Rarely do I intend to use this blog to engage in debate; I see it rather as an opportunity to express my own theological views (or often just musings) and let others debate them. However, I’m puzzled about some of the outstpoken Calvinists’ tendency to ignore a major issue I raised with regard to free will.
To my Calvinist interlocutors I ask: If free will as uncaused choice is logically incoherent, what about God’s decision to create the world? I asked this earlier, but I haven’t seen any response. What caused God to decide to create the world? Don’t say “his wisdom,” because that doesn’t articulate a cause. (If I said that a sinner’s grace-enabled decision to accept the gospel was caused by his wisdom I’m sure you would reject that as an unsatisfactory causal account.)
Some time ago John Frame and I had an e-mail discussion about this. As I recall (I kept the e-mails for a long time but eventually lost them) he finally admitted that it is not correct to say that undetermined free will decision and choice (incompatibilist free will exercised) is strictly logically incoherent IF one affirms (as he does) that God makes such decisions and choices. IF one denies it, then, of course, the world’s existence is necessary and in that case it is not of grace (i.e., pure gift) and becomes an extension of God’s own existence which borders on panentheism (a charge rightly leveled, I judge, against Jonathan Edwards’ view of God and the world).
The Calvinist (or other theist) who wishes to argue that even situated, limited free will (moderate or soft libertarian free will) is logically incoherent because it amounts to belief in an uncaused effect (as John Feinberg quoted here seems say) MUST then say that even God cannot have that kind of free will. The result is what I articulated above. But I have found very few Calvinists who will admit the consequences of their argument against free will for God himself.
What I have trouble understanding is why open theism is so bad compared with affirmation that God does not have free will? Why are evangelicals so exercised over open theism but not over the implicit denial of God’s free will which makes the world necessary and thus not a realm of God’s grace? That would have been considered a heresy by the early church fathers.
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