

At least we can say evil is real, and God has a morally sufficient reason for it, and it's coherent, even though people might not like it.

An atheist cannot do that. So from an apologetic perspective with an atheist, that would be the first place

I would go. I would say, well, what do you mean by evil? And if they don't define it in a way that is objective and universal, then

I'm going to say, so why should we pay attention to you? All you're basically saying is it's your preference, but why should

I take your preference over anyone else's? If they do define it in a way that is objective and universal, then

I would say, well, how do you have objective, universal things on your worldview? What if the person just says, well, on my worldview,

I don't call it objective evil. It's just something crummy we all have to deal with, but on your view, your

God is supposed to be good, and yet he ordains these things. How would you respond to that? Yeah, so first of all, so he's saying there is no objective standard of morality, right?

Right, he's trying to do an internal critique, so he's saying, okay, so if God doesn't exist, okay, there's no objective morality.

I mean, these things happen. It's terrible. Like, I don't like it, but it's not wrong, and it's not evil in an objective sense.

It's you, Mr. Christian, and more specifically, it's you, Mr. Calvinist, who believes that God ordained and decreed these things.

How would you respond to someone who's coming from that perspective? Yeah, so if he's trying to do an internal critique, then what that means basically is he's trying to show an internal contradiction within the reformed worldview, right?

So all I have to do then is show how it's not a contradiction, okay? And I don't want to make light of this, but it's actually pretty easy.

I say God ordains everything that comes to pass, including evil, and he has a morally sufficient reason for ordaining everything that is evil.

And the atheist is going to say, well, what is that? And I'm going to say, I don't know. God doesn't tell us, right?

And if we're talking merely about coherence, that is a perfectly coherent view. He has not succeeded in establishing a contradiction.

Sure. And that's the end of the argument. Now, you could provide some possible answers that are given in Scripture, and you could also punt to, you know,

God might have any number of reasons. But your job in responding, and this is important.

I think it's important from an apologetics perspective. It is your job to provide information that shows that it's not logically contradictory.

It's not your job to provide a detailed answer with, you know, crossing all the

T's and dotting all the I's, you know, giving all this robust explanation of how it's not.

All you need to show is that if it's even possible that God has morally sufficient reasons, that's it. There is no contradiction.

And we can speculate as to what his reasons might be, but we don't have to technically, we don't have to go further than that.

If we want to give him a little more scripturally, we could, but we don't have to, to avoid the internal critique, right?

That's exactly right. In avoiding the internal critique, all you're doing is you're just showing how it's not contradictory.

And here's what – like this is one of the reasons why I like to begin with mystery also is you can even say something like this.

If you have two supposedly contradicting things, and we won't even just – I'm just going to say this abstractly, and then we can fill it out more later if you like.

If you have two supposedly contradicting things, all I have to say is this one is

X in a certain sense, and this one is Y in a certain sense. And I don't even have to tell you what those senses are.

I just have to affirm that there are different senses, and there's no contradiction. And this goes hand in glove with mystery because if God is infinite, then at some point we're going to run up against the wall where we can't do anything more than just say, well, there are different senses, and I can't tell you what those senses are.

But that's enough to establish it's not a contradiction. Okay. That's a great point there.

Okay. So let's suppose – or we've been talking about free will, compatibilism, libertarianism, guidance control, all these scary words, right?

Cool philosophy, bro, right? Okay. But how is this even biblical, right?

I mean, come on. You Calvinists, you're always talking about a high view of scripture, and all you're doing is imposing your philosophical categories upon the text of scripture, right?

Calvinists will boast their systematically complex system of theology.

But the real issue is what does the Bible say? When I read the Bible, Michael, it seems to suggest a libertarian perspective, man.

What gives, bro? How would you respond to the person who is – and I'm trying to bring the highfalutin philosophy to like the average – by the way, all of that highfalutin philosophy is so important, and I would encourage people to dig deeper into that.

But let's bring it down a bit. Where is this in the Bible? Does it have to be in the Bible?

Is it something that there are biblical principles, and then you apply philosophical categories to make sense out of the – how is this working for you?

How do you construct your theology or philosophy in this area? Yeah, I mean

I begin from the Bible. I would not be reformed.

I would not have these philosophical views if I didn't think that there was a basic framework already taught in the

Bible. So let's start – we're talking about compatibilism. Remember, the definition of compatibilism is that determinism is compatible with free will and moral responsibility.

I think everybody can look at the Bible and see it's beyond obvious that God holds us responsible, right?

I mean there's a doctrine of hell. That's the massive way of holding us responsible. So it's non -negotiable that God holds us responsible.

That's biblical. The question is does the Bible teach determinism? Does the

Bible teach that God foreordains or decrees or in a meticulous, providential manner governs the entire universe?

