Author: Papa Giorgio

Ghost In The Machine – Richard Milton

Published by Papa Giorgio

(Posted here originally June 2020. Updated PDF link.)

This is chapter 15 (The Ghost In The Machine) from Richard Milton excellent book entitled [originally published Jan 1, 1992], “SHATTERING THE MYTHS OF DARWINISM” (PDF), as well as a bit from near the end of the book regarding a “spellchecking” program to shore up his ideas from chapter fifteen. It really has to do with responding to the idea that a computer program is shown to “evolve.” That in some way there is an increase in novel information in the program that is adding to the specificity of the program apart from the designers/software engineers.

I would be remiss to not link to an article that also goes through this example well:

Enjoy… mind you this book was read by me in 1998, but the ideas here have been sustained through today.

Ghost in the Machine
pp. 167-176

[167>] Russel and Seguin’s 1982 picture of a human-looking “evolved” version of a dinosaur was an impressive feat combining science and imagination in a constructive and entertaining way. Yet few in 1982 foresaw that in little more than a decade, over 100 million people around the world would pay to be scared by the even more impressive feat of the computer generated dinosaurs of “Jurassic Park”.

Nothing that has entered the evolution debate since Darwin’s time has promised to illuminate the subject so much as the modern computer and its apparently limitless ability to represent, on the monitor-screen, compelling visual solutions to the most abstruse mathematical questions.

The information handling capacity of electronic data processing, with its obvious analogy to DNA, has been enthusiastically enlisted by computer-literate Darwinists as offering powerful evidence for their theory; while genetic software systems, said to emulate the processes of genetic mutation and natural selection at speeds high enough to make the process visible, have become a feature of most up-to-date biology laboratories.

The computer has been put to many ingenious uses in the service of Darwinist theory. And it has changed the minds of not a few skeptics by its powerful visual imagery and uncanny ability to bring extinct creatures – or even creatures that never lived – to life in front [168>] of us. But, compelling though the visual images are, how much confidence should we put in the computer as a guide to the evolution of life?

In his book The Blind Watchmaker Richard Dawkins describes a computer program he wrote which randomly generates symmetrical figures from dots and lines. These figures, to a human eye, have a resemblance to a variety of objects. Dawkins gives some of them insect and animal names, such as bat, spider, fox or caddis fly. Others he gives names like lunar lander, precision balance, spitfire, lamp and crossed sabers.

Dawkins calls these creations “biomorphs”, meaning life shapes or living shapes, a term he borrows from fellow zoologist Desmond Morris. He also feels very strongly that in using a computer program to create them, he is in some way simulating evolution itself. His approach can be understood from this extract:

Nothing in my biologist’s intuition, nothing in my 20 years experience of programming computers, and nothing in my wildest dreams, prepared me for what actually emerged on the screen. I can’t remember exactly when in the sequence it first began to dawn on me that an evolved resemblance to something like an insect was possible. With a wild surmise, I began to breed generation after generation, from whichever child looked most like an insect. My incredulity grew in parallel with the evolving resemblance…. Admittedly they have eight legs like a spider, instead of six like an insect, but even so! I still cannot conceal from you my feeling of exultation as I first watched these exquisite creatures emerging before my eyes.[1]

Dawkins not only calls his computer drawings “biomorphs”, he gives some of them the names of living creatures. He also refers to them as “quasi-biological” forms and in a moment of excitement calls them “exquisite creatures”. He plainly believes that in some way they correspond to the real world of living animals and insects. But they do not correspond in any way at all with living things, except in the purely trivial way that he sees some resemblance in their shapes. The only thing about the “biomorphs” that is [169>] biological is Richard Dawkins, their creator. As far as the “spitfire” and the “lunar lander” are concerned there is not even a fancied biological resemblance.

The program he wrote and the computer he used have no analog at all in the real biological world. Indeed, if he set out to create an experiment that simulates evolution, he has only succeeded in making one that simulates special creation, with himself in the omnipotent role.

His program is not a true representation of random mutation coupled with natural selection. On the contrary it is dependent on artificial selection in which he controls he sees some resemblance in their shapes. The only thing about the “biomorphs” that is biological is Richard Dawkins, their creator. As far as the “spitfire” and the “lunar lander” are concerned there is not even a fancied biological resemblance.

The program he wrote and the computer he used have no analog at all in the real biological world. Indeed, if he set out to create an experiment that simulates evolution, he has only succeeded in making one that simulates special creation, with himself in the omnipotent role.

His program is not a true representation of random mutation coupled with natural selection. On the contrary it is dependent on artificial selection in which he controls the rate of occurrence of mutations. Despite Dawkins’s own imaginative interpretations, and even with the deck stacked in his favor, his biomorphs show no real novelty arising. There are no cases of bears turning into whales.

There is also no failure in his program: his biomorphs are not subject to fatal consequences of degenerate mutations like real living things. And, most important of all, he chooses which are the lucky individuals to receive the next mutation – it is not decided by fate – and of course he chooses the most promising ones (“I began to breed from whichever child looked most like an insect.”) That is why they have ended up looking like recognizable images from his memory. If his mutations really occurred randomly, as in the real world, Dawkins would still be sitting in front of his screen watching a small dot and waiting for it do something.

Above all, his computer experiment falsifies the most important central claim of mechanistic Darwinian thinking; that, through natural processes, living things could come into being without any precursor. What Dawkins has shown is that, if you want to start the evolutionary ball rolling, you need some form of design to take a hand in the proceedings, just as he himself had to sit down and program his computer.

In fact, his experiment shows very much the same sort of results that field work in biology and zoology has shown for the past hundred years: there is no evidence for beneficial spontaneous genetic mutation; there is no evidence for natural selection (except as an empty tautology); there is no evidence for either as significant evolutionary mechanisms. There is only evidence of an unquenchable optimism among Darwinists that given enough [170>] time, anything can happen – the argument from probability.

But although Dawkins’s program does not qualify as a simulation of random genetic mutation coupled with natural selection, it does highlight at least one very important way in which computer programs resemble genetic processes. Each instruction in a program must be carefully considered by the programmer as to both its immediate effect on the computer hardware and its effects on other parts of the program. The letters and numbers which the programmer uses to write the instructions have to be written down with absolute precision with regard to the vocabulary and syntax of the programming language he uses in order for the computer system to function at all. Even the most trivial error can lead to a complete malfunction. In 1977, for example, an attempt by NASA to launch a weather satellite from Cape Canaveral ended in disaster when the launch vehicle went off course shortly after takeoff and had to be destroyed. Subsequent investigation by NASA engineers found that the accident was caused by failure of the onboard computer guidance system – because a single comma had been misplaced in the guidance program.

Anyone who has programmed a computer to perform the simplest task in the simplest language – Basic for instance – will understand the problem. If you make the simplest error in syntax, misplacing a letter, a punctuation mark or even a space, the program will not run at all.

In just the same way, each nucleotide has to be “written” in precisely the correct order and in precisely the correct location in the DNA molecule for the offspring to remain viable, and, as described earlier, major functional disorders in humans, animals and plants are caused by the loss or displacement of a single DNA molecule, or even a single nucleotide within that molecule.

In order to simulate neo-Darwinist evolution on his computer, it is not necessary for Dawkins to devise complex programs that seek to simulate insect life. All he has to do is to write a program containing a large number of instructions (3000 million instructions if he wishes to simulate human DNA) that continually regenerates its own program code, but randomly interferes with the code in trivial ways, such as transposing, shifting or missing characters. (The system must be set to restart itself after each fatal “birth”.)

[171>] The result of this experiment would be positive if the system ever develops a novel function that was not present in the original programming. One way of defining “novelty” would be to design the program so that, initially, its sole function was to replicate itself (a computer virus). A novel function would then be anything other than mere reproduction. In practice, however, I do not expect the difficulty of defining what constitutes a novelty to pose any problem. It is extremely improbable that Dawkins’s program will ever work again after the first generation, just as in real life, mutations cause genetic defects, not improvements.

Outside of the academic world there are a number of important commercial applications based on computer simulations that deserve to be seriously examined. A good example of this is in the field of aircraft wing design where computers have been used by aircraft engineers to develop the optimum airfoil profile. In the past wing design has been based largely on repetitive trial and error methods. A hypothetical wing shape is drawn up; a physical model is made and is aerodynamically tested in the wind tunnel. Often the results of such an empirical design approach are predictable: lengthening the upper wing curve, in relation to the lower, generally increases the upward thrust obtained. But sometimes results are very unpredictable, as when complex patterns of turbulence combine at the trailing edge to produce drag, which lowers wing efficiency, and causes destructive vibration.

Engineers at Boeing Aircraft tried a new approach. They created a computer model which was able to “mutate” a primitive wing shape at random – to stretch it here or shrink it there. They also fed into the model rules that would enable the computer to simulate testing the resulting design in a computerized version of the “wind tunnel”- the rules of aerodynamics.

The engineers say this process has resulted in obtaining wing designs offering maximum thrust and minimum drag and turbulence, more quickly than before and without any human intervention once the process has been set in motion.

Designers have made great savings in time compared with previous methods and the success of the computer in this field has given rise to a new breed of application dubbed “genetic software”. Indeed, on the face of it, the system is acting in a Darwinian manner. The [172>] computer (an inanimate object) has produced an original and intelligent design (comparable, say, with a natural structure such as a bird’s wing) by random mutation of shape combined with selection according to rules that come from the natural world – the laws of aerodynamics. If the computer can do this in the laboratory in a few hours or days, what could nature not achieve in millions of years?

The fallacies on which this case is constructed are not very profound but they do need to be nailed down. In a recently published popular primer on molecular biology, Andrew Scott’s Vital Principles, this very example is given under the heading “the creativity of evolution”. The process itself is called “computer generated evolution” as though it were analogous to an established natural process of mutation and selection.[2]

The most important fallacy in this argument is the idea that somehow a result has occurred which is independent of, or in some way beyond the engineers, who merely started the machine by pressing a button. Of course, the fact is that a human agency has designed and built the computer and programmed it to perform the task in question. As with the previous experiment, this begs the only important question in evolution theory: could complex structures have arisen spontaneously by random natural processes without any precursor? Like all other computer simulation experiments, this one actually makes a reasonable case for special creation – or some form of vitalist-directed design – because it specifically requires a creator to build the computer and devise and implement the program in the first place.

However, there are other important fallacies too. The only reason that the Boeing engineers are able to take the design produced on paper by their computer and translate that design into an aircraft that flies, is because they are employing an immense body of knowledge – not possessed by the com put er – regarding the properties of materials from which the aircraft will be made and the manufacturing processes that will be used to make it. The computer’s wing is merely an outline on paper, an idea: it is of no more significance to aviation than a wave outline on the beach or a wind outline in the desert. The real wing has to actually fly in the air with real passengers. The decisive events that make that idea into a reality are a long, complex sequence of human operations [173>] and judgments that involve not only the shaping and fastening of metal for wings but also the design and manufacture of airframes and jet engines. These additional complexities are beyond the capacity of the computer, not merely in practice but in principle, because computers cannot even make a cup of coffee, let alone an airliner, without being instructed every step of the way.

In order for a physical structure like an aircraft wing to evolve by spontaneous random means, it is necessary for natural selection to do far more than select an optimum shape. It must also select the correct materials, the correct manufacturing methods (to avoid failure in service) and the correct method of integrating the new structure into its host creature. These operations involve genetic engineering principles which are presently unknown. And because they are unknown by us, they cannot be programmed into a computer.

There is also an important practical reason why the computer simulation is not relevant to synthetic evolution: because an aircraft wing differs from a natural wing in a fundamental way. The aircraft wing is passive, since the forward movement of the aircraft is derived from an engine. A natural wing like a bird’s, however, has to provide upthrust and the forward motion necessary to generate that lift making it a complex, articulated active mechanism. The engineering design problem of evolving a passive wing is merely a repetitive mechanical task – that is why it is suitable for computerization. So far, no-one has suggested programming a computer to design a bird’s wing by random mutation because the suggestion would be seen as ludicrous. Even if all of the world’s computers were harnessed together, they would be unable to take even the most elementary steps needed to design a bird’s wing unless they were told in advance what they were aiming at and how to get there.

If computers are no use to evolutionists as models of the hypothetical selection process, they are proving invaluable in another area of biology; one that seems to hold out much promise to Darwinists – the field of genetics. Since Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule, and since geneticists began unraveling the meaning of the genetic code, the center of gravity of evolution theory has gradually shifted away from the earth sciences – geology and pale-ontology – toward molecular biology.

[174>] This shift in emphasis has occurred not only because of the attraction of the new biology as holding the answers to many puzzling questions, but also because the traditional sciences have proved ultimately sterile as a source of decisive evidence. The gaps in the fossil record, the incomplete-ness of the geological strata, and the ambiguity of the evidence from comparative anatomy, ultimately caused Darwinists to give up and look somewhere else for decisive evidence. Thanks to molecular biology and computer science they now have somewhere else to try.

Darwinists seem to have drawn immense comfort from their recent discoveries at the cellular level and beyond, behaving and speaking as though the new discoveries of biology represent a triumphant vindication of their long-held beliefs over the irrational ideas of vitalists. Yet the gulf between what Darwinists claim for molecular biological discoveries and what those discoveries actually show is only too apparent to any objective evaluation.

Consider these remarks by Francis Crick, justly famous as one of the biologists who cracked the genetic code, and equally well known as an ardent supporter of Darwinist evolution. In his 1966 book Molecules and Men, in which he set out to criticize vitalism, Crick asked which of the various molecular biological processes are likely to be the seat of the “vital principle”.[3] “It can hardly be the action of the enzymes,” he says, “because we can easily make this happen in a test tube. Moreover most enzymes act on rather simple organic molecules which we can easily synthesize.”

There is one slight difficulty but Crick easily deals with it; “It is true that at the moment nobody has synthesized an actual enzyme chemically, but we can see no difficulty in doing this in principle, and in fact I would predict quite confidently that it will be done within the next five or ten years.”

A little later, Crick says of mitochondria (important objects in the cell that also contain DNA):

It may be some time before we could easily synthesise such an object, but eventually we feel that there should be no gross difficulty in putting a mitochondrion together from its component parts.

This reservation aside, it looks as if any system of [175>] enzymes could be made to act without invoking any special principles, or without involving material that we could not synthesize in the laboratory. [4]

There is no question that Crick and Watson’s decoding of the DNA molecule is a brilliant achievement and one of the high points of twentieth-century science. But this success seems to me to have led many scientists to expect too much as a result.

Crick’s early confidence that an enzyme would be produced synthetically within five or ten years has not been borne out and biologists are further than ever from achieving such a synthesis. Indeed, reading and rereading the words above with the benefit of hindsight I cannot help but interpret them as saying “we are unable to synthesize any significant part of a cell at present, but this reservation aside, we are able to synthesize any part of the cell.”

