We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
Free Will: An Aesthetic Model
Greg continues his thoughts on free will by offering an aesthetic model for free will. This one gets pretty philosophical, but it’s worth toughing it out.
Category: Q&A
Tags: Calvinism, Determinism, Free Will, Open Theism, Philosophy, Satan and the Problem of Evil
Topics: Free Will and the Future, Providence, Predestination and Free Will
Related Reading
Love and Free Will
God could have easily created a world in which nothing evil could ever happen. But this world would not have been capable of love. God could have preprogrammed agents to say loving things and to act in loving ways. He could even have preprogrammed these automatons to believe they were choosing to love. But these…
Lighten Up: Believing in Believing
OK, we don’t really think this is the difference between theology and philosophy, but how does this guy not get that not believing in believing is, itself, a belief?
What Does It Mean that God Hardens Hearts?
Some argue that passages which speak of God hardening human hearts (Jos 11:19-20; Ex 7:3; 10:1; Rom 9:18) demonstrate that God controls everything, including people resistant to this declared intentions. He hardens whomever he wills, they argue. He could just as easily have softened their hearts, but for his own sovereign reasons he chose not…
What is the significance of Acts 21:10–12?
While Paul and Luke were making preparations to go and preach in Jerusalem, “a prophet named Agabus came down from Judea.” The prophet approached Paul, took his belt, and announced, “Thus says the Holy Spirit, ‘This is the way the Jews in Jerusalem will bind the man who owns this belt and will hand him…
The Case for Including Open Theism Within Arminianism
Here is an excellent post by my good friend Roger Olson in which he makes the case that Open Theism should be embraced by Arminians as an orthodox, if somewhat non-traditional, form of their faith. In fact, Roger argues (rightly in my opinion) that Open Theism is much closer to the “heart” of Arminianism than…
What’s the signficance of Judges 10:6-17
The Israelites rebelled against Yahweh and worshipped other gods. As a result, Yahweh withdrew his protection of them and “sold them into the hands of te Philistines and the Ammonites” (Judg. 10:6-7). The Israelites eventually acknowledged their sin and cried out to God (vs. 10) but Yahweh, perhaps perceiving that their repentance wasn’t genuine, told…