Philosophy

Does Predestination Make the Problem of Evil More Pressing?

/ Apologetics, Philosophy, Theology

[A short article originally written for the ILIAD Forum.]

This is a tough question to answer in a short space, not least because it ties together two complex and controversial topics! Let’s begin with some basic definitions. The problem of evil refers to the challenge of reconciling the reality of evil with the existence of an all-good, all-powerful God. If God is all-good, presumably he would want to prevent all evil. If God is all-powerful, presumably he would be able to prevent all evil. How then can God and evil co-exist?

As many Christian philosophers have pointed out, the apparent logical conflict can be resolved once we recognize that God could have morally sufficient reasons for permitting an evil; for example, if permitting that evil were necessary to accomplish some greater good. Thus, there is no inherent conflict between the existence of an all-good, all-powerful God and the existence of evil. This insight points us in the direction of a greater-good theodicy: a more detailed explanation of why God permits various evils within the world, whether natural evils (such as diseases and earthquakes) or moral evils (such as murders and rapes). Christian thinkers have developed and defended a variety of greater-good theodicies, but it’s enough for our purposes here to recognize that such theodicies exist and many of them are complementary (i.e., they can be combined to address a wide range of different evils).

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The ILIAD Forum

/ Apologetics, Philosophy, Theology

Readers of this blog may be interested to know about a new online resource, the ILIAD Forum. (‘ILIAD’ stands for Ivy League Informational Apologetics Database.) According to the website:

The Iliad Forum was founded in 2021 by undergraduate students from all across the Ivy League, who wanted to provide an online, accessible, and rigorous database of answers to common questions about the nature and commitments of orthodox Christianity. The Iliad Forum site is intended to be a resource for both Christians and non-Christians, where answers to deep and complex questions and objections can be found almost immediately. Many of the questions that we deal with are tailored to the specific interests of undergraduate students at Ivy League universities. However, we also deal with broader topics, such as Christianity in the job market, philosophical apologetics, and Biblical history.

The website already contains dozens of short articles in answer to a wide range of questions. The articles are written by scholars with expertise in the relevant area, including Vern Poythress, William Edgar, and Scott Oliphint.

I was invited to submit answers to five questions in the area of philosophical theology and apologetics. I gather the articles will be posted on the website at intervals, so I’ll post the links here as they become available.

On Malpass’s Dilemma

/ Apologetics, Philosophy / 2 Comments

Alex Malpass has offered one of the most thoughtful critiques of the argument for God from logic in his 2020 Sophia article, “Problems for the Argument from Logic: a Response to the Lord of Non-Contradiction.” Here’s the abstract:

James Anderson and Greg Welty have resurrected an argument for God’s existence (Anderson and Welty 2011), which we will call the argument from logic. We present three lines of response against the argument, involving the notion of necessity involved, the notion of intentionality involved, and then we pose a dilemma for divine conceptualism. We conclude that the argument faces substantial problems.

In this post I will share some thoughts on the third of these “three lines of response,” which I take to be the most interesting point of criticism.1 (Note: I’m speaking only for myself in this post; Greg can speak for himself!)

The argument for God from logic involves defending a version of divine conceptualism (or better, “theistic conceptual realism,” to use Welty’s terminology) according to which the laws of logic, as necessarily true propositions, are ultimately just divine thoughts. Strictly speaking, the argument can be run from any necessary truths, not just the laws of logic, but the laws of logic serve as familiar and convenient examples of necessary truths.2

Horns of a DilemmaIn the last major section of his article, Malpass presents a “dilemma for divine conceptualism.” Rather than quote him at length, I will try to summarize the thrust of his challenge. He begins by observing that parts of our argument appeal to a distinction between “thoughts and the content of those thoughts” (see, e.g., footnote 31 of our 2011 article). But then he points out that this seems to raise a problem for the claim that propositions are divine thoughts. In the first place, he argues, “a thought cannot be the content of itself” (p. 251). The idea that a thought can be its own content is either flat-out incoherent or leads to a “vicious infinite regress” (p. 252). To avoid this, the divine conceptualist has only two options:

  1. A divine thought has no content.
  2. A divine thought has content distinct from the thought itself.

Option 1 looks like a non-starter. If divine thoughts have no content, they can’t be about anything. Isn’t it obvious that God’s thought that 2+2=4 is contentful? Doesn’t it have some content that distinguishes it from other thoughts (e.g., God’s thought that Socrates is mortal)?

