The Free Will Defense to the problem of evil represents part of an entire approach to thinking about Christianity. Its assumptions produce intuitions about what it means to be free, responsible, and to love God. These are then used to interpret key themes in Christianity about why God created, the Fall, and redemption from sin. Specifically, the human will is made the focus and center-piece. The claim is that this will is only free and responsible if it could have done otherwise than it actually did, all things being exactly the same. God suspends his sovereignty and gives sovereignty to humans so that they can freely respond to him and love him. Because of the Fall and continued sin, God offers redemption to all persons who will freely respond to the gift.
We can see this scheme in the work of some of the most acclaimed Christian philosophers of the past 50 years. Here I will call it the anthropocentric view of Christianity. I am going to contrast it with a theocentric or what I will call the doxological view. The doxological view makes the glory of God the center and focus of understanding all things. This includes understanding the human will and the problem of evil. In order to highlight the differences between these two, I will give some examples from philosophers who give voice to the anthropocentric view and contrast it with the doxological view and demonstrate how the anthropocentric view comes short in many ways, including accepting uncaused events and adhering to a form of skepticism about the good and God. Its presuppositions about God need to be analyzed and it has implications about the nature of sin, the Fall, redemption, the work of Christ, and the final judgment that set it at odds with historic Christianity.
Anthropocentric Approach
The anthropocentric view says that God created in order to have a relationship with humans. This relationship could not be brought about by a causal act of God or else it seems coerced and is not free. Therefore, free will must mean a non-causal or undetermined will. Since creating humans with this kind of will also opens up the possibility of evil, the best world includes both a free will and evil. The resulting sin is countered by God’s offer of salvation through the death of Christ. Once again the human will makes the final decision in this salvation offer since behind it is this picture of a relationship and what a relationship must be like.
The anthropocentric approach has the tendency to reduce the work of Christ to an example of love and not a vicarious atonement revealing God’s justice and mercy. In this sense the doxological approach can be Christocentric in a way the libertarian view cannot be. Christ does reveal the love of God but this is done in the context of revealing what is needed to reconcile God and sinners–the sacrificial death of Christ is not just a nice gesture but is the lamb of God sacrificed to satisfy the justice of God and demonstrate the mercy of God. If all that is needed is a free will that can do otherwise then the sinner does not need Christ’s death but only to do otherwise and choose God. Much of American revivalism and self-help religion is summarized in that sentence. It reduces life to the will, voluntarism, libertarianism.
Doxological Approach
By way of contrast I will outline the historic Christian view as expressed in the Westminster Confession of Faith. This is sometimes called Calvinism, but that term can imply something relating only to soteriology and not to a larger worldview. In this doxological approach to Christianity, the purpose of creation and providence is the revelation of the glory of God. God permits sin and the Fall to deepen the revelation of his justice and mercy. Knowledge of the glory of God is the highest good and is known through creation and providence and not apart from these through a direct vision of God. These presuppositions produce very different intuitions than those held by the anthropocentric adherents and this should indicate to us that intuitions are not the final authority but must be tested for coherence and meaning.
In thinking about Calvinism and the free will solution, I am defining Calvinism much more broadly than the soteriology of the Five Points. It can also be understood as a worldview. This is how Abraham Kuyper in his Lectures on Calvinism defined it. Many of the criticism Kuyper aimed at those Christians who rejected Calvinism can be seen as also directed at the Christian philosophers I’ll be considering in a moment. But there is another sense of Calvinism beyond the soteriology and the worldview levels. I think Benjamin Warfield elucidates this. He focuses his attention on the idea that Calvinism makes the glory of God the centerpiece. He says:
But the great question which presses upon it is, How shall God be glorified? It is the contemplation of God and zeal for His honor which in it draws out the emotions and absorbs endeavor; and the end of humans as of all other existence, of salvation as of all other attainment, is to it the glory of the Lord of all. Full justice is done in it to the scheme of redemption and the experience of salvation, because full justice is done in it to religion itself which underlies these elements of it. It beings, it centers, it ends with the vision of God in His glory: and it sets itself before all things to render to God His rights in every sphere of life-activity.[i]
Warfield makes this point about the Westminster Confession of Faith and the accompanying Shorter and Larger Catechisms. The Shorter Catechism begins with the question “what is the chief end of man,” and answers “to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” The Confession claims that the purpose of God in creation, providence, his eternal decree, in permitting the Fall, redemption, and the final judgment is the revelation of his glory. Accepting these points will give us very different intuitions than those held by the anthropocentric group. Indeed, hopefully it will help us wean ourselves from appeals to intuitions and instead learn to critically analyze the presuppositions supporting intuitions including those about free will and responsibility.
