Evan Minton's utterly useless trifles about Molinism

This is my reply to an article by Evan Minton entitled

Cerebral Faith

Q&A: Objections To The Free Will Defense Against The Problem Of Evil

Posted: 29 Mar 2019 05:43 PM PDT

The most successful free will defense argues that in order to do good a person must be able to do evil.

 Then that's a pretty sad defense:  you say your God cannot do evil, so how does he manage to do good?

Evan Minton is doing little more than showing he has a 3rd grader's knowledge of biblical theology, he simply "quotes the bible" as if this automatically leveled the playing field in favor of classical theism.  Since I don't wish to give a point by point reply to absurd speculations about non-existent fairies in the sky and what they might or might not want to do, I've severely restricted the portions of this nonsense I'm willing to provide response to.

What Minton is arguing is a subject that doesn't do jack shit toward making my own atheist criticisms of bible theology any less plausible.

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\\\"God could make us disposed more to good than evil in all cases while still allowing us to have the free will to do wrong. Why did God make it so that if Adam and Eve sinned both they and their descendants would have a nature that makes it impossible to avoid sinning?"\\\ -- Who said God made it impossible to avoid sinning?

Well don't you find it kind of funny that according to the bible, nobody in the entire history of humanity was able to avoid sinning?  See Paul abusing the OT in Romans 3:10 ff.

1 Corinthians 10:13 seems to say just the opposite "No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to man, and God is faithful. He will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you can bear, but with the temptation will provide the way of escape so that you will be able to endure it".

That was written by somebody who blindly denies the bible-god's responsibility for sin.  Dismissed.  God would have done better to simply wave his Ezra 1:1 magic wand, and people would not put themselves in sinful situations in the first place, preempting any need to "escape" from them.

It is true that we have a predisposition to sin. It's also true that it's inevitable we all will sin to a certain degree in this life, but each individual sin which comprises the number of sins we commit in this life could have been avoided. 1 Corinthians 10:13 says so.

Sorry, Minton, but "inevitable" and "could have been avoided" are logically contradictory.

By the way, 1 Corinthians 10:13 is one of the strongest biblical pieces of evidence that we do indeed have the ability to choose between good (A) and evil (non-A).

Utterly irrelevant to the reasonable person who denies biblical inerrancy and thus has no rational motive to force everything in the bible to harmonize.

This verse is unintelligible on deterministic views.

All the better, a proof that the bible contradicts itself.  You might wish to contact Steve Hays, a Calvinist over at Triablogue, who says God in his secret will often causes people to violate His revealed will.  See here. Since you cannot seriously say Hays is a dummy, you are forced to admit the reasonableness of the atheist who sees the Arminian and Calvinist scholars fighting it out for hundreds of years, with no resolution in sight, and who then concludes the biblical wording is surely contradictory or else fatally ambiguous, and thus undeserving of any serious consideration.

On determinism, there was no real way of escape. The way of escape was only an illusion. If determinism is true, then anyone who sins had no choice but to sin either because God or some other force or forces outside of their control made them.

Good point.

But what if there were no sin nature? How much evil would this, in fact, prevent?

 God lacks a sin nature.  How much evil does God create?

We cannot say. We don't know what this hypothetical world would be like.

A worthless thought experiment prompted by ancient fairy tales.

For all we know, perhaps there'd be just as much sin as this one. The demons would still be at work trying to lead souls to ruin (1 Peter 5:8, Ephesians 6:12-19), and the devil is how Adam and Eve were enticed even while in a state of innocence (Genesis 2).

 And who do you blame for the devil's ability to penetrate Paradise?  

The demons might have to work than they do in the actual world if we didn't have an inherent inclination towards wrongdoing, but it is entirely possible that the amount of sin wouldn't be affected by much. We just simply have no idea.

Moreover, I think the argument from love cannot be dismissed in The Free Will Defense against the problem of evil. As I pointed out in my blog post "I Haven't Met My Wife, But I Already Love Her", love is not an emotion but a choice.

