The essential problem with Christian determinism. [Archive]

smaller

September 4th 2005, 11:40 AM

It seems reasonable to say that if A wholly causes B, and B wholly causes C, then A causes C. For instance, if I take a hose, turn on the tap, and point it at my little brother, it seems reasonable to say that 'Ben wet Sam'.

Now, if we hold that every event follows as nescessary consequence from prior causes, and those causes themselves follow nescessarily from earlier causes, it follows that all things are caused, in their entirety, by the first cause or causes.

Which is to say that the Christian determinist must hold that God is the cause of all things. Now, if God is the cause of all things, then we must say either that there is no sin, or that God is the cause of sin.

There is the fact that God "created."

In this equation then you have God as Perfection

and then, and then, and then

there is EVERYTHING ELSE.

Where you say then that God caused sin, when the reality is God caused everything less than Perfection. What are your expectations from this formula? God's other apparent choice would have been to clone Himself, but would the clone of Perfection be distinguishable from the original? Probably not.

So I don't have a problem with God "creating" sin or the capacity for sin to be in His creation because this is a logical outcome of the pattern of being "less than Perfection."

Now, Jesus affirms both that there is sin in the world: in Matthew 9:13 he says 'But go and learn what this means: "I desire mercy, not sacrifice." For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.'

But he also condemns any who would cause sin: Matthew 18:6 'But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.'

It seems that we must hold both that there is sin in the world, and that righteousness (and hence the Father, who is the archetype of righteousness) is incompatible with causing sin.

And I say your math is off. God also created "the devil." The devil was a liar and a murderer "from the beginning" and the devil was also granted power over the flesh and minds of mankind.

Now what are you going to do with that information?

The only logical position I can find in these events is that EVIL serves God's Purposes BECAUSE He is vastly and far Superior to "evil" and the creation of evil and the allowance of evil.

In my math logic this means that everything that IS serves God's Purposes.

But if we recognize that there is something (ie. sin) that is not caused by the first cause, we are by definition rejection determinism.

And you would be a math imbecile.

If we reject determinism, it seems that there are traditionally two options avaliable to us - either that there is a sort of random element in creation, or that people have free will in the libertarian sense - and the idea of genuine chaos in a theistic universe seems inappropriate. This is why I think Christianity nescessarily implies LFW.

And the obvious counter to any free will/lfw/ovt is that freewill is only a GUESS that cannot be quantified whatsoever. Why? Because there is no way to effectively prove that God is not working in His creation in ways that we cannot see or perceive except by a WILD GUESS and of course WILD GUESSES make for poor math formulas.

If you hold to any form of Perfect God then you automatically are determinist OR you are a resistor to God's Potential Abilities and NOT a believer in Him, but in "yourself" and your "guesses" about what God can not and is not doing.

Faith and Hope do not speak that language of the opposer.

enjoy!

smaller

lee_merrill

September 4th 2005, 03:05 PM

Hi everyone,

Seer: Did God "need" sin to accomplish His plan? If He did He is neither all powerful or free. Because He was constrained by an external condition or necessity (sin).
And God is also constrained by his righteousness! He cannot lie, in order to accomplish a purpose. And if God chose to bind all people over to disobedience, in order to show them mercy, I think we may conclude that this decision was best.

Then freedom is always exercised within boundaries, for God, and for us, moral and logical boundaries, and I would also say omnipotence doesn't mean God can do absolutely anything we can think of, I have understood this to mean that God has all the power that there is (Mt. 28:18). And yet there are infinite depths in God's freedom (Rom. 11:33), far beyond what we can imagine...

And we read that Jesus was constrained, as well:

Mark 8:31 He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again.

Matthew 26:39 Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, "My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will."

Jesus was constrained to undergo the cross, which was a sinful event, the worst ever done, and was required, to bring salvation...

Blessings,
Lee

Ormly

September 4th 2005, 03:28 PM

Hi everyone,

And God is also constrained by his righteousness! He cannot lie, in order to accomplish a purpose. And if God chose to bind all people over to disobedience, in order to show them mercy, I think we may conclude that this decision was best.

Then freedom is always exercised within boundaries, for God, and for us, moral and logical boundaries, and I would also say omnipotence doesn't mean God can do absolutely anything we can think of, I have understood this to mean that God has all the power that there is (Mt. 28:18). And yet there are infinite depths in God's freedom (Rom. 11:33), far beyond what we can imagine...

And we read that Jesus was constrained, as well:

Mark 8:31 He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again.

Matthew 26:39 Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, "My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will."

Jesus was constrained to undergo the cross, which was a sinful event, the worst ever done, and was required, to bring salvation...

Blessings,
Lee

Required?? I thought He did out of love, Lee. I see a big difference here.

Kenny

September 4th 2005, 04:47 PM

The assumption that causality is transitive is not obvious (I’m not sure about it myself). Say (this is an example from David Lewis) I don’t want you to attend a conference, so I slash your tires which in turn causes you to take the train which in turn causes your safe arrival to the conference. It seems odd to say that I caused your safe arrival.

But, even if causation is transitive, it doesn’t seem that your verses have “causation” in this unrestricted sort of sense in mind. Say I buy one of the last tickets to a Christian concert, and this causes a new believer who could not get a ticket to go to a drunken party instead where he then proceeds to get wasted and perhaps commits other sins as a result. Did I cause one of these little ones to sin just by buying the ticket? It seems like these verses must have some sort of narrower version of causation in mind – say, being directly causally responsible for some source of temptation. But, the Christian determinist can (and should!) deny that God is the direct cause of temptation to evil (these effects being brought about through secondary causes).

seer

September 4th 2005, 05:17 PM

micah4

September 4th 2005, 06:14 PM

"Causality" in general can be tricky to define as your examples illustrate. However, in certain cases the identification of a responsible cause is not difficult - particularly when certain sets of metaphysical assumptions are claimed (as is the case with determinism). E.g., a murderer might claim that his poor upbringing "caused" him to commit murder. A strong assertion of determinism might support this claim, but if we assume libertarian free will then it is clear that this claim is false, because he was still able to choose otherwise therefore the final say-so is found with him. So it is with your example- your buying the last ticket is clearly not the "cause" of this person's sin if we assume that the person in question had LFW. Your buying the ticket then did not make it necessary for him to sin, he was still free to do otherwise. The identification of "cause" in your examples appears difficult because we aren't assuming any of these metaphysical realities as certainty.

We don't necessarily need to have a universal formula to identify a responsible cause or have an absolute claim that causality is always transitive universally in order to properly identify the responsible cause in certain situations. In another thread I proposed that the responsible cause of X could be identified as that agent who establishes all conditions sufficient to make it necessary that X would occur. I have seen no reason so far why this is an unacceptable criteria for identifying the responsible cause. It may fail to identify any responsible cause in some cases, but in those cases where it does identify a responsible cause I believe it does so properly- and it is adequate to certainly identify the responsible cause given the assumptions of determinism.

This definition may fail to identify a responsible cause in your train example- obviously you didn't establish all conditions which made it necessary that somebody would arrive safely to a conference- you only established one of them (their inability to drive the car). In fact, it might be the case that no single agent established all the conditions which made this event necessary, therefore this set of criteria might not always provide any answer as to who is the responsible cause. There are other formulations of identifying causation which might attempt identify or not identify you as the cause under such circumstances, e.g., identifying causation counterfactually- if it is true that if you had not slashed the tires, then the person would not have arrived safely, then you can be identified as the cause. These more general formulations are also more disputeable, but they are not really necessary here. Given the strong assertions determinism makes, it is relatively easy to delimit a set of criteria that- when it makes a positive identification of responsible cause- does so properly.

The assumption that causality is transitive is not obvious (I’m not sure about it myself). Say (this is an example from David Lewis) I don’t want you to attend a conference, so I slash your tires which in turn causes you to take the train which in turn causes your safe arrival to the conference. It seems odd to say that I caused your safe arrival.

But, even if causation is transitive, it doesn’t seem that your verses have “causation” in this unrestricted sort of sense in mind. Say I buy one of the last tickets to a Christian concert, and this causes a new believer who could not get a ticket to go to a drunken party instead where he then proceeds to get wasted and perhaps commits other sins as a result. Did I cause one of these little ones to sin just by buying the ticket? It seems like these verses must have some sort of narrower version of causation in mind – say, being directly causally responsible for some source of temptation. But, the Christian determinist can (and should!) deny that God is the direct cause of temptation to evil (these effects being brought about through secondary causes).

BenK

September 4th 2005, 11:43 PM

The assumption that causality is transitive is not obvious (I’m not sure about it myself)... [snip!]

Firstly, I think the transitive nature of causality is, in many cases, obvious. We will not absolve a murderer by declaring that a secondary cause (ie. a weapon) is responsible for the victim's death.

Secondly, I think the examples you provide are not analalogous to the position of the Christian determinist. Slashing someone's tires cannot be said to 'wholly cause' them to take a train, nor can buying a ticket be said to 'wholly cause' a youth to go to an immoral party.

However, the Christian determinist holds that (for instance) Adam's sin was wholly the product of Adam's nature and his environment; the content of his character and the circumstances of his environment were wholly the product of God's creative work. Which is to say that God made Adam's sin absolutely nescessary.

It seems to me that if X makes it absolutely nescessary that Y will follow, then X causes Y.

Nang

September 5th 2005, 12:05 AM

And disobedience is a sin, yet as C4H said, God uses secondary causes, so he is not the source of sin, although all that happens is in his plan, for good.

The question I have is: Did God "need" sin to accomplish His plan?

God's "plan" is to eliminate sin.

Nang

Tercel

September 5th 2005, 01:44 AM

Secondly, I think the examples you provide are not analalogous to the position of the Christian determinist. Slashing someone's tires cannot be said to 'wholly cause' them to take a train, nor can buying a ticket be said to 'wholly cause' a youth to go to an immoral party.I agree. Kenny has considered situations where:
* There were many independent causes in bad event, only one of which was initiated by the first party
* The first party was ignorant of the ultimate outcome of their actions, and thus absolved of the responsibility

In short Kenny has appealed to the two things which absolve God of responsibility in an indeterministic system.

lee_merrill

September 5th 2005, 12:24 PM

Hi everyone,

Required?? I thought He did out of love, Lee. I see a big difference here.
But the word Jesus used in Luke 12:50 has a primary sense of "constrained," the word being a picture of being chained between two soldiers, hand to hand, and foot to foot, as Paul was.