What we find is that there are competing understandings of knowledge operating here. On the one hand is the view that knowledge is from personal experience. It is immediate or direct. On the other hand is the view that knowledge is understanding. It is mediate. God is not known directly but is known through the works of creation and providence. The first view says that heaven and the beatific vision is the highest good. The second view points out that this kind of knowledge, direct or immediate knowledge of God, is impossible. God is always and only known through his works. This means that the knowledge of God, as the highest good, requires understanding and understanding is able to respond to challenges and show what is known. This knowledge of the glory of God is the highest good.
Hume and Mackie
J.L. Mackie wrote an article on the problem of evil that became influential at least in the sense that it elicited responses from popular Christian philosophers. There was nothing new or particularly surprising in the article. Indeed, one point I’ll make here is that David Hume, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, anticipated most of what the so-called “new” atheists have claimed about belief in God, and he anticipated most of the Christian responses to these arguments. This includes issues about the problem of evil.
For instance, Hume anticipates the claim that this is the best possible world given the amount of good that God wanted to produce. He says:
Did I show you a house or palace where there was not one apartment convenient or agreeable; where the windows, door, fires, passages, stairs, and the whole economy of the building were the source of noise, confusion, fatigue, darkness, and the extremes of heat and cold, you would certainly blame the contrivance, without any further examination. The architect would in vain display his subtitly, and prove to you that, if this door or that window were altered, greater ills would ensue. What he says may be strictly true: The alternation of one particular, while the other parts of the building remain, may only augment inconveniences. But still you would assert in general that, if the architect had had skill and good intentions, he might have formed such a plan of the whole, and might have adjusted the parts in such a manner as would have remedied all or most of these inconveniences. His ignorance, or even your own ignorance of such a plan, will never convince you of the impossibility of it.[ii]
He gives this response in the voice of Philo in response to Cleanthes who takes an anthropocentric approach to God, arguing that God is like us in being finite but is greater in power. However, this particular response alarms the other character, Demea, who represents the orthodox believer advocating fideism and the incomprehensibility (really unknowability) of God. This is partly because it exposes a weakness in the free will defense. Hume argues this in two ways, one is that even given a libertarian free will things could have been greatly improved if humans had a better disposition:
In order to cure most of the ills of human life . . . Let him be endowed with a greater propensity to industry and labor, a more vigorous spring and activity of mind, a more constant bent to business and application. Let the whole species possess naturally an equal diligence with that which many individuals are able to attain by habit and reflection, and the most beneficial consequences, without any allway of ill, is the immediate and necessary result of this endowment. Almost all the moral as well as the natural evils of human life arise from idleness; and were our species, by the original constitution of their frame, exempt from this vice or infirmity, the perfect cultivation of land, the improvement of arts and manufactures, the exact execution of every office and duty, immediately follow; and men at once may fully reach that state of society which is so imperfectly attained by the best regulated government. But as industry is a power, and the most valuable of any, nature seems determined, suitably to her usual maxims, to bestow it on men with a very sparing hand; and rather to punish him severely for his deficiency in it than to reward him for his attainments.[1]
The other approach is that the argument claiming God is not the cause of evil because it is due to free will either inserts uncaused events (under whatever name, indeterminate events, etc.) or still ends with God as the cause.
Yet, as long as there is any vice at all in the universe, it will very much puzzle you anthropomorphites how to account for it. You must assign a cause for it, without having recourse to the first cause. But as every effect must have a cause, and that cause another, you must either carry on the progression in infinitum or rest on that original principle, who is the ultimate cause of all things.[2]
Philo, and probably Hume, maintain that the only way to think the world was created by a good God is to begin with this assumption. If we instead start by analyzing the world, we would never come to such a conclusion about its author.
Let us allow that, if the goodness of the Deity . . . could be established on any tolerable reasons a priori, these phenomena, however untoward, would not be sufficient to subvert that principle, but might easily, in some unknown manner, be reconcilable to it. But let us still assert that, as this goodness is not antecedently established but must be inferred from the phenomena, there can be no grounds for such an inference while there are so many ills in the universe, and while these ills might so easily have been remedied.[3]
It is interesting that Hume says if we begin with the assumption that God is good, then the problem of evil might easily be resolved. Or in another place, that for all we know there is an easy solution. Is the free will solution this easy solution? Has it addressed the challenges of Hume and preserved the integrity of God and the Christian message? I’ll give some examples from three Christian philosophers, Plantinga, Swinburne, and M. Adams, from representative texts, and argue that their shift to making the human will absolute has kept them from answering important challenges and has not preserved the integrity of the glory of God. As such, it has not preserved the Gospel message. We can see hints at this in the form of claims about universalism, the purpose of Christ’s death, and what amounts to open theism.
