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Calvinism and Arminianism: On Making the Right Objection

I want to make an important point about something that is either a reasoning mistake (if done accidentally) or an underhanded rhetorical trick (if done intentionally). I've seen it a lot (and done it myself, accidentally) in debates between Calvinists and Arminians (mostly on a popular level, but sometimes even in the writings of philosophers and theologians), so I'm going to use this debate to provide examples. Before beginning, however, I want to give a terminological note: in popular theological discussions the term 'Arminian' is normally used to refer to any Protestant (or, sometimes, any Christian) who believes in libertarian free will and/or the resistability of grace. I will refer to such people as "Arminians" (in scare quotes). Others use it to refer to any Protestant (or any Christian) who denies one or more of the five points of Calvinism. Still others use it to refer only to those who reject all five points. However, strictly speaking, it really ought to refer only to those who accept the Remonstrant Articles (note: the link just provided is to a truly virulent Calvinist site which calls the document "perverted" - but the text of the document is there, which is what matters). For the record, the five points of Calvinism were formulated in response to the Remonstrant Articles, and not vice versa, but the five points of Calvinism and the Remonstrant Articles are not simply denials of one another. The disagreements are much more nuanced than that. I will refer to those who accept the Remonstrant Articles as proper Arminians, or just Arminians (without scare quotes) - although I won't have much cause to refer to them in this post. Now, what's interesting about this is that relatively few "Arminians" are proper Arminians. A few are further to the Calvinist side than the Remonstrant Articles, but most (including me!) are in fact hyper-Arminian on one or more points (for instance, Article 5 says "But whether [Christians] are capable ... of forsaking again the first beginning of their life in Christ [etc.] ... that must be more particularly determined out of the Holy Scripture, be fore we ourselves can teach it with the full persuasion of our mind." - so anyone who actually rejects the doctrine of Perseverance of the Saints, as I do, is a hyper-Arminian; in order to be a proper Arminian you must remain agnostic about it). Now, the vast majority of Protestants - especially non-denominational Evangelicals - are "Arminians," but, as I have said, relatively few are proper Arminians.

Ok, now that we've got that out of the way, let's proceed to the issue at hand, which is of general, and not just theological, interest. The issue is this: all of us believe implicit contradictions, because we are unable to determine all the consequences of our beliefs. This means that there is a big difference between rejecting a belief p and accepting a belief q which, unbeknownst to you, logically entails not-p. So, if you believe, as a result of some abstract reasoning, or an attempt to systematize your beliefs, or some such, that q entails not-p, and then go around accusing people who accept q of rejecting p, you are making the wrong objection. The right objection is that people who believe q&p have internally inconsistent beliefs - but this inconsistency has to be proven if it is not obvious. We will now consider a series of common objections - two by "Arminians" against Calvinists, followed by two by Calvinists against "Arminians" - that make this mistake: each side rhetorically accuses the other of rejecting some important Christian doctrine when, in fact, both sides accept that doctrine, and the real disagreement is over whether that doctrine is compatible with certain other beliefs which one side accepts.