And in other passages, Jesus used the word which the translators translate as "must", clearly indicating a constraint, in the cross:

Mark 8:31 And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again.

Luke 24:7 'The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.'

John 3:14 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up...

And people did even protest, as here:

John 12:34 The crowd spoke up, "We have heard from the Law that the Christ will remain forever, so how can you say, 'The Son of Man must be lifted up'? Who is this 'Son of Man'?"

And here:

Matthew 16:22 Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. "Never, Lord!" he said. "This shall never happen to you!"

Jesus responded by saying the alternative was not God's way, to take the Buddhist and Hindu way, of saying that all suffering is pointless, and we should seek escape.

Yet Jesus himself prayed, if it was possible, to have this cup pass from him, and yet there was no other way, and so this sinful deed was indeed required, and in God's plan, for salvation.

Blessings,
Lee

Kenny

September 5th 2005, 03:50 PM

Hello Seer,

It is good to hear from you! I hope that you are in good health these days.

I am enjoying fatherhood very much, and my program is also going well. I was pleasantly surprised to discover how many fellow Christians there are among my fellow graduate students.

Once again, I hope your health is good. You have been in my prayers.

Kenny

September 7th 2005, 10:06 AM

Firstly, I think the transitive nature of causality is, in many cases, obvious. We will not absolve a murderer by declaring that a secondary cause (ie. a weapon) is responsible for the victim's death.

Sure, but even if causality is transitive in all cases, the mere fact that I am causally responsible for something does not automatically entail that I am morally culpable for it.

Secondly, I think the examples you provide are not analalogous to the position of the Christian determinist. Slashing someone's tires cannot be said to 'wholly cause' them to take a train, nor can buying a ticket be said to 'wholly cause' a youth to go to an immoral party.

I think a reasonable construal of “wholly” cause would be “complete a causally sufficient condition for” or perhaps you would want to say it must be both a necessary and sufficient condition. Either way, we can construe these examples in such a way that the criteria are meant, and it is not obvious to me that God’s having in some sense been responsible for all the causal factors adds anything morally relevant over and above God’s having completed a necessary and sufficient causal condition.

However, the Christian determinist holds that (for instance) Adam's sin was wholly the product of Adam's nature and his environment; the content of his character and the circumstances of his environment were wholly the product of God's creative work. Which is to say that God made Adam's sin absolutely nescessary.

Of course, if I completed a sufficient causal condition for the youth’s going to the party and sinning by buying the ticket, I also made his sin absolutely necessary.

Oh, and BTW, bringing foreknowledge into the situation doesn’t change much. Suppose I knew somehow (maybe God told me) that if I bought the ticket the youth would go to the party and sin, but I bought the ticket because I also knew that the only way my friend Jim would go is if I went and that Jim’s life would be radically transformed for Christ if he did go, and I judged this to be the greater good. My intentions were not to cause the youth to sin nor was his sin a means to the good end I wanted to produce (it was just a byproduct), even though I foresaw it would happen. I just intended to produce the greater good of Jim’s transformed life. So, am I morally culpable for the youth’s sin?

And the above scenario is not so far fetched as it sounds. It reflects a well recognized principle in medical ethics (as well as just war ethics) called the “principle of double effect.” A doctor may foresee that giving morphine to a terminal patient will hasten the patient’s death, for example, but if the intention of the doctor is not to cause death but to relieve pain (and this moral good outweighs the moral negative and the moral negative consequence is not in itself a means to the good end), then, according to the principle of double effect, the doctor is not culpable for performing an action that hastens the patient’s death.

Sheepdog

September 7th 2005, 04:38 PM

Sure, but even if causality is transitive in all cases, the mere fact that I am causally responsible for something does not automatically entail that I am morally culpable for it.

you may have to develope this, though i think i agree. for instance, if one is "wholly" causally responsible (using the definitions already established in this thread), yet he himself was wholly determined to act by factors external and prior to himself, an adherent to libertine freedom would argue he is not morally culpable. but that brings us full circle back to the topic of this thread.

I think a reasonable construal of “wholly” cause would be “complete a causally sufficient condition for” or perhaps you would want to say it must be both a necessary and sufficient condition. Either way, we can construe these examples in such a way that the criteria are meant, and it is not obvious to me that God’s having in some sense been responsible for all the causal factors adds anything morally relevant over and above God’s having completed a necessary and sufficient causal condition.

i don't think you really want to go that route. for instance, i could be the whole cause of an assassination via mind control. consider the hypothetical situation where Bob want's a certain Senator named Mr. Patton dead. Yet, he doesn't want to do it himself, so he constructs this convoluted scheme, where he abducts a kid named James off the street. through hypnosis and various mind-control tactics, Bob conditions James such that James cannot fail to assassinate Senator Patton.

Election time roles around, and Bob places James in a convention where he is bound to run into Patton. James does his dirty work, and the rest is history.

Now, i'm not aware of any precidents like this in real life jurisprudence. However, i expect that most people will intuitively say that James is innocent and Bob guilty. Why? Because James had no freewill in the matter, and in effect became a tool through which Bob completed his dirty scheme. Was James still a thinking person? sure. could he have actually come to want to murder Patton? indeed the effect of mind control made it so. yet, he was simply an intermediate cause. furthermore Bob is wholly causally responsible for James' act. unless Bob himself was causally determined by some other outside of and before him, most would say Bob is guilty.

Of course, if I completed a sufficient causal condition for the youth’s going to the party and sinning by buying the ticket, I also made his sin absolutely necessary.

Oh, and BTW, bringing foreknowledge into the situation doesn’t change much. Suppose I knew somehow (maybe God told me) that if I bought the ticket the youth would go to the party and sin, but I bought the ticket because I also knew that the only way my friend Jim would go is if I went and that Jim’s life would be radically transformed for Christ if he did go, and I judged this to be the greater good. My intentions were not to cause the youth to sin nor was his sin a means to the good end I wanted to produce (it was just a byproduct), even though I foresaw it would happen. I just intended to produce the greater good of Jim’s transformed life. So, am I morally culpable for the youth’s sin?

unless you are a utilitarian, or despite the foreknowledge Jim went of his own freewill, yes. and BTW, utilitarianism presupposes moral relativism, which is incompatible with the moral objectivism of the God of the Bible.

remember, nondeterminist adherents of EDF see foreknowledge as being representative of future facts, not predeterminative of them. freewill agents would still be culpable for their actions, since they are the causal agents as well.

And the above scenario is not so far fetched as it sounds. It reflects a well recognized principle in medical ethics (as well as just war ethics) called the “principle of double effect.” A doctor may foresee that giving morphine to a terminal patient will hasten the patient’s death, for example, but if the intention of the doctor is not to cause death but to relieve pain (and this moral good outweighs the moral negative and the moral negative consequence is not in itself a means to the good end), then, according to the principle of double effect, the doctor is not culpable for performing an action that hastens the patient’s death.

some would disagree, though i suppose that isn't important here.

note how stringently you have to construe the scenario for it to work. if a patient was not terminal (other than in the sense that we all are terminal; we all will die someday), then it would be a moral wrong to "expediate the death" via morphine.

were Adam and Eve terminal?

Pereynol of Sheer Dread

September 7th 2005, 05:49 PM

Sure, but even if causality is transitive in all cases, the mere fact that I am causally responsible for something does not automatically entail that I am morally culpable for it.

The question arises: In a world in which every molecule is absolutely determined by the Deity, how might morality be justifiably excluded from the greater matrix of causality? If morality is somehow outside the bounds of what God controls, that in itself suggests that there is indeed an element of indeterminancy within creation, as BenK said in the OP.

I think a reasonable construal of “wholly” cause would be “complete a causally sufficient condition for” or perhaps you would want to say it must be both a necessary and sufficient condition. Either way, we can construe these examples in such a way that the criteria are meant, and it is not obvious to me that God’s having in some sense been responsible for all the causal factors adds anything morally relevant over and above God’s having completed a necessary and sufficient causal condition.

Again, given the assumption of God's meticulous control over all things---including all the moral aspects of his creation involving each particular human nature, choice, sin, as well as his (alleged) intended damnation of specific human beings apart from any apparent criteria pertaining to the people in question---just how can one say that God is morally removed from what happens in his world without resorting to voluntarism or admitting some kind of indeterminancy?

Of course, if I completed a sufficient causal condition for the youth’s going to the party and sinning by buying the ticket, I also made his sin absolutely necessary.

If you did this with the full knowledge and intention that he sin, I'd say you'd be culpable on some level---as would the sinner himself. Does God have the full knowledge and intention that his creatures sin and be damned within Calvinist soteriological determinism? And do not Calvinists answer this question in nuanced ways such that, in some cases, there are implied holes in the fabric of determinism?

Oh, and BTW, bringing foreknowledge into the situation doesn’t change much.

In your analogy, perhaps not. As you said, you hadn't the intention that the youth sin. Moreover, what he did was really beyond your control even though you had prior knowledge of what he would choose to do. I notice that you resort to God's "lending" you his foreknowledge here! And though God loaned you his foreknowledge, he didn't also "loan" you participation in his intentions that the youth sin nor his inviolable sovereign control over what the youth did. You seem to have only escaped culpability because you lacked the intention that the young man sin as well as the soveriegn power to steer his will, even though you had been granted a partial glimpse into divine foreknowledge. Had you also been granted divine power and the supposed intention that this youth commit gratuitous evil, it would be very difficult to see how you'd escape blame at all---unless you resorted to a modified theistic might makes right form of voluntarism, admitted some kind of indeterminancy, or supplied some other kind of explanation. (You somehow know as well that the youth's sin was only a "byproduct" that was not necessary to the achievement of the greater good, and this raises the spectre of certain other objections concerning the amount of gratuitous evil in the world. Does this also suggest indeterminancy?) All in all, it seems your analogy actually serves to implicate God rather than to absolve him, and this is unacceptable, IMHO.

