Devastating.
I have long noted that Augustinian/Calvinist theology is unpopular among Christian philosophers, though many, like me, go through a Calvinist phase (when I was a sophomore and junior in college), before seeing its problems to be hopeless. Walls concisely and fairly sums up what Calvinism is all about, and then shows it to be profoundly problematic, focusing on philosophical problem rather than biblical ones.
I would add that many of us – many Christians who’ve studied analytic philosophy – are persuaded by the Consequence Argument that compatibilism about human freedom is false, and also that if compatibilism about human freedom were true, then J.L. Mackie would have a sound argument for atheism. Christians need to make the free will defense against that argument, and to do that, you must believe in libertarian freedom. (But, that’s the kind of freedom we all, or almost all, believe in anyway.)
Mysterianism, as Walls points out, is very important to being a Calvinist. They think that “The Bible teaches X” is an answer to any difficulty. But it isn’t – in particular, objections to the effect that the Bible doesn’t actually teach X, and/or that X seems to be a contradiction.
Judging just by a few things he says here, I assume that Walls is a “social” trinitarian; but I don’t think that detracts from his case. And note that God is a “he” throughout.
Note to young professors and grad students – this is how you give a presentation. Note what Walls does.
- Simple but relevant slides. Not too many. No distractions.
- Talks loudly, to the audience, moving around.
- Touch of humor.
- Knows what he wants to say, is passionate about it.
- Carefully reasoned. He’s done his homework; he’s not just ad libbing or recycling sermon or classroom material.
- Clear enough to disagree with. If you’re a Calvinist, he’s put you on the spot, and given you some hard choices to make. Calvinist theologians could assign this lecture to their students, and make this an assignment: refute Walls.
- Generous enough quotes from his opponents, with just enough context.
- Clear use of well-chosen concrete examples to make his points and distinctions.
- Aggressive, but not in a mean or unfair way. Doesn’t mince, put on kid gloves, or dance around a point.
- Calls a spade a spade, a weasel a weasel. Qualifies, but doesn’t waffle.
Well done, Dr. Walls.
And well done Evangel University and Dr. Schmidly for hosting the talk, and the Society of Christian Philosophers for sponsoring it.
I discovered your podcast a couple of months ago and I have been steadily going through the archives. I really appreciate your demeanour and logically structured thinking.
I’m a little surprised that you so easily give Wells’ assumed trinitarianism a pass. I understand that this is not the focus of his argument but in explaining the basics of contradiction he uses the Trinity as a coherent example.
Given all that you have been teaching about the Trinity this seem a glaring inconsistency in Walls’ thinking and logic. You make the point in the comments that the “common folk assume libertarian freedom” which coincides with the views you have stated in your podcasts that the laity assume unitarianism (and must be taught trinitarianism).
I see a lot of similarity between the Calvinist/Arminian and the Trinitarian/Unitarian debates.
Hi Mike – glad to have you listening! Yeah, there are some similarities between those two arguments. I thought that Dr. Walls’s critique of Calvinism didn’t depend on any trinitarian claim. So I’m happy to just agree on this issue.
Assertions are not arguments. And you ignored everything before you. If you don’t want to argue and think through these issues, the fact that you have a blog reveals that maybe, just maybe, truth is not your goal. Personally attacking me is then your way to protect yourself from having to face the errors in your judgment, and possibly the career ending implications of facing the truth. I’ve been there. What else is left then but the pity I have for a man who will waste his life learning and never come to the knowledge of the truth. A wasted life indeed.
All time troll-out record! Adios.
Hi Drake,
Long time readers will note that I tend towards being too liberal in allowing the trolls to run free. Enjoy your freedom! 🙂 But note that there are limits. You should not think, by the way, that mere embarrassment explains why Anderson et al don’t want to interact with you. You have, to put it nicely, some rough edges.
“To take your view of the will, is nothing short of denying Christianity full stop. What you are teaching is Aleister Crowley’s Thelema, which is why you also probably don’t keep the Sabbath. You don’t do you?”
This does not bode well for your engaging in dialogue here, Drake. Here we have a wild non sequitur (if libertarian free will then Christianity is false), a bizzare charge (Tuggy is the new Crowley!) and a weird demand – to know whether I keep the sabbath.
I’ll bite only on this last: no. I go with Paul, and with these gents on that issue.
