The Highway Forums General Discussion Open Forum Free will

Thanks, Pilgrim, for your concern.

A couple quick thoughts:

First, God is eternal. Of course it follows from this that there is no deliberation on God's part when 'deciding' to create the world. As an eternally omniscient being, however, He has eternally known all of the ways that He could have created the universe, and He only chose to create one of them. As I was talking about it, a "possible world" is simply one way God could have made things. For instance, God is omnipotent. Accordingly, He is powerful enough to create a world where humans have antlers. As a result, there 'are' "possible worlds" where humans have antlers. These worlds aren't, however, actual worlds that exist independently from God, and God did not have to discover 'them'. God eternally knows all the ways He could have done things. Christian philosophers often call these "worlds" for short, and it didn't occur to me to eliminate academic philosophical jargin. You can reframe the story I told like this:

God knows His own infinite power and all the ways that He could have made the world. One way that He could have made the world involved Adam freely choosing to sin, and another way that He could have made the world involved Adam freely choosing not to sin. God eternally willed to manifest His power of creating a world in which Adam freely chose to sin, but He did this in such a way that Adam's free choice to sin was immutably decided long before Adam actually sinned.

So you see, if I eliminate the technical philosophical jargin, what I said looks a lot more like what traditional Calvinists say. The use of "possible world language" is useful for philosophers and logicians because it allows us to specify truth conditions for claims about necessity, possibility, among other things. Accordingly, the claim that "God is necessary" is true if and only if God exists in all possible worlds. That is, it is impossible that God doesn't exist because there is no possible world in which there is no God. Etc. Alvin Plantinga has entire book on this topic entitled "The Nature of Necessity". No need to be alarmed!

Note: God eternally knows all of these "possible worlds" if He eternally knows all of the things He is capable of doing. So, nothing I said was inconsistent with God's omniscience.

Second, what I suggested isn't something that an Arminian or Pelagian would posit because the fall, on the picture I presented, is devastating and strips away from humans any ability to choose anything good without God's grace. Pelagians and Arminians think that fallen man can contribute at least something to his own salvation. The picture I suggested is purely Calvinistic.

I apologize for any confusion. I'll try to be more clear in the future.

Cheers,
John