LeBlanc contends that determinism reduces human beings to stage props: determinism “creates direct threads between all the objects and God… in eternity past God through his divine decree dictates each and every action. Pointing out the strings is what defines the puppet.” Appeals to consciousness or origination merely list “other things connected to God by the strings,” and the “greater truth” of determinism is said to cancel the “story-level” where we ordinarily ascribe agency (LeBlanc, “The Puppet Analogy Explained,” Soteriology 101).

That move equivocates. The charge begins as a puppet claim (derivative agency), but when moral bite is needed it shifts into a manipulation claim (bypassing/overriding agency). Those are different accusations with different defeat-conditions. A puppet charge must show that determinism abolishes self-conscious agency—the very capacity puppets lack and which is plausibly necessary for responsibility. A manipulation charge must show that determinism’s mode is coercion or bypassing. Neither burden is met. Classical compatibilism specifies God’s determination as operating through reasons-responsive agency, not over or against it. Reasons-responsiveness is the capacity of my own deliberative mechanism to register and answer to sufficient reasons across nearby scenarios; when I act from that mechanism, the deed is mine—even if, at the level of providence, God determined that I would so act.

An agent is reasons-responsive when the mechanism that issues in her action (her ordinary process of weighing beliefs, desires, values, and judgments) is suitably sensitive to sufficient reasons—that is, it would register and guide action differently under nearby conditions where stronger countervailing reasons were present.

Two ingredients.

1. Recognition: the mechanism can grasp reasons (e.g., “this would be theft,” “this would harm a friend,” “this advances my end”).
2. Reactivity: in a range of close variants of the situation, the same mechanism would change course when the reasons cross a threshold of sufficiency (e.g., you would refrain if you learned the wallet belongs to your mother; you would apologize if you saw your words caused real harm).

Why this grounds responsibility (without libertarian “leeway”).
On this picture, praise/blame track source and sensitivity, not an indeterministic power to do otherwise while holding everything fixed. If you acted from your evaluative standpoint—your beliefs, cares, and deliberation—and that standpoint is the kind that would answer to stronger reasons in nearby cases, then the action is attributable to you.

The ownership clause.
To avoid manipulation cases, we also require ownership: the mechanism must be yours (formed and sustained in a way continuous with your rational life), not the product of bypassing implants or coercive threats. Coercion overrides; bypassing circumvents uptake. Either would defeat responsibility. Ordinary providence, by contrast, works through the agent’s own evaluative processes.

1) What the Puppet Analogy Must Prove (but Never Does)

Let’s state the target cleanly. A puppet charge, as such, is an argument by analogy. It only works if the responsibility-canceling feature in puppets also obtains for human action under determinism. Formalized:

1. If X lacks self-conscious agency (no deliberation, no reasons-endorsement), X isn’t morally responsible.
2. Whatever cancels responsibility for puppets also applies to humans under determinism.
3. Therefore humans under determinism aren’t responsible.

The crucial premise is (2). That’s where the work must be done—and where it isn’t. Simply “pointing to strings” assumes, rather than argues, that determination as such removes the self-conscious, reasons-responsive features that ground responsibility. But that’s false: humans plainly do deliberate, evaluate, and endorse (or reject) reasons—and that is the live locus of moral appraisal.

Two immediate consequences follow:

• The strong claim fails. The strong version says there is no relevant difference between puppets and humans under determinism. Yet there is one, obvious and decisive: self-conscious agency. Puppets lack it; humans (determinist or not) possess it. That single relevant difference collapses the strong analogy.
• The weak claim stalls. The weak version retreats to “there’s at least some relevant similarity.” But unless the critic specifies which similarity actually cancels responsibility—and then demonstrates that it obtains under determinism—the claim is inert. “There’s something somewhere” is not a premise; it’s a shrug.

Put differently: the puppet analogy must either (i) show that determinism abolishes self-conscious reasons-responsiveness (the very capacity the puppet lacks), or (ii) show that the mode of determination is coercion or bypassing (which would shift the argument to a different charge altogether—manipulation). It does neither. Compatibilist determinism contends that God determines through ordinary explanatory causes—beliefs, desires, character, practical reasoning—so that agents act from within their evaluative standpoint. That is precisely the sort of sourcehood our practices assess when we praise or blame.

(a) What a true puppet charge would require

Properly stated, the puppet accusation alleges that human actions are nothing more than the instrumental movements of another’s agency. For such a charge to bite, it must show that what renders puppets unaccountable—the absence of self-conscious agency, with no deliberation and no endorsement of reasons—also obtains for human beings under determinism. In other words, the critic must establish that determinism removes self-conscious reasons-responsiveness from human action. But that burden is not met. Whatever else one says about providence, human beings plainly do deliberate, evaluate, and consent; and compatibilists take that very constellation—judgment and endorsement—to be the locus of responsibility.

