For many, there's a real tension between a God that is supposed to be all-good (all-just) and all-powerful on the one hand and his determining persons to commit moral evil on the other. What's worse, is that on Calvinism, he also determines that some are saved and others will face spiritual death forevermore. I don't really know what to say to people that don't immediately see the incoherence here--to me it's akin to insisting in the existence of a circle-square. Still, Gangadeanians try to get around this tension by employing certain euphemisms. God isn't the "source" of sin/moral evil they say, but merely "permits it". That X is the source of sin requires that X is the secondary cause of sin rather than the primary cause, they insist. And humans are responsible for their sins because they are the "secondary causes" of such immorality. But I'm convinced that this is nothing but word play. When pressed on the matter, sometimes Gangadeanians will respond with something like the following.
Look, if we can't be held responsible for our actions because we are only secondary causes of them (and determinism is true), then the whole practice of holding each other morally responsible is senseless. But that's absurd. So it must be the case that we are morally responsible for our actions even if we are merely the secondary causes of them. It then follows that it must be compatible with God's perfect goodness that he hold us responsible for our sins too, despite our being merely secondary causes.This argument is no good. In the first place it presupposes that determinism is true. I'm not convinced by the arguments they present against libertarian free will, but I'll grant it for the time being. Still, another more serious problem remains. The reasoning above also presupposes that whatever it is that makes sense of humans holding each other morally responsible also accounts for its being compatible for God to hold humans responsible. But that's dubious. After all, there are serious differences between human-to-human relationships and God-to-human. I'll explore two of them. (Keep in mind that much of this is closely linked to the problem of evil which we've explored in recent posts. But I want to deal more specifically with the Gangadeanian response above).
For one, no human has created another human to sin. We don't have that kind of creative power, only God does. He started the whole shebang. God is the ultimate source of everything, but no human is. So the question about whether the practice of one human holding another human morally responsible is different from the question of whether it makes sense for God to hold humans responsible. Humans are roughly on a level playing field because all of us are determined to sin and only ever exercise secondary causation. Now I think there is a way to make sense of the rationality of holding one another morally responsible for good and bad actions in light of a deterministic world that does require some revision of our current practices. Instead of thinking about people deserving praise and blame for actions in the traditional sense (which requires that the actions are "up to" them in some robust sense), perhaps we should view things in a reformative light. We "punish" and "reward" people in an effort to condition one another to be better people not because persons "have it coming", but because we recognize that all of us are better off (including the agent in question) if people perform certain actions and abstain from others. Reformative justice here seeks the good of all. Determinism then doesn't threaten the rationality of our practice of holding one another morally responsible wholesale, even if it requires that we rethink and revise our current practices and attitudes. As long as there is some causal relationship between the "rewards" and "punishments" we dole out and the desired results, we can think of our holding one another morally responsible for certain actions as aimed at reformation of each individual. Insofar as seeking the good of all people and society as a whole is a desirable thing, it's perfectly rational to do so even in a deterministic world.
The trouble is, we can't apply these considerations when we consider the matter of God holding humans responsible. Again, on Gangadean's deterministic view, God created humans to inevitably not seek and so to sin and instantiate spiritual death. Some are chosen and regenerated (not because they deserve it in any sense) and others are not. The question to ask then is whether it makes sense for God to hold persons morally responsible for their actions when God played the ultimate role in the bringing about of these very actions. This should feel like an iteration of the problem of evil. More specifically, we're focusing on the matter of whether humans can rationally hold one another responsible in a deterministic world, and also how this bears on whether God can do so. I've just suggested how it could make sense for humans to hold one another culpable in a deterministic world. But the story I told was one where humans didn't play the ultimate role in determining one another to sin in the first place. Would it make sense for one human A to "reform" another human B, if A was the ultimate cause of B's sinning? Well, I'm inclined to think that in such a case, B isn't the only one in need of reforming A is, too. Remember for Gangadean to sin is to live contrary to one's very nature. So we're not talking about some minor hiccup in B's situation which A is ultimately the cause of. Presumably on Gangadean's view, B does considerable harm to himself and perhaps to others in living contrary to his very nature. And the trick is to square this with A's involvement in getting the ball rolling as it were. Now I see two options in explaining A's involvement in being the ultimate cause of B's sin.
1) It's equally compatible with A's nature that she ultimately cause B to sin and that she ultimately cause B not to sin.