Suppose I knew somehow (maybe God told me) that if I bought the ticket the youth would go to the party and sin, but I bought the ticket because I also knew that the only way my friend Jim would go is if I went and that Jim’s life would be radically transformed for Christ if he did go, and I judged this to be the greater good. My intentions were not to cause the youth to sin nor was his sin a means to the good end I wanted to produce (it was just a byproduct), even though I foresaw it would happen. I just intended to produce the greater good of Jim’s transformed life. So, am I morally culpable for the youth’s sin?

Perhaps you aren't. But you are, at least in terms of what you partially know, complicit with God who intends the whole scenario in some sense---gratuitous sin and all. Perhaps you're like a less glorified version of Abraham enjoying an undisclosed variety of "teleological suspension of the ethical." :wink:

But perhaps the sin in question isn't gratuitous; God, after all, determines a world in totality, not just one scenario in isolation. The sin of the young man no doubt affected the lives of others and his choices intertwined with theirs in such a fashion that what he did became an integral component of the overall world God intended to actualize. We are told God doesn't delight in evil or the death of the wicked, yet he determines these things as part of the world he foreknows. He determines that in which he finds no delight because it contributes to his greater intentions with respect to his world---it contibutes to a greater good. But what is that "greater good?" Is it the display of God's glory via dispensing justice to the reprobate---or is it the creation of a certain quality of liberty in men and allowing them the space to use it?

And the above scenario is not so far fetched as it sounds. It reflects a well recognized principle in medical ethics (as well as just war ethics) called the “principle of double effect.” A doctor may foresee that giving morphine to a terminal patient will hasten the patient’s death, for example, but if the intention of the doctor is not to cause death but to relieve pain (and this moral good outweighs the moral negative and the moral negative consequence is not in itself a means to the good end), then, according to the principle of double effect, the doctor is not culpable for performing an action that hastens the patient’s death.

First, this application of the principle of double effect involves an evaluation which seems overly man-centered. How do you know that the suffering the patient would otherwise have endured might not entail a moral good that eclipses the humanly perceived "evil" of pain---in God's eyes? Perhaps God would set a higher value upon suffering through a slightly longer life than he would upon the mere cessation of pain. Second, the whole principle slams itself into well-nigh incomprehension when one considers things like supralapsarian Calvinism, which places more value upon a vacuously defined notion of divine "glory" over against the eternal suffering of scores upon scores of the reprobate who are nothing less than---I've said it before---vessels of wrath by design. The only "out" here seems to be voluntarism, as far as I can see. But neither voluntarism nor the principle of double effect nor the bare supposition that utter determinism might not be transitive with respect to morality seems to supply a very satisfying answer to how God might escape the charge of moral culpability, given consistently applied Calvinist assumptions about soteriology. We all know God isn't morally culpable; Calvinists just haven't done a convincing job of explaining why, given their beliefs. I think the best bet would be to allow for the possibility of some kind of indeterminancy on some level. I also think that the inner logic of Calvinism calls for such a move. It's superior to voluntarism, in any event.

Consider the notion of meticulous control, for example, coupled with compatibilistic freedom. God controls everything---every flicker of every human will. God determined even Adam's fall, and he determined everything that resulted therefrom, even in terms of moral violations in the lives of the reprobate. Some say that God only "allowed" the fall, but this too is determinative---not to mention vague. Given this kind of control, why do we need monergism? Isn't it redundant? If God has meticulous control over our wills anyway, why monergism---seeing that it supplies another "layer" of meticulous control over an already deterministic substrate? And why the language of permission and allowance with respect to the fall and to evil in the world at large? There are some oddities within Calvinism that seem to point toward indeterminancy---even within the confines of what God is said to control. But how shall we understand "control?" In what sense shall we posit indeterminancy?

As the Pooh Bear said, "Think, think, think, think...."

smaller

September 7th 2005, 07:41 PM

The question arises: In a world in which every molecule is absolutely determined by the Deity, how might morality be justifiably excluded from the greater matrix of causality? If morality is somehow outside the bounds of what God controls, that in itself suggests that there is indeed an element of indeterminancy within creation, as BenK said in the OP.

Pardon me for diving in pereynol, but your observations here are excellent ones.

There may be other possibilities such as God's allowance for purposes of judgment or His actual raising of enemies for His Intended Purposes such as showing His Superiority over them.

Indeterminancy could be very far down the list of possibilities, though indeterminancy may also serve His Purposes in Glory just as confusions or fallacies may also serve Him.

Again, given the assumption of God's meticulous control over all things---including all the moral aspects of his creation involving each particular human nature, choice, sin, as well as his (alleged) intended damnation of specific human beings apart from any apparent criteria pertaining to the people in question---just how can one say that God is morally removed from what happens in his world without resorting to voluntarism or admitting some kind of indeterminancy?

Thanks for including (alleged.) Please include same on the other side of the (alleged) ledger as said intended (alleged) damnation is also linked to performances for dodging (alledged) damnation...;)

If you did this with the full knowledge and intention that he sin, I'd say you'd be culpable on some level---as would the sinner himself. Does God have the full knowledge and intention that his creatures sin and be damned within Calvinist soteriological determinism? And do not Calvinists answer this question in nuanced ways such that, in some cases, there are implied holes in the fabric of determinism?

The Calvinist will not hold up to their own standards of Sovereignty. In the end their own God is "the ultimate cause" of all things yet they will deny this extent of Sovereignty.

The facts are IF their God is Sovereign then they should also conclude that their imaginations of what their own Sovereign God could be a vastly inferior view of what that God might do.

Their own view of Sovereignty is that God can do anything He wants to do, yet they will not allow that Sovereign God to violate Calvinistic determinations of Divine Sovereignty in favor of the Sovereign God filtered through the sifter of Mr. Calvin. How Sovereign is that anyway?

Yet in the same breath they will conclude that Mr. Calvin was indeed just a human due for torture without grace!

I say why use Mr. Calvin's filter then? It was obviously tainted.

In your analogy, perhaps not. As you said, you hadn't the intention that the youth sin. Moreover, what he did was really beyond your control even though you had prior knowledge of what he would choose to do. I notice that you resort to God's "lending" you his foreknowledge here! And though God loaned you his foreknowledge, he didn't also "loan" you participation in his intentions that the youth sin nor his inviolable sovereign control over what the youth did. You seem to have only escaped culpability because you lacked the intention that the young man sin as well as the soveriegn power to steer his will, even though you had been granted a partial glimpse into divine foreknowledge. Had you also been granted divine power and the supposed intention that this youth commit gratuitous evil, it would be very difficult to see how you'd escape blame at all---unless you resorted to a modified theistic might makes right form of voluntarism, admitted some kind of indeterminancy, or supplied some other kind of explanation. (You somehow know as well that the youth's sin was only a "byproduct" that was not necessary to the achievement of the greater good, and this raises the spectre of certain other objections concerning the amount of gratuitous evil in the world. Does this also suggest indeterminancy?) All in all, it seems your analogy actually serves to implicate God rather than to absolve him, and this is unacceptable, IMHO.

The problems in any variation of freewiller syndrome is the extraction of God from interaction within His Own creation and that extraction cannot be quantified in any way other than by presumption of extraction of God from any situation.

Another problem in the freewiller camp is the problem of Omission or the "failure" of God to act even though He could. Again saying that He is not acting someway, somehow is also a false extraction. Failure to act can imply just as much implication to the party as participation.

But perhaps the sin in question isn't gratuitous; God, after all, determines a world in totality, not just one scenario in isolation. The sin of the young man no doubt affected the lives of others and his choices intertwined with theirs in such a fashion that what he did became an integral component of the overall world God intended to actualize. We are told God doesn't delight in evil or the death of the wicked, yet he determines these things as part of the world he foreknows. He determines that in which he finds no delight because it contributes to his greater intentions with respect to his world---it contibutes to a greater good. But what is that "greater good?" Is it the display of God's glory via dispensing justice to the reprobate---or is it the creation of a certain quality of liberty in men and allowing them the space to use it?

Well said

The answers and implications could be any multitude of things so intricate and minute that we could not even begin to fathom it, but I believe that all the results of God's Handiwork will result in things that have not entered our minds or hearts and are not worthy to compare to what is happening or has happened in this environment.

Both Calvins and Arminians of various forms are simply arguing against a vastly excluded array of other possibilities and as such are only bowing to their own idols of what they think God may do. We all bow to this form of idol one way or another anyway, but this bowing should not be at other people's eternal expense.

First, this application of the principle of double effect involves an evaluation which seems overly man-centered. How do you know that the suffering the patient would otherwise have endured might not entail a moral good that eclipses the humanly perceived "evil" of pain---in God's eyes? Perhaps God would set a higher value upon suffering through a slightly longer life than he would upon the mere cessation of pain. Second, the whole principle slams itself into well-nigh incomprehension when one considers things like supralapsarian Calvinism, which places more value upon a vacuously defined notion of divine "glory" over against the eternal suffering of scores upon scores of the reprobate who are nothing less than---I've said it before---vessels of wrath by design. The only "out" here seems to be voluntarism, as far as I can see. But neither voluntarism nor the principle of double effect nor the bare supposition that utter determinism might not be transitive with respect to morality seems to supply a very satisfying answer to how God might escape the charge of moral culpability, given consistently applied Calvinist assumptions about soteriology. We all know God isn't morally culpable; Calvinists just haven't done a convincing job of explaining why, given their beliefs. I think the best bet would be to allow for the possibility of some kind of indeterminancy on some level. I also think that the inner logic of Calvinism calls for such a move. It's superior to voluntarism, in any event.

Or the last but not least answer to all of it, that God is so far exceedingly Capable and Wonderous that whatever transpired here can and will be overcome to the benefit of ALL, whatever that may entail.