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(b) What a true manipulation charge would require

By contrast, a genuine manipulation complaint tells a different story. Here the claim is that an external agent bypasses or overrides a person’s evaluative standpoint—by brute implants, hypnosis, coercive threats, or the like—so that the resulting behavior is not the person’s own rationally owned act. The defeat-conditions invoked are thus coercion (force or threat that constrains the will) or bypassing manipulation (inserting or erasing springs of action without rational uptake). To succeed against compatibilism, the critic must therefore show that determinism’s mode just is coercion or bypassing. Yet classical compatibilism explicitly denies those modes, specifying divine determination as operating through the web of ordinary explanatory causes—beliefs, desires, character, and deliberation—rather than over or against them

2) Don’t Slide the Target: Puppet vs. Manipulation

LeBlanc’s presentation begins by “pointing to the strings” (puppet), but the moment moral bite is needed the description shifts: the “greater truth” behind the scene is said to override what happens at the “story level.” That is no longer a puppet claim (derivative agency); it is a manipulation claim (bypassing/overriding an agent’s evaluative standpoint). These are distinct accusations with distinct defeat-conditions.

(c) Why the slide matters

If the critic keeps the talk at “puppets,” the analogy fails on the relevant difference: puppets lack the very capacity (self-conscious agency) that humans retain and that is plausibly necessary for moral responsibility. If the critic shifts to “mind control,” the target has changed; now the debate is about mode—coercion/bypassing versus reasons-responsiveness—not about determination per se. Either way, the argument from “strings” does no work unless the critic identifies and establishes a genuine responsibility-defeater.

When someone says “strings,” ask:

1. Are you alleging no self-conscious agency (puppet)? If so, where is that removed under determinism?
2. Or are you alleging coercion/bypassing (manipulation)? If so, where is that the mode of divine determination, rather than the strawman you’ve imported?
   If neither can be shown, the analogy has changed targets mid-argument.

The moral sting in LeBlanc’s piece is smuggled in by silently moving from derivative agency to bypassed agency. But compatibilist determinism stands or falls on whether God determines through reasons-responsive agency; and on that question, the manipulation charge is unproven

LeBlanc begins by “pointing to strings” (a puppet frame) and then edits the scene into a mind-control frame—closer to Frankfurt-style manipulation cases. That swap matters.

Puppeteering vs. Manipulation (the real difference).

• Puppeteering denies agency: the motions are not the movements of a self-conscious chooser. There is no mind at its post. If that’s the target, the charge must be that determinism rules out agency as such.
• Manipulation grants agency but contests its authentic exercise: the person acts as a thinker/chooser, but the action’s provenance is alleged to be alien (pressure, covert implant, counterfactual intervener, etc.). If that’s the target, the charge is not “no agency,” but “non-owned agency.”

Once the experiment shifts to manipulation, the defeat-condition is not “there is a decree” but how the decree relates to the will. Not every manipulation bypasses agency; only bypassing (or coercive) manipulation defeats responsibility. Compatibilists grant that those cases excuse; they deny that determinism as such entails them.

Where libertarian flavors matter (briefly).

If he is a sourcehood libertarian, he’ll focus on “ownership.” But again, ownership is not negated by determination as such; it’s negated by bypass (history that never ran through the person’s rational uptake) or coercion (acting against one’s will). Determinism can be through-agency (ownership preserved) or around-agency (ownership defeated). You have to show the latter.

If LeBlanc is a leeway libertarian, he’ll say responsibility requires alternate possibilities. Frankfurt-style cases famously aim to show responsibility without leeway (intervention occurs only if you would have done otherwise). But that concedes that agency remains and the question is authenticity—which turns on bypass/coercion, not on determinism per se.

Like the puppet charge, manipulation splits:

Often, they are Question-begging. A bare similarity (e.g., “both are caused”) does no moral work. What matters is how the cause reaches the will.

Strong manipulation claim. There is no relevant difference between a manipulated agent and a human under determinism with respect to the property that cancels responsibility.

To succeed, this must show that determinism entails a responsibility-defeating mode—i.e., bypass (alien insertion that never passes through rational uptake) or coercion (acting against one’s will).

Compatibilist determinism specifies determination through the person’s own judgments and affections, not over or against them.

Weak manipulation claim. There is at least one relevant similarity between manipulation and determinism.

Without naming the defeater (bypass/coercion) and proving it obtains under determinism, this reduces to, “There’s something somewhere.”

