Debating the Causal Chain | Dinesh D’Souza and Guillaume Bignon

Published September 11, 2026September 12, 2026 by Papa Giorgio

Subtitle: From Theological Determinism to the Antecedents of Human Choice

What Follows

Before turning to Bignon’s book, I want to establish the record from the debate itself. The three clips that follow are brief, but they are important. They show that Bignon repeatedly and explicitly affirms theological determinism, including the statement that “God determines everything that happens.”

With that foundation established, I will then turn to Bignon’s book, Excusing Sinners and Blaming God, to examine how he develops that position in greater detail—particularly his treatment of the antecedent conditions of human choice, divine providence, human desires, and moral responsibility. The question is not simply what Bignon calls his position, but whether his own explanation ultimately resolves—or reinforces—the determinist problem.

Debate Evidence #1 — Bignon Explicitly Affirms Theological Determinism

(Dinesh D’Souza): Guillaume, if I may, I just want to put that question to you that ended my summary. I’m happy to address all the issues that you raised in your opening remarks. But the first question I asked, because as you know from the sort of Twitter debate, the X debate, there’s so much of you don’t understand, this is not what we believe, this is not what we think. So I want to ask you, as a sort of leading Calvinist and philosopher of Calvinism, this description, this description of strong sovereignty on God’s part that I gave, do you agree with it or not?

(Guillaume Bignon): Well, it’s not just a lump sum, like everything. They have a lot of different things and there’s certainly some things that I would say differently, but let me be very clear. I affirm the theological determinist position. So yes, God determines everything that happens. These are the two views. It’s either that the choices of men are determined by all of those circumstances at the moment of choice or holding them in place, it’s still the case that they could choose one or the other categorically open. These are the two views and there’s [no] shying away, God determines those things.

Evidence: Bignon explicitly identifies himself with the theological determinist position and states plainly, “God determines everything that happens.”

Dinesh D’Souza and Guillaume Bignon, “Calvinism and Pre-Destination,” The Gospel Truth debate, YouTube video, approximately 45:00–46:30.

Debate Evidence #2 — D’Souza Identifies the Antecedent Conditions

(Dinesh D’Souza): Here’s what I want you to admit to, and I hope you will, because I think this is what you believe, that even though God determines our brain states, God determines all our past, our past events, the family we’re born into, the books we read, the influences inside my brain. God determines everything on the inside and therefore my very desires, my preferences, my wishes, including my desire from God, ultimately is determined internally by God himself. Is that true or is that false?

(Guillaume Bignon): Are you asking me again if I affirm theological determinism? Because I understand I have a French accent, but I thought I really repeated this a number of times. I affirm theological determinism.

Evidence: D’Souza explicitly lays out the antecedent conditions he believes follow from Bignon’s theological determinism—past events, family, books, internal influences, brain states, desires, preferences, and wishes. Rather than rejecting the underlying determinist premise, Bignon responds by again appealing to his affirmation of theological determinism.

Dinesh D’Souza and Guillaume Bignon, “Calvinism and Pre-Destination,” The Gospel Truth debate, YouTube video, approximately 1:31:00–1:32:30.

Debate Evidence #3 — Bignon Again Refuses to Retreat from Theological Determinism

(Dinesh D’Souza): But I think I’ve given an accurate picture of what you are saying and I think it would help the debate if you say, Yes, I agree, or No, I’m saying something different about David.

(Guillaume Bignon): There was so much going on here that I don’t agree with all the formulation. I don’t know how much clearer I can be about saying that I affirm theological determinism.

Evidence: When given a direct opportunity either to affirm D’Souza’s characterization or explain that he is saying something fundamentally different, Bignon objects to “all the formulation,” but once again explicitly reaffirms his position: “I affirm theological determinism.”

Dinesh D’Souza and Guillaume Bignon, “Calvinism and Pre-Destination,” The Gospel Truth debate, YouTube video, approximately 2:00–2:30.

EVIDENTIARY PROGRESSION

Evidence #1:

“I affirm the theological determinist position. So yes, God determines everything that happens.”

Evidence #2:

D’Souza identifies what that means for the antecedent conditions of human choice; Bignon does not abandon theological determinism.

Evidence #3:

When challenged to affirm or deny D’Souza’s characterization, Bignon again says, “I affirm theological determinism.”

This gives us a solid video record before we bring the book back into the analysis.

GUILLAUME BIGNON’S BOOK

Guillaume Bignon’s Excusing Sinners and Blaming God: A Calvinist Assessment of Determinism, Moral Responsibility, and Divine Involvement in Evil offers an extended philosophical defense of Calvinism against the charge that theological determinism undermines human moral responsibility and implicates God in evil.

The work is especially relevant to the present argument because Bignon does not avoid the language of determinism. Rather, he seeks to explain how determinism, divine providence, human freedom, and moral responsibility can be coherently held together. The following excerpts examine that argument on Bignon’s own terms, with particular attention to what his account entails when the antecedent conditions leading to human choices are themselves under God’s providential control.

… Let us then examine these active/passive counterfactuals of determinist free will. For any given sinner and sin about which one wants to maintain a language of divine permission in the sense under discussion, Calvinists would have to affirm:

1) If God were to actively intervene, the sinner would not commit the sin

And,

2) If God were to passively refrain from intervening, the sinner would commit the sin.

To establish the coherence of the model at hand, the question to address is this: how can Calvinists affirm those propositions, and more specifically, how could God be said to “passively refrain” from anything, if he is determining even the very choice to sin? To answer this question, let me begin by drawing an important distinction between two different sorts of causal factors that are at play in determining whether or not the sinner will sin. That human decision is influenced by two sorts of such factors: on the one hand are this person’s nature, nurture, life events, and character-formation history, all the way from his conception up until the moment of choice, and on the other hand are all the immediate influencers at that moment of choice: which circumstances he is placed in, and which forces— internal and external, natural and supernatural—are, on that moment, drawing him in different directions to make his choice one way or the other. Note that this conceptual distinction is uncontroversial: these two types of influences are affirmed by all libertarians as well. Only they maintain that all these influences do not collectively determine the choice one way or the other, but they do influence it.⁴¹⁸ This uncontroversial distinction, then, allows Calvinists to affirm this: God is in full providential control of both sorts of influences, but his so-called “passivity” or “refraining from intervention” can be expressed legitimately with respect to his supernatural influence on the moment of choice. That is a point at which Calvinists can find a very legitimate asymmetry of divine action. If God were to refrain from that active drawing on the moment of choice, then the sinner would sin, because all that would be left within him to express itself in decision-making would be his nature and prior character, which of course Calvinists affirm are corrupted by original sin. Apart from God actively extending his grace to them, fallen sinners sin. “Man without grace can will nothing but evil,” says Martin Luther.⁴¹⁹ The doctrine of original sin, understood very minimally as entailing that humans have a fallen nature that inclines them uniformly toward sin (no need here for anything stronger like total depravity, original guilt or anything remotely controversial for Christians), explains the truth of one of our two counterfactuals: “If God were to refrain from divine intervention (namely an inner intervention in the form of a positive drawing of grace on the heart of the fallen sinner), the sinner would sin.”

This conclusion is secured for every choice made by persons affected by original sin. Of course, one may raise the question of Adam’s sin, but I shall come back to it later. For now, let us turn to the second counterfactual in the pair, namely “If God were to actively intervene, the sinner would refrain from sinning.” It is all the more easily affirmed by Calvinists in light of their doctrine of so-called “irresistible grace.”⁴²⁰ There is according to Calvinists no amount of sinful inclination that divine grace cannot overcome. Philosophically, this comes from their upholding determinism, and it yields exactly the desired theological result: there always exists a type of supernatural drawing available to God, such that if he were to apply it, the sinner would refrain from sinning and would do the right thing instead. This secures the counterfactual at hand, and with it the truth of the active/passive counterfactual pair, thereby justifying the asymmetry at the moment of choice in this specific type of situation, and hence an appropriate language of divine permission in the face of determinism.

NOTES

418. “Of course this should not be taken to mean that freedom is the absence of influences, either external or internal. For someone to act, certain causal conditions are necessary. Rather, it means that these do not determine or necessitate our choices or actions.” Reichenbach, “Reformed View of God,” 69. See also Walls and Dongell, Not a Calvinist, 107.

419. Luther, Bondage of the Will, 318.

420. It might even be that no one but Calvinists can affirm such strong counterfactuals.

Guillaume Bignon, Excusing Sinners and Blaming God: A Calvinist Assessment of Determinism, Moral Responsibility, and Divine Involvement in Evil (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2018), 262–63, nn. 418–20 (p. 275).

HIGHLIGHTED QUOTES

Here Bignon acknowledges the very point at issue: God’s involvement does not begin at the moment of choice; on Calvinism, God has already determined the conditions that shaped the sinner and continues to determine what happens at the moment of sin.

“I suppose that one could object that focusing in this way on God’s action at the moment of sin in relative disregard to his prior involvement in the person’s character-building is inappropriate …for Calvinists as they must maintain that God determined both…. The point was not to relieve God from his control of evil, whether in creating sinners or in providentially controlling their sins….On Calvinism, God clearly determines all these things.” —p. 263

And the very next paragraph reinforces the point:

“the sled was initially placed on the track by the very same persons who subsequently piloted it down the track. They are thoroughly causally responsible for its present sliding down the track…” —p. 264

PASSING COMMENTS

The determinist implications of Bignon’s account are evident from his own formulation. He explains that the sinner’s decision is determined by two layers of causal factors: first, “nature, nurture, life events, and character-formation history, all the way from his conception up until the moment of choice”; and second, the immediate circumstances and “forces—internal and external, natural and supernatural” operating at the moment of choice.

This framework is significant because Bignon then states that “God is in full providential control of both sorts of influences.” The choice, therefore, is not presented as arising in isolation. Rather, the person arrives at the moment of decision with a given history, nature, character, set of desires, circumstances, and operative influences already in place—and Bignon maintains that God providentially controls them all.