Drake, I don’t believe we’ve ever discussed any of those things. I’ve just seen your interactions with others, and so have opted to avoid you based on an inductive inference. I believe I’ve written less than 10 lines total to you, and most have those have been my declining your invitation to “debate.” I also have no clue what you mean by me “refusing to let your comments on [issue X] be made public.” I don’t have that kind of power, though sometimes I think it would be nice. I think the most substantively we’ve interacted—and there wasn’t much substance—was when you said Michael Sudduth’s panentheism was due to his views on divine simplicity, and I merely noted that that was an odd inference to draw given that panentheism is the doctrine that the world is *part* of God. 😉
Dale,
I’m actually quite shocked that you allowed my comments. Thank you. Paul Manata, I’m guessing, and his co. James Anderson, etc. refuse to let my comments on this issue be made public for the sheer embarrassment they create. Paul’s crony, Steve Hays, could not even begin to touch the problems that I showed him.
http://eternalpropositions.wordpress.com/2012/07/25/a-full-refutation-of-steve-hays-van-tillian/
http://eternalpropositions.wordpress.com/2012/12/19/2550/
http://eternalpropositions.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/a-little-bit-more-for-steve-hays/
http://eternalpropositions.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/steve-hays-and-special-pleading/
http://eternalpropositions.wordpress.com/2013/01/08/steve-hays-the-anabaptist/
It has been a while but I think the last time I had a conversation with Manata it concerned his clueless views of the Triune God and its relationship to eternal generation, filioque and how his Triablogue buddies cannot even get a fraction of this stuff straight with each other. It appears Paul is still incensed from our last exchange.
I see the ‘diamond’ was removed from all of my ~(F& w)’s. Mentally insert a possibility operator after the negation in the above formula.
Hi Dale (btw, ignore Drake 🙂 ), I had forgot I responded here. I checked in for a couple days and then got busy with other things and forgot to check back. Permit me a few remarks on your response to me. But first, James Jordan.
James: I don’t think White or Piper are that informed on the issues I am discussing. They’re almost completely philosophically uninformed (which is fine considering that their speciality is not philosophy), and while I appreciate much of what they say theologically and exegetically, I’ve often found better treatments of the subjects they discuss elsewhere. Now, my “correligionists” might agree with my conclusion that Wall’s popular level talk is underwhelming, but that’s not really the interesting fact. The more interesting fact is the *reasons* I found Wall’s lecture less-than compelling, and I doubt Piper/White reject Wall’s lecture for the same reasons I do.
Dale:
Np
N(p->q)
Nq
is not the (full) CA. Moreover, what you claimed the conclusion of the CA was is not capture by Nq. You said that the CA showed that “compatibilism is false,” or, equivalently, that “incompatibilism is true.” That is, where F = any ‘free action’ (or choice, etc) and w = any determined world where F occurs, you said the CA gets you this conclusion:
~(F & w).
Now, you can easily see the fallacy when you give ‘N’ the reading ‘metaphysically necessary,’ and you attach that to ‘p’, for it is *not* metaphysically necessary that there is a remote past, that is, you tried to get a metaphysically necessary conclusion with an essential premise that states a contingent truth—which is a classic fallacy in modal logic. You can make the premise *contingent*, and claim that “it is now-unchangeable” that there is a past, but that can’t get you ~(F & w), for ‘w’ ranges over *every* determined world, including worlds with no pasts!
So, where the form of the CA you cite is not fallacious, that is because, at best, you’ve only argued for *weak* incompatibilism, i.e., not for ~(F & w) (classic or strict incompatibilism), but for ~(F & w*), where w* ranges only over worlds with pasts.
Re: “metaphysical libertarianism is the view of the vast majority of laymen,” well, maybe/maybe not. That’s an empirical claim. I don’t know how we’d ever confirm it. X-phi studies perhaps. But then I’ve seen several X-phi studies that show (a) a majority of laymen affirm compatibilism, (b) laymen have conflicting and incompatible beliefs, (c) laymen think indeterminism rules out freedom too. But I don’t know why this should matter. *Philosophically respectable* libertarianism is a metaphysically expensive view, and I highly doubt the majority of laymen have in mind any of the respectable libertarianisms on offer—of which there are many conflicting versions.
Re: looping time as a real stretch: Perhaps it is. No compatibilist I know of endorses it. But recall our light burden: there just needs to be one *possible* determined world that contains a free action (choice, etc.). It’s like the LPoE. Showing that God and evil are logically consistent just requires the *possibility* of LFW in some world. The *actuality* of LFW may seem like a stretch to many (most!) philosophers. But what does that matter?
But here’s refs:
Bailey, Andrew (2012). “Incompatibilism and the Past.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. LXXXV No. 2, September 2012, 351–376.