1. "The God of the Calvinists is Unjust." I used to make this objection myself, before I made the realizations I'm reporting in this post. The idea of this objection is that the God described by Calvinists is a God who punishes (some of) his creatures for their sins, when, in fact, he is responsible for their sin. As soon as it is phrased the way I have just phrased it, the problem becomes obvious: this isn't the sort of God Calvinists describe at all! Calvinists go about loudly and frequently proclaiming that "God is not the author of sin." Both Calvinists and the "Arminians" who make this objection agree that if human beings are responsible for their sins, then God can justly punish them. Furthermore, both sides agree that human beings are responsible for their sins, and God isn't. What the "Arminian" should be saying is that the Calvinists claim that God is not the author of sin is incompatible with his or her other beliefs, and this claim on the part of the "Arminian" objector is not obvious and so needs an argument to support it. Furthermore, since the contradiction is not obvious, it is not at all difficult to imagine that, even if there is a genuine contradiction, the Calvinist could happily hold both beliefs simultaneously - though, of course, if he or she does come to see the contradiction, then some of the claims ought to be rejected or revised to render the set consistent.
2. "The God of the Calvinists is not Universally Benevolent." This is closely related to the first objection, and I imagine I probably used to make this one too (actually, I think I used to mix the two together). The idea here is that the God of the Calvinists does not love all of his creatures since he only (meaningfully) extends the offer of salvation to some. Now, this objection is a little bit better because many Calvinists do believe the latter half of that sentence. (Actually, depending on how you interpret the word "meaningfully" it may be the case that all Calvinists accept this claim.) However, the Calvinists, of course, do in general believe that God is universally benevolent and the question is, again, whether this is compatible with their other beliefs. (I inserted the words "in general" because a few hyper-Calvinists do indeed reject universal benevolence - I know someone who is a member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church who does not believe that God loves the non-elect. However, the majority of Calvinists would, I think, regard this view as not only false but heretical.)
3. "Arminians Deny that Salvation is by Grace Alone." "Arminians" are emphatically not Pelagians. Many "Arminians" are semi-Pelagians, but (1) there is good reason to believe that it is possible to be an Arminian and an anti-Pelagian (see below - I am using "Pelagianism" to mean the view that human beings work their own salvation; "semi-Pelagianism" to mean the view that human beings contribute something to their own salvation; and "anti-Pelagianism" to mean the view that human beings contribute nothing to their own salvation), and (2) it is not actually clear (to me) whether semi-Pelagianism, as defined, is really outside the bounds of historical orthodoxy to begin with. The Baptists and non-denominational Evangelicals who talk about salvation and say things like "you take one step, God takes ten" don't seem to me to be heretics - though perhaps we should say that they are just being sloppy and are not really intending to claim that you contribute something to your salvation. How do "Arminians" avoid semi-Pelagianism? There was a good article on this in Faith and Philosophy, I believe in the 2005 volume, but I don't have the reference handy (does anybody else?). At any rate, the simplest route is for the "Arminian" to simply say that God does all the work of salvation, but he picks out whom to save by some non-arbitrary criterion. "Arminians" reject unconditional election, but needn't thereby claim to work their own salvation, or even contribute anything to it. Thought experiments can easily be constructed: think of any case where someone promises to do something for you (something you can't do for yourself) if and only if you perform some action which is very easy to perform and is unrelated to the purpose (e.g., if you say "please"). In this case, you are not contributing anything. Furthermore, many "Arminians" think it's the other way around: God saves you unless you do something (the person promises to perform some action unless you say "no"). It is ridiculous to claim that on these views human beings earn, merit, or work their own salvation, or contribute anything to it. But that isn't the point I'm trying to make. The point I'm trying to make is that "Arminians" purport to believe in salvation by grace alone, and so the Calvinist who objects that they reject this doctrine is making the wrong objection. The Calvinist (presumably) believes instead that there is a contradiction within the "Arminian's" belief system, but the contradiction is (as the above discussion demonstrates) far from obvious.
4. "Arminians Deny Divine Omnipotence (or Sovereignty)." Again, the same problem appears. In this case, the objection is, I think, even more misplaced because in the above objections Calvinists and "Arminians" do at least have slightly different understandings of some of the key terms involved in the discussion ('just', 'benevolent', and 'grace', respectively), but here we are generally working with the same definition: virtually all of us would say that divine omnipotence means that God can do the logically possible (i.e. whatever does not contain a contradiction). The "Arminian" claim is that the statement "God causes me to freely choose the good" contains a contradiction. Millenia of philosophical debate shows that this is a non-trivial claim which intelligent, well-informed people can disagree about. If this claim is correct, then "Arminianism" will not contradict divine omnipotence, but if the claim is false, it will. Because the claim is so difficult, the Calvinist needs to argue that it is false, rather than simply asserting that Arminians deny divine omnipotence.