Bignon then introduces the decisive counterfactual. If God were to intervene with a particular supernatural influence, the sinner would choose differently; if God refrains from that influence, the sinner will sin. On this account, the choice appears to be the inevitable result of the antecedent conditions God has providentially arranged, together with the particular divine influence—or non-influence—God supplies at the moment of choice.

The difficulty, then, is that Bignon’s account appears to generate an internal tension. On the one hand, he insists that Calvinism does not diminish divine control:

“On Calvinism, God clearly determines all these things.”

He also anticipates the objection that it is improper to focus on God’s action at the moment of sin while neglecting God’s prior involvement in forming the person’s character, and he acknowledges that Calvinists “must maintain that God determined both.”

On the other hand, Bignon seeks to preserve a morally significant distinction between God’s “active” intervention and His “passive” refraining, so that the sinner’s sin may still be described as something God merely “permitted.” Yet the relevant features of the case remain comprehensive:

God controls the person’s nature and history, controls the circumstances, controls the internal and external influences, and controls the supernatural influence at the moment of choice.

Given those premises, Bignon attempts to locate the morally relevant distinction in God’s decision either to apply or withhold that final supernatural influence. The problem is that the allegedly “passive” condition under which the sinner sins is itself embedded within a divinely determined causal order. Accordingly, the appeal to passivity does not remove the determination of the choice. It merely distinguishes between which divine determination produces the choice.

For this reason, Bignon’s “passivity” should not be understood as ordinary passivity. If I merely refrain from interfering with another person’s decision, it does not follow that I have determined what that person will do. Bignon’s model, however, is stronger: God has already providentially controlled the entire background that brings the person to the decision, and Bignon states that the sinner would sin if God refrained from the relevant supernatural intervention. In that context, the “refraining” itself becomes consequentially determinative.

Stated differently, if God determines all the antecedent conditions that determine what the sinner will choose, then it is unclear what “permission” can mean other than God’s determination of the sinner’s choice through a different point in the causal chain.

This point does not depend on D’Souza’s characterization of Bignon’s position. The statement “On Calvinism, God clearly determines all these things” is Bignon’s own wording.

KNEE DEEP

Bignon’s Own Words: God Determines the Whole Process

The significance of Bignon’s discussion on pages 258–59 becomes much clearer when it is read alongside what he says later on pages 262–63. Taken together, these passages establish a continuous account of divine determination that begins well before the moment of human choice. This is important because the argument does not require us to reconstruct what Bignon must believe from his affirmation of theological determinism. Bignon himself describes God as determining the antecedent conditions that lead to the choice.

In the burglar analogy, Bignon first explains why the ordinary passer-by is different from God under Calvinism. The passer-by has encountered the burglar but has not participated in creating the person who stands before him.

The action of “permitting” is supposed to feature a “hands-off” attitude, almost a passive disengagement on the part of God. It must be a “refraining” from some sort of intervention, thereby letting, or allowing, the evil action to unfold without stepping in. These concepts are the reason why determinism is thought to be problematic here, because if God determines all things, how can he be “hands-off” anything in the requisite sense?

To answer that question and unpack these notions of passivity, permission, and asymmetry, it is helpful to start with a simple, intuitive, and uncontroversial example, which captures well the sense of permission we are looking for. Suppose that a burglar is climbing up a ladder to break into the window of a 3^rd floor apartment, when a passer-by approaches the foot of the ladder and sees him up there, halfway to the top, climbing to break in. At this point, the passer-by has a decision to make.

Among the numerous possibilities open to him, two of them are of special interest for us: on the one hand, he could decide to prevent the burglary, say by pushing down the ladder and tripping the burglar. If he were to do so, the burglary would be prevented. Otherwise, if for whatever reason the passer-by thinks it preferable not to do so (he might find it wrong to send the burglar to a likely hospital bed, or he might be scared by the prospect of a future vengeance, or any good reason one could imagine), he then might decide to refrain from intervening, passively allowing the burglary to occur.

This sort of situation captures very well the intuitions at play when we think of “permission” of evil in the sense relevant for our present purposes. The asymmetry in the passer-by’s action is easy to appreciate here: whether or not the burglary occurs is at this point fully under his control; it is providentially up to him, but depending on which option he chooses, his action will vary in kind: if he decides against the burglary, he will need to actively, intently, perform the positive action of pushing the ladder, thereby preventing the evil at hand. But if he finds it preferable for the burglary to occur, then his control will be a purely passive refraining from any intervention, thereby permitting this evil, knowing that if he were to not intervene, the burglary would occur.

This situation exhibits the sense of asymmetry we are looking for, and I suggest that if theologians are to properly apply permission language to God, it will involve something very much like that.

But of course, some differences between the passer-by and God (especially on Calvinism) immediately come to mind. For one, the passer-by is not involved at all in the burglar’s prior character formation, nor does he actively draw on the burglar’s heart and mind to influence his decision at the moment of choice, whereas on Calvinism, God providentially determines the character and choice of the burglar in the first place, and when it comes to “intervening” or not, though external interventions of the same type as “kicking a ladder” are certainly available to God, the type of intervention Christians typically have in view is an internal intervention, providentially influencing the hearts and minds of persons directly. These points are well taken and I shall discuss what can and cannot carry over when applying these concepts to God.

Nevertheless, there is something that the ladder-kicking passer-by and the burglar tell us about permission and asymmetry in divine providence, and I suggest that it is this: they tell us that proper use of permission language to rescue asymmetry in one’s providential activity rests upon the truth of two important conditional, counterfactual statements that were casually stated above in the discussion of the passer-by. These two statements were as follows:

1) If the passer-by were to actively intervene (by kicking the ladder), the burglar would not commit the crime.

And,

2) If the passer-by were to passively refrain from intervening, the burglar would commit the crime.

BIGNON’S ROW TO HOE

Bignon specifically says that the passer-by:

“is not involved at all in the burglar’s prior character formation” — Bignon, p. 258

God, however, is fundamentally different within the Calvinist model. Bignon writes:

“whereas on Calvinism, God providentially determines the character and choice of the burglar in the first place” — Bignon, p. 259

He then explains that the divine involvement is not restricted to external circumstances. The intervention Calvinists have in view can be internal, involving God:

“providentially influencing the hearts and minds of persons directly.” — Bignon, p. 259

This is the first important link in the argument. Bignon is not merely saying that God determines what happens after a person has developed a particular character. He explicitly says that God “providentially determines the character and choice” in the first place. The character that precedes the choice is therefore itself within God’s providential determination. That becomes even more significant when Bignon later explains what he means by the influences that lead to a human decision. He divides them into two categories. The first consists of the person’s:

“nature, nurture, life events, and character-formation history, all the way from his conception up until the moment of choice” — Bignon, p. 262

The second consists of the immediate influences present when the choice is actually made:

“which circumstances he is placed in, and which forces—internal and external, natural and supernatural—are, on that moment, drawing him in different directions to make his choice one way or the other.” — Bignon, p. 262

Bignon then makes the crucial statement:

“God is in full providential control of both sorts of influences.”
— Bignon, p. 262

That statement is particularly important because it closes off an obvious escape route. One might otherwise argue that although Calvinism says God determines the choice, the various conditions that produced the person who makes that choice remain outside God’s determining activity. But that is not Bignon’s description. He explicitly includes nature, nurture, life events, and character-formation history, extending from conception to the moment of choice, and then says that God is in “full providential control” of those influences.

Bignon even anticipates the objection that his focus on God’s action at the moment of sin might appear to disregard God’s earlier involvement in forming the person. He acknowledges the issue directly:

“one could object that focusing in this way on God’s action at the moment of sin in relative disregard to his prior involvement in the person’s character-building is inappropriate” — Bignon, p. 263

But Bignon does not answer by denying that prior involvement. Quite the opposite. He says Calvinists:

“must maintain that God determined both” — Bignon, p. 263

and then states:

“On Calvinism, God clearly determines all these things.” — Bignon, p. 263

That is a remarkable admission in the context of the argument. Bignon recognizes that God’s involvement cannot simply be restricted to the final moment of choice, because Calvinism maintains that God has already determined the conditions involved in the person’s character-building. His answer is not to retreat from that claim, but to affirm it.

The chronology Bignon gives us is therefore important. There is a prior history—nature, nurture, life events, and character formation. That history produces a particular character and set of inclinations. There are then immediate circumstances and internal and external influences at the moment of choice. And finally there is the choice itself. Bignon places God’s providential determination across this entire sequence.

His own description can therefore be laid out simply:

The important point is that this chain is not something we have constructed by taking Bignon’s premises and extending them beyond what he actually says. Bignon supplies the links himself. He says that God determines everything that comes to pass; he says God providentially determines the person’s character and choice; he says God is in full providential control of the influences extending from conception through character formation and of the immediate influences at the moment of choice; and he explicitly says, “God determined both” and “God clearly determines all these things.”

This becomes especially important for Bignon’s discussion of divine permission. The passer-by analogy works intuitively because the passer-by encounters an already-existing burglar. The passer-by did not create the burglar’s character, did not determine his criminal inclinations, and did not establish the history that brought him to that moment. The passer-by can therefore refrain from intervening without having determined the antecedent conditions that produced the burglary.

But Bignon himself says that the Calvinist case is different. The passer-by:

“is not involved at all in the burglar’s prior character formation” — Bignon, p. 258

whereas:

“on Calvinism, God providentially determines the character and choice of the burglar in the first place.” — Bignon, p. 259

That is precisely where the question of permission becomes more difficult. If God merely encounters an independently formed agent and chooses not to prevent the agent’s action, the distinction between causing and permitting is relatively straightforward. But if God has already providentially determined the agent’s character, has control over the antecedent influences from conception onward, controls the circumstances and immediate influences surrounding the decision, and determines the choice itself, then God’s relationship to the evil cannot be analyzed solely by looking at whether God intervened at the final instant.