Bruekner, Anthony and Christopher Buford (2011). “Bailey on Incompatibilism and the No Past Objection.” Logos & Episteme 2 (4): 613–617.
Campbell, Joseph Keim (2007). “Free will and the necessity of the past.” Analysis 67: 105–111.
_____. (2008). ‘Reply to Brueckner.’ Analysis 68: 264–269.
_____. (2010). “Incompatibilism and fatalism: reply to Loss.” Analysis 70: 71-76.
Re: Adam and not doing otherwise. How would you *show* that? Not the CA.
Re: the refined, not in a good way, defense. Well, you claimed “compatibilism” is false. If your claim is the *weaker* claim that free will is not compatible with worlds with a remote past and deterministic laws of nature that entail one unique future, fine. But then, what is the relevance of *that* claim to this post, i.e., a post dealing with *theological* determinism?
At all events, as an initial response, the point is (roughly) the same as Plantinga’s point against the LPoE. So we may first want to ask: do you deny the LPoC (LPoC= logical problem of compatibilism, sheesh, philosophers ;)? If so, I would like to first welcome you to the compatibilist club (!), and then I can address your specific form of weak incompatibilism. But note this: virtually *all* compatibilists are weak incompatibilists, that is, we think *some* types of determinism are freedom undermining.
Second, I think it is false that the laws of nature are “pushy explainers.” Now, I’m not necessarily sure I know what a law of nature is, or if there are any (HT: van Fraassen), but that aside, many compatibilists are Humeans about laws of nature. If Humeanism about laws is true, then Nq is false. More importantly, I reject nomological causal determinism, but it seems as if that’s your only target,
On this view, if two worlds share the laws of nature and a time, they share all laws and times; they would, therefore, have identical futures. But, as Alvin Plantinga (Where the Conflict Really Lies, OUP, 2011) says, “clearly there is a possible world that (i) shares [all qualitatively identical propositions at a time and the laws of nature] with the actual world, (ii) is not causally closed (because, perhaps, God specially acts in it) and (iii) does not share its future with the actual world” (82). Now, Plantinga concludes from this that *determinism* is false (on the Newtonian conception of the laws of nature). But here ‘determinism’ is simply a *kind* of determinism. I cannot see why God could not create two worlds that share a past and the laws of nature but have different futures and *divine* determinism is true in those worlds, so determinism is *true* in those worlds while nomological determinism is *false* in those worlds. On this view, I can do otherwise given the same remote past and laws of nature, and so, again, the CA fails.
Mark,
“will is dependent on nature, (a necessity”
>>>Are you referring to the object of will or the faculty of will? If the former I agree, but that was not my point. Are you refering to an absolute necessity? Because I was not. I was referring to an aggreability, not an absolute necessity.
It is standard issue that the deliberation of the mind directs the will. To affirm that the will acts arbitrarily is Nominalistic and leads one into hyper-calvinism.
“thus three consubstantial natures will yield three identical will, this is poly-theism and destroys the monarchy of the Father.”
>>>Three natures will yield three FACULTIES of will, yes. But the hypostatic subordination of the Son and Spirit rules out any plurality in the OBJECT of their willing.
“Also, it makes the nature a prior cause of the will of the supreme God”
>>>You speak as if the nature of God is somehow ad extra to God. Why do you assume this? The nature IS the prior cause of the will. Owen worked this out beautifully in his Dissertation on Divine Justice.
http://www.johnowen.org/media/trueman_owen_on_divine_justice.pdf
“making God into an essence but not a concrete person.”
>>>Your criticism assumes upon the absolute simpicity of the person. The Athanasian position is that a nature and will distinction exists within, ad intra, the same person.
Drake,
I have responded at your blog, if will is dependent on nature, (a necessity), then identical nature will yield identical will, thus three consubstantial natures will yield three identical will, this is poly-theism and destroys the monarchy of the Father.
Also, it makes the nature a prior cause of the will of the supreme God, making God into an essence but not a concrete person.
Dale,
If you do not understand the question, you are not prepared as of yet to have a position on this issue. This all comes down to Anthropology and Theology Proper. Pelagius stated that human nature was arbitrary, and only became constituted through the gnomie-the hypostatic use of the faculty of will. Thus, evil and righteous were not to be predicated of a subject until said subject had developed a moral habit of their own through the gnomie. Thus, the idea of an ontological tendency necessary to a genus of beings was ruled out in Pelagius and this is later developed in Eastern Orthodox Theology with Maximus the Confessor who really perfected the idea of the gnomie. This is LFW to the Eastern Pelagian system.