Option 2, however, doesn’t look any more promising. Recall our contention that the laws of logic, as necessarily true propositions, are a special category of divine thoughts. Let LL be some proposition that expresses a law of logic (e.g., the law of non-contradiction). LL is ultimately just a divine thought, so we argue. But according to option 2, the content of LL is something other than LL itself. So what could it be? Presumably that content would have to be propositional or intentional in nature. But it couldn’t be a proposition other than LL, for two reasons. First, that would mean LL has the wrong content; the divine thought would be about something other than what it’s supposed to be about. To use Malpass’s example, LL couldn’t have the Pythagorean theorem as its content; it’s supposed to be about the law of non-contradiction, not a geometrical theorem. The second reason is that if the content of LL is a proposition, but not LL itself, then it must be some other proposition, and therefore (given divine conceptualism) some other divine thought. Call that other divine thought LL*. But then the same considerations will apply to the content of LL*, in which case we’re on the road to a never-ending regress of divine thoughts containing divine thoughts, their content being endlessly deferred.

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  1. This criticism also came up in our conversation last September hosted by Parker Settecase. ↩
  2. As we note in our paper, someone might take the laws of logic to be something other than propositions (e.g., relations), but in that case we can simply restate the argument in terms of necessarily true propositions about the laws of logic. ↩

A Brief(ish) Response to Richard Muller

/ Philosophy, Theology

Grace and FreedomIn 2017, Paul Manata and I co-authored an article published in the Journal of Reformed Theology that offered a critique of two versions of “libertarian Calvinism” proposed by Oliver Crisp. Taking the Westminster Confession of Faith as representative of the Reformed tradition, we argued (1) that the WCF affirms theological determinism (and thus rules out libertarian free will for creatures), and (2) that even if the WCF doesn’t affirm theological determinism, it makes other assertions that conflict with the idea that we have libertarian free will (LFW). In our introduction we made mention in passing to the work of Richard Muller on the Reformed tradition and views on human freedom.

In his most recent book, Grace and Freedom: William Perkins and the Early Modern Reformed Understanding of Free Choice and Divine Grace, Prof. Muller cites our article a couple of times. On both occasions he makes critical comments to which I would like to respond. (Note: I am speaking only for myself in this post, not for my co-author.)

On pages 3-4, Muller writes regarding the debate over whether the Reformed tradition represents a compatibilist view of human freedom:

One line of argument assumes that an identification of the Reformed as compatibilist is mistaken—as would be an interpretation of Reformed theology as libertarian. This reading of the historical materials posits a significant continuity between the early modern Reformed writers and the argumentation of medieval scholastics, at the same time that it identifies a shift of argumentation toward philosophical determinism in eighteenth-century writers like Jonathan Edwards. A line of counter-argument views the Reformed tradition as unequivocally compatibilist and tends to assimilate the scholastic argumentation of a theologian like Francis Turretin to the compatibilism of Jonathan  Edwards. (Muller, pp. 3-4)

A footnote attached to the last sentence cites several articles by Paul Helm (including this and this) before adding:

Note also James N. Anderson and Paul Manata, “Determined to Come Most Freely: Some Challenges for Libertarian Calvinism,” in Journal of Reformed Theology, 11 (2017), pp. 272-297, which argues against Oliver Crisp’s notion of “libertarian Calvinism” but oddly assumes that the argumentation in Reformed Thought on Freedom and various other studies is libertarian, despite the authors’ clear statements to the contrary. The fundamental mistake in Anderson and Manata’s approach is that they assume that modern theories of libertarianism and compatibilism are the only two options for arguing free will. This also leads them to misread the Westminster Confession (Anderson and Manata, pp. 285-285 [sic]) on the issues of contingency and freedom. On the Westminster Confession, see John V. Fesko, The Theology of the Westminster Standards: Historical Context and Theological Insights (Wheaton: Crossway, 2014), pp. 101-111. (Muller, p. 4, fn. 4)

There are a number of things to say in response.