And I would say I can't read the Bible in any other way. I think it's very clear that it does.

You can go to passages like Ephesians 111. God works all things according to the counsel of his will.

He has a counsel of his will, which is his thinking about things, his plan, and he works all things according to that plan.

Okay? Okay, I'm going to stop you right there. I'm going to give you a little pushback, okay? So he works all things after the counsel of his will.

But maybe the counsel of his will is to give his creatures libertarian freedom. How would you respond to that?

I hope you don't mind me jumping in and out, by the way. There are a couple of things to say. One, if he works all things according to the counsel of his will, that necessarily excludes libertarian freedom because libertarian freedom is saying these free acts are not something that God works.

Right? So if you have the conditional ability, then there's nothing that God does to you.

I'm sorry, the unconditional ability. Then there's nothing that God, quote unquote, does to you that determines an action.

So if you have the conditional ability, sorry, unconditional ability or absolute ability, then

God is not working those actions that you're doing. Because to say that God is working it is to say that he's then determining it.

Okay, I'm trying to think from a devil's advocate. So someone says, okay, well, again, but God has to choose.

If you have libertarian freedom, God still has to choose a particular reality to create whereby he knows specifically what you will do.

But then they'll say that God knowing what you will do is not the same as God causally determining what you will do.

That's just making my point. I mean, if Ephesians is saying that God is the active agent working everything in the universe according to his plan, then essentially what he is saying is you don't have to use the word determinism.

But he's not saying that God is taking this hands -off approach where he's waiting to see what you do, and then he's going to actualize that.

Right? And we can make this even more clear by looking at certain passages. There are certain passages in the

Old Testament, for example, where it's explicit that God turns the hearts of the

Assyrians or so -and -so group to hate the Israelites or to give favor to the

Israelites. That's causal language where God is turning the heart. And these are passages, in my opinion, and I haven't done a thorough study of this, so maybe there is a good response to this.

But these are passages that don't seem compatible with a Molinist view. A Molinist is basically saying

God doesn't turn the heart. God looks through all the possibilities, and he sees that you will libertarianly turn your own heart.

Right? So these biblical passages, I think, are at least prima facie incompatible with what a

Molinist or somebody who affirms libertarian freedom would say. Now, I'm sure there's going to be rejoiners and all that, and we would have to get into the details of those arguments.

But in terms of building a basic framework, I would go to passages like Ephesians 111, other passages that talk about God's meticulous providence, other passages that talk about how

God turns the hearts, and he still holds them responsible. Go ahead. Okay.

So, oh, man, I had a question, and I wanted you to finish. I didn't want to interrupt. It was a really good question.

Okay. No, you don't have to apologize. Okay. I'm going to give my substitute question, because I can't think of my really good one.

But what about verses that seem to, you know, I forgot the reference off the top of my head, but it says,

God says, this didn't even enter my mind. So there seems to be this language in Scripture that, you know, what the

Israelites did, this is not something that God's decreed. It didn't even enter my mind that you should do this.

You know, why are you doing this? And then you get the issue of if God decrees all things, why is he upset when certain things happen?

Is he, you know, getting angry at the very thing that he decreed? How would you address that? If you could be very specific and precise.

I know people who are coming from the other perspective, they'll want to push you on this very point. So, well,

I would need to ask more information about the not entering the mind passage. I mean, what is that supposed to establish that it doesn't enter his mind?

Like, is this somehow supposed to be against Calvinism? How so? So I need that to be fleshed out a little bit more.

Because, I mean, in a prima facie way, one way of taking that would be that, you know, okay, well, I guess the open theists are right.

You know, God doesn't know everything. Because if he doesn't enter your mind, then you don't know it. But if God is omniscient, how can something not enter his mind?

So I need more information on how that's supposed to be an objection. Okay, so couldn't someone say it's anthropomorphic language, but it's referring to the idea that there is a sense in which this is just not his will.

I don't see how this is something that God decrees, but then he seems really upset about it when it comes to pass.

Okay, so you're talking about the second part. You gave two kinds of passages. One where it doesn't enter

God's mind. And the other where he's punishing people for doing something he decreed.

So I was talking about the first one first. We can go to the next one next. With regards to the first one,

I would need to know what exactly is it in that passage that you think is objectionable to Calvinism or to Reformed theology.

So I'm asking for more information on that. Okay. Like what would they say?

Like how is that supposed to be against Calvinism? Just to say something didn't enter God's mind. It just seems to go against the idea that God just decrees everything in the way the

Calvinist says. It's just to point out things are clearly not God's will to happen, and it seems to be given the text that it's not his will in a way that is incompatible with God decreeing everything.

Okay, so let me kind of regurgitate this and see if this is what you're saying. And I might be saying it very sloppily.