To take this view of the will is to deny tons of traditional theology. For instance the doctrines of penal substitution and the doctrine of hell require God to have a tendency, an ontological necessity (Thus no LFW), to punish evil. I chased this white rabbit to the bottom of its hole a couple years ago. It also has implications in Theology Proper. In order to maintain the LFW, one must posit an absolute monad as your ultimate principle. Thus God is not a person (The Father) but an essence, huperousia. That is, in order to answer this question: “why does God will what he wills?”, with the answer, “I don’t know” and thus positing an absolute freedom to God’s activity (LFW), one must posit that God is an essence huperousia and not a person. When one posits the ultimate principle as a person, an intelligent being, like the Father, one answers the question “why does God will what he wills?”, with the answer “Because it agrees with his nature” (Thus staying within ousia-the categories of human language and not bailing out into huperuosia); thus marginalizing God’s activity and denying absolute LFW.
To take your view of the will, is nothing short of denying Christianity full stop. What you are teaching is Aleister Crowley’s Thelema, which is why you also probably don’t keep the Sabbath. You don’t do you?
Hi Drake,
Not sure what your question is. Here’s a stab: yes, libertarian free will logically requires that determinism is false – that the future is somewhat “open,” that given the course of events thus far, there are multiple things that may happen yet. Unless this is so, there is no room, as it were, for us to influence things one way rather than another.
Dale,
By LFW, do you mean that nature is arbitrary?
@Paul ” You think Walls’ lecture is “devastating” while I found it very uninformed…”
To Calvinists nobody but James White or John Piper is ever believer to be informed, so its not like this is shocking news that you would agree with all the rest of your coreligionists.
One more thought, Paul, about our clashing reactions to Walls. Of course, they don’t matter. What matters is the reaction of the wider body of Christ – that group of actual disciples, spiritually united to God through the Lord Jesus. They’ve never fully bought in to this sort of Augustinian outlook – never, in the east, and only in limited ways in Catholicism and Protestantism. I think hardly at all in the wide world of pentecostalism.
You may find it bizarre that Walls delivers the “good news” of Calvinism with such horror – but the picture is indeed a shock to a great many believers, and I would argue, rightly so. It’s at odds with various elements of common sense, with various texts of the Bible, and with the view of God which probably most Christians hold. And it’s at least as fatalistic as anything Islam has come up with. And Walls is absolutely correct that it can only survive so long as its hard edges are smoothed over by equivocal talk.
Paul,
I take it you’re lodged deep in your Calvinist fortress, if you think Walls makes no impact. 🙂
“First, re: Mackie’s (LPoE) argument, you don’t need to believe in LFW, you need to believe it is *possible*, even if nonactual.”
(LPoE = Logical Problem of Evil). Sheesh… philosophers. 😉
That’s right – good point. Although disputants about freedom usually assume that the other views are necessarily false. This is the classic charge of compatibilists against believers in libertarian freedom.
“Second, the CA [Consequence Argument] doesn’t get the conclusion that compatibilism about moral responsibility is false”
Strictly correct. Of course, I’m assuming that some degree of freedom is logically required for our being morally responsible.
In my view, the consequence argument is demonstrably not fallacious, but valid. The form of it is:
Np
N(p -> q)
Therefore, Nq.
This is valid when N means “it is metaphysically necessary that”. It is also valid if N means “now-unchangeable” throughout. Or, if the first and last N’s are read as “now-unchangeable” and the middle N is read as “it is metaphysically necessary that.”
Honestly, I don’t see the force of Warfield’s point.
“incompatibilists have expended *loads* of a metaphysical capital to make their theory remotely plausible”
Sorry, but common folk nearly always assume libertarian freedom. So it requires no big metaphysical run-up to be plausible. As soon as the view is described, a majority find it plausible. It is otherwise with compatibilist theories.
“If these are *possible*, then COMP is true.”
Arguing for possibility of compatibilism from the possibility of looping time seems a real stretch to me! But please pass on the reference. About the Adam case – we need not assume that the consequence argument is our only grounds for incompatibilism. We can simply note that he, at that first moment, is indeed acting (he was created that way) but is not freely acting, because at no time in his existence was he ever able to do otherwise (in any sense you please).
This defense seems very… refined. I don’t mean that in a good way. Look, we know that there is a world, our world, featuring causal laws of nature. We really want to know whether anyone could have compatibilist freedom in this world. So we, as it were, consider “nearby” (and at least superficially possible) worlds, where determinism is true. Here, the consequence argument kicks in. Now what’s the point of arguing that if X and Y were the case (which seems impossible, and anyway, are incompatible with what we know) then someone could act culpably yet without any absolute ability to do otherwise (and so without ever having had libertarian freedom). How’s that going to help us believe that we, here in this world, enjoy only compatibilist, and not incompatibilist freedom?