3) “Active vs. Passive” and the Mirage of Permission

LeBlanc tries to blunt the charge of manipulation by speaking of passive or “allowing” causation—as if determinism were less intrusive when phrased as divine permission. But this proves too little or too much.

First, “permission” is either effectual or it is not.

• If effectual, then it is simply the way Providence orders means so that the event surely occurs. That is determination through ordinary explanatory causes—beliefs, desires, character, incentives—rather than over or against them. In that case, the puppet charge has gained nothing: you still owe us a defeater (coercion or bypassing), not a label.
• If non-effectual, then “permission” is just non-deterministic allowance, which is not the position under dispute.

Second, the intimacy of causation is not the guilt-maker. The relevant moral question is mode: Does the causal order coerce or bypass? Compatibilists deny both. They locate God’s rule in the very fabric of reasons‐responsive agency: He governs by the agent’s understanding and inclination, not in spite of it.

Third, if one insists that any certain decree ipso facto reduces us to puppets, that is simply to stipulate the conclusion: question begging. But the determinists need not follow down the route and merely assume determinism is incompatible with human agency.

The “Conscious Sims” Thought Experiment: Why Active vs. Passive Doesn’t Decide Responsibility

Imagine a designer’s sandbox—a Sims world. There are two very different ways to ensure an outcome.

(a) Bypassing route (defeater).
The Designer short-circuits the agent’s faculties: brute implants, hypnosis-style overrides, value erasures that never pass through judgment or consent. The avatar moves, but not as a mind at its post. This maps to coercion or bypassing manipulation—recognized responsibility-defeaters.

(b) Through-agency route (responsibility-grounding).
The Designer orders circumstances, incentives, relationships, and insights so that the agent sees reasons and acts from his own evaluative standpoint—precisely the pattern in which the agent would also refrain were weightier contrary reasons present in a nearby case. That is reasons-responsive determination: governance by understanding and inclination, not instead of them.

Compatibilist determinism claims (b) as the ordinary mode of providence. In Edwards’s terms, the man acts according to the greatest apparent desire—the conjunction of his reason and motivation—without constraint upon the will; what negates liberty is not certainty of consequence but violence upon the faculty.

Why this collapses the “active vs. passive” test

LeBlanc wants “passive/allowing” versus “active” determination to carry moral weight. The conscious Sims case shows it cannot.

• Passivity can still bypass. In a closed Sims world, everything is fixed by initial code and laws—i.e., “passively” determined with no mid-game interventions. If the code embeds mind-traps that skip judgment (value flips, irresistible triggers), responsibility is defeated even though determination is wholly passive.
• Passivity can still preserve agency. The same “passive” setup can be written so that agents learn, weigh reasons, and endorse their acts; in nearby variants (slightly different evidence or stakes) the same mechanism would register stronger reasons and change course.

“Active” determination is not necessary for moral incompatibility (you can defeat responsibility by passive bypass) and it is not sufficient either (ongoing divine action need not be coercive or bypassing; God can act within a creature’s deliberation—teaching, warning, persuading, ordering history—rather than over or against it). But will LeBlanc concede that these through-agency forms of determination are acceptable so long as nothing is “actively” determining actions? Perhaps he’ll reply that some facts are still actively determining character, so the “agent-making” element remains—and that’s the real problem. Yet that reply collapses the very distinction he’s trading on: if determination of anything (character, circumstances, motives) is the problem, then passive vs. active was never doing the moral work.

Put differently: if the rule is counterfactual dependence (God could prevent X; God allows X; therefore God determines X), then—granting classical omnipotence and omniscience—even many Open Theist configurations will entail that God “determines” everything in that sense. So the issue cannot be whether the thing is caused (passively or actively); the issue is how the cause reaches the will—through the agent’s rational uptake or around it.

Thus LeBlanc faces a dilemma he cannot avoid:

If he grants that causation as such does not equal responsibility (as he must to avoid implicating God even on his own view), then the debate turns—not on active vs. passive—but on mode: coercion/bypass vs. through-agency.

If he insists that any divine causation (active or passive) makes God responsible for creaturely choices, then he must deny what he also needs: that causation ≠ moral authorship.

What Kind of Cause Does God Use?

Once the dust settles, we have to ask the obvious question: What sort of cause does God employ? The Christian answer is: a mode unique to God. That matters because you can’t simply port moral conclusions drawn from creaturely agency over to divine agency as if they were same-order kinds.