No, it's fine. I mean, I'm probably going to give a sloppy answer anyway. So is the idea that it didn't enter

God's mind and therefore he couldn't have decreed it because it didn't enter

God's mind. It seems to be that the scripture is suggesting that this is not of God, yet the

Calvinist says all things in a sense are from God and that he decrees everything that happens. So it seems to go against the

Calvinist view of what they would say the causal determinism on Calvinism.

It seems to go against that idea. Yeah, okay. So I would say that that would be a very unwise interpretation of the passage only because if you're going to take it that way, then you have to deny that God is omniscient.

Because if something happened in the world that didn't enter God's mind, then how does he know it?

And if that's the case, then that particular interpretation of the passage would seem to have the bad consequence of denying the omniscience of God.

So it can't be a correct interpretation of the passage. Okay, so they would have to appeal to some kind of anthropomorphic language in that regard.

Which is exactly what I would do. I would say to use a category from the

Reformed Scholastics, this is analogical language. All scripture is analogical language or ectypal knowledge.

Those are good Vantillian words. Yeah, exactly. So it's basically going back to what

I was talking about earlier, how God accommodates himself where he speaks baby talk to us.

We cannot understand exactly how it is in God's mind. So God has to reveal it to us in a downgraded manner, so to speak, so that we can understand things.

And so in terms of the passages that are talking about how God can decree something and then punish us for it.

Well, one, you have explicit passages where he's doing that. You have those passages where he turns the heart and then he punishes them.

But two, we can also say, look, we can't understand

God's mind. So I can't give you the exact details of how it is that God can decree something and then hold us responsible for it.

Other than the general ideas of this is what freedom means, this is what moral responsibility means, and this is what determinism means.

Beyond that, there's a whole bunch more mystery. And that's completely legitimate. Everybody appeals to mystery.

I don't know. Am I scratching your itching? Yes, you are. And I just thought of the thing

I was going to ask previously. I forgot. So you use scripture that seem to suggest that God is determining things precisely the way that the

Calvinist says. But I've heard some non -Calvinists say, well, wait a minute. It is possible for God to determine some things without determining all things.

So all you're telling me is that in some instances, God, pardon,

God determined, you know, some, you know, the enemies of Israel to rise up and to fight against them so that Israel could have victory over them, you know, whatever.

You're just giving me an example of God determining something. But the idea of God determining something is not inconsistent with the notion that God, it's not inconsistent with the idea of God not determining all things, if that makes sense.

So if I'm understanding you're saying that a libertarian could say, look, there are certain things

God determines. Right. I have no problem. I have no problem saying God determines some things, but that doesn't mean he determines everything like you're saying.

So here's my response. If you say that there is one instance where God determines something and then holds them morally responsible, you have affirmed compatibilism.

Because that's that's all we're saying. Right. A libertarian cannot say that more that that free will and moral responsibility can be determined.

That's the whole thesis. The whole thesis is, look, it's incompatible. Right. If they're going to say, yeah, well, in this one instance in the

Bible, this is what happened. Then they've they've kind of given up libertarianism, haven't they? Because now they're saying free will and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism.

And here's one instance of it. Hmm. Okay. So if they do that, then I'm happy to say, oh, great.

I agree with that. That shows you. Now, what if someone holds to a soft libertarian view?

Why don't you define soft libertarian for people so they know what we're talking about here? And does that matter in this discussion that, you know, does that matter with respect to what you just said?

Maybe. I honestly don't know what soft libertarian is. I've never heard that term before. Okay. You want to define it for me really quickly and I can interact with that?

Sure. The first time I hear soft libertarianism touted around by many Molinists, it sounds very compatibilistic.

So I don't I'm going to give you a definition from the top of my head. But it's the idea that one is free to do that which is consistent with their nature.

However, there are multiple things that are consistent with their nature that they can libertarianly choose between.

Does that make sense? So it sounds like compatibilism. I'm acting in a way that's in accordance with my nature.

But I have a libertarian freedom to choose between the options that are compatible with my nature.

So, for example, if I'm totally depraved, there are any number of totally depraved actions that I, you know, sinful actions that I could choose from.

And soft libertarianism, to my understanding, says that they have libertarian freedom to choose between those multiple sinful actions that are consistent with my nature.

That's my understanding of soft libertarianism. I've heard some Molinists say it. I think I've heard

Dr. Kirk McGregor, who wrote a very fine book. Actually, let me give him a shout out because I think he does a really good job.

I think he wrote one of the first biographies of the life of Louis de Molina. And it speaks of his life and theology.

And he really goes into, you know, these specific areas. And I think in a very brilliant way, even though at the end of the day,

I disagree with his view. And if people are interested, actually, I actually interviewed

Dr. McGregor. He's somewhere on the video list, or maybe on my old YouTube channel. But anyway, so soft libertarianism is a thing.