Certainly great strides have been made. William Shrive, writing in the McGraw Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, says, “The complete amino acid sequence of several enzymes has been determined by chemical methods. By X-ray crystallographic methods it has even been possible to deduce the exact three-dimensional molecular structure of a few enzymes.”[5] But despite these advances no-one has so far synthesized anything remotely as complex as an enzyme or any other protein molecule.

Such a synthesis was impossible when Crick wrote in 1966 and remains impossible today. It is probably because there is a world of difference between having a neat table that shows the genetic code for all twenty amino acids (Alanine = GCA, Praline = CCA and so on) and knowing how to manufacture a protein. These complex molecules do not simply assemble themselves from a mixture of ingredients like a cup of tea. Something else is needed. What the something else is remains conjectural. If it is chemical it has not been discovered; if it is a process it is an unknown process; if it is a “vital principle” it has not yet been recognized. Whatever the something is, it is presently impossible to build a case either for Darwinism or against vitalism out of what we have learned of the cell and the molecules of which it is composed.

It is easy to see why evolutionists should be so excited about cellular discoveries because the mechanisms they have found appear to [176>] be very simple. But however simple they may seem, as of yet no-one has succeeded in synthesizing any significant original structure from raw materials. We know the code for the building blocks; we don’t know the instructions for building a house with them.

Indeed, the discoveries of biochemistry and molecular biology have raised some rather awkward questions for Darwinists, which they have yet to address satisfactorily. For example, the existence of genetically very simple biological entities, such as viruses, seems to support Darwinist ideas about the origin of life. One can imagine all sorts of primitive life forms and organisms coming into existence in the primeval ocean and it seems only natural that one should find entities that are part way between the living and the nonliving – stepping stones to life as it were. It is only to be expected, says Richard Dawkins, that the simplest form of self-replicating object would merely be that part of the DNA program which says only “copy me”, which is essentially what a virus is.

The problem here is that viruses lack the ability to replicate unless they inhabit a host cell – a fully functioning cell with its own genetic replication mechanisms. So the first virus must have come after the first cell, not before in a satisfyingly Darwinian processes.

But despite minor unresolved problems of this kind Darwinists still have one remaining card to play in support of their theory. It is the strongest card in their hand and the most powerful and decisive evidence in favor of Darwinian evolutionary processes.

[….]

pp. 223-227

[223>] Earlier on I referred to computers and their programs as a fruitful source of comparison with genetic processes since both are concerned with the storage and reliable transmission of large quantities of information. Arguing from analogy is a dangerous practice, but there is one phenome-non connected with computer systems that could be of some importance in understanding biological information processing strategies.

The phenomenon has to do with the computer’s ability to refer to a master list or template and to highlight any exceptions to this master list that it encounters during processing. This “exception reporting” is profoundly important in information processing. For instance, this book was prepared using a word-processing program that has a spelling checker. When invoked, the spell checker reads the typescript of the book and compares each word with its built-in dictionary, highlighting as potential mistakes those it does not recognize. Of course, it will encounter words that are spelled correctly but are not found in a normal dictionary – such as “deoxyribonucleic acid”. But the program is clever enough to allow me to add the novel word to the dictionary, so that the next time it is encountered it will be accepted as correct instead of reported as an exception – as long as I spell it correctly.

In other words, the spelling checker isn’t really a spelling checker. It has no conception of correct spelling. It is merely a mechanism [224>] for reporting exceptions. Using these methods, programmers can get computers to behave in an apparently intelligent or purposeful way when they are really only obeying simple mechanical rules. Not unnaturally, this gives Darwinists much encouragement to believe that life processes may at root be just as simple and mechanical.

In cell biology there are natural chemical properties of complex molecules that lend them-selves to automatic checking and excepting of this kind. For example many molecules are stereospecific – they will attach only to certain other specific molecules and only in special positions. There are also much more complex forms of exception reporting, for instance as part of the brain’s (of if you prefer, the mind’s) cognitive processes: as when we see and recognize a single face in the crowd or hear our name mentioned at a noisy cocktail party.

In the case of the spelling checker, the behavior of the system can be made to look more and more intelligent through a process of learning if, every time it highlights a new word, I add that word to its internal dictionary. If I continue for a long enough time, then eventually, in principle, the system will have recorded every word in the English language and will highlight only words that are indeed misspelled. It will have achieved the near-miraculous levels of efficiency and repeatability that we are used to seeing in molecular biological processes. But something strange has also been happening at the same time – or, rather, two strange things.

The first is that as its vocabulary grows, the spelling checker becomes less efficient at drawing to my attention possible mistakes. This unexpected result comes about in the fallowing way. Remember, the computer knows nothing of spelling, it merely reports exceptions to me. To begin with, it has only, say, 50,000 standard words in its dictionary. This size of dictionary really only covers the common everyday words plus a modest number of proper nouns (for capital cities, common surnames and the like) and doesn’t leave much room for unusual words. It would, for instance include a word like ‘great’ but not the less-frequently used word “grate”.

The result is that if I accidentally type “grate” when I really mean “great”, the spell checker will draw it to my attention. If however, I enlarge the dictionary and add the word “grate”, the spell [225>]checker will ignore it in future, even though the chances are that it will occur only as a typing mis take – except in the rare case where I am writing about coal fires or cookery.

One can generalize this case by saying that when the dictionary has an optimum size of vo-cabulary, I get the best of both worlds: it points out misspellings of the most common words and reports anything unusual which in most cases probably will be an error. (Obviously to work at optimum efficiency the size of dictionary should be matched to the vocabulary of the writer). As the dictionary grows in volume it becomes more efficient in one way, highlighting only real spelling errors, but less efficient in another: it becomes more probable that my typing errors will spell a real word – one that will not be reported – but not the word I mean to use. Paradoxically, although the spelling checker is more efficient, the resulting book is full of contextual errors: ‘pubic’ instead of ‘public’, ‘grate’ instead of ‘great’ and so on.

It requires a human intelligence -a real spelling checker, not a mechanical exception reporter to make sure that the intended result is produced.

I said two strange things have been happening while I have been adding words to the spelling checker. The second is the odd occasion when the system has highlighted a real spelling mistake to me- say, “problem” instead of “problem” – and I have mistakenly told the computer to add the word to its dictionary. This, of course, has the very unfortunate result that in future it will cease to highlight a real spelling mistake and will pass it as correct. The error is no longer an exception it is now a dictionary word.

Under what circumstances am I most likely to issue such a wrong instruction? It is most likely to happen with words that I type most frequently and that I habitually mistype. Anyone who uses a keyboard every day knows that there are many such ‘favorite’ misspelled words that get typed over and over. Once again, only a real spelling checker, a human brain, can spot the error and correct it.

The reason that the computer’s spellchecker breaks down under these circumstances is that the simple mechanisms put in place do not work from first principles. They do not work in what electronics engineers call ‘real time’ (they are not in touch with the real world) and do not employ any real intelligent understanding [226>] of the tasks they are being called on to perform. So although the computer continues to work perfectly as it was designed to, it becomes more and more corrupted from the standpoint of its original function.

I believe that this analogy may well have some relevance to Darwinists’ belief that biological processes can at root be as simple as the spelling checker. It is easy to think of any number of simple cell replication mechanisms that rely on exception reporting of this kind. I believe that if biological processes were so simple, they too would become functionally corrupt unless there is some underlying or overall design process to which the simple mechanisms answer globally, and which is capable of taking action to correct mistakes. This is the mechanism that we see in action in the case of the “eyeless fly”, Drosophila; in Driesch’s experiment with the sea urchin and Balinsky’s with the eyes of amphibians; the ‘field’ that governs the metamorphosis of the butterfly or the reconstitution of the cells of sponges and vertebrates.

Darwinists believe that the only overall control process is natural selection, but the natural selection mechanism could not account for the cases referred to above. Natural selection works on populations, not individuals. It is capable only of tending to make creatures with massively fatal genetic defects die in infancy, or to make populations that are geographically dispersed eventually produce sterile hybrid offspring. It is such a poor feedback mechanism in the sense of exercising an overall regulating effect that it has failed even to eliminate major congenital diseases. Natural selection offers only death or glory: there is no genetic engineering nor holistic supervision of the organism’s integrity. Yet we are asked to believe that a mechanism of such crudity can creatively supervise a program of gene mutation that will restore sight to the eyeless fly.

This is plainly wishful thinking. The key question remains: what is the location of the supervisory agency that oversees somatic development? How does it work? What is it’s connection with the cell structure of the body?

FOOTNOTES

  • Richard Milton, Shattering the Myths of Darwinism (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 1997), 167-176; 223-226.

(Editor’s Note. The author did not footnote what page he was quoting from, he only cited the work itself)

[1] Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (London, England: Pearson Longman, 1986).

[2] Andrew Scott, Vital Principles: The Molecular Mechanisms of Life (Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers, 1988).

[3] Francis Crick, Of Molecules and Men (Seattle, WA: Univ of Washington Press, 1966).

[4] Ibid.

[5] William Shrive, Enymes, in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1982).

John MacArthur Practicing Eisegesis in Matthew 24:13

Published by Papa Giorgio
  • Matthew 24:13 reads – “But the one who endures to the end, he will be saved” (NASB 1995)

Before and after this verse, MacArthur is rightly discussing the topic presented to the Jews. Their survival during the 7-year tribulation and the hunting of them by the anti-Christ. But in this verse he leaves the exegetical study of the Word of God and inserts a 16th century systematic reintroduced by John Calvin of Perseverance of the Saints. The “P” of the acronym, TULIP.

Here are the notes from his study Bible:

24:13 endures to the end … be saved. Cf. 10:22. The ones who persevere are the same ones who are saved—not the ones whose love grows cold (v. 12). This does not suggest that our perseverance secures our salvation. Scripture everywhere teaches precisely the opposite: God, as part of His saving work, secures our perseverance. True believers “are protected by the power of God through faith for … salvation” (1Pe 1:5). The guarantee of our perseverance is built into the New Covenant promise. God says: “I will put the fear of Me in their hearts so that they will not turn away from Me” (Jer 32:40). Those who do fall away from Christ give conclusive proof that they were never truly believers to begin with (1Jn 2:19). To say that God secures our perseverance is not to say that we are passive in the process, however. He keeps us “through faith” (1Pe 1:5)—our faith. Scripture sometimes calls us to hold fast to our faith (Heb 10:23; Rev 3:11) or warns us against falling away (Heb 10:26–29). Such admonitions do not negate the many promises that true believers will persevere (Jn 10:28, 29; Ro 8:38, 39; 1Co 1:8, 9; Php 1:6). Rather, the warnings and pleas are among the means God uses to secure our perseverance in the faith. Notice that the warnings and the promises often appear side by side. For example, when Jude urges believers, “keep yourselves in the love of God” (Jude 21), he immediately points them to God, “who is able to keep you from stumbling” (Jude 24).

John F. MacArthur Jr., The MacArthur Study Bible: New American Standard Bible. (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2006), Mt 24:13.

This is not exegesis – but eisegesis. In fact, that idea of the Perseverance of the Saints is foreign to the Bible but not even hinted at in this eschatological warning to the Jews. The church will be gone, so it is the Jewish nation and other new Christians during this time that are trying to “persevere” to the end.

Matthew 24 has ZERO to do with this much later dogma. Making it to the end is the end of the 7-years.

This is a must listen presentation:

Neo-Calvinism vs. The Bible 042. Mathew 24:13
Dr. Andy Woods. 9-14-2025

A Facebook Question | “Nominal Calvinists” | PLUS: Calvin and Hobbs

Published by Papa Giorgio

Before going on with “another” post on Calvinism, a reader on my site’s Facebook (FB) was asking why all the hub-bub regarding the topic of Calvinism as of late… although worded differently:

QUESTION:

RANDALL L. ASKED ME ON MY FB PAGE:

  • …so what happens to a soul when you are so tired of hearing all the arguments instead of just hearing the Gospel?….there are many who believe that the Calvinists are heretics…there are many who believe that the Arminians are heretics…there are many who believe that the Charismatics/Non-Charismatics are heretics…what if John 3:36 is actually true?…He who believes on the Son has eternal life…

I RESPOND:

I am posting a lot on the topic because it is “new” to me. I say “new” [in quotes] because I live in the Santa Clarita Valley. Which is under the shadow of MacArthur. And the churches I have enjoyed in our valley are more reformed Baptist. And a Bible study I was in for 10-years was led by a part time Masters College professor. He was [and is] a discipling mentor to me and many men.

When pressed on the issues – for instance, we studied through the 1689 Baptist Confession for a long study – I would always joke that when I read James White, I was a 4-point-5 [4.5] Calvinist, and when I read Norman Geisler, I was a 3-point-Calvinist [3.0]. But the truth is being an Apologetic animal and getting a master’s in theology from a Lutheran seminary, I never accepted the idea of theistic determinism. As I had read CS Lewis and Norman Geisler’s many works in the 90s. I was inoculated against it, so-to-speak.

Some events happened about 6-months ago that when I told my running joke, it was stale in my mouth. Left a bad taste. So, I said to myself, “you know, I have said that for decades. No more. I need to really know-know the entirety of why I reject the 5-points.” And so, I have a two year+ reading plan and am gobbling up tons of videos and series.

And so, just 6-months into the new passion, I can confidently say that if the 5-points [or even 4 points] are true, then there is no rebellion by man against God. Calvary and the Gospel are secondary to election, etc.

But I have a lot more reading ta do.

Thank you for the question/statement – and I understand the frustration. My website has posts galore on the topic as well.

I may add that I love the Christian faith and all it’s history and theological turns. Of which I am still coming to grips with, as it is a large subject. Speaking of LOVE, here is Pastor Rogers chapter on love — well worth your time:

Ronnie W. Rogers, Reflections of a Disenchanted Calvinist, CPHT 7, Love of God

And this happens to be my current pinned post on my sites FB as well as my personal page. I wrote it when I saw this question on Dr. Flowers live stream:

FB PINNED POST

Most church goers do not realize what Calvinism teaches. A pastor might say we have free will, but that is from the pulpit. Get them in an honest conversation, they revert right back to TULIP, which negates free will. Then another pastor may note we do not have free will, and then define it in a fuzzy way, and then two sentences later say we are elected to salvation. THIS MEANS that we cannot make a choice to positively affirm [respond to] the Word of God – at all… but to reject it.

So, TULIP says that if you have three choices:

  1. reject the Gospel message.
  2. be ambivalent to the message of God’s Word.
  3. see the truth in the grace enabled message of God’s Word.

TULIP only – only – allows for A. and B. The Holy Spirit inspired Word of God, sharper than any two-edged sword [cutting between soul and body], the facts of God’s work at Calvary, the preaching of God’s message via pastor’s or the broader body of Christ… NONE OF THAT IS EFFECTIVE.

Piper, MacArthur, many pastors I know, in the end say that one has to be unconditionally chosen before the time-space-continuum and drawn irresistibly to salvation – because they would never be able to even see the truth in the Gospel and have faith by what they see.