 False distinction, love is also an emotion even if also a choice.  Women who hear about their kids dying in an attack are full of emotion because of their love for their children.  Sorry, you aren't living in an honor/shame collectivist culture in 1300 b.c.  Under your stupid reasoning, a person could stop loving another as easily as they put down one candy bar and pick up another:  nothing but choice.

The same is true for its antithesis; hatred. The freedom to love is also the freedom to hate, and certain actions flow from both.

Does God have the freedom to feel toward sinners opposite to what's asserted in John 3:16?

Love is patient, kind, never boasts, does not rejoice in evil but the truth, it always strives for the well-being of the one loved "it always protects" (1 Corinthians 13).

 Which is precisely why your god is not loving.  God not only doesn't strive for the well-being of the loved one, he causes them to be raped, Isaiah 13:15-17.  No, that wasn't an empty threat, it give all appearance of being just as literally intended as any other prediction of doom.  And if the prediction was that god would stir the Medes to give gifts of food to the Babylonians, then suddenly, you'd see no problem crediting this fully to god.

If love can be defined at a minimum as "Seeking the well-being of others", hatred can be defined at a minimum as "Seeking the harm of others". If God is to allow genuine freedom to love my neighbor as myself, he must allow me the freedom to hate my neighbor, and to flip 1 Corinthians 13 on its head; i.e to be impatient, cruel, envious, boastful, proud, easily angered, keeping a record of wrongs, rejoicing in deception. If he does not allow me the freedom to hate my neighbor, then I have no choice but to love my neighbor, and if I have no choice but to love my neighbor, then I am locked into the single action of caring for his wellbeing. Thus, the problem of "robot love" (as I like to call it) surfaces again.

Ezra 1:1 is YOUR problem.  God apparently not only can, but does, approve of causing people to do whatever he wants.  Whether that's a violation of freewill or not is irrelevant:  your god knows of a way to get things done the way He wants them to get done, and yet he rarely ever employs this ability.  So apparently your god is like a demented child who prefers to watch the carnage merely because it's carnage.

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3: \\\"By the logic that free will is more important than horrible suffering we ought not to lock up people who commit crimes or otherwise stop them from committing a crime in fear of infringing on their free will."\\\ --- What applies to God doesn't always apply to us.

But you don't know that god never violates the freewill of human beings.  He does.  Keep "hook in your jaws" in mind as you read about God boasting in Ezekiel 38-39 of forcing future armies to attack Israel, then ask yourself how that metaphor could be appropriate if the mental image that comes to mind when we read "hook in your jaws" is too extreme to be realistic.

We are obligated to stop people from sinning if we know they're going to, but that doesn't mean God is.

 So have you told James Patrick Holding to cease his constant sins of slander and reviling, yes or no?  Regardless, Frank Turek would say it is the law god put in your heart, and the Holy Spirit, that constrain you to stop others from sinning.  So now what?  God moves through you to stop others from sinning, but doesn't himself do anything to stop people from sinning?

As I point out in my chapter on the problem of evil in The Case For The One True God: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Historical Case For The God Of Christianity, The reason this distinction exists is that, unlike God, we are finite in knowledge. God is omniscient, seeing the end from the beginning (Isaiah 46:10, cf. Psalm 139:1-4).

 No, you are just a classical theist who disagrees with other Christian scholars who designate themselves as open-theists.  They don't interpret those passages the way you do. See here.

God knows what would occur in any given circumstance

How?  Magic?  Crystal Ball?

and what will occur. Therefore, God may allow evil A, knowing that if He allowed A, then greater good D would occur.

 which means we run the risk of ruining that good plan if we interfere with an evil act.  If 5 people in Seattle are going to accepted Jesus because a bank was successfully robbed 25 year earlier in Texas,  guess what result you get if, back there during the robbery, you kill the robbers before they rob the bank?

