Agent causation

Does God Lament?

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Recently I watched this video by a Calvinist who clearly isn’t the sort to engage in intellectual discourse. In order to show the incomprehensibility of Arminianism, he performs a scene which he believes typifies God’s…

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The Tweet After the Tweet

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By Derek Ouellette in response to John Piper’s Oklahoma debacle   By now you are probably aware of another tweet by John Piper which fired up an otherwise friendly Christian community (<– yes, facetious). For…

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Thomas Ralston on Freedom of the Will Part 5: The Scriptural Evidence

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Ralston continues with his defense of free moral agency from Scripture. My comments are in bold print.

(2) In the next place, the Scriptures everywhere address man as a being capable of choosing; as possessing a control over his own volitions, and as being held responsible for the proper exercise of that control.

In Deuteronomy 30:19, we read: “I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.” And in Joshua 24:15: “Choose you this day whom ye will serve.” Now, to choose is to determine or fix the will; but men are here called upon to choose for themselves, which, upon the supposition that their will is, in all cases, fixed necessarily by antecedent causes beyond their control, is nothing better than solemn mockery.

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Eric Landstrom, Is God’s Knowledge the Cause of All Things?

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There is a common argument that says God’s knowledge causes all things. It goes like this: If God foreknows that something (x) is going to occur, then something else (non-x) cannot occur. If something (x) does not occur, then God’s knowledge was false. Curiously since they make strange bedfellows, this argument is used by theological determinists like Calvinists as well as those holding to process theology and Openness against orthodox Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and orthodox non-Calvinist Protestants. The argument is used by theological determinists to show that God must determine all things before they come to pass and alternatively, by those who hold that God cannot know the future for free will to be actual and not mere rhetorical sophistry.

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