There is perhaps nothing more opposite than Calvinism and
Armenianism. For while Calvinism
contends that God has the future exhaustively settled, Armenianism contends
that God has not settled the
future. He has left it open to leave
room for human free will; we all have the option to do “this or that” precisely
because God has not decided nor does he know what will happen in the
future. Now, most Armenianists will tell
you that God has a rough framework for where he wants this world to go. But he does not know precisely how these
events will come to pass. You could say
that God and men share in their control of the future; God because of his
superior power and wisdom, and men because God has given them the gift of free
will and the freedom to exercise it.
Armenianism is
strong where Calvinism is weak. It
presents to us a clear explanation of the origin of evil. We have free will, since God neither controls
us nor decides our future, and we used it for evil deeds. To explain why God endowed us with the
ability to do evil at all, Armenianism can always remind us that without the
ability to do evil, we would not have the ability to do good, either. Love that is forced, for instance, is not
really love at all. The ability to love
comes with the ability to hate simply by definition.
But coincidentally,
Armenianism is also weak where Calvinism is strong. While it leaves ample room for evil and free
will, it is unable to attribute to God the amount of power and knowledge which
he is due. Armenianists will protest
this to the grave, so I had better give my reasons.
Whatever we suppose
about God, we ought to suppose that he cannot fail, not simply because so many
theologians before us have insisted as much, but because we realize that it
makes sense after thinking about it for long enough. If God fails, then according to whose
standard has he failed? His own? In that case, how could he remain God if he
has fallen short of his own standard?
Wouldn’t the standard, then,
be what we call “God” instead, since God has fallen short of it? Thus, we conclude that God cannot fail. The problem is that, according to the
Armenianist account, God can
fail. He has left the future open, and
as such, he does not know what will happen in that future. He has an “outline”, if you will,
communicating a general idea of where he wants history to go, but even he
cannot guarantee that it will come to pass.
Armenianists hasten
to point out that though God can
fail, he won’t fail. He is often compared to a master chess player
so skilled at chess that he can anticipate every move his opponent (in this
case, the Devil) might make, and, more importantly, the ideal response to any
move his opponent makes. Note in passing,
however, that God still only knows what his opponents might do. I’m sure I don’t
know why, but Armenianists staunchly deny God the surety of what his opponents will do.
And if God does not know for certain what his opponents will do, then how can he guarantee us
that he certainly will succeed? The best he can offer is that he might succeed, for that is all he can
anticipate about his opponents’ moves.
Armenianists are
like to slough this point off on account of their belief that God knows what
people very probably will do. In other words, he knows with 99.999…%
certainty that person A will freely
choose B given circumstances C.
Two things. First, while this
contention does make it look extremely likely that God will succeed, it does
not remove the merit of my previous contention.
There is still only a 99.999…% chance of that he will succeed, and a
0.000…1% chance that he will fail. To be
considered theologically coherent, Armenianism, if it cannot tell us that God cannot fail, should at least be able to
guarantee us that God won’t
fail. But it cannot even do this.
Second, this idea actually exposes another flaw with the
Armenianist God; namely, a flaw in omniscience.
Now, in order to qualify as omniscient, we ought to say that God must,
at minimum, know whatever he knows completely. It is almost self-evident that he would not
know something only to a limited extent; for instance, if he knew about horses,
he would not have knowledge only of its muscular system and lack knowledge of
its skeletal system. If he knew about
horses, he would know every conceivable thing that there is to know about them;
if he didn’t, then clearly knowledge would be missing from him, and he would
not be omniscient. But we see that the
God of Armenianism does not fulfill this constraint of omniscience. For God knows what people will do, but he
does not know this completely; he knows it with 99.999…% surety but not quite
100% surety. Such is the equivalent of
God knowing 99.999…% of the facts there are to know about horses.
The Armenianist will
combat this by denying that what someone will do is a truth; they will contend
that it cannot be known what someone will do, and thus, God does not need to
know it in order to qualify as omniscient.
There are two more problems with this.
First, if what someone will do was not a truth and thus could not be
known, then God would not know anything
of it. Speaking methodically: if
something cannot be known, then God
knows it with 0% certainty. If something
can be known, then God must know it
with 100% certainty in order to qualify as omniscient (since omniscience
requires that God knows whatever he knows completely). He would not, if something could be known,
know it with 99.999…% certainty.
Armenianists must decide whether or not God knows what someone will do
with 0% certainty – in which case they hold that what someone will do is not a truth – or 100% certainty – in
which case they hold that what someone will do is a truth. Until one of the
two is decided, the Armenianist God still does not obey the constraints of
omniscience.
Second, it is not even
convincing to say that what someone will do is not a truth in the first
place. Namely, because everyday people
with flawed knowledge in comparison to God can know it to a certain extent. We can analyze patterns of behavior and
predict, with weak but not invalid accuracy, what someone will do. Armenianism, to escape the problem of
insufficient knowledge in the God of its theology, must suppose that he knows
with 0% surety what people will do; which would be very odd indeed in light of
the fact that ordinary people can know this with some 25% surety or so (far
more for psychologists). Or they can
suppose that God knows what people will do with 100% surety, at which point
Armenianism collapses into a completely different theology known as Molinism,
or Middle Knowledge, which is not discussed in this essay.
I acknowledge that
the God of Armenianism has a 99.999…% chance of success. But the fact that there is still a 0.000…1% chance
of failure is simply theologically imprudent.
Where the rubber meets the road, God cannot guarantee that he cannot nor that he will not fail. God ought not to be considered, “A thoroughly
powerful being who is 99.999…% perfect.”
He ought to be, “The only being who is 100% perfect.”
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