The insistence of responsibility/reward/punishment that freewillers desire upon other people should also reflect back to their own God as well. Infinite Holiness cannot infinitely extract itself from what it has wrought, directly or indirectly without being a Glorious Hypocrite, as if there were any glory in such a thing.

The "Far More Glorious Outcome" is my all time personal favorite excuse for God and I believe it is scripturally justified as well...;)

Why not raise the standard of Performances by God and quit trying to buy excuses for God??? At least it is somewhat more "logical" to do so.

Consider the notion of meticulous control, for example, coupled with compatibilistic freedom. God controls everything---every flicker of every human will. God determined even Adam's fall, and he determined everything that resulted therefrom, even in terms of moral violations in the lives of the reprobate. Some say that God only "allowed" the fall, but this too is determinative---not to mention vague. Given this kind of control, why do we need monergism? Isn't it redundant? If God has meticulous control over our wills anyway, why monergism---seeing that it supplies another "layer" of meticulous control over an already deterministic substrate? And why the language of permission and allowance with respect to the fall and to evil in the world at large? There are some oddities within Calvinism that seem to point toward indeterminancy---even within the confines of what God is said to control. But how shall we understand "control?" In what sense shall we posit indeterminancy?

Nicely stated. If Absolute Meticulous Control is being exercised the nearly infinite ways and means to "the results" of "the other side" of this life are just too far beyond our abilities to grasp them, and I believe scriptures state as much.

As the Pooh Bear said, "Think, think, think, think...."

I have learned that there is some mental benefit for not erecting false boundries for what I cannot exactly determine. Eternalness and the ways and means thereof is an area that no man should attempt to bind, particularly to the detriment of other people.

enjoy!

smaller

mickiel

September 9th 2005, 05:28 AM

In John 1:3, "All things came into being by him, and apart from him nothing came into being that has come into being." Before cause and then effect came into this reality that we are aware of there was nothing, absolute zero. Anything that is; is what it is because of Christ, who is Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end of everything that is. It is impossible to give anything evolution, or a beginning that Christ is not responsible for. Apart from Jesus, nothing came into being on its own. Nothing, absolutely nothing is the cause of itself. I am simply dumfounded by the museings of learned men as they formulate their conclusions based on their own understanding.

Vs. 4-5, In Him was Life, and the life was the Light of men. Right there is the Spiritual understanding required to understand the totalic responsibility of God, you just have to have the light. Or you think in darkness, meaning you cannot see truth in its completteness. Darkness has come into being. Nothing that has come into being, has come into being APART from Christ. Which SIMPLY means, darkness didNOT create itself, Jesus did. Oh how simple the mind of Christ. Darkness didnot come into being on its own.

Now, anything you choose to name can be put into this verse of truth. Evil, sin, satan, demons, I don't care what it is that is, it didnot create itself. It didnot evolve on its own, it is impossible to give the responsibility of creation to anyone but Christ. Thats all the undercurrent of this discussion is trying to do, take away the responsibility of sin and evil away from God , then help support doctrines based on things built upon the understanding of traditional explination of men.

Thats like saying the tree of the knowledge of good and evil planted , therefore created itself. It just popped up outside of Gods will and WOOSSHH, evil just came into being on its own and then jumped inside of satan. Everything in the garden of Eden was WILLED there by God . Including the EVIL on the tree. That just symbolizes that God created evil. There was nothing in Eden God didNOT create, including the snake, who simply symbolizes satan.

This is why I believe scripture is God breathed, and if that breath has not filtered your mind, your just NOT going to get it. Slap you in the face, enlarge it for your eyes, even explain it. The human can only look at it and see limited things. The scriptures are right there, so why can't people understand them? Why can't they understand that God created the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, SIMPLY meaning he created good and evil. Its just so simple. Why can't they see Gen. 3:1, the serpent was more crafty than any creation that has created itself? The serpent was more crafty but it was more crafty than God. No! It was how it was because God created it to be more crafty than anythingelse in the garden that he had made, INCLUDING Adam and Eve. But God created EVERYTHING in the Garden, the serpent WAS IN THE GARDEN. Evil was in the garden, nothing that was in the Garden has come into being apart from Christ.

I tell you, seperate your mind from teachings that are not from God.\

Peace, Mickiel.

Kenny

September 11th 2005, 01:21 PM

you may have to develope this, though i think i agree. for instance, if one is "wholly" causally responsible (using the definitions already established in this thread), yet he himself was wholly determined to act by factors external and prior to himself, an adherent to libertine freedom would argue he is not morally culpable. but that brings us full circle back to the topic of this thread.

If the argument in the OP has any independent force, then it must grant (for the sake of discussion) a compatibilist notion of freewill and moral responsibility. Otherwise, I have a rather easy way out. Sin entails moral culpability, but since determinism is true and determinism is incompatible with moral culpability, no one has sinned, and therefore God has not caused anyone to sin. Of course, a response like that would be rather like getting out of the frying pan by jumping into the fire, but my point is that if this objection has any force at all, it has it independently of arguments against compatibilist notions of moral responsibility.

i don't think you really want to go that route. for instance, i could be the whole cause of an assassination via mind control. consider the hypothetical situation where Bob want's a certain Senator named Mr. Patton dead. Yet, he doesn't want to do it himself, so he constructs this convoluted scheme, where he abducts a kid named James off the street. through hypnosis and various mind-control tactics, Bob conditions James such that James cannot fail to assassinate Senator Patton.

Election time roles around, and Bob places James in a convention where he is bound to run into Patton. James does his dirty work, and the rest is history.

Now, i'm not aware of any precidents like this in real life jurisprudence. However, i expect that most people will intuitively say that James is innocent and Bob guilty. Why? Because James had no freewill in the matter, and in effect became a tool through which Bob completed his dirty scheme. Was James still a thinking person? sure. could he have actually come to want to murder Patton? indeed the effect of mind control made it so. yet, he was simply an intermediate cause. furthermore Bob is wholly causally responsible for James' act. unless Bob himself was causally determined by some other outside of and before him, most would say Bob is guilty.

Sure, but this scenario has little to do with my claim. My claim was not that by completing a causally sufficient condition for x, I am never responsible for x. My claim was simply that completing a causally sufficient condition for x does not automatically entail that I am responsible for x. In the above scenario, I would say that James is not responsible because he didn't have freewill, and I would say that any adequate account of compatibilist free will should entail that James had no freewill. But, as I noted above, we are assuming (for the sake of discussion) that there is an adequate account of compatibilist freewill (otherwise there's no reason to pursue the objection in the OP – just cut to the chase and argue outright that determinism is incompatible with moral responsibility). Bob, on the other hand, is guilty because he freely and intentionally brought about an evil as a means to an evil end.
unless you are a utilitarian, or despite the foreknowledge Jim went of his own freewill, yes. and BTW, utilitarianism presupposes moral relativism, which is incompatible with the moral objectivism of the God of the Bible.

I'm not a utilitarian. In fact, the principle of double effect is necessary to bring plausibility and coherence to a non-utilitarian form of morality. In practice, we cannot avoid performing actions in which morally negative byproducts result. We choose to give children vaccinations, knowing that some will die as a result. Doctors do choose to give pain medication to patients knowing that the medication will hasten death. In just wars, we sometimes do perform actions which we know will result in the deaths of innocents. But, (if these actions are moral) the morally negative consequences are not consequences that we intend (read intend as "try to") to bring about (even if they are foreseen), they themselves are not means to the good end we are seeking and the good that results from the action outweighs the morally negative byproducts. Only the last condition presupposes utilitarian style reading, and the principle of double effect (contrary to utilitarianism) holds that we may never intentionally bring about a moral evil as a means to some greater good.

That being said, your claim that utiliatianism presupposes moral relativism is simply false. In act utilitarianism there is one objective (and very stringent) moral rule – always act in such a way as to maximize utility. Act utilitarianism is a very stringent morality. On act utilitarianism for instance, it is almost always wrong for me to go see a movie because I could be spending that money in other ways (say donating to unicef) that bring about greater utility. Rule utilitarianism has one objective metarule that entails other objective rules – follow those moral rules which, on balance, tend to maximize utility. In fact, something like rule utilitatianism may be compatible with Biblical morality if God's commands are seen as instances of rules that meet the criteria of the metarule (though I myself am not a rule utilitatian).

remember, nondeterminist adherents of EDF see foreknowledge as being representative of future facts, not predeterminative of them. freewill agents would still be culpable for their actions, since they are the causal agents as well.

Yes, but that's irrelevant here since the objection in this thread only holds water if we grant compatibilism for the sake of argument.

note how stringently you have to construe the scenario for it to work. if a patient was not terminal (other than in the sense that we all are terminal; we all will die someday), then it would be a moral wrong to "expediate the death" via morphine.

Yep, and doctors evaluate whether these stringent criteria are met everyday and then they act on their evaluations.

were Adam and Eve terminal?

An infralapsarian Calvinist could say that God permitted Adam and Eve to exercise their compatibilist freedom and thereby sin, that God's respecting their freedom was itself a moral good (just as the Arminian would want to say that God's respecting freedom is a moral good), that the morally negative consequences that resulted were byproducts of God's choice to respect Adam and Eve's freedom and that the goods that resulted from God's choice to respect Adam and Eve's freedom (i.e., redemption and all it entails) ultimately outweigh the morally negative consequences.

Kenny

September 11th 2005, 02:06 PM

The question arises: In a world in which every molecule is absolutely determined by the Deity, how might morality be justifiably excluded from the greater matrix of causality?

Perhaps the question arises, but (as I pointed out the Sheepdog) it is a question that is independent of the objection in the OP.

If morality is somehow outside the bounds of what God controls, that in itself suggests that there is indeed an element of indeterminancy within creation, as BenK said in the OP.

Given theological soft determinism (i.e., theism + compatibilism + determinism), morality is not outside the bounds of what God ultimately controls.

Again, given the assumption of God's meticulous control over all things---

Who's making that assumption. If by "meticulous control" you mean that God is directly causally responsible for everything, I'm not.

If you did this with the full knowledge and intention that he sin, I'd say you'd be culpable on some level---as would the sinner himself.