First, we have never suggested that the Reformed tradition is “unequivocally compatibilist.” There have been some Reformed theologians who have affirmed something like LFW (Girardeau appears to be one, as Oliver Crisp has noted). Our argument, rather, is that the Reformed tradition affirms certain theological claims (e.g., about divine sovereignty, divine providence, and the nature of conversion) that rule out LFW and thus commit that tradition (whether acknowledged or not) to some form of compatibilism. That’s certainly the case for the Westminster Confession, as we argue in our article.

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Is Christ’s Nature Contradictory?

/ Philosophy, Theology / 5 Comments

Is orthodox Christology merely paradoxical or actually contradictory?

That’s the topic of a conversation I had recently with Dr. Jc Beall, author of The Contradictory Christ, hosted by the exquisitely groomed Cameron Bertuzzi of Capturing Christianity fame:

Dr. Beall was unquestionably the heavyweight in this exchange, and we barely scratched the surface of some of the issues, but I think it was a productive dialogue.

For further discussion of Dr. Beall’s proposal, check out the symposium in volume 7 of the Journal of Analytic Theology.

Does Divine Determinism Make God the Author of Sin?

/ Philosophy, Theology / 5 Comments

Since it’s relevant to some current discussions, I’m posting here a short section from a forthcoming essay entitled “Divine Sovereignty and Human Freedom: Incompatibilism versus Compatibilism,” which is due to appear in a multi-author volume on the doctrine of unconditional election.

Does Divine Determinism Make God the Author of Sin?

Reformed compatibilism maintains that divine determinism is compatible with human freedom and moral responsibility, where divine determinism is understood as the view that all events within the creation, including human choices and actions, are ultimately determined by the will or decree of God. It is commonly objected that divine determinism, if true, would make God to be “the author of sin,” but since God cannot be the author of sin—James 1:13 is commonly cited here—it follows that divine determinism must be false.1

Author of SinLet us note first that Reformed theologians have consistently repudiated the idea that God is “the author of sin.”2 To take one representative example: the Westminster Confession of Faith, in its chapter on God’s eternal decree, affirms that God has sovereignly ordained from eternity “whatsoever comes to pass,” but denies that God is thereby “the author of sin” or that his decree does “violence” to the will of his creatures. Similarly, the Confession’s chapter on divine providence, while asserting that God’s providential control of events extends even to creaturely sins, insists that God “being most holy and righteous, neither is nor can be the author or approver of sin.”

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  1. For examples of this charge, see Bignon, Excusing Sinners and Blaming God, 168. Often the objection is expressed in rather cagey terms, as though the critic wants to claim that divine determinism entails or implies that God is the author of sin but lacks a specific, positive argument in support of that claim. Thus, we encounter statements like, “If divine determinism is true, it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that God is the author of sin,” or rhetorical questions such as, “How can divine determinists avoid the conclusion that God is the author of sin?”—as if the burden of argument lay with Calvinists rather than their critics. In such debates, it is essential to distinguish between a stated argument (which can, in principle, be refuted) and an allusion to an unstated argument (which cannot). ↩
  2. Calvin, Institutes, I.18.4. Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 1:509–10; Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 2004, 2:615. Jonathan Edwards is more nuanced, distinguishing different senses in which “authorship” might be attributed to God. Jonathan Edwards, The Freedom of the Will (London: Thomas Nelson, 1845), 286–88. ↩