Contemporary Christian Philosophers
The essence of the free will solution is the claim that responsibility requires free will and that free will must be uncaused or undetermined such that the agent could have done otherwise all things being exactly the same. This is a half truth since it is true that responsibility requires freedom. But it is not true that a free will must be an uncaused or undetermined will. Instead, a free will can mean an unrestrained will where the agent can do what he wants.
The free will solution then argues that since the human will must be free in the undetermined sense God, in creating such wills, opens up the possibility for great evils. But the world that contains free will and the possibility of good choices but also evils is better than the world that does not contain free will. Swinburne says:
To return to the central case of humans—the reader will agree with me to the extent to which he or she values responsibility, free choice, and being of use very much more than thrills of pleasure or absence of pain. There is no other way to get the evils of this world into the right perspective, except to reflect at length on innumerable very detailed thought experiments (in addition to actual experiences of life) in which we postulate very different sorts of worlds from our own, and then ask ourselves whether the perfect goodness of God would require him to create one of those (or no world at all) rather than our own.[iii]
About natural evil Swinburne says: “The other way in which natural evil operates to give humans their freedom is that it makes possible certain kinds of action towards it between which agents can choose.”[iv]
So then God, without asking humans, has to choose for them between the kinds of world in which they can live—basically either a world in which there is very little opportunity for humans to benefit or harm each other, or a world in which there is considerable opportunity . . . But having the natural possibility of causing suffering makes possible a greater good. God, in creating humans who (of logical necessity) cannot choose for themselves the kind of world into which they are to come, plausibly exhibits his goodness in making for them the heroic choice that they cone [sic] into a risky world where they may have to suffer for the good of others.[v]
In almost the same way, Plantinga says: “The universe with the free creatures it contains and the evil they commit is better than it would have been had it contained neither the free creatures nor this evil.”[vi]
In response to the challenges that perhaps God could have made the same free persons in other worlds where they did not freely choose evil, Plantinga introduces the idea of transworld depravity. This is the claim that a given person makes bad choices in all of the worlds in which he exists. He says:
Obviously it is possible that there be persons who suffer from transworld depravity. More generally, it is possible that everybody suffers from it. And if this possibility were actual, then God, though omnipotent, could not have created any of the possible worlds containing just the persons who do in fact exist, and containing moral good but no moral evil. P 368
The solution is that if we value some kinds of goods, then we must also value the world that contains them even though it also must contain some evils. God cannot make a world that only contains the goods we value. Evils are said to be worthwhile because they make certain kinds of virtues possible and contribute to soul-making. People learn to build character in the face of suffering.
Certain kinds of values, certain familiar kinds of good states of affairs, can’t exist apart from evil of some sort. For example, there are people who display a sort of moral heroism in the fact of suffering and adversity—a heroism that inspires others and creates a good situation out of a bad one. In a situation like this the evil, of course, remains evil; but the total state of affairs—someone’s bearing pain magnificently, for example—may be good.[vii]
The free will solution often embraces a form of skepticism about the good and God. It suggests that for all we know there is some greater good that God is pursuing that makes evil worthwhile. It then uses a kind of pragmatic solution to the problem of evil in that some day evil will be overcome and, therefore, it is not really a problem for Christian belief.
Likewise, I suggest, to exhibit the logical compossibility of both dimensions of divine goodness with horrendous suffering it is not necessary to find logically possible reasons why God might permit them. It is enough to show how God can be good enough to created persons despite their participation in horrors—by defeating them within the context of the individual’s life and by giving that individual a life that is a great good to him/her on the whole.[viii]
The standard way it is overcome is through going to heaven and having the beatific vision.
From a Christian point of view, God is a being a greater than which cannot, be conceived, a good incommensurate with both created goods and temporal evils. Likewise, the good of beatific, fact-to-face intimacy with God is simply incommensurate with any merely non-transcendent goods or ills a person might experience. Thus, the good of beatific face-to-face intimacy with God would engulf . . . even the horrendous evils humans experience in this present life here below, and overcome any prima-facie reasons the individual had to doubt whether his/her life would or could be worth living. [ix]
The highest good is this non-cognitive vision of God and salvation is being saved from sin and hell so as to be able to have this vision. Thus we can put together how the free will solution is part of this larger interpretation of Christianity and how it is in contrast with Calvinism, or the Reformation, as summarized in the Westminster Confession. God wants humans to have the beatific vision; in order to achieve this, humans must have uncaused wills; uncaused wills permit evils that God cannot prevent; humans do indeed end up willing moral evil; God sends his son to be crucified in order to make salvation possible to those who accept the offer. Some implications: universalism is an attractive possibility since there is no reason that all humans wouldn’t eventually accept this offer given enough time. And, God acts and reacts in relation to the sovereign human will which is either similar to, or actually is, open theism. The free will solution often relies on Molinist explanations of God’s foreknowledge in a way that makes his foreknowledge dependent.