But, in the scenario I gave, I did not perform the action with intention that the youth sin. I foresaw that it would happen as a byproduct of my action, but it was not the intended result (the result I was trying to bring about) of my action.

Does God have the full knowledge and intention that his creatures sin and be damned within Calvinist soteriological determinism?

Not in the version of infralapsarian Calvinism that I adopt. God does not intend that his creatures sin, though he knows they will and chooses to permit them to.

And do not Calvinists answer this question in nuanced ways such that, in some cases, there are implied holes in the fabric of determinism?

No. Ultimately, on determinism, creaturely sin does result as a consequence of God's actions, but it need only do so as a foreseen byproduct rather than as an intended consequence.

I notice that you resort to God's "lending" you his foreknowledge here!

I just did that as a throw away plausible explanation. Maybe I'm psychic or maybe I just know Jim's character really well. In truth, we foresee the consequences of our actions all the time simply based on our knowledge of how the world works.

And though God loaned you his foreknowledge, he didn't also "loan" you participation in his intentions that the youth sin nor his inviolable sovereign control over what the youth did.

Strawman. God did not intend that the youth sin anymore than I did. God does have sovereign control over what the youth does in an ultimate sense (he could have stopped it, even as I could have stopped it) but he chose to permit it (even as I chose to permit it).

(You somehow know as well that the youth's sin was only a "byproduct" that was not necessary to the achievement of the greater good

Given the circumstance that I found myself in, the youth's sin was necessary to the achievement of a greater good (namely Jim's transformed life); it just wasn't a means to that good. Of course, the analogy is intended to suggest that God permits evils that are necessary for the achievement of some greater goods (on a much grander scale of complexity and over a much greater span of foreseen time), but God does not intentionally bring those evils about as a means to some greater good.

and this raises the spectre of certain other objections concerning the amount of gratuitous evil in the world.

I would say this specter is, just that, a specter – a shadow of our own ignorance and inability to foresee all ends, not a reality.

Is it the display of God's glory via dispensing justice to the reprobate---or is it the creation of a certain quality of liberty in men and allowing them the space to use it?

Ultimately, it’s the demonstration of the infinite riches of God's love, mercy and compassion through his saving the elect and through his renewal of all things – with all kinds of lesser goods along the way (like respecting liberty and demonstrating justice).

First, this application of the principle of double effect involves an evaluation which seems overly man-centered. How do you know that the suffering the patient would otherwise have endured might not entail a moral good that eclipses the humanly perceived "evil" of pain---in God's eyes?

Our responsibility in the situation is to relieve suffering, though God may have permitted it in the first place for the sake of greater goods.

Second, the whole principle slams itself into well-nigh incomprehension when one considers things like supralapsarian Calvinism, which places more value upon a vacuously defined notion of divine "glory" over against the eternal suffering of scores upon scores of the reprobate who are nothing less than---I've said it before---vessels of wrath by design.

Yeah, that's a reason why I'm not a supralapsarian Calvinist, but what does that have to do with Christian determinism per say (which, by itself, does not even entail Calvinism of any variety).

Consider the notion of meticulous control, for example, coupled with compatibilistic freedom. God controls everything---every flicker of every human will.

Maybe if you adopt the horrid definition of compatibilism in the TWEB glossary, but that's not what compatibilsm proper entails. See

http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/showthread.php?t=47420

Some say that God only "allowed" the fall, but this too is determinative---not to mention vague.

God "allows" those things which he does not intend, even though they are byproducts of his actions to bring about goods which He does intend. Yes, this is determinative, but not vague (we have all sorts of examples of this sort of thing in real life double effect moral dilemmas).

As the Pooh Bear said, "Think, think, think, think...."

I hope you are not intending to imply here that I have not thought through my own position simply because I do not see things the way you do.

In Christ,
Kenny

7thangel

September 11th 2005, 05:29 PM

And the above scenario is not so far fetched as it sounds. It reflects a well recognized principle in medical ethics (as well as just war ethics) called the “principle of double effect.” A doctor may foresee that giving morphine to a terminal patient will hasten the patient’s death, for example, but if the intention of the doctor is not to cause death but to relieve pain (and this moral good outweighs the moral negative and the moral negative consequence is not in itself a means to the good end), then, according to the principle of double effect, the doctor is not culpable for performing an action that hastens the patient’s death.

God is different since he knows all things. In your example, you are already subscribing that, like the doctor, there are external factors that affects God's actions unknown to Him.

basicbeliever

September 11th 2005, 05:45 PM

Now, if we hold that every event follows as nescessary consequence from prior causes, and those causes themselves follow nescessarily from earlier causes, it follows that all things are caused, in their entirety, by the first cause or causes.

Which is to say that the Christian determinist must hold that God is the cause of all things. Now, if God is the cause of all things, then we must say either that there is no sin, or that God is the cause of sin.

We can break down your premise like this:

1. God is the author of everything
2. Evil is something
3. Therefore, God is the author of evil.

A very old argument really, it has been around for much longer than any of us.

The first premire is true. So it appears that in order to deny the conclusion, we have to deny the reality of evil (time to become a pantheist). But we can deny that evil is a thing, or substance, without saying that it isn't real. It is a lack in things. When good that should be there is missing from something, that is evil. After all, if I am missing a wart on my nose, that is not evil because the wart should not have been there in the first place. However, if a man lacks the ability to see, that is evil. Likewise, if a person lacks the kindness in his heart and respect for human life that should be there, then he may commit murder. Evil is, in reality, a parasite that cannot exist except as a hole in something that should be solid.

In some cases evil is more easily explained as a case of bad relationships. If I pick up a good dun, put in a good bullet, and point it at me good head, put my finger on the good trigger and give it a good pull... a bad relationship results. The things involved are not evil in themselves, but the relationship between the good things is definitely lacking something. In this case, the lack comes about because the things are not being used as they ought to be. Guns should not be used for indiscriminate killing, but are find for recreation (gun debate can go elsewhere). My head was not meant to be used for target practice. Similarly, there is nothing wrong with strong winds moving in a circle, but a bad relationship arises when the funnell of wind goes through a mobile home park. Bad relationships are bad because the relationship is lacking something, so my definition of evil still holds. Evil is a lack of something that should be there in the relationship between good things.

Here is a quote from Dr. Normal Geisler: "He [God} created the fact of freedoml we perform the acts of freedom. He made evil possible; men made evil actual".

7thangel

September 11th 2005, 05:51 PM

We can break down your premise like this:

1. God is the author of everything
2. Evil is something
3. Therefore, God is the author of evil.

A very old argument really, it has been around for much longer than any of us.

The first premire is true. So it appears that in order to deny the conclusion, we have to deny the reality of evil (time to become a pantheist). But we can deny that evil is a thing, or substance, without saying that it isn't real. It is a lack in things. When good that should be there is missing from something, that is evil. After all, if I am missing a wart on my nose, that is not evil because the wart should not have been there in the first place. However, if a man lacks the ability to see, that is evil. Likewise, if a person lacks the kindness in his heart and respect for human life that should be there, then he may commit murder. Evil is, in reality, a parasite that cannot exist except as a hole in something that should be solid.

In some cases evil is more easily explained as a case of bad relationships. If I pick up a good dun, put in a good bullet, and point it at me good head, put my finger on the good trigger and give it a good pull... a bad relationship results. The things involved are not evil in themselves, but the relationship between the good things is definitely lacking something. In this case, the lack comes about because the things are not being used as they ought to be. Guns should not be used for indiscriminate killing, but are find for recreation (gun debate can go elsewhere). My head was not meant to be used for target practice. Similarly, there is nothing wrong with strong winds moving in a circle, but a bad relationship arises when the funnell of wind goes through a mobile home park. Bad relationships are bad because the relationship is lacking something, so my definition of evil still holds. Evil is a lack of something that should be there in the relationship between good things.

Here is a quote from Dr. Normal Geisler: "He [God} created the fact of freedoml we perform the acts of freedom. He made evil possible; men made evil actual".

The argument holds that God caused the men who made evil actual.

Kenny

September 11th 2005, 06:49 PM

God is different since he knows all things. In your example, you are already subscribing that, like the doctor, there are external factors that affects God's actions unknown to Him.

I don't see where you are locating the disanalogy. In my example (and in the real life cases upon which the example is based), the doctor does know that the morphine will hasten the death of the patient.

BenK

September 11th 2005, 11:02 PM

If the argument in the OP has any independent force, then it must grant (for the sake of discussion) a compatibilist notion of freewill and moral responsibility. Otherwise, I have a rather easy way out. Sin entails moral culpability...

The OP simply argues that, granted determinism, God (the first cause) is morally responsible for all sin/evil. Even granting the premise that 'sin entails moral responsibility', the argument does not require any particular mortal agent to be morally responsible for the sin.

It seems that the counter-examples you present (ie. the Doctor, the Soldier etc.) are situations where an agent is presented with a choice of evils (ie. either hasten a patient's death or abandon that patient to agony), and must choose the lesser of the two. Now, it seems to me that it is evil for an agent to be presented with a lesser of two evils dilemma. If a terrorist takes a number of hostages, and then forces one to choose who dies first, we would not hold the victim who made the choice morally responsible, granted, but we would hold the terrorist responsible, even though he didn't make the choice.

Now, if these cases are actually analogous to God's own choice, it seems we are presuposing some pre-existent evil which presents God himself with an evil choice to make.

An infralapsarian Calvinist could say that God permitted Adam and Eve to exercise their compatibilist freedom and thereby sin...

Yes, but granted 'compatibilist freedom' (I assume you mean 'soft determinism?' I've read your thread on the definition of compatibilism I thought compatibilism only meant that freedom and moral responsibility were compatible, not that either obtains) we would also affirm that God himself caused them to choose what they chose. It always sounds strange to me to talk about God 'respecting' or 'permitting' what he made happen in the first place.

Who's making that assumption. If by "meticulous control" you mean that God is directly causally responsible for everything, I'm not.

Granted determinism, I don't see how there is any meaningful difference between the first cause 'directly' causing everything or 'indirectly' causing everything. To say that God did not cause every event that happens, he just made every event an inevitability seems a pendantic and desperate splitting of hairs; 'When I pulled the trigger I didn't cause his untimely death your honor, I just made it an inevitability.'