Another problem is that if god wishes to start with an evil to create a chain reaction that results in ultimate good, why does he bitch when some of the chain links perform their intended function?  Under your logic, God's bitching isn't sincere. he likes the fact that we do evil things, it's all part of a grander plan, but he dishonestly pretends he's all mad about it.

If God doesn't allow A to occur, then B wouldn't occur.

No, you are just lost in Molia-mist.  Your classical theist god can cause an act without being helpless against the possible side-effects.   All this bullshit about how maybe god allows evil because he foresees a greater good is total bullshit, and there are enough Calvinists in disagreement with you to justify the atheist in saying this whole business is total bullshit.

If B doesn't occur, then C wouldn't occur, and if C doesn't occur, then D wouldn't occur.

 The bible never presents god viewing some act as setting off some chain of freewill decisions.  The simple fact is, you cannot merely quote the bible to demonstrate what you believe, because what you believe is far more complex and involved than what the bible teaches, hence, the need for properly qualified Christian scholars and theologians to do little more in life than disagree with each other about everything in the bible.

Evil A may be "a child drowning in the river" or "a teenager being gunned down in the streets". As any time travel enthusiast will tell you, every event that occurs sends ripples through history.

You use "time-travel" to enhance your argument?  Let's just say i can tell pretty easily the level you are functioning at.

God's reason for permitting some evil might not emerge until centuries later and even in another country!

 Once again, the bible doesn't present God as viewing some act as resulting in a chain of freewill causes and effects. You've simply mistaken Molina and Bill Craig for "bible", that's all.

Only an all-knowing God can grasp what would occur in the future on the basis of whether or not he permits A to occur in the present.

Dismissed.

God is omniscient.

Fuck you, read Greg Boyd and quit mistaking your youthful tendency to jump to conclusions, for serious knowledge.

We are not. God runs the universe. We do not. Therefore, we are to err on the side of caution and prevent any evil we can.

But if you don't, you can always argue that this omission was part of God's greater plan too.

The Free Will Defense is only one facet of a robust response to the problem of evil.

No, your bible makes it clear that God has no problems just MAKING people do whatever he wants, Ezra 1:1.  You are merely throwing up theological garbage merely because you cannot reconcile the evil of the world with your allegedly all-loving god. 

Greater Good Theodicy shouldn't be divorced from the discussion. This would apply to animal pain and natural evil. God knows the ripple effect while we do not.

You have predicated the allegation of ripple-effect upon nothing but time-travel.  Suffice it to say you won't be taken seriously until you get serious.

So, this reductio ad absurdum doesn't succeed.

4: \\\"God doesn't need to give us the free will to do extreme evil to achieve the ends free will is said to require: raping children, rape in general, the murder of children, murder in general, etc are all unnecessary. And by giving people the opportunity to do them, God, unnecessarily increases their risk of earning additional suffering in Hell."\\\ --

Part of my answer to this will overlap to a certain extent with my answer to the first. Unlike those who say "Hate isn't the opposite of love, apathy is". I do take hate to be the opposite of love.

Then the god who loves sinners in John 3:16 contradicts himself and hates them in Psalm 5:5.  That Psalm isn't saying God hates their "works".  It says he hates the "workers", i.e., the people themselves.

Apathy is only the opposite of love in the sense that apathy is impassionate while love is a passion. Apathy is a lack of choice while love is a positive choice.

No, plenty of people make a choice to walk away from something and "not give a fuck what happens".  This is choice. It's also apathy.

But love and hate are two passions and choices that tug in opposite directions. It seems to me that if one is to be truly free to love to the maximal extent, one ought to be free to hate to the maximal extent.

You are assuming a divine desire for people to be "free".  Does Steve Hays think this is biblical?

You can't have the freedom to love your neighbor without also having the freedom to hate your neighbor.

Then how does your god manages to love sinners without being free to hate them?  or did I ask a stupid question sort of akin to why some fairies have blue eyes?

And as I explained in  "I Haven't Met My Wife, But I Already Love Her", love is not an emotion but a choice.