This fallacy does not, as far as I know, have a name, unless we want to call it a species of Strawman (which I suppose is fairly accurate). At any rate, staying away from it will, I hope, make debates far more civil and productive.

Truth-Makers, Truth-Conditions, and Middle Knowledge

Middle knowledge is a problem that has been bothering me for quite some time now. It goes like this: middle knowledge is knowledge of the truth or falsity of counterfactuals of freedom, where a counterfactual of freedom (sometimes called a counterfactual of creaturely freedom) is a statement about what some agent having libertarian free will would do in a purely hypothetical situation, i.e. one that never has and never will occur. Libertarian free will means that one is free because one could do otherwise than one actually does. So, for instance, if human beings (including me) have libertarian free will (as I believe they do), then the statement "if Kenny was offered $1 million to kill someone yesterday, he wouldn't have done it" is a counterfactual of freedom: yesterday has come and gone, and I can assure you that no such situation arose yesterday. It seems that middle knowledge ought to exist, because it seems that God ought to have it. First, there are a few places in Scripture that seemingly make claims about counterfactuals of freedom, but I find this to be unimportant to the discussion, as the Bible is presumably speaking in a 'loose and popular' sense and not in 'metaphysical rigor.' What I find more problematic is this: assuming that human beings have libertarian free will and that God has foreknowledge of their actions, but there is no such thing as middle knowledge, it would be the case that God wouldn't have known that Adam would sin if he hadn't created this world, the one in which Adam did sin. That is, because God created this world, and it is a world in which Adam sins, God knew from eternity that Adam would sin. However, if God had created a different world - say, for instance, one that didn't have any beings with libertarian free will (other than, I suppose, God himself) - God would never have known what would have happened if he had created Adam and Eve and the garden. Furthermore, if God has foreknowledge but not middle knowledge, then God does not now know with absolute certainty whether Adam would still have sinned if he had placed the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil three inches east of where he in fact placed it. This seems more than a little problematic!

So suppose that there is middle knowledge (and God, being omniscient, has it). In addition to allowing God to make more informed decisions, it is useful for theodicy, in that it allows us to take the step that William Lane Craig does in explaining the justice of the condemnation of those who are under non-ideal conditions with regard to Christian salvation in terms of what Craig calls "transworld damnation" (William Lane Craig, "Is 'Craig's Contentious Suggestion' Really So Implausible?," Faith and Philosophy 22 (2005): 358-361). Craig's interlocutor, Raymond Van Arragon, gave one definition of "transworld damnation" as follows, and Craig seems to accept his formulation: "The property of being such that in every feasible world in which one exists, one does not accept Christ" (ibid. 359, emphasis original). What this means is that we might say that for everyone who rejects Christ and is condemned to hell, there was absolutely nothing that could have been done, no evidence that could have been offered, such that he would accept Christ. Leibniz offers a similar defense from a more fatalistic perspective: he thinks that all properties are essential, and therefore person A's spending eternity in hell is an essential characteristic of person A, and if A's eternal fate were changed, A would no longer be A. In other words, according to Leibniz, it is logically necessary that (A exists)->(A will spend eternity in hell). Not a very comforting thought, but the idea, again, is that if A went to heaven, A would simply not be A.

Now, I don't know that I would want to accept Craig's claim, even if the problem of middle knowledge were solved, but there are clearly many reasons why a Christian would want to say that God has middle knowledge besides just this. So what is the problem of middle knowledge? It is the question of "in virtue of what are conterfactuals of freedom true?" That is, in general, when we say that a proposition is true, we mean something like the classic correspondence theory of truth (no, I haven't read the long article I just linked to) - we claim that it corresponds to some "way things are" out in the world. But what is the "way things are" out in the world such that counterfactuals of freedom are true? If it is facts about my character, I don't have libertarian free will (I act always according to my character, as in compatibilist free will). If it is divine will, I don't have libertarian free will (God compels my hypothetical actions). It seems that if I can actually do otherwise in actual situations, I should be able to hypothetically do otherwise in hypothetical situations! But since the hypothetical situation never happens (the proposition is counterfactual), I never have the chance to act one way or another.