And I hear Molinists say it. If you're not familiar with it, you don't have to speak to it. But I thought that might be relevant at some point.

Yeah, no, that's great. I mean, I've heard the term. I have not seen it defined.

You know, I don't do a lot of interaction with Molinists. So maybe that's why I've heard it and I haven't.

I'm trying to get my head around that. So you're saying that a soft libertarian says that you have a nature, whether good or evil, like say you have a good nature.

And your nature somehow causes you or you libertarianly do a number of things.

So say my palm is the person, right? Okay. And it's my nature. I have a nature.

My fingers are different actions that I can choose that are consistent with my nature.

Right. Now, when I'm going to make a choice, the soft libertarian will say that I have a libertarian freedom to choose among the various options that are consistent with my nature.

So that it is soft in the sense that it sounds like compatibilism, but there is a level of libertarianism in it between the options that I have.

Does that make sense? I'm not seeing how that's any different from libertarianism, though, because the libertarian is basically saying the same thing, right?

They're saying, you know, you have your particular person and you can do various things within your realm of power of being that particular person.

Like what's soft about that? Yeah. Is the idea that it's supposed to be restricted to fewer opportunities or fewer options?

Yeah, perhaps. I don't want to get too into it because I don't remember. When I used to study

Molinism and talk about, I knew it much more, you know, much better. But if you're not too familiar with it,

I'm not going to butcher it because I know someone will make a two hour response video saying why we're wrong. So that's how the

YouTube world works. Okay. So we're up on the on the hour here. What I want to what

I want to do is ask you one final question and then we're going to go into the we have a bunch of questions here in the comments.

And maybe we can unpack a bunch of other stuff in the comments here. But why don't you summarize your view as a

Calvinist, right? Why you believe it in just a general sense, you know, give maybe kind of little pieces of information as this is why

I hold the position. Summarize your position and then we'll move into the questions. Okay? Sure. Okay. Ultimately, as a reformed

Christian, I hold to this view because of what I think the Bible teaches. I think the

Bible teaches that God decrees whatsoever comes to pass and that God has meticulous providence over everything, including our own actions and that he does it in such a manner that we are free and we are morally responsible.

And there are various passages that we've spoken of already and there are many other ones. But for just being general here, that's why

I believe what I believe. I think that contemporary analytic philosophy can kind of be the handmaiden to theology here in that that basic framework that I just laid out could be fleshed out in more detail using the tools of analytic philosophy in these various compatibilist and semi -compatibilist views.

So that's kind of what I see as my project. And apart from your book, who else is writing on this topic that people should check out?

Of course, they should check out your book as well. I mean, that are Christians, you mean? Yes. Okay.

Yes. There's a lot of people that are not Christians that are writing. Sure. Sure. Obviously, the good

Dr. Bignon, right? A good French Calvinist guy. His book is excellent.

I would take that. Paul Helm. He's for years and years and years been writing on these topics.

You have guys like James Anderson and Greg Welty and a number of other guys who have put out a book a while back called

Calvinism and the Problem of Evil. You have another guy by the name of Heath White, who has written an excellent book put out by Notre Dame.

And the name is escaping me right now. The name of the book, if you just go to Amazon and type in Heath White, I'm sure it'll come up.

There's another guy named Peter Furlong, who has written a book called Challenges to Determinism, I believe.

And I don't think he actually ends up siding with determinism, but he goes through the different challenges and shows how determinists have ways out of these.

Even though he doesn't completely agree with it, from what I recall. But those are some things. Like the Heath White book and the

Peter Furlong book are kind of up here, analytic philosophy books. The James White – not

James White – James Anderson – I was like, James White's an analytic philosopher? I didn't know that. The James Anderson, Greg Welty, and others book,

Calvinism and the Problem of Evil, is still pretty high level, but I think it's a little bit more accessible than those.

Paul Helm, his latest book, Reforming Free Will, and other stuff that he's written, it's still a little bit up there, but it's even a little bit more accessible,

I think. So those would be places that one could go to. All right.

Well, thank you so much for that. I'm really enjoying this conversation. I hope you are as well. I'm totally enjoying it, yes.

Thank you. And I always tell people this. I listen to my own show, so I'm probably going to go back and listen to this and be like, okay.

So it can sink in a little more. Just real quick, I want to give a shout out to Tanner Terry, who gave a $5 super chat.

He says, to this end, or she, I don't know. I don't know. Tanner, whatever you are,

Tanner says, to this end, I also labor, striving according to his working, which works in me mightily,

Colossians 129. God works as man works. No need for dialectics. Thank you so much for the $5 super chat.