Which means those who are not drawn with the “U” and the “I” of TULIP, and chosen likewise to go to hell and be tormented eternally not because they rejected God’s message. But because our nature was designed this way through first and secondary causes, not by a “mother nature,” but by God’s decree.

The “T” ensures no one can respond to God’s many grace enablements.

They must be chosen by nothing in themselves. No ability to respond at all to the Holy Spirit drenched Word of God.

This makes Calvary and the Gospel secondary [ineffective] according to Baptist Reformed thinkers [Calvinists].

It is, really, for lack of a better idea: an anti-Christ theology.

Not only that, but, what is there for God to harden, provoke, or restrain if not the autonomous will of creatures?

If God knows the future because He planned the future [Sproul, Piper, MacArthur, etc.], when God hardens, provokes, or restrains…. is He working against Himself? Since He decreed it all to happen?

See more here: What Love Is This? Calvinism’s “Evil” Problem | Determinism

If the “T” of TULIP [total depravity] is a reality, wouldn’t hardening, provoking, or restraining someone be the same thing as digging up bodies in a cemetery and putting blindfold on the rotting cadaver?

In other words, does He plan the abuse of a child just to redeem that act in some way to bring glory to Himself? Is Satan superfluous?

See more here: “Is God the ‘devil’ Behind Satan? | Sovereign Puppeteer“

Are all the prescriptions in the Bible making God out to be duplicitous – since he has planned our actions thru determinative means?

Or…

Is it more like Tozer notes — which lowers man’s position by making him/her responsible to God’s law; and keeps God’s holiness and glory intact as He truly redeems or judges such actions (is He judging Himself in Calvinism?)

God sovereignly decreed that man should be free to exercise moral choice, and man from the beginning has fulfilled that decree by making his choice between good and evil. When he chooses to do evil, he does not thereby countervail the sovereign will of God but fulfills it, inasmuch as the eternal decree decided not which choice the man should make but that he should be free to make it. If in His absolute freedom God has willed to give man limited freedom, who is there to stay His hand or say, ‘What doest thou?’ Man’s will is free because God is sovereign. A God less than sovereign could not bestow moral freedom upon His creatures. He would be afraid to do so.

Fuller quote here: “Challenges To Strict 5-Point Calvinism | Tozer/Winger/Geisler/Lewis“

Here I wanted to share a large clip from a slightly longer post… and may I set it up with a Piper endorsed book that [I think still] Desiring God [Piper’s site] still has it up on their website:

Ephesians 1:11 goes even further by declaring that God in Christ

“works all things according to the counsel of his will.” Here the Greek word for “works” is energeø, which indicates that God not merely carries all of the universe’s objects and events to their appointed ends but that he actually brings about all things in accordance with his will. In other words, it isn’t just that God manages to turn the evil aspects of our world to good for those who love him; it is rather that he himself brings about these evil aspects for his glory (see Ex. 9:13-16; John 9:3) and his people’s good (see Heb. 12:3-11; James 1:2-4). This includes—as incredible and as unacceptable as it may currently seem—God’s having even brought about the Nazis’ brutality at Birkenau and Auschwitz as well as the terrible killings of Dennis Rader and even the sexual abuse of a young child: “The LORD has made everything for its own purpose, even the wicked for the day of evil” (Prov. 16:4, NASB ).14 “When times are good, be happy; but when times are bad, consider: God has made the one as well as the other” (Eccl. 7:14, NIV).

John Piper and Justin Taylor, eds., Suffering and the Sovereignty of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2006), 42.

Put that in yur Pipe[r] and smoke it!

THE “YOU TOO” BULLY
Via: Soteriology 101

This is probably the most employed logical fallacy of the Calvinistic believer when engaging in a debate over the claims of their TULIP systematic. Here is how the conversation typically goes:

Calvin: God brings about every meticulous detail for His own glory, including man’s sinful inclinations and choices.[1]

Hobbs: That claim undermines the character, holiness and goodness of God who abhors moral evil (Prov. 6:16-19; Jer. 7:31), is holy or separate from all evil (Is. 6:3; Ex. 15:11) and who does not even tempt men to sin (Jm. 1:13). He is the redeemer of sinful choices, not the one who brings them about!

Calvin: YOU TOO have the same problem because you believe God knows every evil thing that is going to happen but did not prevent it.

Notice that the Traditionalist (Hobbs) is critiquing an ACTUAL CLAIM of the Calvinistic systematic.  The Calvinist does not answer that critique, but instead they commit the “you too” fallacy by appealing NOT to an ACTUAL CLAIM of the Traditionalistic scholars, but to their own philosophical conclusion about the infinite attribute of divine omniscience – a philosophical conclusion that Traditionalists deny.  

So, the Traditionalist is critiquing an actual claim of Calvinism while the Calvinist is appealing to something all Traditionalists deny (i.e. if God knows something and does not prevent it then it is the same as Him determining it).

Let’s take a look at this same fallacy in a “real world” discussion and see how it plays itself out:

Calvin: I hired a mean kid at my son’s school to bully him so as to toughen him up so he can represent my name in a strong powerful way.

Hobbs: You did what?!? How can a good and loving father do that to his own child?! If your son finds out what you did he will never trust you again.

Calvin: YOU TOO did the same thing last year when your son told you about that bully and you sent him to school anyway. You didn’t have to send your son to school knowing there was a bully there. You could have prevented him from being bullied, but you didn’t, so YOU TOO are as bad as I am!

Hobbs: WHAT!?  I did not hire some mean kid to mercilessly torture my son. I hated that he went through that. I wept with him. I worked with him every night on what to say and do in order to confront his bully. I helped redeem that horrible situation to make him stronger. I did not cause it, or bring it about, or make it happen for my own namesake. If someone went to my house and convinced my son that I had actually hired that bully last year then he would never trust me again. It would undermine my character and trustworthiness and completely ruin our relationship. I am the helper and redeemer of my son’s bad situation, not the cause of it! How dare you even compare what I did to what you did!

The idea that God’s choice to permit free creatures to make free choices and suffer the full weight and consequences of those choices is somehow equal to the divine meticulous determinism being promoted by pastors like John Piper is blantantly absurd. ……

Baby Parts [Still] For Sale | Democrats Dehumanizing Human Life

Published by Papa Giorgio

Updated with this video via CHOICE42

“I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don’t know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus.” — Faye Wattleton, former president of U.S. Planned Parenthood

(I am posting most of the headers to each section, but #2 I post in full to compare to the 20/20 investigation many years ago (part of the original post): via THE FEDERALIST

Top 10 Sickening Details About How Federal Employees Trafficked Baby Body Parts

New emails uncovered by Judicial Watch’s FOIA request detail how FDA employees were working with buyers to get ‘fresh’ aborted baby organs for experiments.

In what should have been a national headline, the exposure of the U.S. government’s involvement in trafficking aborted baby bodies is now even more newsworthy following Friday’s announcement from the White House. At President Biden’s direction, the Department of Health and Human Services reversed the Trump administration’s policy protecting preborn Americans from the callous dehumanization of organ harvesting and further desecration of their bodies in research disguised as “science.”

This sickening decision now gives license to our “best and brightest” government researchers and agencies, those in charge of steering the country towards medical breakthroughs and scientific progress, to use the skin, brains, and eyeballs of children in research that affects all of us and is funded by our money. For this very reason, we must know the full extent of how federal agencies traffic aborted baby body parts.

These top 10 shocking examples come from the latest emails uncovered by Judicial Watch’s FOIA request and recent investigations.

1. The FDA Paid $2,000 Per Baby

2. FDA Bought Organs of Dismembered Babies

The FDA bought organs like livers, brains, and eyeballs of dismembered babies for hundreds of dollars apiece, courtesy of ABR’s collusion with local Planned Parenthoods.

ABR fee schedules and pricing charts obtained during a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Investigation allow us to piece together how much a baby costs by body part, as if each child was a slaughtered animal sold in sections.

3. ABR Sold the Skin of a 21-Week-Old Down Syndrome Baby

4. The FDA Wanted ‘Fresh’ Babies

5. The FDA Asked for Organs from Late-Term Babies

6. The FDA Bought Skulls of Second-Trimester Babies

7. Busy Abortion Clinics Produced ‘Awful Specimens’

8. FDA Requested Boy Organs to Create Humanized Mice

9. FDA, ABR Employees Called Aborted Babies ‘Amazing’

10. Taxpayers Paid for FDA Trips to ‘Humanized Mice Workshops’ in Europe

All I can say is Big Government is an evil sombitch!

OLDER POST

(2015)

BREITBART comments:

America’s utterly useless, hopelessly corrupt mainstream media has once again been scooped by New Media, this time on a major story involving a major left-wing institution. According to undercover video released Tuesday, for anywhere from $30 to $100 a pop, Planned Parenthood is happy to adjust the way in which it murders unborn children.

You want a heart? A liver? A lower extremity? Not a problem. While butchering this child — hopefully during a late-term abortion in order to bump up the price — Planned Parenthood will be super-duper-extra-careful to murder the baby in a very specific way that keeps those organs intact.

This is happening. In America. And we’re only learning about it thanks to a group that has nothing to do with the MSM — the same MSM that has all kinds of time to fabricate racism, stir up riots in inner-cities, fabricate infrastructure problems around a train crash, and ask Donald Trump the same three goddamned immigration questions for a full month.

Why isn’t our media regularly investigating and calling for full transparency from a taxpayer-funded institution like Planned Parenthood?

Why doesn’t our media treat Planned Parenthood with even a tenth the scrutiny it does the NFL or Koch Industries?

The answer is simple: When the media targets certain institutions, there is big political and cultural upside for the Left. On the flip-side, if the media were to investigate others institutions, there is potential downside for the Left. Therefore, this is the media’s driving criteria when it comes to editorial decisions….

THE BLAZE makes this accurate assessment:

…Mysteriously, these “clumps of cells” are suddenly considered identifiable bodies with limbs and organs.

And with the calvarium, in general, some people will actually try to change the presentation so that it’s not vertex. So if you do it starting from the breech presentation, there’s dilation that happens as the case goes on, and often, the last step, you can evacuate an intact calvarium at the end.

In case you’re wondering, the calvarium is piece of the skull. According to Nucatola, as the abortionist is executing the child, he will sometimes “evacuate” it a certain way so the baby’s head can later be sold for money…

GAY PATRIOT comments on the above information:

No one who is pro-abortion should have any problem with this. After all, so long as a woman is not inconvenienced by a pregnancy, nothing else matters. Besides, those organs probably come from “communities we don’t want too many of,” as Democrat heroine Margaret Sanger or Ruth Bader Ginsburg would put it.

ORIGINAL POST

(2007)

The following comes from my old blog dated June, 2007. It is an import perfect for the above new information.

Peter Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. Singer was the founding President of the International Association of Bioethics and, with Helga Kuhse, founding co-editor of the journal Bioethics. In his book “Practical Ethics,” he writes:

If the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby does not either, and the life of a newborn baby is of less value to it than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee is to the nonhuman animal.

If we can put aside these emotionally moving but strictly irrelevant aspects of the killing of a baby we can see that the grounds for not killing persons do not apply to newborn infants.

Remember that Peter Singer teaches ethics to generations of medical students. An ABC 20/20 SPECIAL turned up some horribly unsettling info about an industry that has come into being with the slow march towards the devaluation of human life:

ABC News “20/20” Investigation Into Alleged Trafficking In Fetal Tissue Finds Companies That Appear To Be Profiting From Selling Human Tissue For Medical Research

A three-month “20/20” hidden-camera investigation has uncovered an industry in which tissue and organs from aborted fetuses, donated to help medical research, are being marketed for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars.

“20/20” has investigated one businessman whose company issued a price list charging what many call exorbitant prices for fetal tissue. In addition, ABC News “20/20” chief correspondent Chris Wallace has an exclusive interview with a whistle-blower who says two tissue retrieval companies he worked for went so far as to, on some occasions, encourage him to take fetal tissue obtained from women who had not consented to donate their fetuses to medical research. The report will air on “20/20 Wednesday,” March 8 (10:00-11:00 p.m., ET), on the ABC Television Network.

Many say that fetal tissue is vital in scientific research that may provide dramatic medical breakthroughs, and federal law permits the donation of tissue from aborted fetuses for that purpose. But the law says companies that transport fetal tissue to medical research labs may only charge a reasonable fee to recover costs of collecting and shipping human tissue. “20/20’s” investigation found some companies are charging high fees — fees that critics say are not based on recovering costs; for example, the price list for one company, Opening Lines, includes listings of $325 for a spinal cord, $550 for a reproductive organ, $999 for a brain.

How are these prices determined? One “20/20” producer went undercover as a potential investor to meet Dr. Miles Jones, a Missouri pathologist whose company, Opening Lines, obtains fetal tissue from clinics and ships it to research labs. “It’s market force,” Dr. Jones told the producer about how he sets his prices. “It’s what you can sell it for.” He says he hopes to run his own abortion clinic in Mexico where he says he could get a greater supply of fetal tissue by offering cheaper abortions: “If you control the flow — it’s probably the equivalent of the invention of the assembly line.”

“That’s trading in body parts. There’s no doubt about it,” said Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics.

Representative Thomas Bliley (R-VA), who chairs the United States House Commerce Committee, says his committee is now investigating four companies after finding evidence they may be selling tissue for a profit. He says the committee is interested in ensuring that people transporting fetal tissue only recover their legitimate costs. “It appears that it’s more than that. That it comes down to trafficking in tissue parts,” he tells Mr. Wallace. Rep. Bliley’s committee expects to hold hearings on this issue later this week. [Note: The House Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Health and the Environment has scheduled a hearing on Thursday, March 9, at 2 p.m., on the subject, “Fetal Tissue: Is It Being Bought and Sold in Violation of Federal Law?”]

Another piece to this puzzle was added with an article by MONA CHARIN, a nationally syndicated columnist when she wrote this in reference to another think tank article:

Body Parts For Sale

“Kelly” (a pseudonym) was a medical technician working for a firm that trafficked in baby body parts. This is not a bad joke. Nor is it the hysterical propaganda of an interest group. It was reported in the American Enterprise magazine–the intelligent, thought-provoking, and utterly trustworthy publication of the American Enterprise Institute.

The firm Kelly worked for collected fetuses from clinics that performed late-term abortions. She would dissect the aborted fetuses in order to obtain ‘high-quality” parts for sale. They were interested in blood, eyes, livers, brains, and the thymuses, among other things.

“What we did was to have a contract with an abortion clinic that would allow us to go there on certain days. We would get a generated list each day to tell us what tissue researchers, pharmaceutical companies, and universities were looking for. Then we would examine the patient charts. We only wanted the most perfect specimens.’ That didn’t turn out to be difficult. Of the hundreds of late-term fetuses Kelly saw on a weekly basis, only about 2 percent had abnormalities. About 30 to 40 babies per week were around 30 weeks old–well past the point of viability.