Previously dismissed that nonsense.

The same is true for its antithesis; hatred. While love and hate can certainly spark emotions, or the emotions can spark the choices, love and hate are not emotions in and of themselves. They can either be caused by emotions in some circumstances, or doing loving actions or hateful actions can eventually bring you to feel emotional about the actions, but love and hate are not emotions. They're choices.

I don't see the point of this trifle.  Under your logic, a mother who just gave birth can "choose" to refrain from loving her baby just as easily as she can choose between new and used tires.  Women aren't perfect, and some women can do this, but most cannot, their love for their offspring is automatic and instinctive, there is no "choice" about it.

If I choose to love my neighbor, I will choose to be patient with him when he does things that get on my nerves.

Then under your logic, when you aren't patient, you lack love.

"But patience and impatience are emotions you can't control!" You might object. Of course, I have no control over whether I feel patient or impatient towards my neighbor,

And whose fault is that?

but I can choose to be patient.

Not in the libertarian sense.  Some people are thugs and are always in and out of jail because their genetics will not permit them to change their ways.   Some people are mentally retarded and will flip out impatiently at the least provocation.  Yet your god seems to think giving them less freewill than you was a good thing.

I can conceal my irritation at his lollygagging and not scold him for taking too long.

That would be dishonest.  "thou shalt not lie".

I can overlook his character flaws and not express my anger at his pride or whatever quirks he has that annoy me. Love is not only patient but kind.

Which means god isn't being loving when acting unkind, such as torturing a baby to death over a period of 7 days.  2nd Samuel 12:15-18. 

When someone is in need, I am to meet their needs.

Do you know how many crack-babies need foster care?  or did you suddenly discover how much easier life would be if you insisted that you don't feel "called" to engage in activities your natural self already hates?

If they need food, I love them by feeding them.

And if you don't feed them and they starve, God wants you to know it was He who killed them (Deut. 32:39).

If they are thirsty, I love them by giving them drink. If they need a place to stay while in town but can't afford a hotel, I let them crash at my place.

So..how many homeless bums do you let live in your house, and could you be doing more, and what should we conclude about a person who tries to do good, but doesn't do their best?

maybe something similar to what i conclude about the fact that god doesn't do his best to save people?

David Parrish showed me kindness by paying for my plane ticket and letting me stay at his hotel room so that I could attend The ETS Conference In Colorado last year. Love doesn't boast. If I love my neighbor, I won't rub my achievements in their face.

 What a fucking waste of money.  You don't need to attend such conferences in order to carry out your need to do apologetics.

Most of the things 1 Corinthians 13 describes as love have to do with choices, and the very few that have to do with feelings can be interpreted as controlling or concealing your feelings for the sake of your neighbor, which is, of course, an action.

Now, if I am free to make these love choices, then I am free to make the opposite of these; hate choices. I'm free to be impatient with my neighbor; to be cruel to him (whether this takes the form of insults, depriving him of things he needs, shunning him, or even torturing him for the fun of it). I am free to be boastful; to rub my neighbor's face in my accomplishments. "Look at how many copies my book has sold. How many have yours sold? Do people even know it exists?" "Look at how many views a day my blog gets? Yours gets, what? 20 views a day?" "Why should we take your broken down jalopy. Let's take my Ferrari instead". <-- I don't actually have a Ferarri unfortunately, this is just for the sake of illustration.

So...it took a while for me to get here, but here's my overarching point: If God restricts me from hating my neighbor as much as I would were He not to restrict me, then he would be pushing me towards being more loving towards my neighbor than I otherwise would be.

if God can restrict you from hating your neighbor without violating your freewill, he can also "restrict" the pedophile without violating their freewill.  So when he doesn't, there is no intellectual compulsion on us to insist God surely only allowed evil to happen for the sake of a greater good.  We are within our epistemic rights to say your god doesn't exist, and is nothing but wishful thinking on the part of ancient barbarians and their imperfect tortured path toward civility, and that's why this "god" operates in ways that defy all expectations of love and common sense.  NOT because he is "mysterious". 