I really appreciate that. All right. So let's go all the way back up to the top and see if we can pick apart some questions here.

Okay. So let's see. Here's Plantinga's Bulldog. Does Michael deal with the metaphysics in his book, particularly the control metaphysics?

I assume you know what he's talking about. Maybe you could address that. Well, I certainly deal with control and what that means according to guidance control.

So, yes, and I deal with certain kinds of metaphysics, but there's much more to be said.

My book is not an all -encompassing book that deals with everything in analytic philosophy about free will.

It's more an attempt to take the reform scholastics and analytic philosophy and show how they're compatible and come up with a more clear understanding of what a reform view of freedom would be.

So, yes, in part, if I understand his question correctly, yes. In part, I do.

Okay. Very good. Plantinga's Bulldog also asks, who is Dr. Preciado's favorite contemporary philosopher in philosophy of free will?

Does he think deterministic incompatibilism, i .e., Dirk Paraboom, is a problem for theism?

So my favorite one would be John Martin Fisher. I don't know if you are familiar with him.

He's just an outstanding philosopher. He's the one that he and another philosopher named

Mark Ravisa came up with the whole guidance control view. He's an atheist. So this should show you that there are certain things to be mined.

It doesn't mean we have to agree with his atheism. Sure, sure. Common grace, man, common grace.

Exactly, exactly. So now the question then was, does he think deterministic incompatibilism is a problem for theism?

Yeah, I mean, basically, Dirk Paraboom does not believe that we are morally responsible in the basic desert sense.

And I think that a reform or any Christian has to say that we are responsible in the basic desert sense.

We do a certain act, and we are praised or blamed for it, in part at least, because we deserve to be praised or blamed for it.

So that would be an obstacle for Paraboom's view. That said, there's a lot in Paraboom that is fantastic that could be used by a reformed philosopher to deal with some of these issues.

Okay, all right, very good. Here's my buddy Brian Knapp. Folks, if you're interested in discussions on presuppositional apologetics, you should check out

Brian Knapp's and Chris Baltz's new YouTube channel. I think it's called Revelational Apologetics.

Sounds very similar to Revealed Apologetics, but it's okay. No copyright issues there.

I highly recommend you check that out. They just have their first episode up, and I just listened to it today. It was really good stuff.

So, hey, Brian, how's it going? And his question to you, Michael, is we likely agree that we will not sin in heaven, but are we able to sin in heaven?

I suppose there's a philosophical discussion to be had with respect to the sort of able that he's getting at.

Yeah, that would be the question. What do we mean by able? And if you're going to basically take the conditional analysis view, we would say something, well, sure, if we wanted to, we would be able to.

But in heaven, we're not going to want to. So in that sense, we're not able. The way that I understand these issues of ability or, you know, certain modal phrase or words like can and stuff like that is

I take what's more known as a contextualist view, which is there's always a context in which these words function.

So if I say, if you were to ask me, Michael, can you go to Hawaii tomorrow or today, like in the same day?

And I would have to say, well, it depends on the context. If I take a plane, I can get to Hawaii in five hours.

So, yes, I'm able to do that. If I'm going to try to swim, no, I can't do that.

Right? So these words always have a context, and we have to ask, well, what the context is. So in heaven, are we able to sin?

Well, in one sense, yes. I mean, if you're looking at things like the laws of logic, is there somehow a contradiction in the statement saying

Michael can sin in heaven? Well, no, there's no logical contradiction.

The issue would be that my nature is now glorified. And so I would not be able to do it in the sense of my nature not allowing it, but not in the sense of the laws of logic.

So I confirm, well, sure, according to the laws of logic, I'm able to. According to my nature that's been glorified, no,

I'm not able to. And there are many other contexts in which to define these words.

So we'd have to be very specific as to exactly which one we're talking about. I don't know if that's helpful.

Yeah, no, very helpful. Tanner asked the question, what do you mean by mystery? This question came up when you spoke about beginning with mystery.

Why don't you tell us what you mean by mystery and why your version of mystery, which is not a special version, we all have mystery, is different than what

Calvinists typically just punt things off to mystery. People kind of wave it off as, eh, we don't have an answer for that, so it's mysterious.

Why aren't you doing that? But why is the notion of mystery still important? So what

I mean by mystery is I would – maybe I'm wrong about this, but I would think pretty much any

Christian would basically mean the same thing. We basically just mean that we are finite and God is infinite, and that means our knowledge is limited.

So the limitation of our knowledge then means that the things that extend beyond our knowledge are mysterious to us.

They're not contradictory. We believe that God is a rational being who has complete coherence within his being.

So we're not saying a mystery is a contradiction. We're saying a mystery is something that transcends our ability to understand or comprehend it.