Strawman. God did not intend that the youth sin anymore than I did. God does have sovereign control over what the youth does in an ultimate sense (he could have stopped it, even as I could have stopped it) but he chose to permit it (even as I chose to permit it).

Again, I don't see what you can mean by 'permit' here. God caused the youth to do what he did. God made what the youth did inevitable. To talk of God 'permitting' the action makes it sound like the action was causally grounded in something other than God.

God "allows" those things which he does not intend, even though they are byproducts of his actions to bring about goods which He does intend. Yes, this is determinative, but not vague (we have all sorts of examples of this sort of thing in real life double effect moral dilemmas).

Surely you must have some sense that your theology requires ajustment when you start to talk about the 'unintentional byproducts of God's actions'.

BenK

September 11th 2005, 11:06 PM

Bad relationships are bad because the relationship is lacking something, so my definition of evil still holds. Evil is a lack of something that should be there in the relationship between good things.

Here is a quote from Dr. Normal Geisler: "He [God} created the fact of freedoml we perform the acts of freedom. He made evil possible; men made evil actual".

Mmm, I agree; all things are good, evil consists of wrong relationships between good things.

However, the Christian Determinist must hold that God causes good things to relate wrongly to one another; on that ground I reject christian determinism.

In other words, Christian Determinism holds not only that God made evil possible, it holds that God made evil inevitable.

7thangel

September 11th 2005, 11:14 PM

I don't see where you are locating the disanalogy. In my example (and in the real life cases upon which the example is based), the doctor does know that the morphine will hasten the death of the patient.

I read again your post, and I see that I fully misunderstood you. :blush:

basicbeliever

September 12th 2005, 02:10 AM

The argument holds that God caused the men who made evil actual.

Correct

Kenny

September 12th 2005, 02:50 AM

Surely you must have some sense that your theology requires ajustment when you start to talk about the 'unintentional byproducts of God's actions'.

No, not in the careful way I defined these terms. And, if the above entails a theology that requires adjustment, then the only theology I know of that doesn't require adjustment is a high supralapsarian Calvinism in which God intends everything without any distinctions or qualifications. Even given indeterminism, it is not plausible to deny that evil is in some sense a consequence of God's actions. If I create a bomb, for instance, and hook it up to some quantum indeterminate triggering mechanism and it happens to go off, then it is unreasonable to say that its going off was not a consequence of my actions. Likewise, if God creates free will agents, and they happen to do evil, then it is unreasonable to say that there is no sense in which their doing evil was a consequence of God's actions. Both of us want to say that it was an unintended (even if foreseen) consequence and that God is not morally implicated in the evil that was done.

It may be several days before I have time for a fuller response …

BenK

September 12th 2005, 04:06 AM

I'll wait till then before further comment.

Colossians

September 12th 2005, 04:31 AM

It seems reasonable to say that if A wholly causes B, and B wholly causes C, then A causes C. For instance, if I take a hose, turn on the tap, and point it at my little brother, it seems reasonable to say that 'Ben wet Sam'.
Going well here.

Now, if we hold that every event follows as nescessary consequence from prior causes, and those causes themselves follow nescessarily from earlier causes, it follows that all things are caused, in their entirety, by the first cause or causes.
Well also.

Which is to say that the Christian determinist must hold that God is the cause of all things. Now, if God is the cause of all things, then we must say either that there is no sin, or that God is the cause of sin.
Yep, logic is still strong here.

Now, Jesus ..condemns any who would cause sin: Matthew 18:6 'But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.'
No probs here, just a factual item.

It seems that we must hold both that there is sin in the world, and that righteousness (and hence the Father, who is the archetype of righteousness) is incompatible with causing sin.
Oopsy daisy!!This is where you go wrong. Here you reveal that your logic which you have not shown to be wrong by any mechanism, was only ostensible: you never intended to stay with it, but rather intended to sweep it aside by your premise based upon an incomplete understanding of the purpose and nature of sin.

God's dislike of sin, does not mean His non-creation of it.
Sin was simply necessary to make His Son learn obedience. God was the discipliner ("it pleased Him to bruise Him") and thus God was the creator of sin. For it is sin which disciplined Christ.
The little one who is caused to sin by an evil one, is simply an Ado Domino instantiation of such discipline for Christ, in His Body which is the church.
You need to read my response to the "Colossians: Is God double minded?" thread.

But if we recognize that there is something (ie. sin) that is not caused by the first cause, we are by definition rejection determinism.
Redudant inlight of what has been pointed out above.

If we reject determinism, it seems that there are traditionally two options avaliable to us - either that there is a sort of random element in creation, or that people have free will in the libertarian sense - and the idea of genuine chaos in a theistic universe seems inappropriate. This is why I think Christianity nescessarily implies LFW.
This is again redundant, and further evidence of your loaded thinking where you are illegally dismissing a valid logic of cause and effect just because you don't like the conclusion. That is not proper reasoning Mr Ben.
Proper reasoning takes any line of thinking on its own merits, and does not dismiss such until it has been shown to be internally inconsistent.
All you have done is make a pretended argument for cause and effect, and then dismissed it even though in itself it contains no error. Thus you induce rather than deduce, and thus your reasoning is invalid. You have a preconceived answer, and are here reverse-gearing the proof to fit it.

BenK

September 12th 2005, 05:08 AM

So, If I understand correctly, Jesus didn't die to save us from our sins so much as God causes us to sin so that Jesus must die?

Pereynol of Sheer Dread

September 12th 2005, 11:46 AM

Perhaps the question arises, but (as I pointed out the Sheepdog) it is a question that is independent of the objection in the OP.

I don't think so; the OP spoke of God as the cause of all things. That being the case, just how does morality in general (including all human moral choices and the consequences of those choices, which are said to be determined by God as part of his world prior to creation itself) escape the greater matrix of determinism?

Given theological soft determinism (i.e., theism + compatibilism + determinism), morality is not outside the bounds of what God ultimately controls.

I find your responses brief and selective here. But I note that you admit God "controls" morality.

Who's making that assumption. If by "meticulous control" you mean that God is directly causally responsible for everything, I'm not.

I suppose this needs some elaboration. Are you simply asserting that secondary causes (including human compatibilistic choices) put God at sufficient remove from moral evil such that he's not, in your words, "directly causally responsible for everything?" What, exactly, is gained for Christian determinism by such an assertion?

But, in the scenario I gave, I did not perform the action with intention that the youth sin. I foresaw that it would happen as a byproduct of my action, but it was not the intended result (the result I was trying to bring about) of my action.

And I granted as much, if you'll re-read my post. But can we agree that, if you did possess the intention that the young man sin, you would share the responsibility for what he did?

Not in the version of infralapsarian Calvinism that I adopt. God does not intend that his creatures sin, though he knows they will and chooses to permit them to.

How does "the version of infralapsarianism you adopt" exclude the divine intention that his creatures sin? Does God intend any of his creatures' sins? Perhaps he intends only a few? Did God intend Pharoah to sin in Exodus, for example? The way you use foreknowledge theoretically seems very close to Arminianism.

No. Ultimately, on determinism, creaturely sin does result as a consequence of God's actions, but it need only do so as a foreseen byproduct rather than as an intended consequence.

Was Adam's fall and all that it brought forth merely a "forseen byproduct?" Was "original sin" a "forseen byproduct?" Most contemporary infralapsarians would say "No."

I just did that as a throw away plausible explanation. Maybe I'm psychic or maybe I just know Jim's character really well. In truth, we foresee the consequences of our actions all the time simply based on our knowledge of how the world works.

Yet we are talking here about God---not about men---in this thread. Your analogy concerns a hypothetical scenario concering how we limited human beings might interact, but given God's comparative sovereign power, I'd say the corespondances between the human and divine become strained.

Strawman. God did not intend that the youth sin anymore than I did. God does have sovereign control over what the youth does in an ultimate sense (he could have stopped it, even as I could have stopped it) but he chose to permit it (even as I chose to permit it).

I don't think your characterization of God's sovereignty here is very deterministic. What separates you from an Arminian?

Is the set of things God controls (or determines) identical to the set of things he intends? In what sense do they differ in your estimation?

How do you define divine permission causally? After all, one can "permit" things that are good or evil, and secondary causality likewise concerns both good and evil. You seem to be using "to permit" exclusively to characterize God's causal relation to evil, when, in actuality, everything that exists, both good and evil, obtains only by his divine permission, given determinism. Does your language here not suggest an artificially limited moral relation between God and evil that fails to take proper account of the wider causal relation? Does the set of things God permits humans to do with their CFW morally speaking differ from the set of things God intends them to do causally speaking? Is it only man's evil deeds that are a "forseen byproduct" or are man's good deeds a "forseen byproduct" as well?

Given the circumstance that I found myself in, the youth's sin was necessary to the achievement of a greater good (namely Jim's transformed life); it just wasn't a means to that good. Of course, the analogy is intended to suggest that God permits evils that are necessary for the achievement of some greater goods (on a much grander scale of complexity and over a much greater span of foreseen time), but God does not intentionally bring those evils about as a means to some greater good.

But, does God intentionally bring about evil at all---whether as a means or a "byproduct?" (Maybe God sometimes brings about evil as a means to his ends?) Do any of these evils come about unintentionally? And what is the moral significance of your distinction between means and byproduct with respect to God?

I would say this specter is, just that, a specter – a shadow of our own ignorance and inability to foresee all ends, not a reality.

That would depend upon how you answer the above question.

Ultimately, it’s the demonstration of the infinite riches of God's love, mercy and compassion through his saving the elect and through his renewal of all things – with all kinds of lesser goods along the way (like respecting liberty and demonstrating justice).

While this is quite true, it sidesteps the issues we are discussing.

Our responsibility in the situation is to relieve suffering, though God may have permitted it in the first place for the sake of greater goods.

If one pushes this too far, one arrives at euthanasia. But again, how do you know that the relief of suffering is a "greater good" when weighed against lengthened life? How do you make that judgment?