I don’t think these comments are a good place to pursue Calvin’s understanding of the Trinity formulas. Email me if you’re interested in doing a guest post on that.
Hi Dale,
These things are always interesting to me. You think Walls’ lecture is “devastating” while I found it very uninformed on some important issues and underwhelming overall. How people can have such diverse reactions is a strange phenomenon, touching on psychological matters as well as epistemological.
Anyway, on the consequence argument (CA) remark:
First, re: Mackie’s (LPoE) argument, you don’t need to believe in LFW, you need to believe it is *possible*, even if nonactual.
Second, the CA doesn’t get the conclusion that compatibilism about moral responsibility is false. That’s arguably a more important compatibility claim than the freedom claim, since the Bible speaks much about the latter but not much about the former. Of course, you can argue that LFW is necessary for moral responsibility, but the point I’m making is that the CA doesn’t show it.
Third, by ‘compatible’ I assume you mean
COMP = There does exist a model on which ‘determinism’ is true and someone is ‘free’ in the model. Put differently, there is *at least one* determined worlds that contain a single free person (or choice, or act, etc.).
I take it by ‘compatibilism is false,’ you mean the negation of COMP. The negation of COMP is incompatibilism:
INC = There does *not* exist a model on which ‘determinism’ is true and someone us ‘free’ in that model. Put differently, there are *no* determined worlds that contain a single free person (or choice, or act, etc.).
But how could the CA show *that*? In fact, the CA you cite is modally fallacious if the conclusion is INC. It employes an essential premise that is a *contingent* premise, and then concludes INC.
As incompatibilist Ted Warfield notes,
“Most incompatibilists, to be precise, seem unaware that in order to get the incompatibilist conclusion that determinism and freedom are strictly incompatible (that no deterministic world is a world with freedom), their conditional proofs must not introduce or in any way appeal to premises that are merely contingently true in between the assumption of determinism and the step at which the “no freedom” conclusion is reached.”
What’s the contingent premise? The premise that “If determinism is true then all of our actions are the consequences of the laws of nature and facts about the remote past.”
Recently, Joseph Campbell has exploited this fact. He asks us to consider ‘Adam’, a being who exists at the first instant of a determined world and does an action in the first instant. Adam has no remote past, and so the CA can’t show he’s unfree. Some have responded that you can’t do an action at an instant. This response requires one to buy some controversial metaphysical theories about time, actions, belief-desire complexes, etc. So the argument will depend on controversial metaphysical assumptions, and let’s face it, incompatibilists have expended *loads* of a metaphysical capital to make their theory remotely plausible. But suppose you’re committed to the necessary truth of this theory of action. Campbell has presented ‘oscillating’ Adam. This Adam lives in a cyclical universe, where time operates in a cycle, with Adam growing old then becoming you, etc. His has no “remote past”, and thus the CA can’t show that he’s unfree. If these are *possible*, then COMP is true.
Some have tried to respond by making the argument employ a premise about the laws of nature conjoined with *any* time (a la PVI’s “The Second Argument”). But of course, other Adam’s can be constructed. Adam who live in a world where anti-realism about laws is true and yet is determined to do some free action by a fact about their nature. Or we might think of a timeless Adam, who’s nature determines that he freely think about the Pythagorean theorem. You’ll balk that they’re not free. But the CA can’t show that.
Finally, one can keep laws and times yet deny that the laws of nature plus the facts about a time do the determining. Perhaps it’s the ‘fates’, the ‘laws of logic’, or ‘God’s will’. In these determined worlds, someone can do a free action if they meet the compatibilist criteria. You will object that they aren’t free; but of course, the point is that *the CA doesn’t tell you that*.
So, the CA doesn’t get INC.
… than came the Saving Grace of Analytic Philosophy … 😉
Hi Dale,
By the way, I heard of some college students going through phases worse than Calvinism 🙂
Jim
Yes – post-modernist truth-relativism.
Did that one too.
Dale,
probably the answer is somewhere in Dr. Wall’s presentation but, as it is over an hour long, I thought it would be quicker to ask you, who have presumably examined it in detail: what is philosophically (rather than biblically) problematic with Calvin’s doctrine of the “trinity”?
Thanks.
MdS
P.S. My question, BTW, ties up with my comments on Calvin at thread White vs. Navas – Does the New Testament teach “the deity of Christ”?
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