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As a Maximally Great Being,

Sorry, maximal 'greatness' means precisely nothing, thus explaining why you make little sense in your sophistry.  Your theological house stands on an incoherent foundation.  What would maximal greatness be?  How about the ability to successfully convince all freewilled creatures to obey, sort of like the way most schoolteachers successfully accomplish with the vast majority of schoolkids every day?

God certainly loves all persons, whether they be human persons, angels, or demons. Therefore, he desires all to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4, 2 Peter 3:9, Ezekiel 18:23). Whatever the reason for demons not escaping judgment, we can conclude that it isn't that God doesn't love his former angels and doesn't desire them to repent.

Sorry, Calvinsts are perfectly well-aware of those passages, and they see nothing in them indicating that God has the same level of love toward every sinner. YOU might feel constrained by your interpretation of such passages to think certain theological options are off the table, but this is hardly "apologetics".

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6: \\\"The fact that God foreordains (see Psalm 139:16, Job 14:5 and Deuteronomy 32:39) people to die young, permits brainwashing, allows certain types of (mental) illness, etc proves that God has no problem infringing upon our free will or with allowing it to be infringed upon. "\\\ --

I fail to see how the foreordaining of our deaths is an infringement of our free will?

We are perfectly reasonable to say god foreordains by his own involvement.  If Deut. 32:39 is true, the mugger who stabs you to death is being actuated by god.  God foreordained Jesus' death on the cross, but it was also god's "hand" that put Jesus to death (Acts 4:28).  

Do you think God ought to allow us to choose the dates of our deaths or something?

No, your god is a fiction because if he were truly perfect, he'd have been perfectly "content" with the way things were before he created the universe, and as such, there would be no mortals to encounter death and create the problem in the first place. Feel free to get around that problem by saying God wasn't perfectly content before Genesis 1:1.

Or perhaps you're thinking of instances in which a human agent is the cause of someone's death. In the latter, Molinism perfectly solves the problem. Interested readers are directed to my paper "The Case For Mere Molinism" which I also read aloud in episode 10 of The Cerebral Faith Podcast for a full explanation and defense of Molinism. But, Molinism basically means that can sovereignty ordain the death of someone via a human agent without violating the murderer's libertarian free will. He does this by acting on His knowledge of what any free creature would freely choose to do in any given set of circumstances.

 James Patrick Holding is a molinist too, now I know why you immediately flock to him as if any answer he gives is beyond criticism.  But again, plenty of serious conservative Christian scholars say "fuck you" to Molinism, so its not like this foists some intellectual obligation on skeptics, who already have excellent reasons to label all god-talk and many-worlds-foreknowledge talk as total bullshit.

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Of course, then the question must be asked "Why then, would God create a world of free creatures? Why does God care so much about whether human beings have libertarian free will?"

First of all, love requires at a minimum, the ability to resist one's advances.

Oh, so if you grab your 16 year old daughter to prevent her from slicing her arm in an act of suicide, you aren't loving because you aren't allowing the possibility for her to successful resist such force?

Otherwise, what you have is something akin to Stockholm Syndrome. You certainly don't have this on determinism. Not even on compatibilism. Indeed. Compatibilism is more like Stockholm Syndrome in that the person "willingly" obeys. But they've been conditioned out of having the ability to even want to resist, much less having the capacity to resist. For our actions to be valued as genuinely good or evil, we must have the ability to choose.

 I wonder how which female war-captives mentioned in Deut. 21:10-14 were suffering something like Stockholm Syndrome as they allegedly said "yes" to an offer of marriage by one of the army men who recently massacred her family and kidnapped her.

I don't get outraged a man who knocks me down because he inadvertently tripped over his shoelace. I do get outraged at the man who freely chooses to shove me. In the latter case, he had the ability to choose not to shove me, unlike in the former case.