Yeah, that's a reason why I'm not a supralapsarian Calvinist, but what does that have to do with Christian determinism per say (which, by itself, does not even entail Calvinism of any variety).

Calvinism is the most prominant form of Christian determinism around, so it makes sense to discuss it here. And it would be helpful if you'd spell out just how you think infralapsarianism (your specific variety of it) becomes morally superior to supralapsarianism. That's where we need to go next.

God "allows" those things which he does not intend, even though they are byproducts of his actions to bring about goods which He does intend. Yes, this is determinative, but not vague (we have all sorts of examples of this sort of thing in real life double effect moral dilemmas).

As I said, I think the distance between the divine and human makes your conclusions dubious. How does what God allows relate to what he intends?

I hope you are not intending to imply here that I have not thought through my own position simply because I do not see things the way you do.

I was merely being lighthearted. And I believe that, no matter how carefully our little human minds "think through our positions," we remain only children who gaze curiously into an infinity we cannot fathom. But we can think together;we can correct one another and refine one another's thoughts----hopefully in a friendly way....

Colossians

September 13th 2005, 02:33 AM

Benk,

So, If I understand correctly, Jesus didn't die to save us from our sins so much as God causes us to sin so that Jesus must die?
Yes. This is because of his urge to demonstrate His love within the Godhead.
I trust you have read my post which I referred you to on the thread concerning whether God is double minded. I have hopefully explained it systematically there.

seer

September 13th 2005, 08:08 AM

Calvinism is the most prominant form of Christian determinism around, so it makes sense to discuss it here. And it would be helpful if you'd spell out just how you think infralapsarianism (your specific variety of it) becomes morally superior to supralapsarianism. That's where we need to go next.

I think Calvinism logically leads to the "supra" position. And I think it is much more honest to hold that view instead of fudging through the "infra" position...

Kenny

September 13th 2005, 10:57 AM

I think Calvinism logically leads to the "supra" position.

How so?

Kenny

September 13th 2005, 01:36 PM

I don't think so; the OP spoke of God as the cause of all things. That being the case, just how does morality in general (including all human moral choices and the consequences of those choices, which are said to be determined by God as part of his world prior to creation itself) escape the greater matrix of determinism?

By “morality” do you mean moral acts or moral rules. If the former, then morality doesn’t escape the matrix of determinism (compatibilism, which must be assumed for the sake of this discussion, entails it doesn’t need to). If the later, then I suppose it depends on one’s view of the origin of moral rules. I think moral rules are necessary truths, and since no one can be causally responsible for a necessary truth, God is not responsible for them. Of course, that requires a reading of “all things” in the OP in a restrictive sense (all contingent things), but that seems like a natural reading in any case. But theories of the origins of moral rules seems off topic here.

I find your responses brief and selective here. But I note that you admit God "controls" morality.

Vague questions receive vague answers. God “controls” all moral actions in the sense that God can choose to permit them or prevent them.

I suppose this needs some elaboration. Are you simply asserting that secondary causes (including human compatibilistic choices) put God at sufficient remove from moral evil such that he's not, in your words, "directly causally responsible for everything?"

God directly causes anything God brings about apart from natural causes (so if God makes an electron in my brain wiggle without its wiggling being caused by some other natural event, God has directly caused its wiggling). God indirectly causes (assuming we have a case in which causality is transitive – that may be all cases) something if he brings it about through natural causal events (e.g., he makes one electron in my brain wiggle by making another electron wiggle nearby).

What, exactly, is gained for Christian determinism by such an assertion?

The application of double effect style moral evaluations of God’s acts, the possibility of distinguishing between what God intends to cause and what God merely causes simpliciter.

God only directly causes moral goods. God may cause moral evils indirectly, but they are merely unintentional (though foreseen) causal byproducts of God’s actions.

And I granted as much, if you'll re-read my post. But can we agree that, if you did possess the intention that the young man sin, you would share the responsibility for what he did?

Yes.

How does "the version of infralapsarianism you adopt" exclude the divine intention that his creatures sin?

God intentionally creates Adam and Eve (an intrinsically good act). God intentionally presents Adam and Eve with a moral choice (another intrinsically good act). God intentionally refrains from interfering with Adam’s and Eve’s moral agency (also a good act). Adam and Eve sin as a consequence of God’s actions, but God merely foresaw that this would result from the good actions he intentionally performed and did not intend this consequence.

Does God intend any of his creatures' sins?

No.

Perhaps he intends only a few? Did God intend Pharoah to sin in Exodus, for example? The way you use foreknowledge theoretically seems very close to Arminianism.

You’re right. I would understand the Pharaoh example in the same way an Arminian does (God only “intended” Pharaoh’s sin in the weak sense that he chose to permit it).

Was Adam's fall and all that it brought forth merely a "forseen byproduct?"

Not all it brought forth, since it brought redemption and redemption was an intentional divine act.

Was "original sin" a "forseen byproduct?" Most contemporary infralapsarians would say "No."

I say “Yes.”

Yet we are talking here about God---not about men---in this thread. Your analogy concerns a hypothetical scenario concering how we limited human beings might interact, but given God's comparative sovereign power, I'd say the corespondances between the human and divine become strained.

Locate the relevant disanalogy. It’s not enough to say God is different from us (of course!), but that doesn’t mean the analogy does not line up in the relevant areas.

I don't think your characterization of God's sovereignty here is very deterministic. What separates you from an Arminian?

In a lot of areas, not much. I don’t see why an Arminian couldn’t hold to a version of soft determinism similar to the one I hold (likewise, there are Calvinists – e.g., congruists, who believe in libertarian free will).

Is the set of things God controls (or determines) identical to the set of things he intends? In what sense do they differ in your estimation?

They differ via the double effect distinctions I have already laid out.

How do you define divine permission causally?

Permission has both a causal and an intentional component. An agent permits an event if she could stop it but does not (the causal component), but in so refraining she does not intend for that event to come about (the intentional component). E.g., by going to a movie rather than donating that money to World Vision, I may permit someone to starve, but I do not intend for someone to starve.

After all, one can "permit" things that are good or evil, and secondary causality likewise concerns both good and evil. You seem to be using "to permit" exclusively to characterize God's causal relation to evil, when, in actuality, everything that exists, both good and evil, obtains only by his divine permission, given determinism.

The way I’m using “permit,” God permits all kinds of events, good ones, bad ones, non-moral ones. God has created a world distinct from Himself, and granted it its own causal integrity.

Does the set of things God permits humans to do with their CFW morally speaking differ from the set of things God intends them to do causally speaking?

Yes.

Is it only man's evil deeds that are a "forseen byproduct" or are man's good deeds a "forseen byproduct" as well?

That depends on other considerations concerning sin and soteriology. If good deeds are defined as meritorious deeds (such that they include facts about the intentions of those who do them), I say no, because I don’t think (given the fall) that people can do meritorious good acts without God’s intentionally giving them the grace to do so. If by good deeds you mean simply inherently good acts (regardless of the intentions of those who do them), then, yes, some of these likely are.

But, does God intentionally bring about evil at all---whether as a means or a "byproduct?"

No.

Do any of these evils come about unintentionally?

In the strict way I have defined “intentionally,” all of them do (God never intentionally brings about evil).

And what is the moral significance of your distinction between means and byproduct with respect to God?

The same as it is in double effect cases for humans.

If one pushes this too far, one arrives at euthanasia.

No, because in the background we have a rule that we may never intentionally kill an (innocent) person. That’s why we bother with double effect reasoning to begin with. Double effect reasoning is indispensable to medical ethics (in which Doctors often have to make choices like the one I described) unless we give in to full blown utilitarianism.

But again, how do you know that the relief of suffering is a "greater good" when weighed against lengthened life? How do you make that judgment?

We make it as best we can; given the facts we have.

Calvinism is the most prominant form of Christian determinism around, so it makes sense to discuss it here.

Some Calvinists are not determinists and some Armninians are, so I don’t think a discussion of Calvinism itself is on topic.

And it would be helpful if you'd spell out just how you think infralapsarianism (your specific variety of it) becomes morally superior to supralapsarianism. That's where we need to go next.

Unlike the supralapsarian, I do not believe God intentionally brings about evil as a means to the good, and so I avoid turning God into a utilitarian.

As I said, I think the distance between the divine and human makes your conclusions dubious.

Not until you locate a relevant disanalogy.

And I believe that, no matter how carefully our little human minds "think through our positions," we remain only children who gaze curiously into an infinity we cannot fathom.

Agreed.

Kenny

September 13th 2005, 04:25 PM

The OP simply argues that, granted determinism, God (the first cause) is morally responsible for all sin/evil. Even granting the premise that 'sin entails moral responsibility', the argument does not require any particular mortal agent to be morally responsible for the sin.

This isn’t your original setup. Your original setup quoted verses about human sin and about causing humans to sin. On the above construal, I could simply deny that there is any moral evil in the world (of course, I can’t do that as a Christian, but I can when it comes to the “easy way out” I spoke of before insofar as I can show there’s no independent problem here unless compatibilism is assumed for the sake of discussion). There may be suffering and the like, but suffering alone does not entail moral evil. On any plausible account of things it would seem that some of God’s actions have causally (even deterministically) produced suffering in the world without the intermediate actions of other moral beings (e.g., animal suffering, natural disasters). To deal with those sorts of scenarios, we need to develope a natural theodicy, but that’s every Christian’s problem, not just the Christian determinist’s.

It seems that the counter-examples you present (ie. the Doctor, the Soldier etc.) are situations where an agent is presented with a choice of evils (ie. either hasten a patient's death or abandon that patient to agony), and must choose the lesser of the two.

That’s an odd way to construe the example. “Abandoning” the patient to agony is not a positive action in the same way administering morphine is, and giving a medication to relieve suffering is itself a good thing to do in any case, not just an avoidance of evil. It is a good (relieving suffering) that the doctor intends to accomplish by administering the morphine, and a byproduct of the doctor’s action is a morally negative consequence (a shortened life for the patient) which itself is not a means to the good end the doctor intends.