In other words, the question cannot simply be, “Did God intervene when the sinner made the choice?” Bignon’s own account requires us to look at what happened BEFORE the choice. And according to Bignon, God was already providentially determining the relevant conditions.

This is why the pages 258–59 passage is so important to the larger argument. It establishes the antecedent side of the equation, while pages 262–63 make that antecedent control explicit and comprehensive.

Bignon does not merely affirm that God determines the final decision while leaving the development of the person unexplained. He places the person’s character, character-formation history, nature and nurture, life events, circumstances, internal and external influences, and ultimately the choice itself within God’s providential determination.

So the argument does not need to say:

“If Bignon’s theological determinism is true, then God must control the antecedent conditions.”

The stronger—and more defensible—claim is:

Bignon says that God controls the antecedent conditions.

And that is what makes these passages so important. The issue is no longer merely what an opponent says Calvinism logically entails.

THE EVIDENTIARY RECORD COMES FROM
BIGNON’S OWN DESCRIPTION OF CALVINISM.

Why Both Atheists and Christians Need to Believe in Free Will

Published August 31, 2026September 7, 2026 by Papa Giorgio

Originally posted December 2025

The audio at the start from Jeff Durbin is bad… so one has to put up with it a little when the initial audio is played. But the same arguments against atheistic determinism can be used against Augustinian/Calvinistic [theistic] determinism:

Dr. Braxton Hunter, President of Trinity Seminary and host of Trinity Radio, joins Dr. Flowers to talk about how the main arguments against naturalistic determinism can apply against theistic determinism, as held by Compatibilistic Calvinists. They demonstrate this by engaging a clip from Apologia Studios with Jeff Durbin which references a quote from Calvinistic apologist, Greg Bahnsen.

Justin Brierley drives this point home in his article:

… Atheist Determinism

Calvinistic Christians have more in common with many atheists than they may realize. Determinism has also become a very popular philosophy among their godless counterparts. For some time, prominent voices in atheist circles have also been announcing that the notion of free will is past its sellby date.

Popular atheist author Sam Harris wrote a book titled Free will (Free Press) which, drawing on research in neuroscience, argued that our innate sense of freedom is merely an illusion foisted on us by nature. None of us is actually in control of what we do. So far so Calvinist. But rather than believing God has predestined us, atheists like Harris say the universe is responsible.

Atheist determinism springs from a ‘materialist’ worldview. All that exists is the ‘material’ stuff of the universe. Everything about us and the world we live in can ultimately be explained by the physics of atoms, electrons, quarks and neutrons, interacting according to the predictable regularity of natural laws.

Think of it like this: the skill of the snooker player is in predicting as accurately as possible how the balls will ricochet off each other in order to find the pockets on the table. But, theoretically, if a snooker player lined up their very first shot with perfect precision and perfect force, they could clear the table in one shot. The universe is like that, but on a much bigger scale.

Every single physical event, from the movements of electrons to the orbits of the planets, follows predictable laws of cause and effect. Therefore, the way the universe is now is a direct result of the way it was when it first began. If you rewound the clock by 13 billion years to the exact same physical state of affairs, things would roll out in exactly the same way they already have.

But, in such a universe, the idea that we have any measure of free will evaporates. Every aspect of our existence was predestined by a cosmos blindly following the laws of cause and effect. …

READ IT ALL: “Why Both Atheists and Christians Need to Believe in Free Will“

You cannot have LOVE with people made into dolls with a pull string that say, “I love you.” This is evidence that Calvinists/”Reformed” make Calvary useless.

Here is a favored adapted combination of mine:

One of the most intriguing aspects mentioned by Ravi Zacharias of a lecture he attended entitled “Determinism – Is Man a Slave or the Master of His Fate,” given by Stephen Hawking, who is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, Isaac Newton’s chair, was this admission by Dr. Hawking’s, was Hawking’s admission that if “we are the random products of chance, and hence, not free, or whether God had designed these laws within which we are free.”^[1] In other words, do we have the ability to make choices, or do we simply follow a chemical reaction induced by millions of mutational collisions of free atoms? Michael Polyni mentions that this “reduction of the world to its atomic elements acting blindly in terms of equilibrations of forces,” a belief that has prevailed “since the birth of modern science, has made any sort of teleological view of the cosmos seem unscientific…. [to] the contemporary mind.”^[2]

[1] Ravi Zacharias, The Real Face of Atheism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2004), 118, 119.

[2] Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago, IL: Chicago university Press, 1977), 162.

This is one of the biggest reasons I [about half-a-year-ago] have rejected the 5-Points of Calvinism. Which is, determinism. I have written, posted, and debated this with atheists for years on the WWW., and when I saw that people like Al Mohler refute the atheist versions of this but does not apply the same thinking to his position — my apologetic bug was brought alive. Here is the video that started this rabbit trail:

Here is the full Al Mohler article: “So . . . Why Did I Write This? The Delusion of Determinism”

The subversion of moral responsibility is one of the most significant developments of recent decades. Though this subversion was originally philosophical, more recent efforts have been based in biology and psychology. Various theorists have argued that our decisions and actions are determined by genetics, environmental factors, or other forces. Now, Scientific American is out with a report on a study linking determinism and moral responsibility.

The diverse theories of determinism propose that our choices and decisions are not an exercise of the will, but simply the inevitable outcome of factors outside our control. As Scientific American explains, determinists argue that “everything that happens is determined by what happened before — our actions are inevitable consequences of the events leading up to the action.”

In other words, free will doesn’t exist. Used in this sense, free will means the exercise of authentic moral choice and agency. We choose to take one action rather than the other, and must then take responsibility for that choice.

This link between moral choice and moral responsibility is virtually instinctive to humans. As a matter of fact, it is basic to our understanding of what it means to be human. We hold each other responsible for actions and choices. But if all of our choices are illusory — and everything is merely the “inevitable consequence” of something beyond our control, moral responsibility is an exercise in delusion.

Scientific American reports on a study performed by psychologists Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler. The psychologists found that individuals who were told that their moral choices were determined, rather than free, were also more likely to cheat on an experimental examination.

As Shaun Nichols reports:

The Western conception idea of free will seems bound up with our sense of moral responsibility, guilt for misdeads and pride in accomplishment. We hold ourselves responsible precisely when we think that our actions come from free will. In this light, it’s not surprising that people behave less morally as they become skeptical of free will. Further, the Vohs and Schooler result fits with the idea that people will behave less responsibly if they regard their actions as beyond their control. If I think that there’s no point in trying to be good, then I’m less likely to try.

Even if giving up on free will does have these deleterious effects, one might wonder how far they go. One question is whether the effects extend across the moral domain. Cheating in a psychology experiment doesn’t seem too terrible. Presumably the experiment didn’t also lead to a rash of criminal activity among those who read the anti-free will passage. Our moral revulsion at killing and hurting others is likely too strong to be dismantled by reflections about determinism. It might well turn out that other kinds of immoral behavior, like cheating in school, would be affected by the rejection of free will, however.

There are limitations to this kind of research, of course, but the report is both revealing and unsurprising. If we are not responsible for our actions, they why would people do the right thing? The most immediate result of such thinking is the subversion of moral accountability.

Of course, this pattern of thought also renders human existence irrational. How can we understand ourselves, our children, our spouses, our friends, or our neighbors if moral responsibility is undermined by determinism. Our legal system would completely collapse, as would the entire experience of relating to other human beings.

Shaun Nichols explains that “the Western conception of free will seems bound up with our sense of moral responsibility.” That “Western conception” is a product of the Christian inheritance and the biblical worldview. The Bible clearly presents human beings as morally responsible. Christians of virtually all theological traditions — including Reformed theology, Arminianism, and Catholicism — affirm moral and spiritual responsibility and the authenticity of the experience of choice.

As a matter of fact, this capacity and accountability is rooted in the biblical concept of the imago Dei — the image of God. Our Creator made us as moral creatures and planted within us the capacity of conscience. All this refutes the concept of moral determinism.

In its most modern forms, determinism is a product of naturalism — the belief that everything must be explained in purely natural terms. Naturalism explains the human mind (including the experience of moral choice) as a matter of chemical reactions in the brain, and nothing more.

Determinism is implied by naturalism and relieves human beings of moral responsibility. There is no moral revolt against the Creator, no Fall, and no need for the Gospel. This subversion of moral responsibility is both a delusion and a trap. And, as the Scientific American report indicates, even those who say they believe in moral determinism are unable to live consistently with this assumption. We know we are responsible.

SOME QUOTES CONNECTING THIS IDEA MORE

ATHEISTS:

THEISTS:

If Mohler applies that to his own theological determinism, he would have to reject it.

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THERE IS NO GOSPEL IN TULIP

In other words, a person accepts Christ’s death and Resurrection as secondary to being ELECTED.

Here is more on this via this excerpt of an article and short video:

ARMINIAN PERSPECTIVE:

Calvinist: “That is why Christ said that you must be born again in order to even see the kingdom of God. The new nature must come before faith. God making us willing is not mind control in the sense that you describe it but giving us a new nature and a new mind. Of course the analogy isn’t perfect but it does illustrate the fact that we can be made to love without it being against our will.”

Me: “No it doesn’t. If we were God haters that wanted nothing to do with Christ prior to His irresistible act of “giving us a new heart” that “makes us willing”, then it was certainly “against our will” because our will was to hate and reject God prior to His irresistible working in us. It would be like a man meeting a girl at a bar and the girl doesn’t like him and wants nothing to do with him. In fact, she finds him repulsive. So the man slips a pill in her drink that removes her inhibitions and causes her to begin to find him attractive, even to the point of “making her willing” to sleep with him. Now if this incident was brought before the court, would the court say that the man is not liable for violating the woman against her will, since the pill he put in her drink “made her willing”? Of course not. Nobody would say that she freely chose to be with the man under such circumstances, and no one would say that her will was not violated.”