A Conversation with Alex Malpass

/ Apologetics, Philosophy

Last week I had the pleasure of interacting with British philosopher Dr. Alex Malpass on the topic of the argument for God from logic. (Many thanks to podcaster extraordinaire Parker Settecase for hosting and moderating the discussion.) Dr. Malpass recently published an article in the journal Sophia in which he leveled several objections at the Anderson-Welty argument. Here’s the abstract for the article:

James Anderson and Greg Welty have resurrected an argument for God’s existence (Anderson and Welty 2011), which we will call the argument from logic. We present three lines of response against the argument, involving the notion of necessity involved, the notion of intentionality involved, and then we pose a dilemma for divine conceptualism. We conclude that the argument faces substantial problems.

In our 90-minute-or-so live-broadcast discussion, Dr. Malpass summarized his three criticisms and I gave responses to each one. We also fielded a few questions from viewers. In the end, there was a surprising (but gratifying) amount of agreement between us regarding some of the logical and metaphysical issues at stake, even though Alex remains unpersuaded by the argument! Anyway, you can watch the exchange and draw your own conclusions:

Be sure to watch right to the end, where the two Brits are invited to weigh in on the contentious coffee-versus-tea debate.

I’m grateful to Dr. Malpass for his willingness to participate in what proved to be an illuminating and good-humored discussion, and I look forward to further exchanges (including, I hope, a published response to his article). For those interested, Dr. Malpass has his own blog here.

Bavinck on the Use of Philosophy

/ Philosophy, Theology / 3 Comments

Herman Bavinck on the use of non-Christian philosophy in the service of Christian theology:

Initially the Reformation assumed a hostile posture toward scholasticism and philosophy. But it soon changed its mind. Because it was not, nor wanted to be, a sect, it could not do without theology. Even Luther and Melanchthon, therefore, already resumed the use of philosophy and recognized its usefulness. Calvin assumed this high position from the start, saw in philosophy an “outstanding gift of God,” and was followed in this assessment by all Reformed theologians. The question here is not whether theology should make use of a specific philosophical system. Christian theology has never taken over any philosophical system without criticism and given it the stamp of approval. Neither Plato’s nor Aristotle’s philosophy has been held to be the true one by any theologian. That theologians nevertheless preferred these two philosophical systems was due to the fact that these systems best lent themselves to the development and defense of the truth. Present also was the idea that the Greeks and Romans had been accorded a special calling and gift for the life of culture. Still to this day, in fact, our whole civilization is built upon that of Greece and Rome. And Christianity has not destroyed but Christianized and thus consecrated those cultures. Still, theology is not in need of a specific philosophy. It is not per se hostile to any philosophical system and does not, a priori and without criticism, give priority to the philosophy of Plato or of Kant, or vice versa. But it brings along its own criteria, tests all philosophy by them, and takes over what it deems true and useful. What it needs is philosophy in general. In other words, it arrives at scientific theology only by thinking. The only internal principle of knowledge, therefore, is not faith as such, but believing thought, Christian rationality. Faith is self-conscious and sure. It rests in revelation. It includes cognition, but that cognition is completely practical in nature, a knowing (γιγνώσκειν) in the sense of Holy Scripture. Theology, accordingly, does not arise from believers as such; it is not a product of the church as institution; it does not have its origin in the official ministry Christ has given his church. But believers have still another, fuller life than that which comes to expression in the church as institution. They also live as Christians in the family, the state, and society, and pursue the practice of science and art. Many more gifts than are operative in the offices are granted them, gifts of knowledge and wisdom and prophecy. Among them, too, there are those who feel a strong impulse toward study and knowledge, who have received gifts for apprehending and systematizing the truth of God. Thus theology arises in the church of Christ; its subject is not the institutional church but the church as organism, the body of Christ. It is a product of Christian thinking.

Source: Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. 1: Prolegomena, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Baker Academic, 2003), pp. 608-9.