AMP / WOTMR: Naturalism, Calvinism and Double Standards

The latest of Albert Mohlers blog entries made me write this article. It's about one of the most serious cases of compartmentalization that one encounters when he or she tries to debate Christians. It's about the moral responsibility in a reality in which course of action is determined before they are done or even thought of. More so it's about the right to punish in such a society.
People with a Christian worldview perspective encounter such a reality in Calvinism - specifically in predestination. Predestination is theologically one of the concepts that is hardest to grasp and seems to distort the Christian worldview the more someone understands it. This concept results from the perfect knowledge of God and the absolute sovereignty of his actions. If you have a theist worldview with an omnipotent, omniscient, sovereign good God all his plans for this world were known to him in the beginning of the world. Everything that would happen would have already played out in his perfect mind. Each and every action was known to God from the very beginning. God knew that I would be writing this article in 2008 when the world was created and he also knew that you are reading this article some time later. Even whether you would go to heaven or hell would have been known to God before you were born and there is nothing you can do about changing what God already knew before.



I can really understand that Todd Friel won't present his audience with those most disturbing theological facts. (He rejects to answer any questions dealing with this issue)



The only way you can accept this precept is if you realize that this world was never in any way, shape or form about us. Just in realizing and resigning to the fact that it was always completely and exclusively about God one can perhaps live without desperation in such a world, while probably facing hell.



And now lets turn to naturalism and what theists criticize it. If this world is purely governed by natural law - by physics - everything is purely like a machine. Our own thoughts are just like the program running on a machine which was built by an evolutionary process. There's nothing creative about them, nothing inspirational. Everything is purely chemical and predetermined.

How can anyone be punished if it were just predetermined chemical and physical processes who made him conceive and do the crimes one committed will be asked.



To answer it I want to compare again the similarities between theological predestination and naturalistic predeterminination. Both have in common that everything you do is preset. Either by Gods perfect will or by the laws of physics. Both show that 'Free Will' is just an illusion.

So how do theists go about the fact that in predestined reality no one bears responsibility for his/her actions in the same sense that no one bears responsibility for his/her in a naturalistic reality?

- They ignore it and live just as if Free Will would be real.
They do it for two reasons, Firstly we are addressed in Scripture as if we could have Free Will. So it seems that from his perfect perspective God would find some sense in presenting us with this illusion. Secondly it might keep people from living according to Gods law if they were told that everyone is already assigned whether he or she would go to hell.



People with a naturalistic worldview could of course do the same and ignore the deterministic nature of our reality and stay in their biologically evolved illusion of Free Will.

But even if we would turn our attention to the fact that our mind is just a chemical machine we don't face any moral implications. That we have morals and ethics depends on the fact that we do punish those who break the rules. Morals evolved because it is beneficial for individuals who live in a society to not get murdered or stolen from. Genes that would support social and ethical behavior would replicate very well in a world without cheaters. On the other hand: genes that make individuals cheat on such a moral society would replicate even better. At this point the concept of punishment becomes necessary for the moral rest of the society. To make a moral and ethical order survive within a species those who cheat on this order have to be punished - after all their evolutionary advantage that they could gain from such a behavior has to be neutralized.

Apart from personal responsibility our society has a much better interest in punishing unethical people. If we wouldn't punish cheaters the "God given" moral conscience would disappear rather quickly from the gene pool.



But there is a difference between calvinist predestination and naturalist predetermination. In a naturalist, predetermined world your evolutionary benefit you would gain from crimes just get neutralized by the rest of society through punishment. While in the calvinist, predestined world you get tortured in hell forever for your inability (if you don't have the faith to believe a book of highly disputable origin) to believe in God and respond rightly.



What upsets me most is that the scolding naturalism receives by theists is intellectually fraudulent.



You can't go through a theological education without encountering predestination at least once and learning about it. I don't have the slightest doubt that both, Albert Mohler and Todd Friel, know this concept very well. You can't possibly push that far enough to the back of the mind, that you wouldn't be reminded about it - and about its similarities - as soon as you encounter naturalism.

They just invoke naturalism when debating atheists to scare them off the atheist position into theism, while knowing very well that the predestination part of their worldview isn't much different. I guess they hope that most people won't know those calvinist parts of their religion during the witnessing encounter and that by the time they encounter this issue in their Christian walk their mind is that deafened that they won't remember the intellectual fraud that originally brought them into the religion.



To put it into an aphorism what the use of naturalism as a point against atheism is:



It's like a real-estate agent who wants to sell a house. He tries to get someone out of his old house and into a new by telling him that there are nasty mice in the cellar of his current house while knowing that a very similar breed of mice occupies the cellar of the new house as well.