“As distasteful as this illustration might be, it illustrates the exact same principle behind your claims that while God “makes us willing” this making us willing by “giving us a new heart” is not a violation of the person’s will. Instead of dropping a pill into our drink, God drops a “new heart” into our God hating chest. The only difference would be that in your view of how God works, the “effects” of the “drug” would never wear off. But that doesn’t change the fact that a person’s will has been obviously violated in the process.”

“It really is pretty simple. If God’s working faith into us is not resistible, but irresistible, then it certainly violates freedom and the will. That is so obvious, it shouldn’t even need to be pointed out. If you want to say that God irresistibly brings sinners to faith and love and devotion to Him (by irresistibly removing their “hate God heart” and putting in a “love God heart”) because you think the Bible teaches that, then fine. But trying to then claim that God does this in such a way that we freely come to him in such a way that our wills are not violated is clearly incoherent. You can’t have it both ways. Sorry.”

Dr. Leighton Flowers talk about martyrs who stood against the Calvinists of their day and what happened to them.

Is Divine Determinism a Different Gospel?

Published November 22, 2025March 6, 2026 by Papa Giorgio

See my related post: “Why Both Atheists and Christians Need to Believe in Free Will“

Dr. Tim Stratton and Phil Kallberg present their paper at the Evangelical Philosophy Society on whether or not Divine Determinism (or EDD) is a different gospel, and if so, is it a heresy?

There is a rough patch around the 16:45 mark, here is that text:

… including the passages of scripture appealed to supporting ed. The entire project crumbles. This is epistemic meltdown. We can build on this with an adapted version of CS Lewis’s argument from reason. Premise one, no theological belief is justified if it can be fully explained as the result of untrustworthy antecedent conditions. Two, if that is true, then all theological beliefs can be fully explained as the result of untrustworthy anticedent conditions. Three, therefore, if Ed is true, then no theological belief is justified.

The paper that kicked off the topic in the video above is here: An Explanation and Defense of the Free-Thinking Argument, by Timothy A. Stratton and J. P. Moreland (PDF download here). Here is the Abstract:

This paper is a defense of the big ideas behind the free-thinking argument. This argument aims to demonstrate that determinism is incompatible with epistemic responsibility in a desert sense (being praised or blamed for any thought, idea, judgment, or belief). This lack of epistemic responsibility is problematic for the naturalist. It seems to be an even worse problem, however, for the exhaustive divine determinist because not only would humanity not stand in a position to be blamed for any of our thoughts and beliefs, but it also surfaces a “problem of epistemic evil”, which can be raised against the knowledge of God, the rationality of humans, and the trustworthiness of Scripture.

A couple syllogisms from a questioner via: “Is the God of EDD Deceptive?“:

E1- If EDD is true, then God determines all Christians to affirm some false theological beliefs.
E2- If God determines all Christians to affirm some false theological beliefs, then God is deceptive and His Word (the Bible) cannot be trusted.
E3- God is not deceptive and His Word can be trusted.
E4- Therefore, God does not determine all Christians to affirm some false theological beliefs.
E5- Therefore, EDD is false.

Here is another (Ibid.):

If God determines all things about humanity, then God determines all Christians to have some false theological intuitions and to hold some false theological beliefs.
If God determines all Christians to have some false theological intuitions and to hold some false theological beliefs, then God is [an untrustworthy source of theological beliefs].
If God is [an untrustworthy source of theological beliefs], then, there is reason to doubt God’s inspired word.
There is never reason to doubt God’s inspired word.
Therefore, God is not [an untrustworthy source of theological beliefs].
Therefore, God does not determine all Christians to have some false theological intuitions and to hold some false theological beliefs.
Therefore, God does not determine all things about humanity.

In another challenge proffered to Tim, here is a question/challenge after the person watched this video, found here: “Epistemic Meltdown“:

The key premise of the Deity of Deception Argument reads like this: “If God determines all Christians to affirm some false theological beliefs, then God is deceptive, and His Word cannot be trusted.” The committed determinist will try to provide some counter-examples to try to defeat the argument. The examples involve some sort of machine or process that are generally reliable but can fail on a handful of occasions. Listen to Tim while he examines this response to the argument! Hint: It misses the point!

A few more challenges/questions, and even a “chat” with ChatGPT”:

I will end with the opening by Doc Stratton from a debate. The full debate is linked at the videos YouTube

Balthasar Hubmaier: Baptist History in the Reformation (Updated)

Published July 6, 2025December 14, 2025 by Papa Giorgio

Balthasar Hubmaier (1480–1528) was an influential German Anabaptist leader and one of the most well-known and respected Anabaptist theologians of the Reformation.

Balthasar Hubmaier

It is important that we remember, not only those who were martyred for preaching the truth of salvation by faith in Christ alone, but also those within our Baptist heritage who were martyred for their convictions in Scripture as the final authority and believers’ baptism. Balthasar Hubmaier was one of these men. Learn more about his courageous stand for Christ in this short video.

While he was an early martyr by fellow Reformationists… the firsts were:

The Martyrdom of Felix Manz & George Blaurock

In the closing of his work entitled “Freedom of the Will” he laid out a very strong argument against theistic determinism and fatalism which are the undercurrent of Augustinian philosophy and Calvinist “Sovereignty”.

BAPTIST MARTYRS

This Baptist History is brought to you by Steve Brady at Fairhaven Baptist Church in Chesterton, Indiana. (Full playlist of 50 Baptists You Should Know here)

A little more history on Hubmaier…

Here, you can find more information about our online class program, and how you can earn your Associate in Bible degree online. Whether you are a pastor or a layman wanting to increase your Bible knowledge, a teacher desiring to refine your teaching methods, or someone who is curious about a certain course being offered, we encourage you to register today and begin working toward your degree, and more importantly, furthering your knowledge of the Bible. (Full playlist of Baptist History here)

One of Hubmaier’s best works was his “On The Sword,” sort of his “95-thesis” – so to speak. Here is some discussion of the history of his views on violence.

Shawn sits down with Drew from the Provisionist Perspective to discuss Balthasar Hubmaier’s two works on violence: On Heretics and Those Who Burn Them and On the Sword. This discussion covers how we should treat Christians who disagree with us (don’t burn them at the stake) and how we should relate to government (be a part of it if you can!).

Other worthwhile watches:

Why were the early reformers opposed to Anabaptists (4 minutes)
Kyle McCartan – A Biographical Sketch of Balthasar Hubmaier (an hour and 4 minutes)
Balthasar Hubmaier, Sketches of Church History Giants– 100 Arrows Series (16 minutes)
Balthasar Hubmaier’s Freedom of the Will: A Review (39 minutes)
Balthasar Hubmaier On Violence (35 minutes)

Many will simply dismiss people like this with labels, especially the modern movement of Provisionists/Baptist traditionalism.

LABELS

Let me say something to ppl who do not take the time to know what something is and dismiss with labels. Stalin called Lenin a fascist

In similar fashion, we find this “labeling” among the Reformers: See Leighton’e Full Interview of Professor Harwood

Which brings me to an excerpt from a book I have a PDF form of… so the pages and the footnotes will not be properly marked.

As I am going thru this book (pictured), I am rejecting more of my compatibilism and drilling down on a more solid foundation.

Note also how Paul wheels the argument of Romans 1—11 to a climactic conclusion: “For God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all” (Rom 11:32, emphasis added). Here the scope of God’s intention to have mercy matches the scope of human sinfulness, as indicated by the repeated all. If Paul has already established in Romans 1—3 that all human beings without exception have been consigned to disobedience, then the symmetry of Paul’s expression in Romans 11:32 strongly implies that God intends to have mercy in a similar scope: on all human beings without exception. Even if we allow that Paul may here be referring to Jews and Gentiles as people groups, we must not imagine that God’s desire to show mercy fails to apply to every individual within each group. After all, Paul establishes that all humans are under sin by arguing that both Gentiles (Rom 1:18-32) and Jews (Rom 2:1—3:20) as people groups are under sin. If we accept Paul’s strategy of indicting every individual through indictment of the group, then consistency requires that we allow the same extension to hold with regard to God’s mercy, as Romans 11:32 seems to say.

The Pastoral Epistles abound with passages pointing toward God’s universal saving intentions: “God our Savior, who wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:3-4); “Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all” (1 Tim 2:5-6); “We have put our hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all men, and especially of those who believe” (1 Tim 4:10); “For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all” (Tit 2:11). Given the unqualified use of all in these passages to identify those whom God desires to save, the burden of proving otherwise is on those who hold that biblical writers assumed a limitation on those who would be saved.¹

Of course Calvinists have offered their own accountings of these passages. Some argue, for example, that the “world” loved by God in John 3:16 must refer only to “the elect within the world.”² Similarly, they read the unqualified all in restricted senses (e.g., “all types of people” or “all the elect”). Accordingly, the scriptural claim that Jesus died not only for our sins but also for the sins of the whole world means that Jesus died not only for the sins of (some) Jews but also for the sins of (some) Gentiles. But D. A. Carson, certainly no Arminian sympathizer, considers such moves to be clever but unconvincing exegetical ploys that feebly attempt to overcome “simply too many texts on the other side of the issue.”³ These restrictive interpretations of all require such textual gymnastics that they condemn themselves as invalid.

[….]

… compatibilism is a popular position among Calvinists, particularly among the philosophically informed, we want to stress that not all Calvinists embrace it. Some Reformed theologians have argued for another option. These writers do not agree with Feinberg that a Calvinist must either give up freedom altogether or accept compatibilism. To the contrary, they hold that we are required by Scripture to accept both God’s control of all things and human freedom, but they insist that it is not up to us to find a way to reconcile these truths. Popular evangelical author J. I. Packer is a proponent of this view. He endorses this position in his widely read book Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God.