So that's what I mean by mystery. All right. Thank you. Terry has another question. I think it was based off something you said with respect to the internal states and it not being related to external states or something or other.

But Tanner says, Eli's mental and physical faculties aren't related to the internal state of Eli.

Do you remember the context in which you were speaking about that? Yeah. No, I would definitely say that your mental and physical faculties are part of what it means to be your internal state.

Okay. I mean, is that all he's asking? Well, I mean, we just roll with the questions as they come.

I'm not sure, but that's sufficient for me. Here's one more by Terry. Terry has a bunch of questions, and his or hers comes first before the bottom of the list there.

But Tanner asks, what is compatibilistic freedom? And we did define that before, but why don't you just briefly define it for us now?

Again, so compatibilism is an overarching category wherein there are numerous different understandings of what compatibilist freedom is.

So I can give a couple. I'll give just as examples, too. You have someone like a Harry Frankfurt. So he believes that you have this kind of hierarchy of desires.

So you have a first order desire and you have a second order desire. A first order desire would be

Eli desiring to eat French fries. A second order desire would be Eli approving of his first order desire to eat

French fries. And Frankfurt would say you have freedom when your first order and second order desires mesh.

So that's one compatibilist view. Another compatibilist view would be like what I'm advocating with a reasons responsive view.

And I would basically say what it means to be free is that you are reasons responsive, that you have the ability to respond to reasons in various situations.

Now, that gets fleshed out in more detail, of course, but those would be two different types of views. And there are others of what compatibilist freedom would be.

The essence of compatibilism is basically just saying that some view of freedom, genuine freedom, is compatible with determinism.

All right. Very good. Plantigos Bulldog asks, what does Dr. Preciado think of the problem of luck for compatibilist views?

Yeah, no, this is a great question. And this guy obviously knows something about this area. Yeah, I think the problem of luck,

I mean, obviously understanding it in a certain way is unavoidable for anybody. And I think the

Calvinist has the best way of answering it. We basically think that God ordains everything.

And well, let me take a step back and give you an understanding of what luck, the problem of luck is.

There's a number of ways of cashing this out. But basically, the problem of luck is, is that we don't have control over certain things about us.

Right. So the kinds of care. So this would be called constitutive luck. Constitutive luck is basically saying you don't have control, ultimate control over how your character has developed from what you're making choices.

Right. So you're born into a certain family in a certain nation. That's not in your control.

They raise you in a certain way. And that affects your character and forms your character. You're not in control of that.

So then the question is, that's luck. I mean, how can you be responsible for luck?

Right. That's constitutive luck. Another form of luck would be like circumstantial luck, which would basically be like the classic example is two drunk drivers.

Right. You have two drunk drivers. They leave at the same time. One hits a pedestrian who just ran across the street.

The other gets home safely. Right. Given the circumstances, one is lucky and the other is unlucky.

They're just as guilty of driving drunk. But one seems to be more morally responsible for hitting the person than the one that didn't, even though it had nothing to do with their own control.

It just was a matter of luck. Right. So a Calvinist is going to say, look, God, Providence ordains everything, even if we don't have control over it.

And he still holds us morally responsible for things. And he holds us morally responsible for those things, as I would say, that we have guidance control over.

Now, I think the problem of luck ends up being a really big problem for a libertarian, because I think in their view and I'm obviously oversimplifying here.

But when we go back to the rollback argument that we spoke of earlier. Right. What is it that accounts for why when you roll back plan of the universe a thousand times that 60 times he does 60 percent of times he does one thing and 40 percent he does another.

What accounts for that? The answer would be luck. Right. Because nothing in the agent is causing or determining him to make one choice or another.

And if if luck is the issue, if luck is located right there, then you have a problem of control.

In what sense did the agent control what actually happened? If there's nothing in him that is an extension that gets extended in his action, how do we make sense out of that?

How that person had control. And if we can't make sense out of that person had control. How can you hold him responsible?

No. All right. Yep. That makes perfect sense. Here's a question. It's not going to be on the screen, but it's a friend, my friend

Tyler here. He says, I'll probably be watching. He was anticipating him coming late, but he asked the question.

I'm just going to read the whole statement he has here. I'll probably be watching by then. But if not, please ask him. That's you to talk about any real substantive differences in sourcehood, incompatibilism and the compatibilistic understanding of guidance control.

I've always found that when pressed, the source incompatibilist just means guidance control.

But when shown that but when shown that fall back on some some lack of categorical ability or opportunity to choose otherwise.

Does that make sense to you? Kind of. I might need you to reread it for me.

That's no problem. No problem. It's like in a statement and a question in a statement. I'll probably be watching by then.

But if not, please ask him to talk about any real substantive differences in sourcehood, incompatibilism and the compatibilistic understanding of guidance control.

