Post by Dr James Ach on May 17, 2015 23:39:23 GMT 3
I am going to expound on this a lot more later (and I've touched on it briefly in another article on our main website at Do Right Christians, which see, "Would God Have Reprobated Perfect Human Beings?), but there's a fundamental error and oversight among Calvinists that ask the question, "Why did God create knowing that we would sin?". Calvinists often think this question proves God determines all things and that events are known to God because He determines them. The cop-out question is a 'hail mary' defense to make the opponent's theology look just as bad as theirs: In other words, if we Calvinists can't explain how God brings all things to pass, yet we can't adequately explain how that avoids making Him the author of sin, well then your theology is bad, too, because why would God create us in the first place if He knew we would sin?
The problem with this question is that it is ONE SIDED. It recognizes or admits to ONLY ONE POSSIBILITY. Now, if God created us knowing that we COULD ONLY do what was morally wrong, then we would have a problem. Now I won't go into the other issues here of what God could have or would have, but here's the most simple answer to this question: because God knew that we could have ALSO chosen NOT to sin. When Calvinists ask this "aha gotcha" question, they ignore THAT PART of the equation, and give the idea that God created man with ONLY the option to sin. It is the libertarian free will explanation of theodicy that includes both options (the ability to sin and NOT sin) that proves God is not the author and creator of sin. That explanation doesn't work with a deterministic/compatibilist view.
More later.
The problem with this question is that it is ONE SIDED. It recognizes or admits to ONLY ONE POSSIBILITY. Now, if God created us knowing that we COULD ONLY do what was morally wrong, then we would have a problem. Now I won't go into the other issues here of what God could have or would have, but here's the most simple answer to this question: because God knew that we could have ALSO chosen NOT to sin. When Calvinists ask this "aha gotcha" question, they ignore THAT PART of the equation, and give the idea that God created man with ONLY the option to sin. It is the libertarian free will explanation of theodicy that includes both options (the ability to sin and NOT sin) that proves God is not the author and creator of sin. That explanation doesn't work with a deterministic/compatibilist view.
More later.