As he notes, divine sovereignty and human responsibility are both clearly taught in Scripture. And he understands sovereignty in the Calvinistic sense that God unconditionally determines everything that happens. “Man is a responsible moral agent, though he is also divinely controlled; man is divinely controlled, though he is also a responsible moral agent.”⁴ Packer identifies this pair of claims as an “antinomy” because he believes we cannot dispense with either one of them, nor can we understand how they are compatible. From the standpoint of finite human reason, it may seem contradictory to affirm both of these claims and therefore impossible to do so. Here is Packer’s advice for dealing with such antinomies.

Accept it for what it is, and learn to live with it. Refuse to regard the apparent inconsistency as real; put down the semblance of contradiction to the deficiency of your own understanding; think of the two principles as, not rival alternatives, but, in some way that at present you do not grasp, complementary to each other.5

Apparently Packer means to affirm that both determinism and freedom in the libertarian sense are true. It is the affirmation of both of these that produces antinomy. By contrast, the affirmation of determinism and the compatibilist account of freedom produces no such intellectual tension. The resolution of antinomy will need the perspective of eternity, but it is easy to see here and now how freedom and determinism can be held together if one accepts a compatibilist account of freedom.

[….]

Second, we believe that there are large stretches of Scripture that are hard to make sense of if humans aren’t free in the libertarian sense of the word. In chapter two we examined some of these, but now let us consider another one, namely, Jeremiah 7:1-29. In this passage God calls his people to repentance. God enumerates the sins of his people and reminds them that while they were doing such things, he spoke to them again and again (Jer 7:13). But instead of repenting, they persist in idolatry and other self-destructive behavior. God promises to punish them for their sin, but he again reiterates that he repeatedly sent his prophets to them to urge them to obedience (Jer 7:20-26).

This passage is hardly unusual. The book of Jeremiah contains several other similar passages, as do most of the Prophets as well as some other biblical texts. Now the question we want to raise is, what view of freedom is implied in such texts? Of course, as we have already noted, Scripture does not expressly define the nature of our freedom or draw philosophical distinctions for us. But it is still worth asking what sort of freedom is implied by various texts of Scripture.

For a helpful treatment of such terms as all and every in the Pastoral Epistles, see I. Howard Marshall, “Universal Grace and Atonement in the Pastoral Epistles,” in The Grace of God and the Will of Man: A Case for Arminianism, ed. Clark H. Pinnock (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1989), pp. 57-63.
See D. A. Carson’s characterization of this point of view in The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2000), p. 17.
Ibid., p. 75.
John S. Feinberg, “God, Freedom and Evil in Calvinist Thinking,” in The Grace of God, the Bondage of the Will, ed. Thomas R. Schreiner and Bruce A. Ware (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1995), 2:465.
J. I. Packer, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1961), p. 23. […] 21.

So there is wiggle room in orthodoxy – is my main point. Spurgeon is wrong:

And I have my own private opinion, that there is no such thing as preaching Christ and him crucified, unless you preach what now-a-days is called Calvinism. I have my own ideas, and those I always state boldly. It is a nickname to call it Calvinism. Calvinism is the gospel, and nothing else.

— Charles Spurgeon, Spurgeon’s Sermons, vol. I (Baker Books, reprinted 2007), 88-89.

And, I can disagree with Pink:

When we say that God is Sovereign in the exercise of His love, we mean that He loves whom He chooses. God does not love everybody. — A.W. Pink

Armstrong and Getty Critique Ezra Klein w/Some Tom Sowell!

Published April 4, 2025 by Papa Giorgio

SPECIAL APPEARANCES BY: John Cleese, Obama, and Sam Harris.

FOR FURTHER TOPIC STUDY, SEE:

■ The Argument from Reason | David Wood (PLUS: Greg Bahnsen)
■ Love Is Illusory (Wolpert | Sizer/Ammi | Provine | + Lennox)
■ Evolution Cannot Account for: Logic, Reasoning, Love, Truth, or Justice

The Argument from Reason | David Wood (PLUS: Greg Bahnsen)

Published February 16, 2025February 16, 2025 by Papa Giorgio

Originally posted in March of 2016

(H/T ~ Debunking Atheists)

…. Darwin thought that, had the circumstances for reproductive fitness been different, then the deliverances of conscience might have been radically different. “If . . . men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering” (Darwin, Descent, 82). As it happens, we weren’t “reared” after the manner of hive bees, and so we have widespread and strong beliefs about the sanctity of human life and its implications for how we should treat our siblings and our offspring.

But this strongly suggests that we would have had whatever beliefs were ultimately fitness producing given the circumstances of survival. Given the background belief of naturalism, there appears to be no plausible Darwinian reason for thinking that the fitness-producing predispositions that set the parameters for moral reflection have anything whatsoever to do with the truth of the resulting moral beliefs. One might be able to make a case for thinking that having true beliefs about, say, the predatory behaviors of tigers would, when combined with the understandable desire not to be eaten, be fitness producing. But the account would be far from straightforward in the case of moral beliefs.” And so the Darwinian explanation undercuts whatever reason the naturalist might have had for thinking that any of our moral beliefs is true. The result is moral skepticism.

If our pretheoretical moral convictions are largely the product of natural selection, as Darwin’s theory implies, then the moral theories we find plausible are an indirect result of that same evolutionary process. How, after all, do we come to settle upon a proposed moral theory and its principles as being true? What methodology is available to us?

Paul Copan and William Lane Craig, eds., Contending With Christianity’s Critics: Answering the New Atheists & Other Objections (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing, 2009), 70.

A few of my resources:

I explain some of this in my introductory chapter of my book: Technology Junkies
See more at my post: Evolution Cannot Account for: Logic, Reasoning, Love, Truth, or Justice (lots o’stuff)
And, Love Is Illusory (a manageable amount of stuff)

Laws of Logic | Greg Bahnsen VS. Gordon Stein
I played with the audio a lot. About the best on the WWW:

The full debate can be found here (FULL DEBATE). This is a classic back-n-forth showing that in order to deny God’s existence based on the immaterial nature of God, non-physical laws of logic [reasoning that crosses all cultures, time, and space] are used. The video portion/graphics are not my creation. I note that YouTube Channel in the video. I merely enhanced the audio:

In a short [and excellent] article, Dr. J.P. Moreland notes the BIG THREE:

There are three fundamental laws of logic. Suppose P is any indicative sentence, say, “It is raining.”

The law of identity: P is P.
The law of noncontradiction: P is not non-P.
The law of the excluded middle: Either P or non-P.

The law of identity says that if a statement such as “It is raining” is true, then the statement is true. More generally, it says that the statement P is the same thing as itself and its different from everyhting else. Applied to all realty, the law of identity says that everything is itself and not something else.

The law of noncontradiction says that a statement such as “It is raining” cannot be both true and false in the same sense. Of course it could be raining in Missouri and not raining in Arizona, but the principle says that it cannot be raining and not raining at the same time in the same place.

The law of the excluded middle says that a statement such as “It is raining” is either true or false. There is no other alternative.

These fundamental laws are true principles governing reality and thought and are assumed by Scripture. Some claim they are arbitrary Western constructions, but this is false. The basic laws of logic govern all reality and thought and are known to be true for at least two reasons: (1) They are intuitively obvious and self-evident. Once one understands a basic law of logic (see below), one can see that it is true. (2) Those who deny them use these principles in their denial, demonstrating that those laws are unavoidable and that it is self-refuting to deny them.

The basic laws of logic are neither arbitrary inventions of God nor principles that exist completely outside God’s being. Obviously, the laws of logic are not like the laws of nature. God may violate the latter(say, suspend gravity), but He cannot violate the former. Those laws are rooted in God’s own nature. Indeed, some scholars think the passage “In the beginning was the Word [logos]” (Jn 1:1) is accurately translated, “In the beginning was Logic (a divine, rational mind).” For example, even God cannot exist and not exist at the same time, and even God cannot validly believe that red is a color and red is not a color. When people say that God need not behave “logically,” they are using the term in a loose sense to mean “the sensible thing from my point of vew.” Often God does not act in ways that people understand or judge to be what they would do in the circumstances. But God never behaves illogically in the proper sense. He does not violate in His being or thought the fundamental laws of logic.

Are Those Who Have Not Heard the Gospel Damned? RPT Q&A +More

Published April 1, 2024April 1, 2024 by Papa Giorgio

UPDATED WITH WRETCHED… originally posted August 2014

This evangelism encounter is POWERFUL. Watch an intelligent college student PRESS street-preacher Todd Friel on the requirements to enter Heaven, then receive a biblical explanation.

This post is a response to a question posed to me via my email by an atheist.

I see that you do some apologetics. Here are a few sincere questions that I’ve tried to get answered from Christians like Greg Koukl, but I never seem to get a response. I’m not baiting you by sending you these questions. If you have any thoughts on these issues, I’d appreciate getting to read your opinion.

1. The New Testament makes it clear that its only through faith in Jesus and his sacrifice that humans can enter heaven. Anyone who lived before Jesus started his ministry had no way of having faith in Jesus. Maybe the people of ancient Israel could piece together what they needed to believe to achieve salvation, but for the gentiles or even humans who lived in North America before the birth of Jesus, they would have no knowledge of the nation of Israel. And most certainly they would have no knowledge of a coming messiah or a future person named Jesus and his sacrifice. What I can conclude is that God allowed humans to be born that would have absolutely no chance of avoiding eternal torment in the fires of hell. I’ve been told that human morality proves that God must be a moral being. However, we have an enormous contradiction here. The God in this scenario is not worthy of respect or love because he is not moral. Hitler and Stalin would have to be quite envious of the amount of torment this God would have allowed.

I brought up the idea of Native-Americas (N-A) not hearing the Gospel with my dad. It seemed, to me, unfair that they should not be afforded at least some clarity in an opportunity to be judged before their maker. My dad shared his thoughts on the matter, and it started with a reading from Romans:

18 For God’s wrath is revealed from heaven against all godlessness and unrighteousness of people who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth, 19 since what can be known about God is evident among them, because God has shown it to them. 20 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. As a result, people are without excuse. (The Holy Bible: Holman Christian Standard Version. [Nashville: Holman Bible Publishers, 2009], Ro 1:18–20.)
But God’s angry displeasure erupts as acts of human mistrust and wrongdoing and lying accumulate, as people try to put a shroud over truth. But the basic reality of God is plain enough. Open your eyes and there it is! By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can’t see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being. So nobody has a good excuse. (Eugene H. Peterson, The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language [Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2005], Ro 1:18–20.)