Christians don’t hesitate to say “God causes.” We hesitate to say He causes like we do. Scripture never pictures God as one finite factor nudging other finite factors. He speaks, and it is; He upholds, and all things continue (Gen 1; Ps 33:6, 9; Heb 11:3; Acts 17:28; Rom 11:36). Divine agency is creative word and sustaining power, not push-and-pull mechanics or any other physical causes. God thinks—and it is. If you start with God as a same-order lever-puller, “strings” will feel inevitable because you’ve already made the category mistake.

“But is that even ‘causation’?”

The worry goes: if God’s act shares no creaturely properties, calling it “cause” is irrational—how could our predicates be true if nothing is shared? Answer: analogy is not equivocation. God Himself supplies truth-tracking ways to speak of His work—creating, commanding, upholding, giving life—so cause applies truly to God even if not univocally to creaturely pushes. The revealed mode warrants the predication without collapsing God into the cosmos.

The “aboutness”

Objection: “If a sentence is about God, the is-about relation must be the same on both sides, or else the predication isn’t about God.” That slides from a minimal condition to a metaphysical demand.

• What is agreed about is that “A is about B” is true only if A and B stand in the aboutness relation.
• What we deny is that the ground must be the same kind on both sides. The truthmaker is divine condescension/revelation. God’s own act by which He causes our predicates to genuinely latch onto Him. Not some shared creaturely property.

Several confusions keep recurring in objections to analogical predication. First is a slide from relation to ground. It’s one thing to say a theological statement must truly be about God (the minimal condition that the statement and God stand in the aboutness relation). It’s another to demand that both sides share the same kind of ground—a creaturely property—to make that relation hold. The former is obvious and granted; the latter is a gratuitous metaphysical add-on. Christian theism instead locates the ground in divine self-accommodation: God’s own act by which our predicates latch onto Him without collapsing Creator and creature.

A second mistake is the “shared property” requirement, which generates a regress. If every true predication needs a further shared feature to underwrite it, what underwrites that feature’s applicability—another feature, and so on ad infinitum? The demand explains nothing; it only defers explanation. The regress is cut short when the truthmaker is God’s condescension itself—His revealing, creative word, and upholding that furnish aboutness without requiring a bottom layer of creaturely sameness.

Third, critics often blur two distinct questions: Do two things share a single relation? and Do they occupy the same role within that relation? A single relation can host genuinely asymmetric roles without ceasing to be one relation. Think of an “order” relation: if A is in front of B, then B is behind A—same relation, different positions. Or consider teacher/student or parent/child: each side stands in the relation, but each stands there differently. Translating that to theology: aboutness is one relation in which God stands as the ground/revealer (the One who makes the predication latch onto Him), and our linguistic or mental tokens stand as the receiver/sign (the creaturely side that bears and expresses what God grounds). Insisting that both sides must fill the same role confuses participation in a relation with identity of participation-type—that’s a type error.

Closely tied to this is a semantic smuggle: treating “the same predicate-word” in our sentences as if it entailed “the same metaphysical kind” on both sides of the relation. But words can be stable and truth-bearing across asymmetric roles without collapsing their metaphysics. The claim at issue is explicitly metaphysical: what makes the predication true (its truthmaker) differs across the two sides—God’s act (fiat, upholding, condescension) on the divine side versus creaturely signs and capacities on ours. So, even when the predicate is the same in language and truly applied, the ground of that truth is not a shared creaturely property.

Finally, attempts to “fix the meaning” first on the creaturely side (then finding it won’t apply to God), or on God’s side (then finding it won’t apply to creatures), only assume what’s contested—that participation in one relation must be identical in kind on both sides. Once role-indexed participation is allowed, the oscillation dissolves. And if someone insists on univocity to secure aboutness, they inherit their own burden: an account of universals/common natures that avoids brute coincidence or nominalism. By contrast, analogy preserves truth and transcendence: aboutness is shared at the level of truth, not at the level of creaturely ground—same relation, different roles; God grounds the reference, our words receive it. (HT Jimmy Stephens)

Flatten divine causation into our kind and you’re forced into one of two failures:

1. Dependency: God’s being is explained by what is not God; or
2. Contingency: God’s perfections are made alongside the world, leaving no ground for constancy.

Both deny aseity. The classical confession is simpler and saner: God is all that He is, and all that He is is God—self-existent, simple, immutable. Therefore His “causing” cannot be mapped one-to-one onto ours. He is nearer to every event than any creature, not as a rival item in the system, but as its maker and sustainer.

If God’s essence changes with the world (not merely by assuming covenantal relations, but in His being), you inherit worse problems: either Platonism (God measured by abstractions beyond Himself) or volatility (divine “qualities” contingent and made, with no ground for tomorrow’s constancy). In both cases God leans on what is not God; the biblical reflex is the opposite: all else leans on Him.