Now, it seems to me that it is evil for an agent to be presented with a lesser of two evils dilemma.
…
Now, if these cases are actually analogous to God's own choice, it seems we are presuposing some pre-existent evil which presents God himself with an evil choice to make.

Some sets of goods may logically entail the existence of some evils. In which case, God cannot actualize those sets of goods without actualizing the evils as well. So God may be presented with the “moral dilemma” of refraining from doing some good or allowing some evil to come into being as a necessary consequence of doing that good. It seems odd to say that a logically necessary truth is itself an evil.

Yes, but granted 'compatibilist freedom' (I assume you mean 'soft determinism?' I've read your thread on the definition of compatibilism I thought compatibilism only meant that freedom and moral responsibility were compatible, not that either obtains)

I just mean they had freedom of a significant sort that is compatible with determinism (whether determinism is true or not – but of course here we are assuming it is).

we would also affirm that God himself caused them to choose what they chose.

Caused, yes. Intended, no.

It always sounds strange to me to talk about God 'respecting' or 'permitting' what he made happen in the first place.

Perhaps, but I think we can make reasonable sense out of it from the double effect examples. If you don’t like the phrase ‘permit’ in this context then just substitute ‘foresaw but did not intentionally cause.’

Granted determinism, I don't see how there is any meaningful difference between the first cause 'directly' causing everything or 'indirectly' causing everything.

See my most recent post. Direct causation is just causation that is not mediated through other natural causes.

To say that God did not cause every event that happens, he just made every event an inevitability seems a pendantic and desperate splitting of hairs;

I don’t say that. If causality is always transitive (as it may be), then God did cause everything. That doesn’t mean he intended everything.

'When I pulled the trigger I didn't cause his untimely death your honor, I just made it an inevitability.'

If you intended to cause his death through your actions, you are guilty of a moral wrong. Causing someone’s death (even an innocent person’s death) in and of itself is not always a moral wrong even if one foresees this as a result of one’s actions, provided that one causes the death unintentionally (e.g., administering wide scale vaccinations with a small risk of death, administering morphine to a terminal patient, some actions in just wars, in which civilians are not targeted, but which nonetheless result in civilian deaths).

Again, I don't see what you can mean by 'permit' here. God caused the youth to do what he did.

I also caused the youth to do what he did, but I think it’s reasonable to say that I did not intend the youth to do what he did and therefore I think there is a reasonable sense in which I merely permitted the youth to do what he did.

God made what the youth did inevitable.

So did I.

To talk of God 'permitting' the action makes it sound like the action was causally grounded in something other than God.

It merely acknowledges that God is not the only causal factor involved.

Pereynol of Sheer Dread

September 14th 2005, 11:28 AM

By “morality” do you mean moral acts or moral rules. If the former, then morality doesn’t escape the matrix of determinism (compatibilism, which must be assumed for the sake of this discussion, entails it doesn’t need to). If the later, then I suppose it depends on one’s view of the origin of moral rules. I think moral rules are necessary truths, and since no one can be causally responsible for a necessary truth, God is not responsible for them. Of course, that requires a reading of “all things” in the OP in a restrictive sense (all contingent things), but that seems like a natural reading in any case. But theories of the origins of moral rules seems off topic here.

I mean both moral acts and rules. You affirm that moral acts don't escape the matrix of determinism. As to rules, well, if they are necessary truths, one would think they find their origin in the character of God (not as a set of standards existing outside him such that they have independence or such that he is subject to them). That being the case, they are in some wise determined by him---rather than his judgments being determined by them.

Vague questions receive vague answers. God “controls” all moral actions in the sense that God can choose to permit them or prevent them.

But he also set the world process in motion that makes them necessary, and he set forth the whole system of moral rules governing them, including the consequences and penalties which apply when the rules are broken.

God directly causes anything God brings about apart from natural causes (so if God makes an electron in my brain wiggle without its wiggling being caused by some other natural event, God has directly caused its wiggling). God indirectly causes (assuming we have a case in which causality is transitive – that may be all cases) something if he brings it about through natural causal events (e.g., he makes one electron in my brain wiggle by making another electron wiggle nearby).

God's involvement in causality is more extensive than mere temporal sequence; it also has a simultaneous aspect. God doesn't just set independent systems in motion and let the machine run; he also maintains the machinery in all its complexity, his power holding the universe together.

The application of double effect style moral evaluations of God’s acts, the possibility of distinguishing between what God intends to cause and what God merely causes simpliciter.

These evaluations alone are not sufficient; one also needs to assume other things, as you do---and, as Arminians do---like a foreknowledge that sometimes isn't bound by God's direct, deterministic intentions, as well as a power in man that operates apart from God's intentions. This, however, should be recognized as a departure from historic and conventional forms of Calvinism and "Christian determinism."

God only directly causes moral goods. God may cause moral evils indirectly, but they are merely unintentional (though foreseen) causal byproducts of God’s actions.

How does this work?

God intentionally creates Adam and Eve (an intrinsically good act). God intentionally presents Adam and Eve with a moral choice (another intrinsically good act). God intentionally refrains from interfering with Adam’s and Eve’s moral agency (also a good act). Adam and Eve sin as a consequence of God’s actions, but God merely foresaw that this would result from the good actions he intentionally performed and did not intend this consequence.

Again, this is remarkably similar to Arminianism. It also bears some affinity to earlier forms of infralapsarianism which granted pre-fallen Adam LFW or something like it (though none of Adam's children had this power), along with God's real "permission" allowing Adam's agent causality to do its thing apart from God's moral intentions. This kind of infralapsarianism largely died as a result of its privileging foreknowledge over God's decree. Latter infralapsarianism affirmed that what God ordained with respect to Adam's fall was in no way dependent upon what God foreknew. (I'm sure you're aware of this, but I'm stating it for the benefit of those who are not.)

But you affirm compatibilism, even with respect to pre-fallen Adam (which the early infralapsarians didn't). You do employ foreknowledge the way they did and Arminians do, however. And you seem to espouse a kind of agent causality that excludes LFW. Given this, there must be some sort of power in man that allows him to make moral choices apart from what God intends other than LFW, and this power must be couched somehow in compatibilism. One would think you would have a specific anthropology in mind. I think of John Feinberg, who seems to "locate" something like this "between" the nature and the will in a variant of Jonathan Edwards' essentialism. The nature may operate in such a way that human intentionality is in some wise beyond divine control, thus supplying a viable theodicy for Calvinism---and perhaps for "Christian determinism" in other manifestations.

Yet, I note that such innovations are not definitive of either Calvinism or "Christian determinism." And the even a compatibilistic agent causality might qualify in BenK's eyes as being outside the bounds of what he means by "Christian determinism." Indeed, what you propose might loosely conformto what he means by a "random element" at work in creation as an alternative to LFW, even though your solution isn't random or indeterministic, properly speaking. But I leave that judgment to him.

You’re right. I would understand the Pharaoh example in the same way an Arminian does (God only “intended” Pharaoh’s sin in the weak sense that he chose to permit it).

Good enough.

Locate the relevant disanalogy. It’s not enough to say God is different from us (of course!), but that doesn’t mean the analogy does not line up in the relevant areas.

Given your modifications to Calvinism, the disanalogy may not apply. In historic Calvinism, though, it would, since God is omniscient and effectively intends everything that comes to pass in the moral sense. (What one means by "intentionality" may become pertinient here, depending upon one's phenomenlogical approach---something to consider.)

In a lot of areas, not much. I don’t see why an Arminian couldn’t hold to a version of soft determinism similar to the one I hold (likewise, there are Calvinists – e.g., congruists, who believe in libertarian free will).

In many ways, our views are similar. But I do hold to LFW---YET, I wouldn't find compatibilism alone so objectionable, particularly if one views it as you do. And both compatibilism and LFW contain vagueries, being perhaps indistinguishable on both an empirical and experiential level.

Again, I don't know that you're really a "Calvinist" or a "Christian determinist" in the sense that BenK has in mind. I think of Plantinga, who is a self-avowed supralapsarian and holds to LFW. There are many who call themselves "Calvinists" and "Arminians" who are nevertheless NOT recognized as such by mainstream sectarians. The same could hold true for "determinism," depending upon how one defines it. There is a sort of determinism, even in Arminianism, but it isn't so obvious as to be recognized or openly espoused such that the system deserves that label.

The way I’m using “permit,” God permits all kinds of events, good ones, bad ones, non-moral ones. God has created a world distinct from Himself, and granted it its own causal integrity.

I of course agree, as would most Christians, but I also think your overall approach contains significant departures from Calvinism as it is usually presented.

No, because in the background we have a rule that we may never intentionally kill an (innocent) person.

My point concerns this "background" rule. Have we apprehended it correctly, given that moral rules are "necessary truths?" And if our act to relieve pain also involves death, howis the rule applied with respect to time? How much time is it permissible to cut short a life for the relief of pain? Moreover, we privilege one moral good over another---even at the other's expense, and it may well be that we have erred in our judgment. But, this has now become but a quibble in our greater discussion, IMHO.

That’s why we bother with double effect reasoning to begin with. Double effect reasoning is indispensable to medical ethics (in which Doctors often have to make choices like the one I described) unless we give in to full blown utilitarianism.

I don't dispute that. Yet one's metaethical stance might alter the degree of confidence we place upon such considerations, as might our assumptions about other things and our worldview in general.

We make it as best we can; given the facts we have.

Yes, and we do a lot of things the best we can. We think the best we can, and we theologize the best we can....

Some Calvinists are not determinists and some Armninians are, so I don’t think a discussion of Calvinism itself is on topic.

I'll leave that question to BenK. But I'm glad we've discussed what we have discussed. After all, if one confines the thread to overly generic topics---like an artificially wide category of "Christian determinism," for instance, then one will not be able to discuss the relevant particulars that make our theologies live and breathe.

Unlike the supralapsarian, I do not believe God intentionally brings about evil as a means to the good, and so I avoid turning God into a utilitarian.

But I wouldn't think God's allowing some evil as a means to a greater good in itself reduces to rank utilitarianism....