He explained that the tribes that were very “war-like,” like the Comanches, acted in rejection of what they knew to be God’s creation and how they should treat their fellow man and nature via the attributes they could clearly interpret via nature. The Sioux were at other times feared as well.

Peaceful tribes – not perfect mind you, but they had a deep understanding of their Creator and how to care for their own and other Native-American tribes they encountered — would interpret nature’s revelatory aspect of Whom they were to worship, and how. The Hopi tribe is one example.

To be clear, when theologians say that God is ultimately sovereign in his decisions over his creation, I am down with this. God — in classical understanding — IS the “Good” and would have a larger view of the panoply of history (since God would be outside of it and viewing it as a whole… the Eternal Now type stuff). So His judgement would necessarily be a Just one. I am not questioning this. I am saying that there are views within orthodoxy that struggle with the boundaries of those who have lived by law seeing that redemption of nature and themselves was somehow woven into nature and never hearing the Gospel (Hebrews 11:9-11). …continuing….

So using the Romans understanding of “The Book of Nature,” and the basis for “unsaved” people seeing – yes, even God’s attributes – something metaphysical and not just material, and looked forward to this hope. Also, these stories of creation and serving a God were handed down from the beginning of mankind. Some people across the earth held close these ancient stories although changed with time.

Combine this with the story of Abraham’s Bosom (Luke 16:19-31) and what Peter tells us about Jesus preaching to these lost souls (I Peter 3:18-20). I would posit — staying within the lane-lines of orthodoxy — that those in the world [pre and post Calvary] who have not been afforded a good explanation of the Gospel message may be afforded an opportunity to respond. This is not me arguing for universalism, but for justice being metered out in some form that was communicated to the Hebraic peoples that is hinted to in the New Testament.

Some Commentary On 1 Peter 3:18-19

This verse raises the two most difficult questions in the letter. When did Jesus preach to the spirits in prison, and who were they? Some take the verse to refer to the chronological sequel to Jesus’ death, when his spirit passed into the realms of the departed. Then, with Acts 2:31 and Eph. 4:9, this verse establishes the clause in the Creeds about Jesus’ descent to the dead. In that case he must have preached to all the dead in one of three ways: to offer them a second chance of salvation; to proclaim his victory over death and triumph over the power of evil and so confirm the sentence on unbelievers and announce deliverance for believers; to proclaim release from purgatory to those who had repented just before they perished in the flood (a popular interpretation among Roman Catholic writers).

Neither the first nor the last of these can be supported from Scripture, but the second has been held by many commentators as fitting in with the NT evidence above. E.G. Selwyn (The First Epistle of Peter [Macmillan, 1949]), and others see the spirits in prison as the fallen angels of Gn. 6:1–8 referred to in 2 Pet. 2:4–10 and Jude 6 as well as in the apocryphal 1 Enoch. Peter’s aim in this context is to demonstrate that God’s purpose is being worked out even in times of suffering. So it would seem best to understand the preaching as a declaration of Christ’s triumph, in order to assert (22) that all angels, authorities and powers [are] in submission to him. Grudem (TNTC) in an appendix summarizes the views and claims that the spirits were Noah’s contemporaries who rejected the preaching of the Spirit of Christ through Noah (see 2 Pet. 2:5) and are now in the prison of the abode of the dead. The interpretation of made alive by the Spirit (18) as a reference to the resurrection, and the spirits in prison as a reference to the fallen angels is cogently argued by R. T. France in New Testament Interpretation, ed. I. H. Marshall (Paternoster Press, 1979), pp. 264–281. He claims that NT and contemporary usage favour this understanding of the word spirits when used by itself, rather than applying it to men and women who had died before Jesus came to bring the gospel.

No view is free of problems, but the use of a verb implying steady and purposeful progression (went [19] and has gone [22] are both the same Gk. word poreutheis) suggests that Peter is recounting what Jesus accomplished between his death and exaltation.

D. A. Carson et al., eds., New Bible Commentary: 21st Century Edition, 4th ed. (Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1994), 1380–1381.

I marry this understanding to a view via William Lane Craig, a name you may be familiar with is on the opposing side of Christian apologetics. He has a view on Molinism I enjoy a bit. [“Enjoy a bit” – I believe is still in the pale of orthodoxy] Here is what he says, and I will emphasize the important aspect I wish to highlight:

The doctrine of Molinism seeks to reconcile God’s sovereign predestination with man’s free will. Through His divine middle knowledge, God can know all possible outcomes of any world that is feasible for Him to create, including all the circumstances required for an individual to come to a saving knowledge of Him. But what if the saving of one individual means the loss of another? Does Molinism provide answers to such a dilemma? In this article, Dr. Craig answers questions on the how God would act if his choices were bound by damning either person A or person B arbitrarily.

I see the solution to your query in your first question in the above. [And the few videos immediately below.]

And it is the same question[s] I struggled with and struggle with. This does away with the contradiction you see. I do wish to note however, that you are taking a moral position in your premise, Saby. And without God, this cannot be the case. Jesus would HAVE to be intimately involved in all of the above scenarios… intimately. None of the above take away from this fact.

I do not know your worldview you operate from, but I can assume atheistic in its presuppositions. But truth (absolute ethical statements are included in this understanding of truth) is something of a fiction to the atheistic evolutionist. Here are some quotes and audio/videos to make my point:

Let’s consider a basic question: Why does the natural world make any sense to begin with? Albert Einstein once remarked that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. Why should we be able to grasp the beauty, elegance, and complexity of our universe?

Einstein understood a basic truth about science, namely, that it relies upon certain philosophical assumptions about the natural world. These assumptions include the existence of an external world that is orderly and rational, and the trustworthiness of our minds to grasp that world. Science cannot proceed apart from these assumptions, even though they cannot be independently proven. Oxford professor John C. Lennox asks a penetrating question, “At the heart of all science lies the conviction that the universe is orderly. Without this deep conviction science would not be possible. So we are entitled to ask: Where does the conviction come from?”” Why is the world orderly? And why do our minds comprehend this order?

Toward the end of The God Delusion, Dawkins admits that since we are the product of natural selection, our senses cannot be fully trusted. After all, according to Darwinian evolution, our senses have been formed to aid survival, not necessarily to deliver true belief. Since a human being has been cobbled together through the blind process of natural selection acting on random mutation, says Dawkins, it’s unlikely that our views of the world are completely true. Outspoken philosopher of neuro-science Patricia Churchland agrees:

The principle chore of brains is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing [the world] is advantageous so long as it… enhances the organism’s chances for survival. Truth, whatever that is, takes the hindmost.

Dawkins is on the right track to suggest that naturalism should lead people to be skeptical about trusting their senses. Dawkins just doesn’t take his skepticism far enough. In Miracles, C. S. Lewis points out that knowledge depends upon the reliability of our mental faculties. If human reasoning is not trustworthy, then no scientific conclusions can be considered true or false. In fact, we couldn’t have any knowledge about the world, period. Our senses must be reliable to acquire knowledge of the world, and our reasoning faculties must be reliable to process the acquired knowledge. But this raises a particularly thorny dilemma for atheism. If the mind has developed through the blind, irrational, and material process of Darwinian evolution, then why should we trust it at all? Why should we believe that the human brain—the outcome of an accidental process—actually puts us in touch with reality? Science cannot be used as an answer to this question, because science itself relies upon these very assumptions.

Even Charles Darwin was aware of this problem: “The horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the conviction of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” If Darwinian evolution is true, we should distrust the cognitive faculties that make science possible.

Sean McDowell and Jonathan Morrow, Is God Just a Human Invention? And Seventeen Other Questions Raised by the New Atheists (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2010), 37-38.

….Darwin thought that, had the circumstances for reproductive fitness been different, then the deliverances of conscience might have been radically different. “If . . . men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering” (Darwin, Descent, 82). As it happens, we weren’t “reared” after the manner of hive bees, and so we have widespread and strong beliefs about the sanctity of human life and its implications for how we should treat our siblings and our offspring.

Paul Copan and William Lane Craig [Mark D. Linville], eds., Contending With Christianity’s Critics: Answering the New Atheists & Other Objections (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing, 2009), 70.

What about human actions? They are of no more value or significance than the actions of any other material thing. Consider rocks rolling down a hill and coming to rest at the bottom. We don’t say that some particular arrangement of the rocks is right and another is wrong. Rocks don’t have a duty to roll in a particular way and land in a particular place. Their movement is just the product of the laws of physics. We don’t say that rocks “ought” to land in a certain pattern and that if they don’t then something needs to be done about it. We don’t strive for a better arrangement or motion of the rocks. In just the same way, there is no standard by which human actions can be judged. We are just another form of matter in motion, like the rocks rolling down the hill.

We tend to think that somewhere “out there” there are standards of behaviour that men ought to follow. But according to Dawkins there is only the “natural, physical world”. Nothing but particles and forces. These things cannot give rise to standards that men have a duty to follow. In fact they cannot even account for the concept of “ought”. There exist only particles of matter obeying the laws of physics. There is no sense in which anything ought to be like this or ought to be like that. There just is whatever there is, and there just happens whatever happens in accordance with the laws of physics.

Men’s actions are therefore merely the result of the laws of physics that govern the behaviour of the particles that make up the chemicals in the cells and fluids of their bodies and thus control how they behave. It is meaningless to say that the result of those physical reactions ought to be this or ought to be that. It is whatever it is. It is meaningless to say that people ought to act in a certain way. It is meaningless to say (to take a contemporary example) that the United States and its allies ought not to have invaded Iraq. The decision to invade was just the outworking of the laws of physics in the bodies of the people who governed those nations. And there is no sense in which the results of that invasion can be judged as good or bad because there are no standards to judge anything by. There are only particles reacting together; no standards, no morals, nothing but matter in motion.