2) It is only compatible with A's nature that she ultimately cause B to sin.
If 1), then A did something wrong in choosing to create the former and not the latter (again given the seriousness of sin on Gangadean's worldview). If 2), then there's something questionable about A's very nature. Either way, there's a real tension. That's sort of what we're dealing with when we consider God's system of holding persons morally responsible in a theologically deterministic world. At the very least, it's far from clear that it would make sense for B to need reforming, and not A. Moreover, since the Gangadeanians probably disagree with my reformative notion of justice and moral responsibility, we should also say that it's far from obvious that B could "deserve" anything that A doesn't also deserve. After all, A seems to be the mastermind behind B's sin. Indeed B wouldn't have even existed had A not created her, let alone committed any sin.
But it gets worse! Here's the second disanalogy between humans holding one another culpable on the one hand and God doing so for humans. What's at stake is not just whether a person like B does harm to himself or others. For Gangadean, God determines each of our ultimate destinies (everlasting spiritual live vs. everlasting spiritual death). And just as humans don't create one another to inevitably sin, no human determines the ultimate destiny of another. Again, we don't have that kind of power. But on Gangadean's view, that's just what God does. He regenerates some, and leaves others in the inevitable moral evil and spiritual death that they were, by God's own decree, created into (or at least created to realize).
So again trying to apply my reformative account of how the practice of holding one another morally responsible for sin in a deterministic world might make sense, won't work here. It would be one thing if God merely determined people would sin, but he was in the unrestricted redeeming business (as in universal salvation). As I suggested earlier, perhaps we can make sense of our moral practices in light of determinism if we thought about our purpose in giving out rewards and punishments as reformative. That is, in recognizing that we are not ultimately responsible, we wouldn't treat one another as if we "deserve" punishment for wrong doings, or "rewards" for good actions at least not in the traditional sense of 'deserve'. Instead we'd try to seek the good for all persons and figure out how best to promote it. That's what moral responsibility would consist of. I then noted that a real tension arises when we include the idea that the one doing the reforming of the sinner turns out to be the ultimate cause of the sin. But now I'm suggesting that if the person doing the reforming of the other, were also discriminatory, then that too would be unjust. To not only be the ultimate cause of the existence of all sinners (and a fortiori all sin), but further to seek the good of only some sinners and not others indicates that the reformer needs moral reforming.
When I've pointed this stuff out to Gangadeanians in the past some have resorted to suggesting that I've got a faulty notion of justice in mind. That I'm trying to apply my limited understanding of justice to God's doings and that just won't work. In effect, they are choosing to define 'justice' in one way and favoring their own account over mine which is a common practice as noted here. But it didn't occur to them that they are guilty of the very same thing. They too have a proposal of what divine justice should look like, but it isn't argued for, but rather presupposed to be the "right" one. On other occasions some Gangadeanians have suggested that God's justice consists in "treating equals as equals". I guess this is their intuitive notion of justice and divine justice exemplifies this perfectly. But they overlook the fact that God's justice is nothing like that at least if we turn to the bible, which they affirm. Calvinism is the very opposite of "treating equals as equals". The unregenerate don't deserve salvation. According to Gangadean, all have sinned, no one seeks not one and so all persons were at one time reaping the consequences of not seeking--i.e., spiritual death. God's grace in the act of regeneration then is by definition an unmerited gift. To apply this grace to some and not others is far from treating "equals as equals." The upshot: we can deny that God's goodness is compatible with God holding humans ultimately culpable for sin in light of the fact that he is the ultimate cause of their sin. But that need not undermine the rationality of humans holding one another morally responsible if we adopt a reformative approach. So you can deny that Gangadean's Calvinism is compatible with the thesis that a perfectly good God exists, that it to say you can deny that it would be consonant with God's perfect justice to hold persons responsible for merely being secondary causes while also affirm that it makes sense for humans to hold each other morally responsible. No nihilism follows.
In the article I've linked above, the author speaks about God's will (as well as his exercise of it in creation) as not only causally, but also logically prior to any and all human agency (including the performing of any and all moral evil/sin). All this noise about "primary vs. secondary causes" and "merely permitting vs. being the author of" doesn't get around the fact that God's will (and the exercise of his will in the act of creation) is both causally and logically prior to all moral evil in a deterministic universe according to Gangadean.
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