I've always found that when pressed, the source incompatibilist just means guidance control.

But when shown that they often fall back on some lack of categorical ability or opportunity to choose otherwise.

OK, so, well, there's a lot to unpack there, and I hope I understood the question properly.

Just try your best. It's a it's a sorry, Tyler. It was a slop, a sloppily constructed question, but it's all good.

You can try your best. Go ahead. OK, so guidance control would be considered a semi -compatibilist view, first off.

So it wouldn't be considered a compatibilist view. There are other source.

Well, how do I want to put it? So he said source incompatibilism and compatibilism.

Something like that. Substantive difference. Yeah. OK. Yeah.

So as I understand source incompatibilism, that's the view that you don't have to be the ultimate source of your action in order to be free and morally responsible.

OK, and that would be a tenant of guidance control.

Guidance control would say you don't have to be the ultimate source of your action in order to be free and morally responsible.

But there are other source incompatibilist views that aren't guidance control. So Frankfurt would basically be something like that, a source incompatibilist view.

He would say you don't have to be the ultimate source of your action in order to be free and morally responsible.

So I don't know that I would make the connection between source incompatibilism and guidance control and say that they're the same thing.

OK. All right. That was good, given the question. I mean, I could have gotten that completely wrong. No worries.

How are you doing? Are you OK? Yeah, I'm good. My daughter hasn't woken up yet, so that's good. All right.

Very good. Scott. Scott asks, is Mr. Preciado still planning to do an analytically precise work on Van Til's epistemology?

We desperately need it. Wow. Well, how did he know that I even had anything like that in mind?

Did I mention that? I don't know. Maybe I mentioned that. Maybe I did. Oh, you are?

Yes. I mean, this is a long term project. I want to finish the free will project first.

I'm slowly starting to re -familiarize myself with the transcendental argument literature, but I don't foresee anything being completed for probably a number of years still.

Now, that said, since my channel focuses heavily on presuppositionalism and transcendental argumentation, would you be willing to come on in the future and have a conversation?

I mean, I know you're going to be working on it for years, but based upon where you are at the moment, maybe we could unpack some of the things, the project that you're doing.

What are you trying to accomplish? Maybe we can unpack that. That would be a lot of fun. That would be great. You just have to give me a little bit more time to re -familiarize myself with…

No worries. No worries. Of course. Of course. Brian asked the question, could you explain reasons responsive for us and perhaps provide an example?

Sure. Okay. So here's – I'll give a quick example. I think this is kind of a variant of something that Fisher gives.

Okay, so assume that you have a person with a nervous tick, right?

And the nervous tick just causes the person's arm to go like that, right? That's what it does.

Okay. So he's walking down the street one day and he sees one of his friends.

And at the moment he sees one of his friends, the nervous tick goes off and he goes, boom, and he punches the guy right in the face, right?

Is he morally responsible for that? We're going to say as a reason responsive theorist, no.

And the reason why is because no matter what reason was presented to him, he still would have done the same thing because the nervous tick is not reasons responsive.

And it's one of the reasons why we say things like that are not things that you can hold someone responsible for.

Does that make sense? Sure. Yeah. Okay. Good. Let's see here.

Scott also asked, did Mr. Preciado read Paul Minotta's book on the will?

If so, what are your thoughts? He has a book on the will? I guess he didn't read it.

Well, no, I read something a long time ago. Okay. I think it was like an introduction to something.

Maybe this is what he's referring to. And my memory just isn't good, but I do recall reading something from him.

And I have had, as I was writing this in his dissertation form,

I had some email conversations with him and one phone conversation with him. So I think

I have read what he's referring to. I'm not 100 % certain. Sure. I read something by him.

That was good. I liked it. Paul's good. I've been trying to get Paul to come on. He's a busy guy, too.

Well, that would be a great show. I would watch that. Yeah, I would probably rewatch it because my interactions with him on Facebook, he's a funny guy.

I think we'd actually have a great conversation. Absolutely. At any rate, wink, wink, Paul, if you're watching.

Hello. All right. Anyway, Mr. C says, given the fact that we all desire, want soundness of mind, does that desire not lead us to other objective truths, the main one being that the use of malice in any form contradicts soundness?

I'm not sure I understand that. I don't either. Okay. That's all right.

If you don't understand it, we'll move along so we can get to other questions. Well, if you want to rewrite it or something, I don't want him to leave unhappy.

Yeah. It's all right. Okay. Let's see here. Let's see here.

Okay, here we go. Scott asks, can Michael, I was saying

Mr., but I don't know where Mr. came from. Can Michael offer a general outline of God's will, given the categories he's laid out this evening?

In a short snippet, of course. I mean, that's a big topic, but. A general outline of God's will.