Is this legal? Federal law makes it illegal to buy and sell human body parts. But there are loopholes in the law. Here’s how one body parts company–Opening Lines Inc.–disguised the trade in a brochure for abortionists: “Turn your patient’s decision into something wonderful.”

For its buyers, Opening Lines offers “the highest quality, most affordable, freshest tissue prepared to your specifications and delivered in the quantities you need, when you need it.” Eyes and ears go for $75, and brains for $999. An “intact trunk” fetches $500, a whole liver $150. To evade the law’s prohibition, body-parts dealers like Opening Lines offer to lease space in the abortion clinic to “perform the harvesting,” as well as to “offset the clinic’s overhead.” Opening Lines further boasted, “Our daily average case volume exceeds 1,500 and we serve clinics across the United States.”

Kelly kept at her grisly task until something made her reconsider. One day, “a set of twins at 24 weeks gestation was brought to us in a pan. They were both alive. The doctor came back and said, ‘Got you some good specimens–twins.’ I looked at him and said: ‘There’s something wrong here. They are moving. I can’t do this. This is not in my contract.’ I told him I would not be part of taking their lives. So he took a bottle of sterile water and poured it in the pan until the fluid came up over their mouths and noses, letting them drown. I left the room because I could not watch this.”

But she did go back and dissect them later. The twins were only the beginning. “It happened again and again. At 16 weeks, all the way up to sometimes even 30 weeks, we had live births come back to us. Then the doctor would either break the neck or take a pair of tongs and beat the fetus until it was dead.”

American Enterprise asked Kelly if abortion procedures were ever altered to provide specific body parts. “Yes. Before the procedures they would want to see the list of what we wanted to procure. The (abortionist) would get us the most complete intact specimens that he could. They would be delivered to us completely intact. Sometimes the fetus appeared to be dead, but when we opened up the chest cavity, the heart was still beating.”

The magazine pressed Kelly again. Was the type of abortion ever altered to provide an intact specimen, even if it meant producing a live baby? “Yes, that was so we could sell better tissue. At the end of the year, they would give the clinic back more money because we got good specimens.”

Some practical souls will probably swallow hard and insist that, well, if these babies are going to be aborted anyway, isn’t it better that medical research should benefit? No. This isn’t like voluntary organ donation. This reduces human beings to the level of commodities. And it creates of doctors who swore an oath never to kill, the kind of people who can beat a breathing child to death with tongs.

Here is an actual price list from one of the now many companies that participate in the trafficking of human parts (more at Fathers for Life):

Opening Lines
A Division of Consultants & Diagnostic Pathology,
Inc. P.O. Box 508, West Frankfort,
IL 62896
Fee for Services Schedule

> greater than

< same or less than

  • Unprocessed Specimen (> 8 weeks) $ 70
  • Unprocessed Specimen (< 8 weeks) $ 50
  • Livers (< 8 weeks) 30% discount if significantly fragmented $150
  • Livers (> 8 weeks) 30% discount if significantly fragmented $125
  • Spleens (< 8 weeks) $ 75
  • Spleens (> 8 weeks) $ 50
  • Pancreas (< 8 weeks) $100
  • Pancreas (> 8 weeks) $ 75
  • Thymus (< 8 weeks) $100
  • Thymus (> 8 weeks) $ 75
  • Intestines & Mesentery $ 50
  • Mesentery (< 8 weeks) $125
  • Mesentery (> 8 weeks) $100
  • Kidney-with/without adrenal (< 8 weeks) $125
  • Kidney-with/without adrenal (> 8 weeks) $100
  • Limbs (at least 2) $150
  • Brain (< 8 weeks) 30% discount if significantly fragmented $999
  • Brain (> 8 weeks) 30% discount if significantly fragmented $150
  • Pituitary Gland (> 8 weeks) $300
  • Bone Marrow (< 8 weeks) $350
  • Bone Marrow (> 8 weeks) $250
  • Ears (< 8 weeks) $ 75
  • Ears (> 8 weeks) $ 50
  • Eyes (< 8 weeks) 40% discount for single eye $ 75
  • Eyes (> 8 weeks) 40% discount for single eye $ 50
  • Skin (> 12 weeks) $100
  • Lungs & Heart Block $150
  • Intact Embryonic Cadaver (< 8 weeks) $400
  • Intact Embryonic Cadaver (> 8 weeks) $600
  • Intact Calvarium $125
  • Intact Trunk (with/without limbs) $500
  • Gonads $550
  • Cord Blood (Snap Frozen LN2) $125
  • Spinal Column $150
  • Spinal Cord $325

Here is the last article dealing with this topic, and is a recent discovery the devaluing of human worth under a more socialized medicine in Europe:

HARVESTING ORGANS

Sarah Boseley, health editor

Thursday January 11, 2001

The true scale of the scandal of human organ retention by hospitals will be revealed today by the government’s chief medical officer, who will tell parents and professionals that 50,000 organs are being stored in hospitals in England alone. The number far exceeds expectations.

Liam Donaldson will say that what was done in the name of the NHS over many years was an affront to families who had lost their loved ones. Addressing a public seminar, whose audience will include top pathologists and other senior doctors:

“Some of the past practices around organ retention belong to an era where decisions were made by the NHS for patients, but not with patients. This has caused a period of immense distress for families, especially in places like Bristol and Liverpool, when they found out their children’s organs were taken without their knowledge. Something went seriously wrong in the way the health service dealt with the issue of organ retention.”

Prof Donaldson will pledge that the government “will do whatever it takes to put things right, changing the law if necessary to ensure that relatives are given the right kind of information so they can give consent in a fully informed way if they choose to do so.”

At Alder Hey hospital in Liverpool, where an inquiry will report shortly, more than 3,000 children’s organs have been discovered; other hospitals were not thought to have anything like that number.

The chief medical officer will offer an unmitigated apology and assurances for the future to the parents of the Alder Hey children and those whose children died and had organs removed at the Bristol royal infirmary who have been invited to today’s seminar. None of the parents knew that hearts, brains and other whole organs would be removed and kept after the autopsy on their son or daughter.

Ian Kennedy, chairman of the inquiry into children’s deaths following heart surgery at Bristol, published an interim report into organ retention at the hospital last May. He found that the law was complex and obscure. Different laws covered hospital autopsies – which help doctors find out about the progress of disease – and those ordered by the coroner to find out the cause of death. Prof Kennedy recommended at least a new code of practice and preferably a new law.

Prof Donaldson has issued interim guidance to hospitals, requiring them to tell parents and relatives exactly what an autopsy involves and get their explicit permission if there is any need to remove organs. Today’s seminar is part of his information-gathering process on the way to producing his final report to the health secretary, Alan Milburn. That is expected, along with the Alder Hey inquiry report, before the end of the month.

Ed Bradley, chairman of the Alder Hey parents’ support group, said more than 140 parents and relatives had travelled to London for the seminar and were glad of the opportunity to give evidence, “however, we do question how much benefit can be gained from a one-day conference where we have only been given five minutes to represent our views.” They also felt it would be more appropriate to discuss the way forward after the Alder Hey inquiry had reported.

Alder Hey hospital is generally considered a special case, because whole organ systems were found to have been collected by a consultant pathologist, Dick Van Velzen, who is facing disciplinary hearings at the General Medical Council.

Bristol parents at the seminar will be asking for Prof Kennedy’s recommendations to be implemented and questioning why there has been no action since his report was published. “It was quite clear the law was in a mess,” said Steve Parker, chairman of the Bristol Heart Children’s Action Group.

The Problem of Defining “Irresistible Grace” | Steve Lemke

Published by Papa Giorgio

The Below is an excerpt from Chapter 5 (“A Biblical and Theological Critique of Irresistible Grace”) of Whosoever Will: A Biblical-Theological Critique of Five-Point Calvinism (out of print). Chapter by Steve W. Lemke.

Full PDF of the chapter with as many updated links as I could find, is HERE.

… The Synod of Dort, however, strenuously objected to the Remonstrants’ denial of irresistible grace:

Who teach that the grace by which we are converted to God is nothing but a gentle persuasion, or (as others explain it) that the way of God’s acting in man’s conversion that is most noble and suited to human nature is that which happens by persuasion, and that nothing prevents this grace of moral suasion even by itself from making natural men spiritual; indeed, that God does not produce the assent of the will except in this manner of moral suasion, and that the effectiveness of God’s work by which it surpasses the work of Satan consists in the fact that God promises eternal benefits while Satan promises temporal ones.

[….]

Who teach that God in regenerating man does not bring to bear that power of his omnipotence whereby he may powerfully and unfailingly bend man’s will to faith and conversion, but that even when God has accomplished all the works of grace which he uses for man’s conversion, man nevertheless can, and in actual fact often does, so resist God and the Spirit in their intent and will to regenerate him, that man completely thwarts his own rebirth; and, indeed, that it remains in his own power whether or not to be reborn.4

The Problem of Defining Irresistible Grace

The term “irresistible grace,” then, came initially as a view denied by the Remonstrants and defended by the Dortian Calvinists. The Synod of Dort rejected the notion that God’s grace was limited to His exerting strong moral persuasion on sinners by the Holy Spirit to lead them to salvation. They also rejected the notion that a person can “resist God and the Spirit in their intent and will to regenerate him.”5 Instead, the Dort statement asserted that God brings to bear the “power of his omnipotence whereby he may powerfully and unfailingly bend man’s will to faith and conversion.”6

In order to understand how Calvinists say that God effects irresistible grace, one must understand the important distinction they draw between what is variously known as the “general” or “outward” call from the “special,” “inward,” “effectual,” or “serious” call. Steele, Thomas, and Quinn virtually equate the “efficacious call” with irresistible grace, based on this distinction between these proposed two different callings from God:

The gospel invitation extends a call to salvation to every one who hears its message. . . . But this outward general call, extended to the elect and the non-elect alike, will not bring sinners to Christ. . . . Therefore, the Holy Spirit, in order to bring God’s elect to salvation, extends to them a special inward call in addition to the outward call contained in the gospel message. Through this special call the Holy Spirit performs a work of grace within the sinner which inevitably brings him to faith in Christ. . . .

Although the general outward call of the gospel can be, and often is, rejected, the special inward call of the Spirit never fails to result in the conversion of those to whom it is made. This special call is not made to all sinners but is issued to the elect only! The Spirit is in no way dependent upon their help or cooperation for success in His work of bringing them to Christ. It is for this reason that Calvinists speak of the Spirit’s call and of God’s grace in saving sinners as being “efficacious,” “invincible,” or “irresistible.” For the grace which the Holy Spirit extends to the elect cannot be thwarted or refused, it never fails to bring them to true faith in Christ!7

As this statement indicates, some contemporary Calvinists seem to be a little embarrassed by the term “irresistible grace” and have sought to soften it or to replace it with a term like “effectual calling.” They also object when others criticize that “irresistible grace” suggests that God forces persons to do things against their wills. Instead, they insist, God merely woos and persuades. Calvinists thus sometimes sound disingenuous in affirming a strong view of irresistible grace while simultaneously softening the language about it to make it more palatable. For example, John Piper and the Bethlehem Baptist Church staff affirm that irresistible grace “means the Holy Spirit can overcome all resistance and make his influence irresistible. . . . The doctrine of irresistible grace means that God is sovereign and can overcome all resistance when he wills.”8Yet, just a few paragraphs later, they affirm that “irresistible grace never implies that God forces us to believe against our will. . . . On the contrary, irresistible grace is compatible with preaching and witnessing that tries to persuade people to do what is reasonable and what will accord with their own best interests.”9 No attempt is made in the article to reconcile these apparently contradictory assertions.

Likewise, R. C. Sproul argues at great length that John 6:44 (“No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him” HCSB) does not refer merely to the necessity that God “woo or entice men to Christ,” and humans can “resist this wooing” and “refuse the enticement.”10 In philosophical language, Sproul says, this wooing is a necessary but not sufficient condition for salvation “because the wooing does not, in fact, guarantee that we will come to Christ.”11 Sproul states that such an interpretation is “incorrect” and “does violence to the text of Scripture.”12 Instead, Sproul insists, the term “draw” is “a much more forceful concept than to woo,” and means “to compel by irresistible superiority.”13

However, in discussing irresistible grace, Sproul tells of a student who, hearing a lecture on predestination by John Gerstner, rejected it. When Gerstner asked the student how he defined Calvinism, the student described it as the perspective that “God forces some people to choose Christ and prevents other people from choosing Christ.” Gerstner then said, “If that is what a Calvinist is, then you can be sure that I am not a Calvinist either.”14 Sproul likewise chastised a Presbyterian seminary president for rejecting the Calvinist doctrine that “God brings some people, kicking and screaming against their wills, into the kingdom.” Sproul describes this Presbyterian theologian’s view as “a gross misconception of his own church’s theology,” as a “caricature,” and “as far away from Calvinism as one could possibly get.”15 So which way is it? If God compels persons with “irresistible superiority,” in what way is it inaccurate to say that God is forcing people to choose Christ?

The Synod of Dort insisted that such attempts at moral persuasion of unsaved persons was wasted time. That God’s grace was resistible and not merely the use of strong moral persuasion was precisely what the Synod of Dort rejected and the Remonstrants affirmed. The Remonstrants insisted that the compelling grace of God persuaded the lost to receive Christ as Lord and Savior. The Synod of Dort insisted that this was not going far enough. Note their explicit denial that a person can “resist” God. Note the use in the Synod of Dort language of divine omnipotence, which can “powerfully and unfailingly bend man’s will to faith and conversion.”16 Bending the will of a fallible being by an omnipotent Being powerfully and unfailingly is not merely sweet persuasion. It is forcing one to change one’s mind against one’s will.

Calvinists often describe their position as monergism as opposed to synergism. In monergism, God works entirely alone, apart from any human role. In synergism, on the other hand, humans cooperate with God in some way in actualizing their own conversion. None of us non-Pelagians would affirm for a minute that we can achieve salvation apart from God. The question is whether humans have any role at all in accepting or receiving their own salvation. On the one hand, the Calvinists say, “No! Your salvation is monergistic, provided only by the grace of God.” When a critic says this response means that God imposes irresistible grace against a person’s will or that humans do not have a choice in the matter, the Calvinists protest that they are being misunderstood and caricatured.

When challenged that irresistible grace goes against someone’s will, most Calvinists reply that it is not against a person’s will at all. God changes their will through regeneration invincibly, such that the person is irresistibly drawn to Christ. Calvinists call this willing, which is externally driven, compatibilist volition, as opposed to the more common view, libertarian freedom. In libertarian freedom a person does not have absolute freedom (a frequent Calvinist stereotype), but the person chooses between at least two alternatives. In every case a person could have, at least hypothetically, chosen something else. But in compatibilism, people always choose their greatest desire. They have no alternative choice but to will to do what they want to do. So when God changes their will through irresistible grace or enabling grace, they really have no choice. They will what God has programmed them to will. So the Calvinist system advocates both monergism (God is the only actor) and compatibilism (they go along with what God wants them to do after He changes their will through preconversion regeneration).