The Westminster Confession of Faith and Doxological Christianity
By way of contrast to these recent free will solutions, anticipated by Hume and given as the response to atheists like Mackie, we can expand on Warfield’s definition of Calvinism and the Westminster Confession. We will look at what the Confession says about God’s purpose in creation, providence, his eternal decree, the fall, the order of salvation, and the final judgment.
The Confession begins by establishing the inexcusability of unbelief. In the first paragraph it maintains that the works of creation and providence so manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God so as to leave unbelief without excuse. In chapter 2 it then defines God and God’s relation to the creation:
God has all life, glory, goodness, blessedness, in and of Himself; and is alone in and unto Himself all-sufficient, not standing in need of any creatures which He has made, nor deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting His own glory in, by, unto, and upon them. He is the alone fountain of all being, of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things; and has most sovereign dominion over them, to do by them, for them, or upon them whatsoever Himself pleases In His sight all things are open and manifest, His knowledge is infinite, infallible, and independent upon the creature, so as nothing is to Him contingent, or uncertain. He is most holy in all His counsels, in all His works, and in all His commands. To Him is due from angels and men, and every other creature, whatsoever worship, service, or obedience He is pleased to require of them.[x]
The Confession first defines the eternal decree of God before discussing the free will of humans. It affirms that all things come to pass based on the will of God and also that this does not take away freedom since all humans are still free to do as they will. About the eternal decree it says:
God from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass;[4] yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.
By the decree of God, for the manifestation of His glory, some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life; and others foreordained to everlasting death
The rest of mankind God was pleased, according to the unsearchable counsel of His own will, whereby He extends or withholds mercy, as He pleases, for the glory of His sovereign power over His creatures, to pass by; and to ordain them to dishonor and wrath for their sin, to the praise of His glorious justice.
And so not only does creation reveal the glory of God, but the reality of sin and its consequences reveal the glory of God as well.
God’s purpose in creation was not to give humans a beatific vision or cultivate a relationship but was to manifest his glory:
It pleased God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost for the manifestation of the glory of His eternal power, wisdom, and goodness, in the beginning, to create, or make of nothing, the world, and all things therein whether visible or invisible, in the space of six days; and all very good.
Similarly, the providence of God manifests the glory of God. This includes the rule of God from the greatest events to the smallest detail. And it includes God’s rule over the wills of humans. The Confession makes the distinction between God as the primary cause and the created order or the human personality and will as the secondary cause. Freedom pertains to the level of secondary causation. Humans are free in that their will is unrestrained and they can do what they want. However, all of the secondary causation level is under the sovereignty of God as the primary cause of all things.
God the great Creator of all things does uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least, by His most wise and holy providence, according to His infallible foreknowledge, and the free and immutable counsel of His own will, to the praise of the glory of His wisdom, power, justice, goodness, and mercy
This providence of God extends to the fall and to sin. In stark contrast to the possible world approach of those quoted above, God permits evil for the manifestation of His glory. God is not in the passive role of looking into future decisions in order to make up his own mind. Instead, God actively determines all that comes to pass for the manifestation of his glory. In its chapter on free will, the Confession affirms that the will is not necessitated to either good or evil, and that the will can be free in each of the four-fold states: pre-fall, post-fall, regenerated, and glorified. It is free after the fall even though it cannot will to do any spiritual good. All of this occurs in the context of God permitting the fall for the manifestation of his justice and mercy.
Our first parents, being seduced by the subtlety and temptations of Satan, sinned, in eating the forbidden fruit. This their sin, God was pleased, according to His wise and holy counsel, to permit, having purposed to order it to His own glory.
This extends even to the final judgment and its permanent results. All humans manifest either the mercy or the justice of God. All humans get what they want even in this final judgment and, therefore, all humans are free.