I'm trying to wrap my head around what that would mean. Maybe like the different senses of God's will, like his decrees, maybe prescriptive, or maybe that's where he's coming from.

Classic distinction in Reformed theology, and actually, it's not unique to Reformed theology, at least formally.

I mean, they mean different things, but between his decretive will and his prescriptive will. God's prescriptive will are the commandments that he gives to us, the expectations that he has of us as to how to live our life.

And the decretive will is what he has decreed from before the foundation of the world.

Is that what he's saying? So it says that given the categories he's laid out in this evening. Right, I think given what you've said with respect to free will, more responsibility, determinism, how does

God's will work out in all this? How would you lay it out? If we just take those two categories, for instance, obviously

God's decretive will is his all -determining will. So that would be the determinism.

His prescriptive will doesn't always come to pass, so that would not be a deterministic, decretive will.

If you're asking how they relate, I mean, if the question is how they relate, they relate somehow in God.

I mean, God has given us these commandments to live by, and then he has decreed in some instances for us to not live by them, right?

And the question is, well, how does that make any sense? Well, it makes sense in God's mind. And from us as a human perspective, a finite human perspective, we make sense out of that basically by saying

God has a morally sufficient reason for decreeing us to not fulfill his prescriptive will.

Now, again, that's not going to be satisfying to people that want to know the details of everything, but it is a coherent answer, and the charge of a contradiction would not be applicable.

Okay, very good. That's a very helpful way of phrasing that there. Brian asks, do you feel

Exodus 10 .1 is a good example of compatibilism, semi -compatibilism, God decreeing that Pharaoh will not let the

Israelites go free and yet will hold him responsible? I do, but I do know that there are issues like hardening

Pharaoh's heart, and some people say, well, Pharaoh hardened his heart first, and then God. I like to use other passages where they specifically talk about God turning the will of the

Assyrians or other people to either give favor to the Israelites or to hate the

Israelites. I think those passages are even more clear than the issue with Pharaoh.

Okay, that is the last question. I'm scrolling down here. I think you did a really good job.

Well, I appreciate that. Thank you. Oh, okay. There was one more question. I don't want to skip over.

This is the last question here. So Mr. C asks, since free will isn't something that we desire, but rather implied, doesn't that change the whole concept of free will as a choice?

Wouldn't it be a non -choice? Again, I'm not sure what he's asking. Maybe you can unpack that. So since free will,

I'm trying to read it here. Since free will isn't something that we desire, well, I'm not sure why it wouldn't be something we desire, but rather implied.

Implied from what? Doesn't that change the whole concept of free will as a choice?

Well, free will would be considered more than just a choice, pretty much on any definition as far as I understand it.

Wouldn't it be a non -choice? No, honestly, I don't quite grasp what is being asked.

All right. No worries. That's just the way how live streams go. When people ask questions about presuppositionalism,

I'm like, I have no idea what you're saying there. It's totally normal. Michael, you did an excellent job.

You've given a lot of food for thought. As I said before, I'm definitely going to go back and listen to this, and I hope folks do if they're really interested in this topic.

Is there any way people can find your content online? I know your website's not very active, but will you be doing something soon?

What's going on with you? Yeah. So I have a website, michaelpresciato .com, and originally

I planned to have a podcast and to have an active blog, and life has just gotten so busy.

I have not had the time to do that. I do plan on doing that eventually, so I would say, Lord willing, within the next year there will be more activity on there.

I have a Facebook account. You can just look me up, and if you don't look like an ax murderer,

I'll accept your friend request. I also am, as I mentioned to you, a teacher of the congregation at Faith Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Garland, Texas.

If you want to attend the Bible studies that I teach, feel free to come. Say hi to me.

We have an awesome pastor there. His name is Chad Vaughn. You will get an awesome, exegetical,

Bible -based sermon every single week in and out. No disappointments there, so feel free to come say hi to me there.

Those would be ways of getting more content and ways of getting a hold of me,

I guess. Okay. Someone says here, what if I look like an ax murderer, but I'm actually really nice?

Then look nice. You would have to look nice. That's right. That's right. Well, Michael, this was a lot of fun and very, very helpful, and I really appreciate your time.

Thank you so much. Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate that. All right. Well, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for listening.

Once again, before I end, I just want to point people in the direction of my website,

Revealed Apologetics. If you're interested in taking an online course that I created, complete with lectures and outlines and PowerPoint slides, you can sign up for that on RevealedApologetics .com,

and you click on the option PresuppU, which is short for Presupp University.

You could enroll in that and email me at RevealedApologetics at gmail .com. If you have any questions, suggestions of guests to have in the future,

I definitely read those and take them to heart. So please feel free to do that. Other than that, this concludes this episode.

I really appreciate everyone who's taken the time to listen and send a question. I hope this has been helpful to folks.