The problem is that Calvinists cannot have their cake and eat it, too. They cannot insist that an omnipotent God overwhelms and bends human will powerfully and unfailingly, and then transform this doctrine into something other than it is by softening it with more palatable language such as “effectual calling” and “compatibilism.” The effectual calling means precisely the same thing as irresistible grace. Effectual calling just sounds nicer. At the end of the day, people have no choice but to do what God has programmed them to do. Nonetheless, Calvinists often attempt to sidestep criticism by asserting that the doctrine has been misunderstood, even when non-Calvinists have quoted or paraphrased what Calvinists themselves have said in describing their own doctrine.

For example, at the “Building Bridges” conference, Nathan Finn chastised Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Roy Fish for the following description of irresistible grace, which Finn described as a “stereotype” and a “misunderstanding” of the doctrine:

The “I” in the TULIP is what is called irresistible grace. That means that people who are going to be saved have no other option. They really don’t have a choice. The grace of God cannot be resisted. They cannot resist this special saving grace.17

A line-by-line study of Fish’s description reveals that Calvinists define irresistible grace in virtually the same words:

Roy Fish: (Irresistible grace) “means that people who are going to be saved have no other option. They really don’t have a choice.”

  • The Synod of Dort: “And this is the regeneration, the new creation, the raising from the dead, and the making alive so clearly proclaimed in the Scriptures, which God works in us without our help. But this certainly does not happen only by outward teaching, by moral persuasion, or by such a way of working that, after God has done his work, it remains in man’s power whether or not to be reborn or converted. Rather, it is an entirely supernatural work. . . . As a result, all those in whose hearts God works in this marvelous way are certainly, unfailingly, and effectively reborn and do actually believe. . . .”18
  • James White: “The doctrine of ‘irresistible grace’ . . . is simply the belief that when God chooses to move in the lives of His elect and bring them from spiritual death to spiritual life, no power in heaven or on earth can stop Him from so doing. . . . It is simply the confession that when God chooses to raise His people to spiritual life, He does so without the fulfillment of any conditions on the part of the sinner. Just as Christ had the power and authority to raise Lazarus to life without obtaining his ‘permission’ to do so, He is able to raise His elect to spiritual life with just as certain a result.”19
  • David Steele, Curtis Thomas, and S. Lance Quinn: “The Holy Spirit extends a special inward call that inevitably brings them to salvation. . . . [T]he internal call (which is made only to the elect) cannot be rejected. It always results in conversion. By means of this special call the Spirit irresistibly draws sinners to Christ. He is not limited in His work of applying salvation by man’s will, nor is He dependent upon man’s cooperation for success. . . . God’s grace, therefore, is invincible; it never fails to result in the salvation of those to whom it is extended.”20

Roy Fish: “The grace of God cannot be resisted. They cannot resist this special saving grace.”

  • The Synod of Dort: The Synod rejects that . . . “God in regenerating man does not bring to bear that power of his omnipotence whereby he may powerfully and unfailingly bend man’s will to faith and conversion. . . .” (The Synod rejects that someone) “can, and in actual fact often does, so resist God and the Spirit in their intent and will to regenerate him.”21
  • John Piper: Irresistible grace “means the Holy Spirit can overcome all resistance and make his influence irresistible. . . . The doctrine of irresistible grace means that God is sovereign and can overcome all resistance he wills. . . . When God undertakes to fulfill his sovereign purpose, no one can successfully resist him. . . . When a person hears a preacher call for repentance he can resist that call. But if God gives him repentance he cannot resist because the gift is the removal of resistance. . . . So if God gives repentance it is the same as taking away the resistance. This is why we call this work of God ‘irresistible grace.’ ”22

Was Fish reflecting the statements of some Calvinists in his definition? Distinguishing Fish’s from Finn’s is so difficult that one must ask, What exactly is it in Fish’s description that Finn objects to so strenuously? Fish has echoed Calvinist descriptions of irresistible grace, and yet Finn takes him to task for doing so. No matter how modern-day Calvinists may attempt to gloss over the hardness of irresistible grace and project it in a softer, gentler light, the doctrine remains what it is. When pressed by their own words, Calvinists sometimes seem to play word games or equivocate their words in order to make their beliefs more palatable. However, this study will examine irresistible grace as it is described and defined in standard Calvinist doctrinal teachings.

NOTES

  1. “The Canons of the Synod of Dort,” Heads III and IV, Rejection of Errors, Articles VII and VIII, in Schaff, 3:570 (in Latin). For an English translation, see L. M. Vance, The Other Side of Calvinism (rev. ed.; Pensacola: Vance, 1999), Appendix 4, 621–22, which is also available online at RELIGIO-POLITICAL TALK; added and accessed October 3, 2025.
  2. Ibid.
  3. Ibid.
  4. D. N. Steele, C. C. Thomas, and S. L. Quinn, The Five Points of Calvinism: Defined, Defended, Documented (expanded ed.; Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2004), 52–54.
  5. J. Piper and the Bethlehem Baptist Church staff, “What We Believe About the Five Points of Calvinism,” p. 10, 
  6. Piper and the Bethlehem Baptist Church staff, “What We Believe About the Five Points of Calvinism,” 12.
  7. R. C. Sproul, Chosen by God (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 1994), 69–70.
  8. Ibid.
  9. Ibid.
  10. Ibid.
  11. Ibid., 122.
  12. Ibid.
  13. “The Canons of the Synod of Dort,” Heads III and IV, Rejection of Errors, Articles VII and VIII, in Schaff, 3:570 (in Latin). For an English translation, see L. M. Vance, The Other Side of Calvinism, Appendix 4, 621–22, which is also available online at
    Historic Faith accessed November 1, 2008.
  14. Nathan Finn, “Southern Baptist Calvinism: Setting the Record Straight,” in Calvinism: A Southern Baptist Dialogue (ed. E. R. Clendenen and B. J. Waggoner; Nashville: B&H Academic, 2008), 171–92, esp. 184; citing “The C-Word,” a sermon preached at Cottage Hill Baptist Church in Mobile, AL, on August 11, 1997, posted online at (reproduced at Religio-Political Talk, download the PDF here)
  15. “The Canons of the Synod of Dort,” Heads III and IV, Articles 10 and 12, in Schaff, 3:589–90.
  16. J. White, “Irresistible Grace: God Saves Without Fail,” in Debating Calvinism: Five Points, Two Views, by Dave Hunt and James White (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 2004), 197 (italics mine).
  17. Steele, Thomas, and Quinn, Five Points of Calvinism, 7 (italics mine).
  18. “The Canons of the Synod of Dort,” Heads III and IV, Rejection of Errors, Articles VII and VIII, in Schaff, 3:570 (in Latin); for an English translation, see Vance, The Other Side of Calvinism, Appendix 4, 621–22 (italics mine).
  19. Piper and the Bethlehem Baptist Church staff, “What We Believe About the Five Points of Calvinism,” 10, 12 (italics mine).

Calvinism’s “Reading Rainbow” | John 11

Published by Papa Giorgio

One of the many issues I saw in a study on sovereignty at church was this side-by-side statement in our handout:

  • God chooses some people for salvation, this is one of His decrees
  • Man is responsible for rejecting God

This is the furthest thing from the truth if one understands the “T” in TULIP. We will also visit the “U” and the “I.” Let us start in order of the acronym however.

Man cannot react to, freely, an offer of salvation through enablement’s or grace offered evidence the work at Calvary. Other grace enablement’s that are soaked with the Holy Spirit are the Gospel, preachers teaching from the Word, other Christians witnessing, etc. I do not accept selective regeneration of the elect which precedes faith and necessarily results in faith in Christ “IS” how one is saved (Acts 16:31-32; Romans 1:16).

Calvinists believe that a totally depraved person is spiritually dead. By ‘spiritual death’ they mean the elimination of all human ability to understand or respond to God, not just a separation from God. Further, the effects of sin are intensive (destroying the ability to receive salvation) ~ Geisler, Chosen but Free (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1999), 56.

Pastor Rogers helps us define it as well:

Total Depravity: The whole of man’s being is corrupted by sin and he is, therefore, incapable of doing any eternal spiritual good.

Calvinism’s understanding of total depravity includes a compatibilist view of human nature, unconditional election, and limited and selective regeneration. This means the only interpretive option Calvinism permits for God to be able to redeem such a compatibly defined totally depraved person is that God must give him a new nature (variously called quickening, regeneration, or restoration), which he is pleased to do only for the limited unconditionally elect; thereby, guarantying their subsequent free exercise of faith.

Viewing man from a compatibilist perspective means that while fallen man freely chooses to sin, he cannot freely choose to believe in the gospel unless God gives him a new nature and past that assures he will freely choose to exercise faith in Christ; however, in either state, man cannot choose to do other than he did choose because while freely choosing, he has no salvific choice.

Although it seems most Calvinists in the SBC do believe in regeneration prior to faith, it is true not all Calvinists depend upon regeneration preceding faith. Nevertheless, they all do depend upon on a preceding determinative work of God that changes the elect’s past. This work of God changes their nature from what it was before to something different after the work. This is due to their commitment to compatibilism. Technically, compatibilism requires that given the same past, man cannot choose, in the moral moment of decision, other than he did in fact choose.

Consequently, while some may seek to avoid reliance upon a new nature preceding faith, if they are going to be consistent compatibilists, they must believe God works determinatively in the unconditionally elect so as to change man’s past in order that he can transition from only being able to reject Christ to only being able to accept Christ. Therefore, regardless of what term they choose to employ, it never changes the deterministic nature of salvation nor its limited accessibility. This pre-faith work necessary to exercising faith is intentionally withheld by God from the non-elect.

Ronnie W. Rogers, Does God Love All or Some? Comparing Biblical Extensivism and Calvinism’s Exclusivism (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2019), 30-31.

Calvinistic Election says to the unregenerate elect, “Don’t Worry, your Depravity is no obstacle to salvation,” and to the unelect, “Too bad, you have not been predestined for salvation but damnation” (George L Bryson, The Five Points of Calvinism: Weighed and Found Wanting). Here is a definition of Total Depravity’s “inability” (more… longer PDF):

… The doctrine of total depravity is explained as total inability in the writings of some theologians. James Boice and Philip Ryken explained, “In this sad and pervasively sinful state we have no inclination to seek God, and therefore cannot seek him or even respond to the gospel when it is presented to us. In our unregenerate state, we do not have free will so far as ‘believing on’ or ‘receiving’ Jesus Christ as Savior is concerned.”130 They clarified that unbelievers “cannot” respond to the gospel by repenting and believing in Jesus when it is presented. Consistent with article 3 in the Canons of Dort, they taught that a person believes in Jesus after they are born again. Mark DeVine wrote, “Humanity’s fall into sin results in a condition that must be described in terms of spiritual blindness and deadness and in which the will is enslaved, not free.” DeVine continued, “We need to ask whether the Arminian insistence that the work of the Holy Spirit frees the will to either repent and believe or refuse to do so does not evidence a deeper misunderstanding of the nature of depravity itself.”131 John Piper wrote, “Faith is the evidence of new birth, not the cause of it.”132 “Regeneration precedes faith,” R. C. Sproul explained. He added, “We do not believe in order to be born again; we are born again in order to believe.”133 R. Albert Mohler Jr. also affirmed that regeneration precedes faith:

In the mystery of the sovereign purposes of God and by his sheer grace and mercy alone, the Word was brought near to us. As a result, we were called, made alive, and regenerated. We then believed what we otherwise would never have been able to believe, and we grasped hold of it, knowing that it is the sole provision of our need. We came to know of our need and of God’s response and provision for us in Christ, and then we came to know of our necessary response of faith, repentance, confession, and belief.134

According to these views of total depravity, spiritual blindness and deadness results in the enslavement of the human will so that people do not have the ability to repent and believe the message of the gospel unless they are first regenerated, or born again.

[130] James Montgomery Boice and Philip Graham Ryken, The Doctrines of Grace: Rediscovering the Evangelical Gospel (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009), 30; italics in the original.

[131] Mark DeVine, “Total Depravity,” in Barrett and Nettles, Whomever He Wills, 35 (see intro., n. 22).

[132] John Piper, Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 1986), 50.

[133] Robert C. Sproul, Chosen by God (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1986), 72.

[134] R. Albert Mohler Jr., “The Power of the Articulated Gospel,” in The Underestimated Gospel, ed. Jonathan Leeman (Nashville: B&H, 2014), 19.

To further the point, here is John MacArthur explaining it:

Now, any discussion of the doctrine of predestination or the doctrine of divine sovereign election, or, if you will, sovereign salvation as a work of God is based on another doctrine, on another doctrine.  God must save us.  He must choose us, call us, regenerate us, justify us by his divine power, because we are neither willing nor able to do it for ourselves.  And this takes us to what I’m going to call the “doctrine of absolute inability.” 

[….]

Especially would I never say to a dead man, “Bill, come forth.”  I mean, you wouldn’t waste words.  You’d look foolish.  Dead men can’t hear.  Dead men can’t think.  Dead men can’t respond cause they’re dead and dead means the absolute inability to do anything in response to any stimulus.  There’s no will.  There’s no power to think or act. 

[….]

Those who deny the doctrine of divine election, those who deny the doctrine of divine salvation as an act of God have to believe that there’s something in man left to himself that enables him to become willing and to come to life.  Is that what the Bible teaches?  The Bible doesn’t describe our condition as a disability.  It describes it as death.  And everybody knows that death means an inability to respond.

[….]

That is not what is meant when theologians refer to total depravity because not everybody is as bad as they could be, and not everybody is as bad as everybody else.  What we’re talking about here is what I’ve chosen to call “absolute inability.”  What is true of everybody is we have no ability to respond to the gospel.  We are completely unable to raise ourselves out of a state of death.  We are completely unable to give our blind hearts sight.  We are completely unable to free ourselves from slavery to sin.  We are completely unable to turn from ignorance to truth.  We are completely unable to stop rebelling against God, stop being hostile to His Word.

So far the point about “Man is responsible for rejecting God” is not in the cards. Romans 1:19-20:

  • since what can be known about God is evident among them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made.al As a result, people are without excuse. (CSB).
  • God punishes them, because what can be known about God is plain to them, for God himself made it plain. Ever since God created the world, his invisible qualities, both his eternal power and his divine nature, have been clearly seen; they are perceived in the things that God has made. So those people have no excuse at all! (GNB)
  • because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. (NASB95)
  • For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God himself has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible attributes—his eternal power and divine nature—have been understood and observed by what he made, so that people are without excuse. (ISV)
  • since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. (NIV)
  • For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. (ESV)

Romans continues to say (CSB): “For though they knew God, …. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie.” So, they knew God, and had the truth, but with the hardening of their hearts and chasing after worldly pleasure and letting their emotions trample on the Imago Dei, they handed over that plain truth to lies and sensuality.

