Calvinism first. Most people are
familiar with Calvinism – it is, as of today, dominant in the Church – but even
so, I’ll summarize it briefly. The entirety
of Calvinist theology can be summarized through the single statement: “God
causes all things”. The Calvinist God
has exhaustively settled the future, down to amount of honey you will put in
the tea you will drink on January 16th, 2017 at 8:36 a.m. Pacific
Standard Time. He knows everything that
will happen, not simply because he knows everything but because he is the one
causing it to happen. A common term tied
to Calvinism is predestination, or foreordination, which simply means that
when something (anything) happens, it happens because God said, “This shall
happen”.
There are strengths
to this doctrine. First, it offers a
simple an obvious interpretation to the verses in the Bible which assert God’s
sovereignty. It also leaves God’s
infallibility intact; if he wants something to happen, he will cause it to
happen. He has that power. Calvinism attributes truly absolute power to
God. And that is, to Christians, how it
ought to be: God ought to be the most powerful being that has ever and will
ever exist.
But there are also
weaknesses here – fatal weaknesses, in my opinion. In fact, the arguments against Calvinism have
been thrown in Calvinists’ faces so often that I regret the need to produce
those same arguments yet again (I’m sure Calvinists are getting rather weary of
it). But I must. Calvinism offers no explanation for the
problem of evil. For, if God is to be
considered the cause of absolutely all of our actions, then that means that he
causes people to do evil things as well, such as murder, lie, or steal. An act of love by a person is caused by God;
so is an act of hatred by another. This
is a startling compromise of the unilateral agreement among theologians that
God is perfectly good and that he never causes evil.
Now, Calvinists have
attempted to amend this flaw through the concept of secondary causality. What this means, in short, is that they have
suggested that if God causes someone to cause evil, then it is the second cause
– the person – who is responsible for the evil which was caused. I would like to briefly note, before I go on,
that I do not know if Calvinists are still pressing this point. But just in case they are, I would like to
refute it. There are two reasons why
this contention does not work.
First, its
truth-value finds no realization in the real world. To demonstrate this, I would like to conduct
a brief thought experiment. Imagine a
scientist who has invented a microchip which, when surgically inserted into
someone’s brain, gives him complete control of that person. The scientist, once the microchip is
implanted, forces the subject to murder a man in cold blood. Who is responsible for the murder? Clearly, the scientist is, because the
subject was forced: he could not have done any differently than what he
did. The scientist, on the other hand,
could just as soon have forced his subject to give to charity or hug his wife
rather than murder. The little insight
that we can glean from this thought experiment comes from the realization that
the God of Calvinism can be perfectly compared to the scientist, and mankind
can be perfectly compared to the scientist’s subject. If God is the one who causes everything to
happen, then we do not have control over anything that we are doing. God is the one who is ultimately responsible
for everything we do, including our immoral actions.
Second, even if we
were to suppose that the secondary cause of an action is itself responsible for
perpetuating that action, then we have simultaneously thrown away one of the
fundamental tenets of Calvinism. Allow
me to explain. Calvinists believe in total depravity. The precise meaning of this belief is
extensive and impossible to explain completely and briefly. For now, we need only to concern ourselves
with one part of this doctrine. Total
depravity means that mankind cannot do anything good without God’s help
(exactly what “good” means here is flexible, but only slightly). It also, by extension, means that whenever
God helps a man do something righteous, God is ultimately credited for it. Man, after all, could not have done anything good on
his own. He needed God both as the
source and the cause. It makes perfect
sense, then, that God is given credit. For
if God is the first cause and man the second cause of a good deed, then of
course that is to God’s credit. If the
scientist forced his subject to give to charity, that would be charitable on
the scientist’s part, not the subject’s.
But we see here a
critical inconsistency. On the one hand,
Calvinism says that God is credited for good deeds on account that he is the first cause. On the other hand, Calvinism says (or used to
say) that man is credited for evil deeds on account that he is the second cause. We must decide, once and for all, which cause
gets the credit. As I pointed out two
paragraphs up, it is clearly the first cause which gets the credit. A puppeteer gets credit for what the puppet
does. The scientist gets credit for what
his robot does. Thus, if God is to be
the considered the cause of all of our actions, then he is to be put in the
same boat as the puppeteer and the scientist.
We would, allowing Calvinism its way, be forced to conclude that God
causes men to do evil things.
Theologically, we simply cannot do this.
As I understand,
Calvinists have further tried to amend this through the contention that God
controls everything “in such a way” that man is still responsible for
evil. I would like to return to this
later. For now, we note before moving on
that this contention can be neither proven nor refuted. Calvinists who suggest this will tell you
that the “way” referred to in their “in such a way” clause is ultimately
inscrutable. We have dealt with what we
have been able to deal with, and, according to workable logic, we have found that
setting up God as the first cause of everything makes him responsible for everything,
including evil. Defeated, we count on Armenianism
to succeed where Calvinism has failed.
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