Dawkins finds it very hard to be consistent to this system of belief. He thinks and acts as if there were somewhere, somehow standards that people ought to follow. For example in The God Delusion, referring particularly to the Christian doctrine of atonement, he says that there are “teachings in the New Testament that no good person should support”. And he claims that religion favours an in-group/out-group approach to morality that makes it “a significant force for evil in the world”.

According to Dawkins, then, there are such things as good and evil. We all know what good and evil mean. We know that if no good person should support the doctrine of atonement then we ought not to support that doctrine. We know that if religion is a force for evil then we are better off without religion and that, indeed, we ought to oppose religion. The concepts of good and evil are innate in us. The problem for Dawkins is that good and evil make no sense in his worldview. “There is nothing beyond the natural, physical world.” There are no standards out there that we ought to follow. There is only matter in motion reacting according to the laws of physics. Man is not of a different character to any other material thing. Men’s actions are not of a different type or level to that of rocks rolling down a hill. Rocks are not subject to laws that require them to do good and not evil; nor are men. Every time you hear Dawkins talking about good and evil as if the words actually meant something, it should strike you loud and clear as if he had announced to the world, “I am contradicting myself”.

Please note that I am not saying that Richard Dawkins doesn’t believe in good and evil. On the contrary, my point is that he does believe in them but that his worldview renders such standards meaningless.

____________
The Dawkins Proof, chapter one.

Even Darwin had some misgivings about the reliability of human beliefs. He wrote, “With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”

Given unguided evolution, “Darwin’s Doubt” is a reasonable one. Even given unguided or blind evolution, it’s difficult to say how probable it is that creatures—even creatures like us—would ever develop true beliefs. In other words, given the blindness of evolution, and that its ultimate “goal” is merely the survival of the organism (or simply the propagation of its genetic code), a good case can be made that atheists find themselves in a situation very similar to Hume’s.

The Nobel Laureate and physicist Eugene Wigner echoed this sentiment: “Certainly it is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin’s process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.” That is, atheists have a reason to doubt whether evolution would result in cognitive faculties that produce mostly true beliefs. And if so, then they have reason to withhold judgment on the reliability of their cognitive faculties. Like before, as in the case of Humean agnostics, this ignorance would, if atheists are consistent, spread to all of their other beliefs, including atheism and evolution. That is, because there’s no telling whether unguided evolution would fashion our cognitive faculties to produce mostly true beliefs, atheists who believe the standard evolutionary story must reserve judgment about whether any of their beliefs produced by these faculties are true. This includes the belief in the evolutionary story. Believing in unguided evolution comes built in with its very own reason not to believe it.

This will be an unwelcome surprise for atheists. To make things worse, this news comes after the heady intellectual satisfaction that Dawkins claims evolution provided for thoughtful unbelievers. The very story that promised to save atheists from Hume’s agnostic predicament has the same depressing ending.

It’s obviously difficult for us to imagine what the world would be like in such a case where we have the beliefs that we do and yet very few of them are true. This is, in part, because we strongly believe that our beliefs are true (presumably not all of them are, since to err is human—if we knew which of our beliefs were false, they would no longer be our beliefs).

Suppose you’re not convinced that we could survive without reliable belief-forming capabilities, without mostly true beliefs. Then, according to Plantinga, you have all the fixins for a nice argument in favor of God’s existence For perhaps you also think that—given evolution plus atheism—the probability is pretty low that we’d have faculties that produced mostly true beliefs. In other words, your view isn’t “who knows?” On the contrary, you think it’s unlikely that blind evolution has the skill set for manufacturing reliable cognitive mechanisms. And perhaps, like most of us, you think that we actually have reliable cognitive faculties and so actually have mostly true beliefs. If so, then you would be reasonable to conclude that atheism is pretty unlikely. Your argument, then, would go something like this: if atheism is true, then it’s unlikely that most of our beliefs are true; but most of our beliefs are true, therefore atheism is probably false.

Notice something else. The atheist naturally thinks that our belief in God is false. That’s just what atheists do. Nevertheless, most human beings have believed in a god of some sort, or at least in a supernatural realm. But suppose, for argument’s sake, that this widespread belief really is false, and that it merely provides survival benefits for humans, a coping mechanism of sorts. If so, then we would have additional evidence—on the atheist’s own terms—that evolution is more interested in useful beliefs than in true ones. Or, alternatively, if evolution really is concerned with true beliefs, then maybe the widespread belief in God would be a kind of “evolutionary” evidence for his existence.

You’ve got to wonder.

Mitch Stokes, A Shot of Faith: To the Head (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2012), 44-45.

AND THE BELOW is taken from another post of mine:

I wish to start out with an excerpt from a chapter in my book where I use two scholarly works that use Darwinian naturalism as a guide to their ethic:

Dale Peterson and Richard Wrangham, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, 1997).
Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).

My incorporation of these works into my book (quote):

“Lest one think this line of thinking is insane, that is: sexual acts are something from our evolutionary past and advantageous; rape is said to not be a pathology but an evolutionary adaptation – a strategy for maximizing reproductive success….. The first concept that one must understand is that these authors do not view nature alone as imposing a moral “oughtness” into the situation of survival of the fittest. They view rape, for instance, in its historical evolutionary context as neither right nor wrong ethically. Rape, is neither moral nor immoral vis-à-vis evolutionary lines of thought, even if ingrained in us from our evolutionary paths of survival. Did you catch that? Even if a rape occurs today, it is neither moral nor immoral, it is merely currently taboo. The biological, amoral, justification of rape is made often times as a survival mechanism bringing up the net “survival status” of a species, usually fraught with examples of homosexual worms, lesbian seagulls, and the like.”

(pp. 7-9 of Roman-Epicurean-ism-Natural-Law-and-Homosexuality)

Now, hear from other atheist and evolutionary apologists themselves in regard to the matter:

Richard Dawkins

(h/t: TrueFreeThinker) – A Statement Made by an atheist at the Atheist and Agnostic Society:

Some atheists do believe in ethical absolutes, some don’t. My answer is a bit more complicated — I don’t believe that there are any axiological claims which are absolutely true, except within the context of one person’s opinion.

That is, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and so are ethics. So, why is Adolf Hitler wrong? Because he murdered millions, and his only justification, even if it were valid, was based on things which he should have known were factually wrong. Why is it wrong to do that? Because I said so. Unless you actually disagree with me — unless you want to say that Adolf Hitler was right — I’m not sure I have more to say.

[side note] You may also be aware that Richard Dawkins stated,

…I asked an obvious question: “As we speak of this shifting zeitgeist, how are we to determine who’s right? If we do not acknowledge some sort of external [standard], what is to prevent us from saying that the Muslim [extremists] aren’t right?”

“Yes, absolutely fascinating.” His response was immediate. “What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn’t right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question. But whatever [defines morality], it’s not the Bible. If it was, we’d be stoning people for breaking the Sabbath.”

I was stupefied. He had readily conceded that his own philosophical position did not offer a rational basis for moral judgments. His intellectual honesty was refreshing, if somewhat disturbing on this point….

Stated during an interview with Larry Taunton, “Richard Dawkins: The Atheist Evangelist,” by Faith Magazine, Issue Number 18, December 2007 (copyright; 2007-2008)

Lewis Wolpert

From the video description:

Atheists Trying to Have Their Cake and Eat It Too on Morality. This video shows that when an atheist denies objective morality they also affirm moral good and evil without the thought of any contradiction or inconsistency on their part.

Dan Barker

This is from the video Description for the Dan Barker video below:

The atheist’s animal-level view of “morality” is completely skewed by dint of its lack of objectivity. In fact, the atheist makes up his own personal version of “morals” as he goes along, and this video provides an eye-opening example of this bizarre phenomenon of the atheist’s crippled psyche:

During this debate, the atheist stated that he believed rape was morally acceptable, then he actually stated that he would rape a little girl and then kill himself — you have just got to hear his psychotic words with your own ears to believe it!

He then stammered and stumbled through a series of ridiculously lame excuses for his shameful lack of any type of moral compass.

To the utter amazement of his opponent and all present in the audience, the gruesomely amoral atheist even goes so far as to actually crack a sick little joke on the subject of SERIAL CHILD-RAPE!

:::shudders:::

Meanwhile, the Christian in the video gracefully and heroically realizes the clearly objective moral values that unquestionably come to humanity by God’s grace, and yet are far beyond the lower animal’s and the atheist’s tenuous mental grasp. Be sure to keep watching until the very end so that you can hear the Christian’s final word — it’s a real knuckle-duster!

Atheist dogma™ not only fails to provide a stable platform for objective human morality for its adherent — it precludes him even the possibility. It’s this very intellectual inability to apprehend any objective moral values that leads such believers in atheist dogma™ as Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Dahmer to commit their horrific atheistic atrocities.

Any believer in atheist dogma™, given sufficient power, would take the exact same course of action that Hitler did, without a moment’s hesitation.

Note as well that evolutionary naturalism has very dogmatic implication, IF — that is — the honest atheist/evolutionist follow the matter to their logical conclusions, via the ineffable Dr. Provine:

William Provine

Atheist and staunch evolutionist Dr. William Provine (who is often quoted by Richard Dawkins) admits what life has in stored if Darwinism is true. The quote comes from his debate here with Dr. Phillip E. Johnson at Stanford University, April 30, 1994.