MacArthur and the others contradict the plain reading of Scripture, and they have to throw in Lazarus to try and prove their point by Eisogesis rather that exegesis. Because Christ Himself told us what that story meant.

  • Jesus, however, was speaking about his death, but they thought he was speaking about natural sleep. So Jesus then told them plainly, “Lazarus has died. I’m glad for you that I wasn’t there so that you may believe…” (John 11:13-15, CSB)

Notice what Jesus didn’t say, via the HCBV (Honest Calvinist Bible Version):

Jesus, however, was speaking about his death, but they thought he was speaking about natural sleep. So Jesus then told them “plainly,”

Lazarus serves as an example that everyone on earth is born spiritually dead. Not everybody is as bad as they could be with their hands, but spiritually they are bad as they could be. Completely blind, unable to respond to any grace enablements, so the words I speak and the truth I present are 100% impossible to be responded to, the 115 passages which condition salvation on believing alone, and about 35 simply on faith… all that is poppycock I tell you, truly!

There is a narrow way in which I effectually call you from before time was created, and nothing you have or will do made God choose you. You were arbitrarily and unconditionally chosen, and the vast majority of people made in my image I [God] chose for perdition, hell. They cannot respond because they are totally unable, not effectually called and drawn irresistibly to truth.

So my death to come soon on Calvary is secondary to that unconditional, arbitrary choice. Sorry, many here I have chosen, irresistibly, to end up in eternal torment — not based on them rejecting anything; because, if you are unconditionally chosen, likewise, you are unconditionally ‘unchosen.’ Too bad, soo ‘sad’ that you have not been predestined for salvation but damnation.

Truly, truly I tell you, that when you’re in heaven, the very few listening to my words I have chosen since before time will be so sanctified that you will be able to see your own mother, brother, sister, best friend standing next to you now — in hell — and rejoice in that, knowing that God’s perfect justice is being carried out. Again I tell you, You will be so sanctified in heaven that you can look into the pit of hell, see your mother there, and be glad.

Remember when I said to Matthew:

  • Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 

Or what Peter clearly heard, that

  • the Lord is not slow about his promise, as some people understand slowness, but is being patient with you. He does not want anyone to perish, but wants everyone to come to repentance.

Those are merely my public statements. Secretly I care for birds more than you and wish most to be damned. I will only allow a very select few to understand this gnosis [secret] of the material flesh being bad and the ‘secret will of my counsel,’ so that much the Gnostics got right — So toughen up buttercup, eternal torture is in store for most hearing and reading my words… not because of anything you didn’t do, but because of what I didn’t do.

I wish to be clear, I realize I told an audience in front of my beloved disciple, John, 

  • You study the Scriptures, because you think that in them you will find eternal life. And these very Scriptures speak about me! Yet you are not willing to come to me in order to have life.

What I was REALLY SAYING was this:

  • You pore over the Scriptures because you think you have eternal life in them, but there is no salvation in the book called the Bible unless I irresistible and effectually called you to believe… the Gospel is powerless to effectually save you, and yet they testify about me. But I have not elected you for effectual salvation before the foundation of the world so that you can not irresistibly come to me so that you may have life. 

So that you may believe. HOW?

By God forcing you to believe — against your will.

Got it? Good. Selah.

[See: Born Dead? and The Walking Dead]

In other words, Jesus didn’t teach Calvinism. The Calvinist repeatedly uses such unbiblical and utterly fallacious reasoning. The Calvinist also assumes a contradiction between sovereignty and free will that doesn’t exist.

  • If God merely foresaw human events, and did not also arrange and dispose of them at his pleasure, there might be room for agitating the question [of free will] …but since he foresees the things which are to happen, simply because he has decreed them, they are so to happen, it is vain to debate about prescience. … If this frigid fiction [of free will] is received, where will be the omnipotence of God, by which, according to his secret counsel on which everything depends, he rules over all? (Calvin, Institutes, III: xxiii, 6–7.)

VERSUS TOZER:

  • Here is my view: God sovereignly decreed that man should be free to exercise moral choice, and man from the beginning has fulfilled that decree by making his choice between good and evil. When he chooses to do evil, he does not thereby countervail the sovereign will of God but fulfills it, inasmuch as the eternal decree decided not which choice the man should make but that he should be free to make it. If in His absolute freedom God has willed to give man limited freedom, who is there to stay His hand or say, What doest thou? Mans will is free because God is sovereign. A God less than sovereign could not bestow moral freedom upon His creatures. He would be afraid to do so.

Tozer is saying that the Calvinist God is too small. Can I return quickly to Johnny Mac?

He said this of the Lazarus story:

Especially would I never say to a dead man, “Bill, come forth.”  I mean, you wouldn’t waste words.  You’d look foolish.  Dead men can’t hear.  Dead men can’t think.  Dead men can’t respond cause they’re dead and dead means the absolute inability to do anything in response to any stimulus.  There’s no will.  There’s no power to think or act. 

What I personally view as foolish is that God is made to look like a fool with that non-Biblical retelling through the lens of a systematic invented in the 16th century. If [BIG IF] the “T” from TULIP is correct, why restrain? Why harden? Why provoke? Why mention to resist the Devil or veil things? That would be like going around a graveyard and digging up bodies and putting blindfolds on them and ear plugs in their ear — or what is left of the cadavers.

It also changes the nature of God in a dangerous way. Making the God of the Bible more like Allah of the Qur’an.

  • God saw all that he had made, and it was very good indeed. (Genesis 1:31, CSB)

I just added the below quote from Calvin to Genesis 1:31 in my Bible…. if Calvinism is correct, and the theistic determinism that is its baggage, then God called “good” His creation [man] by nature destined by decree to sin.

  • “God not only foresaw the fall of the first man, and in him the ruin of his posterity; but also at His own pleasure arranged it … Though their perdition depends on the predestination of God, the cause and matter of it is in themselves … Man therefore falls, divine providence so ordaining, but he falls by his own fault.” (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.23.7; 3.23.8)

Gordon H. Clark: “I wish very Frankly and pointedly to assert that if a man gets drunk and shoots his family, it was the will of God that he should do so …In Ephesians 1:11, Paul tells us that God works all things, not some things only, after the counsel of his own will.”

  • They have built high places to Baal on which to burn their children in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal, something I have never commanded or mentioned; I never entertained the thought (Jeremiah 19:5, CSB)

James 1 says every good gift that we get is from God. He doesn’t cause our sin thru 1st or secondary causes.

  • No one undergoing a trial should say, “I am being tempted by God,” since God is not tempted by evil, and he himself doesn’t tempt anyone. But each person is tempted when he is drawn away and enticed by his own evil desire. Then after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and when sin is fully grown, it gives birth to death. Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers and sisters. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. (James 1:13-17, CSB)

Otherwise, He would be redeeming His own decree, a dualistic God of Eastern metaphysics. Even our prayers are rendered useless, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” ~ His will is being done, to the “T”. Which is why when challenged in a lecture about prayer and Reformed ideas, Wayne Grudem said our prayers were even decreed [scripted] before the creation of the time-space-continuum.

To be clear, I do not worship a God restricted by a Calvinistic theological systematic.

  • “…how foolish and frail is the support of divine justice afforded by the suggestion that evils come to be, not by His will but by His permission…It is a quite frivolous refuge to say that God otiosely permits them, when Scripture shows Him not only willing, but the author of them…Who does not tremble at these judgments with which God works in the hearts of even the wicked whatever He will, rewarding them nonetheless according to desert? Again it is quite clear from the evidence of Scripture that God works in the hearts of men to incline their wills just as he will, whether to good for His mercy’s sake, or to evil according to their merits. ” — John Calvin, “The Eternal Predestination of God,” 10:11)
  • “Hence we maintain that, by his providence, not heaven and earth and inanimate creatures only, but also the counsels and wills of men are so governed as to move exactly in the course which he has destined.” — John Calvin, Inst. I.xvi.8. 1539 edition. Quoted in A.N.S. Lane, “Did Calvin Believe in Freewill?” Vox Evangelica 12 (1981): 73
  • “Men do nothing save at the secret instigation of God, and do not discuss and deliberate on anything but what he has previously decreed with himself, and brings to pass by his secret direction.” — John Calvin, Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God 177 (OC 8.360) (‘summam et praecipuam rerum omnium causam’). Cf. Inst. I.xviii.2 (1559). See A.N.S. Lane, “Did Calvin Believe in Freewill?” Vox Evangelica 12 (1981): 73
  • “Plainly it was God’s will that sin should enter this world, otherwise it would not have entered, for nothing happens except what God has eternally decreed. Moreover, there was more than a simple permission, for God only permits things that fulfill his purpose.” — A.W Pink, The Sovereignty of God, 2009, 162.
  • (Eph 1:11) “works all things according to the counsel of his will.” Here the Greek word for “works” is 𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑟𝑔𝑒ø, which indicates that God not merely carries all of the universe’s objects and events to their appointed ends but that he actually 𝑏𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑠 𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑡 all things in accordance with his will. In other words, it isn’t just that God manages to turn the evil aspects of our world to good for those who love him; it is rather that he himself brings about these evil aspects for his glory (see Ex. 9:13-16; John 9:3) and his people’s good (see Heb. 12:3-11; James 1:2-4). This includes—as incredible and as unacceptable as it may currently seem—God’s having even brought about the Nazis’ brutality at Birkenau and Auschwitz as well as the terrible killings of Dennis Rader and even the sexual abuse of a young child: “The LORD has made everything for its own purpose, even the wicked for the day of evil” (Prov. 16:4, NASB ).14 “When times are good, be happy; but when times are bad, consider: God has made the one as well as the other” (Eccl. 7:14, NIV). — John Piper and Justin Taylor, eds., Suffering and the Sovereignty of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2006), 42.

This is unbiblical. And as C.S. Lewis cogently noted:

“On the one hand, if God is wiser than we His judge­ment must differ from ours on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil.

On the other hand, if God’s moral judgement differs from ours so that our ‘black’ may be His ‘white’, we can mean nothing by calling Him good; for to say ‘God is good’, while asserting that His goodness is wholly other than ours, is really only to say ‘God is we know not what’. And an utterly unknown quality in God cannot give us moral grounds for loving or obeying Him. If He is not (in our sense) ‘good’ we shall obey, if at all, only through fear—and should be equally ready to obey an omnipotent Fiend. The doctrine of Total Depravity— when the consequence is drawn that, since we are totally depraved, our idea of good is worth simply nothing— may thus turn Christianity into a form of devil-worship.”

CS LEWIS, from chapter 3 of The Problem of Pain.

Yep, I refuse to worship “a god” that is the “devil behind Satan.”

God has never desired sin, nor will He ever. God always desires holiness.

TO SUMMARIZE:

  • If the “T” is correct, there is no rebellion against God’s will. Add the “U” and the “I,” the Gospel is rendered meaningless. It is sad, but it is a logical outgrowth of those. The Word of God, the Gospel message sent to a dying and sick world is secondary, Calvary becomes moot. Your hope can only be in if you won the cosmic lottery.

So when the unbeliever stands before God and Romans 1:19-20 is in the thought of our Holy God, when the words come out of said unbelievers mouth,

“I could not believe in your salvific offer because of my nature which you ensured. I suspect you won’t torture a cow [cows are biologically designed to eat grass] for eternity because your command was to eat meat, but ensured their nature was vegetarian.

What should God’s response be?

Discussing Pharoah’s Heart | by His Will, Or God’s? Split the Horns

Published by Papa Giorgio

Here’s the full study on this topic from my verse by verse teaching through Romans: Why God Hardens Hearts: Romans 9:17-24 This is my best understanding of this topic and I think that it fits really well with a wide variety of Scripture that speaks to the issue. For a fuller defense of my own view please see the video I have linked above. My website https://BibleThinker.org

In a good conversation about Pharoah’s hardened heart, although not in alignment with what I was asking at “SOTO 101” Discussion thread, I got a response to this by MARK H. Here is the convo thus far:

MARK H. Pharaoh stiffened his heart first?

Nope, God hardened Pharaoh’s heart first…Exodus 7:3.

Pharaoh only ‘repented’ because of the plagues God sent upon him and Egypt, God raised Pharaoh up for one reason and one reason only, to show His power and to make His name to be declared throughout the world.

RELIGIO-POLITICAL TALK (RPT): “But I will harden Pharaoh’s heart” Future tense… A strict Calvinist would say God was looking down the corridors of time [a bit of sarcasm there] and seeing the after FX of Pharaohs choices and God allowing and hardening that resolve.

MARK H. Religio-Political Talk (RPT) I believe God hardened Pharaohs heart first. This is what Paul’s argument is in Romans. God could have shown him mercy by softening his heart but He sovereignly chose to harden him so He could display His power and wrath by destroying Egypt. Potter and the clay.

RELIGIO-POLITICAL TALK (RPT):  LONG COMMENT

POTTER & CLAY

Also, don’t forget what was said of Israel a few verses later to be able to choose… 𝐼𝑁 𝑂𝑇𝐻𝐸𝑅 𝑊𝑂𝑅𝐷𝑆, keep reading for Scripture to explain Scripture:

“This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “Go down to the potter’s house, and there I will give you my message.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and I saw him working at the wheel. But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him. Then the word of the Lord came to me. He said, “Can I not do with you, Israel, as this potter does?” declares the Lord. “Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, Israel” (Jer. 18:1–6).

[CALVINISTS STOP AT VERSE 6]

“If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned. And if at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, then I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it. “Now therefore say to the people of Judah and those living in Jerusalem, ‘This is what the Lord says: Look! I am preparing a disaster for you and devising a plan against you. So turn from your evil ways, each one of you, and reform your ways and your actions.’ But they will reply, ‘It’s no use. We will continue with our own plans; we will all follow the stubbornness of our evil hearts’” (Jer. 18:7–12).

To Wit, SOTO 101: Who are you, O man?

[….]

Some Calvinistic scholars attempt to disassociate this text with Paul’s use of the analogy in Romans. For instance, James White writes, “Where is there a discussion of vessels of honor and dishonor in Jeremiah 18? Where is there a discussion of vessels of wrath and vessels of mercy? There is none.”[1] Only someone set on dismissing human responsibility would be unwilling to acknowledge the clear connection. Richard Coords explains:

The vessels of honor can be seen in God’s fashioning to “bless” (v. 10), “build,” and “plant” (v. 9), while the vessels of dishonor can be seen in the fashioning to “uproot,” “pull down” and “destroy” (v.7) including “fashioning calamity” and “devising a plan against” (v. 11), which is also consistent with the Jewish hardening described in Romans chapter 9 and at Romans 11:25.[2]

Paul is not oblivious to the need of the clay to respond to the expressed will of the Potter, as Paul draws upon this analogy again in his letter to Timothy:

“Now in a large house there are not only gold and silver vessels, but also vessels of wood and of earthenware, and some to honor and some to dishonor.  Therefore, if anyone cleanses himself from these things, he will be a vessel for honor, sanctified, useful to the Master, prepared for every good work” (2 Tim. 2:20–21).

