Over on BTWN, a woman challenged me on the issue of Libertarian Freewill vs Determinism. Here is that conversation:

Linda Johnson,

I think you have missed my point about how events are interrelated with one another. The point isn’t whether God can determine such events. The point is whether God can determine events in isolations from other events in a timeline. It is actually ironic that you have been espousing a sort of fatalism. You make end events irrelevant to the events in between that bring it about. This is because you are isolating events from their historical setting that allows them to take place. It may be unclear to you why this is true. So, let us define Fatalism:

“A more interesting (and I think more common) way to understand ‘fatalism’ is as the view that events will turn out a certain way no matter what we do. The central idea here is that future events (at least the major life-impacting ones) are fixed in such a way that our choices are irrelevant; those events aren’t dependent on, or affected by, our decisions or actions to any significant extent. So a fatalist might believe (based on the pronouncements of a fortune-teller perhaps) that he will die on a certain date, or in a particular fashion, regardless of any course of action he might take now.”

Dr. James Anderson, http://www.proginosko.com/2014/07/calvinism-and-determinism/

The reason this definition works for your position is that you maintain God can determine these singular events in isolation from preceding events. Think about Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. God may determine his assassination. Why? How does that event make sense apart from other events? Historians often talk about the long and short terms reasons for why events happen.

“If one person does not sin, another will come along to play that part, grieving God in the process, by the way. He is more than able to bring about His objectives using the freedom of men, and He really means it that He hates sin his way.”

So, if one doesn’t sin then someone else must sin? Do you have an argument for that? It seems that you either need to espouse a form of Molinism or give up this claim. You are then conceding a weak form of determinism.

“What if–instead of the mechanistic, gear-drives-gear view you have of everything, even of the dealings of God with men–at every decision point, we have real freedom to choose God’s way or not, despite all of the pressures on us, including our own inclinations? ”

I don’t think it is analogous to a machine but rather to a book and its author.

“Christian doctrine never believed in this pagan idea, until it got unduly philosophical, accepting the doctrinal spin of Augustine under the threat of death.”

This is clearly false because Clement of Rome and various other Church Fathers maintained a strong view of predestination. The ironic hypocritical nature of this comment is overwhelming. Do you suppose Libertarian indeterministic freedom was started by Christians?