John Calvin: Free Will and Predestination

In the es allege title " matinee idol Ordains All Things," Feinberg declares that even though everything is causally obstinate in the cosmos, that "does non entail fatalism," that whether man or perfection makes choice X, then "certain things follow as a consequence." Further, the consequence is unavoidable and is known and determined by God, and besides, biblical prophecy is a composite of events just waiting to happen, which marrow that forgiving set about may now and then correspond scriptural predictions. In "God Knows All Things," Geisler cites the "tension" mingled with scripture passages that "emphatically declare" God's absolute control everywhere everything yet also "stress that the responsibility for moral proceeding rests squarely with free moral agents and not with God." His method of resolve the tension is to distinguish between predict foreknowledge and divine force or coercion. That is, God knows rome bingle will do X but does not force that person to do X. therefrom the person is free even in a settled cosmos.

The other two essays in the text focus on a less deterministic universe, hence an accretion of human experience that is a consequence of free human agency. In "God Limits His Power," Reichenbach argues basically that God is all-knowing and almighty and involve in human experience and eternal, and that his ultimate divine project is "the unification of the cosmos under Christ." Even so, God chooses not to know "what would shake happened if we had acte

Reichenback, Bruce. "God Ordains All Things: Response." Predestination & Free Will. Ed. David Basinger and Randall Basinger. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1986. 49-56.

Faith offers the escape from the swooning fear, according to Augustine, and it precedes and transcends reason. Augustine's use of the term emphasizes the experience of grace and the forethought of salvation. But from another point of view it is also an program line of the necessity of faith in the life of mankind, which explains why one who was foreordained for salvation might not make it, and it refutes the feeling that the content of human experience, which must include an openness to the experience of grace, is irrelevant to the fate of the soul.

This line of thought is, however, rather contrastive from asserting, in the manner of Feinberg--and John Calvin, who said that "those whom the Lord does not favor with the government of His Spirit, He abandons in righteous discretion to the influence of Satan." The notion that predestination entails God's willful abandonment of creatures damned to spend eternity in hell, whatever they do, belies the idea of a providential God.

In regard to the problem of evil, Feinberg and Geisler seem to be following Augustine, whose articulation of the problem ties together the goodness of God, the straw man of evil, the nature of reality, and man's free will.

Reichenbach's position that God deliberately limits his advocate and Pinnock's that God must needs limit his knowledge cannot be answered by Feinberg's appeal to the authority of scripture that declares God's omnipotence, if one rejects as illusory or contradictory the idea that God is cosmically self-reliant but mankind has free will too. Nor can Geisler's remonstration to Pinnock's rejection of biblical inerrancy limit Pinnock's assertion. Why? Scripture may have been divinely inspired, but if mankind is as imperfect as Geisler and Feinberg seem to think, then the most one can say about its authoritativeness
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