Clearly, the biblical authors speak of the clay as if it is able to respond (and thus be held responsible) to the will of the Potter. The vessel must “cleanse himself” so as to be “useful to the Master,” which clearly illustrates that Paul does not necessarily intend to remove man’s part in the process by way of this kind of analogy.

God, a patient and trustworthy Potter who genuinely loves the hardened clay (Rom. 9:1–2; 10:1, 21), has remade some of it to be used for “noble purposes,” such as proclaiming the inspired truth to the lost world. The rest of the lump, still genuinely loved by the Potter despite their turning to other gods (Hos. 3:1), is used to bring about the ignoble purpose of crucifixion and the grafting in of other vessels for redemption (Rom. 11:25). All the while, the Potter is holding out hope for the spoiled lump to turn from its evil and be cleansed through repentance and faith (Rom. 11:11–23).

[1] James White, The Potter’s Freedom (Amityville, NY: Calvary Press, 2000), 225.

[2] Richard Coords, “Jeremiah 18:6,” Examining Calvinism, web page; accessed 08 June 2015.

Take note that PAUL would have been familiar with Isaiah 29:16-19, which as I see it, was a “Messianic prophecy” fulfilled in Jesus and Paul’s discussion of Israel’s true believing remnant:

You have turned things around, as if the potter were the same as the clay. How can what is made say about its maker, “He didn’t make me”? How can what is formed say about the one who formed it, “He doesn’t understand what he’s doing”? Isn’t it true that in just a little while Lebanon will become an orchard, and the orchard will seem like a forest? On that day the deaf will hear the words of a document, and out of a deep darkness the eyes of the blind will see. The humble will have joy after joy in the LORD, and the poor people will rejoice in the Holy One of Israel. (Isaiah 29:16–19, CSB)

THAT BEING SAID, if you come at Scripture with a systematic, I can understand your viewpoint … if you believe in the T, the U, and the I… then every one’s “hard heart” is ultimately by God’s design. Unless He unconditionally through irresistible grace changed your heart by a miracle — against your will. [I add that last part is because of Ronnie W. Rogers. Because of “total depravity “, any good response to God is impossible… our will would not allow for it, so it must be “disallowed” to be saved. Not by the Gospel message, but through the work of God long before you were born… nothing you “responded to.”]

IN OTHER WORDS, if you believe all that…. then yes, each time his heart was hardened, by God or himself, it was God anyways.

However, I enjoyed this Jewish commentary, and, my favorite part is this: “However, as Luzzatto implies, the situation is never permanent” (excerpted below). As Romans agrees and emphasizes… which Calvinism struggles with acknowledging – without breaking apart the smooth flow of 9-11.

… a resource break

… continuing

EXCERPT

… A number of classical sources deal with this question, including the Rabbinic commentary Exodus Rabbah, which observes a critical detail: Exodus 9:12 is the first time that the Torah tells us that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, but we see evidence of Pharaoh impacting his own heart five times earlier in this portion. Twice (Exodus 7:13 and Exodus 22) in response to Moses’ challenges and requests, the Torah tells us, his heart “hardened.” And three times after that (Exodus 8:11, Exodus 15 and Exodus 28), we’re told that Pharaoh “made his heart heavy.”

Five times Pharaoh turned away from Moses’ call and the suffering of the Israelites. Five times he made his own heart less and less supple and soft. As such, Rabbi Simon ben Lakish claims in Exodus Rabbah, a collection of Midrash compiled in the 10th or 11th century (scholars are unsure of the exact date), “Since God sent [the opportunity for repentance and doing the right thing] five times to him and he sent no notice, God then said, ‘You have stiffened your neck and hardened your heart on your own…. So it was that the heart of Pharaoh did not receive the words of God.’”

In other words, Pharaoh sealed his own fate, for himself and his relationship with God.

As the 18th-century Italian philosopher Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto wrote, “Our external actions have an effect on our inner feelings. We have more control over our actions than our emotions, and if we utilize what is in our power, we will eventually acquire what is not as much in our power.”

This is true in both directions. When we make the choice to turn away from suffering, when we engage in the action of walking away from others’ pain, we impact our inner life — our own heart is hardened, we become estranged from the divine and from our own holiest self. True, it’s scary to look that pain in the eyes, and then to grapple with the feelings of responsibility it might engender in us. But there’s a cost to that turning away.

However, as Luzzatto implies, the situation is never permanent. Even when you’ve turned away from others and toward your own self-interest to the point that you can no longer hear the still small voice whispering in your direction. Even then, the gates to the divine — and to ourselves — are always open. As the Talmud (Brachot 32b) teaches in the name of Rabbi Elezar, “From the day on which the Temple was destroyed, the gates of prayer have been closed… But though the gates of prayer are closed, the gates of weeping are not closed.”

We can do the work of goodness in the world. It will change us. And when we’re finally ready to let our heart break open, the gates will be there, ready to receive us.

(MY JEWISH LEARNING)

Dr. Brown opens up the Hebrew Bible in order to understand what really happened with the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart in Exodus.

 

Predestination and Foreknowledge

Published by Papa Giorgio

The REAL Difference Between Calvinistic &
Non-Calvinistic Predestination w/ ‪@BraxtonHunter‬

Ronnie W. Rogers, Reflections of a Disenchanted Calvinist,

CPHT 2, Predestination and Foreknowledge (PDF)

Predestination and Foreknowledge

  1. I affirm that God’s predetermination and foreknowledge are coextensive, which is to say that God is essentially omniscient rather than knowing things perceptively. God has always known all contingencies (decisions yet to be actualized) because even though they do not exist external to the mind of God, they have eternally existed in the mind of God by virtue of the nature of His being. Moreover, I affirm that the distinction between predestining something to happen a certain way and predestining to allow some human freedom to determine outcomes are both within the scope of the biblical meaning of predestination and foreknowledge. I further affirm that both understandings of predestination are compatible with and demonstrative of sovereignty so long as He made the decision freely, which He did in fact do, thereby being part of His plan rather than contrary to His plan.

The Calvinist position that God elects to regenerate some, the elect, and all that He regenerates will necessarily believe inescapably leaves God determining to send some to hell who could have been spared that torment if He had chosen for them to be spared because all that He elects to regenerate must believe and all that He chooses not to regenerate cannot believe. This position is in contrast to the position I am advocating, whereby God enables all to have a real choice of whether to believe or not, and those who go to hell are there because they rejected a real chance to not be there.

I further affirm God’s omniscience, which includes perfect, exhaustive knowledge of every actuality, potentiality, contingency, and conditional reality. Thus, God knows everything about the future including every potential and actual choice of every person. He also knows the consequence of every potential and actual choice. God’s foreknowledge is in reality just knowledge for God. He has known every future event in an eternal present. W. T. Shedd notes, “Omniscience excludes both foreknowledge and subsequent knowledge.”14 Augustine said, “What is foreknowledge but the knowledge of the future. But what is future to God? For, if the divine knowledge includes all things at one instant, all things are present to him, and there is nothing future; and his knowledge is knowledge, and not foreknowledge.”15

Thus, the future, or tomorrow for us, has always been known to God. In this sense, there is no future with God, although He differentiates between what is past, present, and yet to sequentially happen. As far as knowledge, He knows the future as well and certain as He knows the past. Charnocke says, “the knowledge of one thing is not, in God, before another; one act of knowledge doth not beget another. In regard of the objects themselves, one thing is before another; one year before another; one generation of men before another; one is the cause, and the other is the effect; in the creature’s mind there is such a succession, and God knows there will be such a succession; but there is no such order in God’s knowledge; for he knows all those successions by one glance, without any successions of knowledge in himself.”16 This is what I mean by saying God’s predestination and God’s foreknowledge are coextensive. God does see the sequence of events, but he does not learn from looking at sequential actions or choices and then choose to act because He sees them all simultaneously.

Shedd says, “God has a knowledge of all things that are possible ….He knows all that he can do ….It is knowledge that… never causes an act of the will….God has knowledge of what is conditionally possible, that is, of those events which have never come to pass, but which might have occurred under certain possible conditions ….For example, God knows that if a certain person should live to middle life, he would become exceedingly vicious and wicked. He prevents this by an early death of the person. Biblical instances are Matthew 11:21-23 (the repentance of Tyre and Sidon; of Sodom and Gomorrah); 1 Samuel 23:5-14; Jeremiah 38:17-20.”17

So when we speak of God’s foreknowledge, it does not convey the idea of learning, or becoming aware, but rather as Shedd notes, “Foreknowledge, strictly taken, implies an interval between the knowledge and the event.”18 Lewis Sperry Chafer says, “Omniscience brings everything—past, present, and future—with equal reality before the mind of God.”19 Again, he notes “The omniscience of God comprehends all things—things past, things present, and things future, and the possible as well as the actual.”20

Therefore, “by divine arrangement, events do follow in sequence or chronological order. Yet, to God, the things of the past are as real as though now present and the things of the future are as real as though past. (Isaiah 46:10; Romans 4:17)”21 Creation was the omnipotent act of bringing knowledge or the conceptual that had existed eternally in the mind of God into experiential knowledge or reality. God was not surprised or in any sense unaware of the choices of Lucifer or Adam and Eve. Although He abhors sin and is perfectly holy in all of His thoughts and actions, He chose to create man as a free moral agent, with real free choice. God never desires sin, but rather He always unwaveringly desires holiness. When time is no more, we will understand more fully how even the evil of man and Lucifer fit into God’s plan, which ultimately assures that man created in His image with libertarian freedom will live eternally, freely choosing only righteousness. Chafer notes, “The perfect foreknowledge of God was aware of the fact that sin would call for the greatest sacrifice even God could make—the death of His Son …. God was not overtaken by unforeseen calamity and failure. His purposes are being executed and will be seen in the end to have been holy, just, and good.”22

  1. I disaffirm that God’s infallible foreknowledge or predetermination caused man to sin or spend eternity in hell, and further, that foreknowledge or predetermination eliminates real free choices of man in salvation and the first sin. I also disaffirm that God’s foreknowledge of events, which makes certain their coming to pass, means that He was the efficient cause or in any way the direct cause of every event that comes to pass. He is the ultimate cause of all good, the direct (efficient) cause of many things, but other events (sin) happen because He sovereignly and freely created efficient causes, e.g., man and his ability to choose.

Further, I disaffirm that foreknowledge is the same as causation because epistemology (study of knowledge) deals with foreknowledge and etiology (study of cause) deals with causation, and to conflate the two is a fallacious confusion of categories. I am not saying that all knowledgeable Calvinists do this, but it is a common mistake among young Calvinists, as well as many others who label themselves as Calvinist. In fact, the Scripture ties salvation to God’s foreknowledge on more than one occasion (Romans 8:29; 1 Peter 1:2). Foreknowledge is not the same as predestination; the very sentence before us distinguishes the two. “His foreknowledge marks out the persons; His predestination determines His purposes and acts on their behalf.”23

Moreover, I disaffirm that God’s absolute foreknowledge of future events or choices necessitates or often even includes, in any sense, that God determined those events or choices in such a way that man did not make an actual free choice, although at times, God certainly does intervene, and has every right to do so. In particular, God’s foreknowledge of a person’s choice regarding the gospel does not cause the choice. Many often conclude that foreknowledge is causal and therefore there is not a real choice between two actual alternatives, e.g. to accept or reject the gospel. Chafer notes, “Divine prescience of itself implies no element of necessity or determination, though it does imply certainty.”24

What God knows will certainly come to pass, but that certainty is not causality. God’s foreknowledge and man’s ability to choose are both presented in the Scripture with clarity and frequency. Chafer says of this, “On the one hand, revelation presents God as foreknowing all things including the actions of human agents, and apart from such knowledge God would be ignorant and to that degree imperfect. On the other hand, revelation appeals to the wills of men with the evident assumption that man is capable of a free choice—’whosoever will may come.'”25 Needless to say, I am disaffirming that the plea of Scripture “whosoever will may come” cannot be answered by grace enabled faith. According to Calvinism, this plea is true, but equally true is that no one will come until God selectively regenerates him, and then he will most certainly come. This belief transforms this beautiful plea of the Savior into a recitation of brute facts. Of course, consistent Calvinism asserts, “whosoever can come”, but the unspoken counterpart of Calvinism is that whosoever really does not mean anyone because only some of the “whosoevers” will be selected to come; the unselected cannot come. This is a disquieting reality.

Some ask, would God be wrong, and therefore not perfect, if He knew Adam would sin, and Adam chose at the last moment to not sin? The answer is no. Because if Adam’s real free choice would have resulted in Adam choosing not to sin, God would have eternally known that. Chafer says concerning this, “If the question be asked whether the moral agent has freedom to act otherwise than as God foresees he will act, it may be replied that the human will because of its inherent freedom of choice is capable of electing the opposite course to that divinely foreknown; but he will not do so. If he did so, that would be the thing which God foreknew. The divine foreknowledge does not coerce; it merely knows what the human choice will be.”26 Therefore, contrary to Calvinism, foreknowledge establishes certainty but not causation.

Although all human examples of God’s foreknowledge seem to break down at some point, e.g. humans never can know the future perfectly; the following illustrates the difference between foreknowing and causing even though the foreknowledge is not absolute. I tell people that I know whom Gina (my wife for over 41 years) will vote for when she goes into the voting booth. I know this with mathematical certainty. I can tell you whom she voted for before I ever see her or talk with her after casting her vote. Why? Is it because I forced her, I coerced her, or that I somehow rigged the booth to cause her to vote a certain way? Absolutely not! I know how she will vote because I know her intimately. My knowledge of how she would vote actually has no bearing on her choice of whom to vote for, but rather I know because I know her. Therefore, knowledge and causation of certain actions are not synonymous.

《《 《《  FOOTNOTES  》》》》

14 William G. T. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (n.d., reprint with introduction by Edward E. Hindson, Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1980), 355.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid., 355-356.

18 Ibid., 355.

19 Chafer, Systematic Theology. vol. I, 192.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid., 197.

23 Collected Writings of W.E. Vine, (Thomas Nelson, 1997, c1996 Logos electronic version), Romans 8:29.

24 Chafer, Systematic Theology. vol. I, 194.

25 Ibid., 194-195.

26. Ibid., 196.

Reviewing John MacArthur’s view on Foreknowledge in Romans 8:29

Dr. Leighton Flowers critiques MacArthur’s rather simplistic explanation of Divine Foreknowledge from the non-Calvinistic worldview. For Dr. Flowers commentary over Romans 8:28 and following you can go here:

Did God Decree Charlie Kirk’s Death? (Idol Killer)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Okay, this 1st video was a homerun. The second video was close as well. I just want to note up front that I disagree with IDOL KILLER over some issues, one being penal substitution. I side with Mike Winger and Michael Brown on the issue — believing it to be Biblical. But the issue comes up only in the 2nd video, and I understand why Idol Killer dislikes it is God decrees our sin. Here are the videos:

God Decreed Evil? Responding to Todd Friel

Recently Todd Friel of ‪@WretchedNetwork‬ released a video in which he argued God eternally and meticulously decreed all evil. He quoted Calvinist authors and Confessions like the Westminster, provided a couple passages of Scripture removed from their context and contradicted himself several times. In this video Idol Killer responds to the claims Todd made, pushing back and offering a Biblically based Theodicy instead.