This is known as the 'grounding objection,' and is discussed in another paper by William Lane Craig, which I just finished reading online, entitled "Middle Knowledge, Truth-Makers, and the 'Grounding Objection.'" I was hoping for a fantastic solution from Craig that would solve all of my problems but, alas, I was quite disappointed. Craig's paper actually only argues that oponents of middle knowledge have not demonstrated that counterfactuals of freedom need truth-makers, and that the whole theory of truth-makers is convoluted, controversial, and quite possibly false. Furthermore, even those who embrace the theory often hold that not all propositions need truth-makers. This is all well and good, but what, I ask, about truth-conditions?! Surely propositions must have truth-conditions! If a sentence is meaningful (i.e., actually expresses a proposition), there must be some condition in virtue of which it is true (or false). I'm not talking about verificationism here - that is, I'm not claiming that in order for a sentence to be meaningful there must be some process by which we can determine its truth. Rather, I am claiming that in order for a sentence to be meaningful there must be some way that existing things in the universe are such that the sentence is true or false. Craig doesn't seem to address this in either of papers I read, but perhaps he could do so with a kind of limited modal realism:

I'm not sure what is meant by a "feasible world" in the transworld damnation discussion, but suppose it means a world that would have occurred had God acted differently than he actually did. That is, God acts differently, and then leaves the other beings with libertarian free will to act as they wish. Now suppose that all feasible worlds exist - perhaps on a lower ontological plane than the actual world, or perhaps we should say like David Lewis that 'actual' is simply an indexical term, picking out one of the feasible worlds and they are all on the same ontological level. Now we will need to claim that you and I are in fact 'transworld entities' - that is, we are made up not just of our selves in the actual world but of our counterparts across all feasible worlds. If this is the case then we actually do choose whether counterfactuals of freedom about us will be true or false, and middle knowledge is saved. However, the whole transworld damnation thing only works if God picks out certain feasible worlds to create. So perhaps we should say that only the people who exist in the actual world are 'real' and God has created all of the feasible worlds which contain one or more 'real' people, and that he does so specifically so that counterfactuals of freedom will have meaning.

At this point, I think we are worse off than we started. (1) It's still not clear that God really has middle knowledge, because he only knows about what free beings do in worlds he creates (he just created a lot of worlds). (2) What happens to the merely 'feasible' people (those who do not exist in the actual world)? Are there 'feasible' heavens and hells? Or will those people simply cease to exist at the end of the actual world? (3) Are merely feasible people actually people with moral value and so forth? (4) If the feasible worlds are real, how do I know I'm in the actual world and not one of those? Furthermore, how do I know I'm a 'real' person (transworld entity) and not merely feasible? If I'm merely feasible, doesn't that mean that God still doesn't have (complete) middle knowledge about me?

In short, problem not solved, by me or by the Craig papers I read. Does anyone have better suggestions? Craig seems to have written a lot on the subject. Perhaps one of his other papers solves this problem?

Blogging Parmenides

I feel the need to point to this post about Parmenides over at Mathetes simply because ... well, because I approve of blogging about Parmenides! The post gives a good overview of Parmenides' argument for the establishment of monism. To which let me add three things:

1. This is the oldest deductively valid argument in surviving literature.


2. It is contained in a hexameter poem (written, presumably, in imitation of Homer and Hesiod) which begins with an appeal to divine revelation (a narrative about being carried in a chariot to meet a strange goddess who promises to reveal "the way of truth" and "the way of mortal opinions, in which there is no truth at all").


3. In addition to becoming the father of logic by being the first to (a) write down a deductively valid argument, and (b) formulate the principle of contradiction, Parmenides also becomes the father of metaphysics (according to me) by being the first person we know of to conceive of the possibility of "representation dualism."

My complements to Kristopher on his impeccable taste in blog subjects.