No, Calvinists say God has predestined all human actions infallibly.  If anybody shoves you down on purpose, it's because they had no ability to deviate from infallible decree. 

7: \\\"God could have cut Adam and Eve's offspring off and restarted life on another planet thus preventing their descendants from being affected by original sin. And animals could be put in paradise or on another planet without suffering and death with humans being fed manna from heaven, or if you can demonstrate that the fall was justified then humans could be fed with something else that is corrupted not requiring animal pain. And finally, animal pain is unnecessary-even in this world because God could make sure that animals avoid dangerous things by giving them a strong sense of joy in trying to escape dangerous things with no need for any suffering involved."\\\ --

God could have eliminated Adam and Eve (and the other humans which were probably around at the time, since I affirm Evolutionary Creationism) and just started all over, but how do you know these people wouldn't also fall?

 That's your problem.  the point is that the biblical way god got things done wasn't the only possibility, there are others that are less brutal...tending to show that your god appears to favor, without good reason, the more brutal solution. 

For all we know, anyone in Adam and Eve's circumstances would have done the same thing.

Then God should know better than they create any such situation in the first place.  it's not like the maximally perfect state he enjoyed before creation could be "increased".

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 Some Christians do think that God cursed the universe with carnivorous activity and natural disasters post-fall (primarily Young Earth Creationists), but I see no reason to accept this explanation.

Yet another rational warrant for the atheist, if they wish, to keep themselves ignorant of biblical bullshit. it's nothing but a pile of contradictory horseshit that experts in theology and philosophy have been killing each other over for centuries.

Romans 5 doesn't say Adam's sin brought animal death into the world, it's speaking specifically of humans. Indeed, as I pointed out in my article "Why Pre-Fall Animal Death Isn't A Problem For Old Earth Creationism", including animals in the passage renders an absurd meaning. And Genesis 3? God never says he would bring hurricanes and carnivorism into existence in the list of curses He pronounces. That's read into the text.

 Correct, but Jesus said it is god who "feeds" the birds:

 26 "Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. (Matt. 6:26 NAU)

Really?  It is god who gives the hawk the ability to sadistically eat another bird alive?  See here.

So why does God allow non-human animals to suffer? Since my view of origins is Evolutionary Creationism a.k.a Theistic Evolution, I need to wrestle with the question of why God allowed this to happen millions of years before the fall especially. We don't know with certainty.

 Thus leaving open the door to the possibility that carnivores do what they do, because there is no loving god in charge of this earth.

The Bible doesn't give us the answer. We can only speculate.

perhaps the bible doesn't give you the answer because the carnivorous nature of some animals really is a forceful argument against any notion that 'god' is 'loving'.

One very plausible explanation for why, specifically, pre-fall animal death was allowed was given by Hugh Ross which I quoted in my blog post "Why Pre-Fall Animal Death Isn't A Problem For Old Earth Creationism". Check out that blog post for the longer answer. The short answer is that God's purpose for using evolution was to train the animal kingdom to adapt step-by-step to increasingly advanced and intelligent hominid creatures so that when human beings evolved and fell into sin, the negative impact we would have on the environment would be restrained.

 Which means your god is a fuckhead, because he can just create humans like tin soldiers, than use telepathy to con them into doing whatever he wants them to do, no "need" to "allow suffering" for millions of years. Ezra 1:1.

Now, Ross doesn't accept evolution (he thinks each hominid was created ex nihilo), but his reasoning still applies either way.

yet another reason to say you have no more right to think God is guiding your bible study any more than Calvinists or Young Earth creationists.  Being in agreement on doctrine is required, see Phil. 2:2.  You will never be "of the same spirit" if Ross thinks one way about the bible, and you think the opposite way.

We also mustn't forget the ripple effect that each event has on history.

Oh yeah, that part where you pretend that time-travel is sufficiently reasonable and coherent as to deserve being used as a support for another argument.  No thanks.