  • “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness; Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!” Isaiah 5:20

An excellent video on Calvinistic apologetics. BTW, Leighton Flowers will be on

Why Calvinist Apologetics FAIL

In this video we address Calvinist Apologists ‪@3of7Project‬ ‪@AllieBethStuckey‬ ‪@AominOrg‬ ‪@ApologiaStudios‬ ‪@desiringGod‬ ‪@CanonPress‬ ‪@blogmablog4870‬ ‪@ligonier‬ ‪@gracetoyou‬ ‪@Heartcrymissionary‬ ‪@AMessengerofTruth‬ and several others. We note how what they present is anti-Gospel, anti-reason, anti-Scripture, anti-Christ and ahistoric as they intend to defend Calvinism rather than Christianity.

Calvinism’s “Reading Rainbow” | John 5:39–40

Published by Papa Giorgio

I will clip 1st the actual Scripture, then rewrite it as a Calvinist must see it (if they follow their systematic logically):

  1. You pore over the Scriptures because you think you have eternal life in them, and yet they testify about me. But you are not willing to come to me so that you may have life.  (John 5:39–40, CSB)
  2. You pore over the Scriptures because you think you have eternal life in them, but there is no salvation in the book called the Bible unless I irresistible and effectually called you to believe… the Gospel is powerless to effectually save you, and yet they testify about me. But I have not elected you for effectual salvation before the foundation of the world so that you can not irresistibly come to me so that you may have life.  (John 5:39–40, Augustinian/Calvinistic determinism – RCSB or HCBV – you choose)

To be clear, Jesus did not say, “I refused to give you life so that you would come to me.” Again, Jesus was not saying, “you refuse to believe because I and the Father rejected you before the foundation of the world and are withholding the grace you need to believe,” which is the necessary implication of the Calvinistic doctrine.

I think I should write a Bible version. 😆 The Revised Calvinistic Standard Bible. The RCSB! Or the HCBV: The Honest Calvinist Bible Version.

Charlie Kirk’s Death 100% MSM and Democrats Fault

Published by Papa Giorgio
  • Any Rep. or Senator who says Trump, his supporters, or other Republicans is Hitler or a Nazi doesn’t care about minimizing the horrors of the Holocaust. Any reporter who doesn’t challenge that disgusting statement is just as bad. (THE LID, May 2025 | See also NYP, July 2024 | )
  • Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA) is under fire after widespread airing of four-year-old remarks in which he called former President Donald Trump’s voters a “horde of budding blood-and-soil fascists.” (Washington Examiner, June 2024)

Clay Travis has a blunt response to Barack Obama’s claim that he “doesn’t know” what motivated Charlie Kirk’s murder. In just two minutes, Travis summed up what every angry American is feeling right now.

“YOU CAUSED THIS!”

“You can’t call the president of the United States Adolf Hitler for 10 years… you cannot say that anyone who voted for Trump or advocated for him like you, me, Riley, and Charlie Kirk are Nazis, and then when someone tries to kill us, suddenly say, ‘We condemn this violence.’ You caused it!”

“Look at me right now! You caused this! When you tell people that someone is Hitler, you are telling crazy people: go kill them. And I’m sick of pretending that is anything other than what they are doing. … Charlie Kirk bore the brunt of that left-wing violence.”

Also see,

“How We Got Here“

And yes, Lefties [similar to Islamo-Fascists], Thinks Lawns Are Racist. Add to that Math. Even showing up to work on time is “systematic white supremacy.” When everything is racist there’s no room for reason. And this is what we are seeing, when horticulture is considered racist, you have a whole generation that is ill prepared for real life:

It is this generation of young adults, with safe rooms with videos of kittens when a disagreeing speaker comes to their campus… “what are these kids to do when something bad happens?”

Reason is gone, not offending someone is the new gospel: “…demanding the campus be made more of a “sanctuary” as they protested classism, sexism, discrimination and ethnic intimidation.” (Detroit News) | Milk and cookies, crayons and coloring books, therapy dogs and ducks (Campus Reform). When the real world and these people collide, escape goats are the outcome:

  • So, in the West as these “well-meaning” ideals works themselves out, expect more legal, cultural, and violent expression against those who hold to a historical, conserving theology and expressing this in public life. (ME/RPT in 2015)

Need more examples to support the Left’s [read here Democrats and the MSMS] push to label Republicans such horrible things that people want to kill us?

Which brings me to Nick Freitas’ response to the Left…

There is a civil war that Prager said was not bloody, that became bloody with the attempted assassinations of Trump, and the successful assassination of Charlie Kirk.

America’s Second Civil War

It is time for our society to acknowledge a sad truth: America is currently fighting its second Civil War.

In fact, with the obvious and enormous exception of attitudes toward slavery, Americans are more divided morally, ideologically and politically today than they were during the Civil War. For that reason, just as the Great War came to be known as World War I once there was World War II, the Civil War will become known as the First Civil War when more Americans come to regard the current battle as the Second Civil War.

This Second Civil War, fortunately, differs in another critically important way: It has thus far been largely nonviolent. But given increasing left-wing violence, such as riots, the taking over of college presidents’ offices and the illegal occupation of state capitols, nonviolence is not guaranteed to be a permanent characteristic of the Second Civil War.

There are those on both the left and right who call for American unity. But these calls are either naive or disingenuous. Unity was possible between the right and liberals, but not between the right and the left.

Liberalism — which was anti-left, pro-American and deeply committed to the Judeo-Christian foundations of America; and which regarded the melting pot as the American ideal, fought for free speech for its opponents, regarded Western civilization as the greatest moral and artistic human achievement and viewed the celebration of racial identity as racism — is now affirmed almost exclusively on the right and among a handful of people who don’t call themselves conservative.

The left, however, is opposed to every one of those core principles of liberalism.

Like the left in every other country, the left in America essentially sees America as a racist, xenophobic, colonialist, imperialist, warmongering, money-worshipping, moronically religious nation.

Just as in Western Europe, the left in America seeks to erase America’s Judeo-Christian foundations. The melting pot is regarded as nothing more than an anti-black, anti-Muslim, anti-Hispanic meme. The left suppresses free speech wherever possible for those who oppose it, labeling all non-left speech “hate speech.” To cite only one example, if you think Shakespeare is the greatest playwright or Bach is the greatest composer, you are a proponent of dead white European males and therefore racist.

Without any important value held in common, how can there be unity between left and non-left? Obviously, there cannot.

There will be unity only when the left vanquishes the right or the right vanquishes the left. Using the First Civil War analogy, American unity was achieved only after the South was vanquished and slavery was abolished.

How are those of us who oppose left-wing nihilism — there is no other word for an ideology that holds Western civilization and America’s core values in contempt — supposed to unite with “educators” who instruct elementary school teachers to cease calling their students “boys” and “girls” because that implies gender identity? With English departments that don’t require reading Shakespeare in order to receive a degree in English? With those who regard virtually every war America has fought as imperialist and immoral? With those who regard the free market as a form of oppression? With those who want the state to control as much of American life as possible? With those who repeatedly tell America and its black minority that the greatest problems afflicting black Americans are caused by white racism, “white privilege” and “systemic racism”? With those who think that the nuclear family ideal is inherently misogynistic and homophobic? With those who hold that Israel is the villain in the Middle East? With those who claim that the term “Islamic terrorist” is an expression of religious bigotry?

The third significant difference between the First and Second Civil Wars is that in the Second Civil war, one side has been doing nearly all the fighting. That is how it has been able to take over schools — from elementary schools, to high schools, to universities — and indoctrinate America’s young people; how it has taken over nearly all the news media; and how it has taken over entertainment media.

The conservative side has lost on every one of these fronts because it has rarely fought back with anything near the ferocity with which the left fights. Name a Republican politician who has run against the left as opposed to running solely against his or her Democratic opponent. And nearly all American conservatives, people who are proud of America and affirm its basic tenets, readily send their children to schools that indoctrinate their children against everything the parents hold precious. A mere handful protest when their child’s teacher ceases calling their son a boy or their daughter a girl, or makes “slave owner” the defining characteristic of the Founding Fathers.

With the defeat of the left in the last presidential election, the defeat of the left in two-thirds of the gubernatorial elections and the defeat of the left in a majority of House and Senate elections, this is likely the last chance liberals, conservatives and the right have to defeat the American left. But it will not happen until these groups understand that we are fighting for the survival of America no less than the Union troops were in the First Civil War.

FLASHBACK!

JOE ROGAN learns live:

TMZ Caught Celebrating Charlie’s Death

9/11 | NEVER FORGET

Published by Papa Giorgio

A Tradition/Tribute since 2007

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“There will even come a time when anyone who kills you
will think he’s doing God a favor”
(John 16:2 – The Message)

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Remember … Meditate … Pray

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Throughout the day on 911, but typically the following Sunday, I will add political cartoons as they are released.

I am splitting the post into sections:

I am a BIG fan of editorial cartoons/cartoonists and will let these talented people memorialize this solemn day ~ their talent to catch a big-idea in one image is unrivaled. New frames will be added under the GOLD moniker just below. The newer cartoons will be larger than the older ones. The parameters of the old blog did not allow for bigger. [Note: this does not mean the newer cartoons directly below are themselves “new,” it just means that I recently found them… they in fact may be old.]

~ with love and remembrance, PapaGiorgio

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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Newer Tributes Below
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Click to ENLARGE the Below (see original on FB)


Missing 1

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9-11 2016 Ramirez

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Never Again

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The Hour of Islam 9-11-01

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If there is indeed a social revolution under way, it shouldn’t stop with women’s choice to honor their [own] nature. It must also include a newfound respect for men. It was New York City’s firemen who dared to charge up the stairs of the burning Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. The death tally of New York City’s firefighters was: men 343, women 0. Can anyone honestly say you would have wanted a woman coming to your rescue on that fateful day?

Suzanne Venker & Phyllis Schlafly, The Flipside of Feminism: What Conservative Women Know — and Men Can’t Say (Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2011), 181-182.

TATTOOS

These are mainly by fireman/port authority guys in remembrance of those lost

 

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BEAMS

Just a few pictures of steel beams and info

 

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You are looking at what some people believe is a miracle.

Two days after the disaster, a construction worker found several perfectly formed crosses planted upright in a pit in the rubble of the heavily damaged 6 World Trade Center.

The large, cross-shaped metal beams just happened to fall that way when one of the towers collapsed. An FBI chaplain who has spent days at ground zero says he has not seen anything like it on the vast site.

As word of the find has spread at ground zero, exhausted and emotionally overwhelmed rescue workers have been flocking to the site to pray and meditate.

“People have a very emotional reaction when they see it,” says the Rev. Carl Bassett, an FBI chaplain. “They are amazed to see something like that in all the disarray. There’s no symmetry to anything down there, except those crosses.”

This is the Ground Zero cross seen Friday, October 4, 2002, in New York. Father Brian Jordan and a group representing construction workers and victims of the World Trade Center are asking the governor to preserve the ground zero cross and use it as part of the eventual memorial that will be erected at Ground Zero.

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VIDEOS

From Cox & Forkum’s Site (cartoonists):

In the excellent book Never Forget: An Oral History of September 11, 2001, authors Mitchell Fink and Lois Mathias collected stories from eyewitnesses. Here’s an excerpt from what David Kravette, a Cantor Fitzgerald broker, told the authors about his experience at the World Trade Center:

On the morning of September 11, I was on floor 105, tower 1. I had an 8 a.m. meeting set up with a client. He was bringing by some tech people to do some due diligence on our technology company called E-Speed. I get to work usually around seven, seven-fifteen. At eight, the client called to tell me they were running late. And I said fine. But I reminded him to bring photo ID downstairs. Ever since the last terrorist attack in ’93, the building requires photo ID downstairs. He’s been there before, so he knew the drill. He said, “Fine. No problem.”

At 8:40, I get a phone call from the security desk downstairs, asking me if I’m expecting visitors. I said yes. “Well, they’re here,” they said. “But one of them forgot their ID.”

I’m 105 flights up. The commute to get downstairs takes about five minutes, especially around that time. So I’m annoyed, obviously, because I have to go down now to sign these people in after I just told them to bring ID. I look at this desk assistant across from me, thinking maybe she’ll help out and go down, but she’s on the phone. She’s also about eight months pregnant. She’s a few weeks from maternity leave and she’s on the phone talking to a friend and she’s on a website looking at bassinets and cribs. A very nice girl expecting her first child. So how lazy am I? I decide to go myself. …

… I take these two elevator rides down. I take the elevator from 105 to 78, change, and take the express down to the ground. I got down to the lobby. Our elevator banks actually face the visitors’ gallery. And I started walking over to the visitors’ gallery, I’d say it’s about thirty yards, and they’re standing there waiting for me. And I remember yelling, “Which one of you knuckleheads forgot your ID?”

And as I say this, you hear this really loud screeching sound. I turn around and it’s kind of coming from the elevators. So I run away from it, like ten steps, and look back. And the elevators are free-falling. Then, from the middle elevator bank, not the one I came down on, but from the middle one, a huge fireball explodes in the lobby. This huge fireball is coming right toward me. People got incinerated. And I remember just looking at this thing, not feeling scared, but just sad because I knew I was going to die. But as quickly as it came toward me, it actually sucked back in on itself, and it was gone. It left a lot of smoke and everything was blown out, all the glass and revolving doors leading into the shopping area. All I felt was a big wave of heat come over me, like when you put your face too close to a fireplace. My customer and my general counsel and I just ran out. The three of us ran over the overpass to where the Financial Center is. We went down to where the marina is, where the yachts are. And that’s when we found out what happened, that a plane had hit the building.

I looked up and saw this big gaping hole. I said, “What’s that falling out of the window?”

My general counsel looks at me like I’m nuts. And he says, “That’s people jumping out.” …

Cantor Fitzgerald had four floors in the North Tower — 101, 103, 104, and 105. Nobody got out on those floors. Everyone who was upstairs perished. There were a lot of phone calls to wives and husbands at around nine o’clock saying good-bye, as though they knew they were going to die.

Remembering The Jumpers

On another note, there is an old SNL skit where, coincidentally, John Belushi explains how the Twin Towers will come down via SkyLab:

WHERE WAS GOD?

Where was God at 9/11? Columbia asks the tough questions to an Oxford scholar on 9/11 at a Veritas event:

GROUND ZERO MOSQUE

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tattoo ground zero

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