Sam Harris denies completely free will: “In fact, the concept of free will is a non-starter, both philosophically and scientifically.” This is important — as Stephen Hawking points out in his lecture entitled Determinism: Is Man a Slave or the Master of His Fate — who admitted that if “we are the random products of chance, and hence, not free, or whether God had designed these laws within which we are free.”^[1] In other words, do we have the ability to make choices, or do we simply follow a chemical reaction induced by millions of mutational collisions of free atoms? Michael Polyni mentions that this “reduction of the world to its atomic elements acting blindly in terms of equilibrations of forces,” a belief that has prevailed “since the birth of modern science, has made any sort of teleological view of the cosmos seem unscientific…. [to] the contemporary mind.”^[2]

Which is why in Hawkings most recent book he says “This book is rooted in the concept of scientific determinism, which implies that the answer to [the question of miracles] is that there are no miracles, or exceptions to the laws of nature.”^[3]And hence the spiral from scientism, to determinism, to reductionism: “…so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.”^[4]

[1] Ravi Zacharias, The Real Face of Atheism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2004), 118, 119.

[2] Michael Polanti and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago, IL: Chicago university Press, 1977), 162.

[3] Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (London, England: Bantam Press, 2010), 34.

[4] Ibid., 32.

Ethics and propositions that include ethical choice is one that rejects naturalistic origins. Some more quotes to make the point:

What merit would attach to moral virtue if the acts that form such habitual tendencies and dispositions were not acts of free choice on the part of the individual who was in the process of acquiring moral virtue? Persons of vicious moral character would have their characters formed in a manner no different from the way in which the character of a morally virtuous person was formed—by acts entirely determined, and that could not have been otherwise by freedom of choice.

Mortimer J. Adler, Ten Philosophical Mistakes (New York, NY: Touchstone, 1985), 154.

If what he says is true, he says it merely as the result of his heredity and environment, and nothing else. He does not hold his determinist views because they are true, but because he has such-and-such stimuli; that is, not because the structure of the structure of the universe is such-and-such but only because the configuration of only part of the universe, together with the structure of the determinist’s brain, is such as to produce that result…. They [determinists – I would posit any philosophical naturalist] want to be considered as rational agents arguing with other rational agents; they want their beliefs to be construed as beliefs, and subjected to rational assessment; and they want to secure the rational assent of those they argue with, not a brainwashed repetition of acquiescent pattern. Consistent determinists should regard it as all one whether they induce conformity to their doctrines by auditory stimuli or a suitable injection of hallucinogens: but in practice they show a welcome reluctance to get out their syringes, which does equal credit to their humanity and discredit to their views. Determinism, therefore, cannot be true, because if it was, we should not take the determinists’ arguments as being really arguments, but as being only conditioned reflexes. Their statements should not be regarded as really claiming to be true, but only as seeking to cause us to respond in some way desired by them.

J. R. Lucas, The Freedom of the Will (New York: NY: Oxford University Press, 1970), 114, 115.

He thus acknowledged the need for any theory to allow that humans have genuine freedom to recognize the truth. He (again, correctly) saw that if all thought, belief, feeling, and choice are determined (i.e., forced on humans by outside conditions) then so is the determinists’ acceptance of the theory of determinism forced on them by those same conditions. In that case they could never claim to know their theory is true since the theory making that claim would be self-referentially incoherent. In other words, the theory requires that no belief is ever a free judgment made on the basis of experience or reason, but is always a compulsion over which the believer has no control.

Roy A. Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality: An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2005), 174.

Determinism is self-stultifying. If my mental processes are totally determined, I am totally determined either to accept or to reject determinism. But if the sole reason for my believing or not believing X is that I am causally determined to believe it I have no ground for holding that my judgment is true or false.

J. P. Moreland & William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2003), 241; Quoting: H.P. Owen, Christian Theism (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1984), 118.

Frank Zindler (Editor of American Atheist Magazine and Director of American Atheists Press), denies the existence of free will. In an article he wrote for the American Atheist magazine, he writes this:

Although I risk inciting to disaffection many of the people who have expressed admiration for some of my previous articles, I must now focus my ‘Probing Mind’ upon the question, “Can will be free?” Let me answer the question straightaway with a firm “no,” and then attempt to support my conclusion.

The Center for Naturalism is strongly advocating for widespread rejection of free will:

We should doubt the little god of free will on the very same grounds that atheists doubt the big god of traditional religions: there’s no evidence for it.

(Reasons for God)

I hope this helped and challenged you to know the variability within faith (while remaining orthodox) as well as bringing you face-to-face with your own premises in your worldview. Remember, if you disagree with the above ethics portion, you are not arguing against me but arguing against fellow atheists (if you are an atheist… I would hope you are a soft-agnostic). I also hope you asked your questions in a manner that is in line with you truly seeking a solution to these sticky issues. I will respond to your other challenges (honest questions) at a later date,

Finally, it is objected that the ultimate loss of a single soul means the defeat of omnipotence. And so it does. In creating beings with free will, omnipotence from the outset submits to the possibility of such defeat. What you call defeat, I call miracle: for to make things which are not Itself, and thus to become, in a sense, capable of being resisted by its own handiwork, is the most astonishing and unimaginable of all the feats we attribute to the Deity. I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. I do not mean that the ghosts may not wish to come out of hell, in the vague fashion wherein an envious man “wishes” to be happy: but they certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that self-abandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good. They enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self-enslaved just as the blessed, forever submitting to obedience, become through all eternity more and more free.

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York, NY: Simon & Shuster, 1996), 113-114.

Papa Giorgio

Do We Have Free Will?

Published January 4, 2019 by Papa Giorgio

Do humans have free will or are our decisions entirely products of chemistry, physics, and genetics? Is there a difference between the brain and the mind? Could a neuroscientist with enough knowledge of our brains know every decision that we’ll make? The answers to these questions cut to the heart of what it means to be human.

Hard Hearts & God’s Sovereignty

Published July 26, 2017July 26, 2017 by Papa Giorgio

Pastor Todd of Crossroads Community Church deals with a very tough theological thorn of free-will and God’s sovereignty. Yes. I have believed this for years and consider it somewhat of a mystery, just like the Trinity. I added some graphics (Scripture verses read) for the casual viewer so they can follow along with Todd. As an unimportant aside, the first time Scripture explicitly mentions Pharaoh hardening his heart is in Exodus 8:15.

Here are two quotes that came to mind during the sermon:

4:21 The Bible teaches that human beings are free to make choices (Gn 2:19; 4:7; Ezk 18:2–32). God is good (Ps 25:8; 34:8; 100:5) and always acts consistently with His nature. Yet people can choose to rebel against God’s goodness, and consistent rebellion can lead to their hearts being “hardened.” As the saying goes, “The same sun that melts butter also hardens clay.” Egyptian pharaohs believed they were divine, and Pharaoh would never have been inclined to submit to the Israelites’ God. Each time God placed a demand on him, he became more determined to resist. Thus it was both God’s demands and Pharaoh’s own pride-motivated stubbornness (Ex 8:15, 32; 9:34) that led to his hardened heart. God would use Pharaoh’s stubbornness for a good end, to demonstrate His power and extend His reputation (9:16).

The Apologetics Study Bible: Real Questions, Straight Answers, Stronger Faith (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2007), 91–92.

partII. GOD THE REDEEMER OF SINNERS

While reiterating the teaching of nature as to the existence and character of the personal Creator and Lord of all, the Scriptures lay their stress upon the grace or the undeserved love of God, as exhibited in his dealings with his sinful and wrath-deserving creatures. So little, however, is the consummate divine attribute of love advanced, in the scriptural revelation, at the expense of the other moral attributes of God, that it is thrown into prominence only upon a background of the strongest assertion and fullest manifestation of its companion attributes, especially of the divine righteousness and holiness, and is exhibited as acting only along with and in entire harmony with them. God is not represented in the Scriptures as forgiving sin because he really cares very little about sin; nor yet because he is so exclusively or predominatingly the God of love, that all other attributes shrink into desuetude in the presence of his illimitable benevolence. He is rather represented as moved to deliver sinful man from his guilt and pollution because he pities the creatures of his hand, immeshed in sin, with an intensity which is born of the vehemence of his holy abhorrence of sin and his righteous determination to visit it with intolerable retribution; and by a mode which brings as complete satisfaction to his infinite justice and holiness as to his unbounded love itself. The biblical presentation of the God of grace includes thus the richest development of all his moral attributes, and the God of the Bible is consequently set forth, in the completeness of that idea, as above everything else the ethical God. And that is as much as to say that there is ascribed to him a moral sense so sensitive and true that it estimates with unfailing accuracy the exact moral character of every person or deed presented for its contemplation, and responds to it with the precisely appropriate degree of satisfaction or reprobation. The infinitude of his love is exhibited to us precisely in that while we were yet sinners he loved us, though with all the force of his infinite nature he reacted against our sin with illimitable abhorrence and indignation. The mystery of grace resides just in the impulse of a sin-hating God to show mercy to such guilty wretches; and the supreme revelation of God as the God of holy love is made in the disclosure of the mode of his procedure in redemption, by which alone he might remain just while justifying the ungodly. For in this procedure there was involved the mighty paradox of the infinitely just Judge himself becoming the sinner’s substitute before his own law and the infinitely blessed God receiving in his own person the penalty of sin.

B.B. Warfield, Selected Short Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1970), 71-72.

Dr. John Lennox Responds To a Question on Free Will

Published June 6, 2016June 6, 2016 by Papa Giorgio

Free will and God… Dr. Lennox give a great anecdote between the “how” and the “that.” We do not have to explain “how” something works in order to know the comparability with the best explanation.

Great short apologetic response.

Ravi Zacharias On Free Will and Evil In the World

Published March 7, 2016 by Papa Giorgio

[fbvideo link=”https://www.facebook.com/uju.okezuruonye/videos/984682531597413/” width=”685″ height=”400″ onlyvideo=”1″]

Do We Have Free Will? (Frank Pastore ~ PragerU)

Published April 10, 2015April 10, 2015 by Papa Giorgio

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Religio-Political Talk (RPT)

"I never discuss anything except politics and religion. There is nothing else to discuss." ~ G.K. Chesterton

Free-Will