The end of God’s appointing this day is for the manifestation of the glory of His mercy, in the eternal salvation of the elect; and of His justice, in the damnation of the reprobate, who are wicked and disobedient. For then shall the righteous go into everlasting life, and receive that fullness of joy and refreshing, which shall come from the presence of the Lord; but the wicked who know not God, and obey not the Gospel of Jesus Christ, shall be cast into eternal torments, and be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of His power.
This presentation of the Christian message and God’s nature is the consistent application of God’s nature. It prevents us from shifting the focus from God and the glory of God to the human will as absolute and sovereign.
If we considered the Larger and Shorter Catechisms we would get this same picture. The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. God is known through his works of creation and providence. The first commandment is a command to know God in all that by which he makes himself known. The Lord’s Prayer asks that God would be known and glorified throughout the entire world.
Why Have You Made Me So?
The intuition on which an objection rests is that humans cannot be held responsible if they cannot do otherwise. If they cannot do otherwise God is the author of sin. This objects defines freedom, responsibility, and God as the author of sin in a circular way. Of course if freedom is the ability to do otherwise then moral responsibility requires this ability. The application of this to God reveals how the speaker is willing to change the definition of God to fit intuitions about freedom when these intuitions themselves are due to unexamined presuppositions.
When thinking about responsibility and freedom what is relevant is doing what one wants. If a person could have done otherwise but not what he wanted it strains credibility to say he is responsible. If he didn’t do what he wants there seem to be mitigating factors in responsibility. Intention matters in responsibility.
On the other hand, if a person did what he wants but could not have done otherwise the wanting is what is relevant. If I am told that although I did what I wanted I couldn’t have done otherwise id reply that I didn’t want to do otherwise I wanted to do as I did.
Humans are responsible for their choices and what they want. At the most basic level, the level of knowing and seeking God, humans always get what they want. Paul highlights this in Romans 9. His argument could be misunderstood as a dismissal of the question “why has God made me so.” However his response exposes that the question is self-defeating.
If a person asks “why has God made me so” this can either be a complaint or a request for me information. As a complaint it is self-defeating: Why has God, who I don’t believe exists, created me so?” If you don’t like it, don’t want it, choose otherwise. As a request for information it’s not obvious what is being sought. God created you thus to reveal his glory in grace and justice.
Warfield captures some of the intuitions behind the anthropocentric form of free will in noting the contrast between grace and works:
There are at bottom but two types of religious thought in the world — if we may improperly use the term “religious” for both of them. There is the religion of faith; there is the “religion” of works. Calvinism is the pure embodiment of the former of these; what is known in Church History as Pelagianism is the pure embodiment of the latter of them.[xi]
By way of contrast to the anthropocentric view which focuses on God wanting as many humans as possible to get into heaven, Warfield defines consistently held theism as teleological: “For in what does Theism come to its rights but in a teleological view of the universe?” Furthermore, Calvinism as the theistic expression of religion is conceived as absolute dependence on God.[xii]
Warfield recognizes that many other theists may also speak about the glory of God. However, Calvinism differs in not confusing works, grace, and nature and instead keeping God’s glory and sovereignty at the center.
Calvinism will not play fast and loose with the free grace of God. It is set upon giving to God, and to God alone, the glory and all the glory of salvation. There are others than Calvinists, no doubt, who would fain make the same great confession. But they make it with reserves, or they painfully justify the making of it by some tenuous theory which confuses nature and grace.[xiii]
The intuitions that led many to support the free will defense and the belief that one is free and responsible only if one could have done otherwise all things being exactly the same are the consistent outcome of the belief that humans must contribute to their own salvation. This could be the kind of Pelagianism that says humans must initiate salvation, or it might be the kind of semi-Pelagianism that says humans respond favorably to God’s invitation. In either case the final outcome is a consequence of the human will.
The Confession affirms that the human will is free but that it is also predetermined. Apart from regeneration it cannot will any spiritual good and if it is regenerated then it wills some spiritual goods. Regeneration is not an offer that can be accepted or rejected but is instead a recreation or a raising of the dead.
The Confession also keeps us away from the mistake of making salvation the central teaching of Christianity. Salvation is part of a larger reality and worldview that is teleologically focused on the glory of God. It is the knowledge of the glory of God that is the good. Salvation is a restoration to this knowledge and so cannot be understood apart from it.
Conclusion
In conclusion Warfield argues that Calvinism is the consistent expression of theism. While there are other less consistent expressions, they must depart from the doctrine of God and the good at one more points. Instead, he says:
The difference between Calvinism and other forms of theistic thought, religious experience, evangelical theology is a difference not of kind but of degree. Calvinism is not a specific variety of theism, religion, evangelicalism, set over against other specific varieties, which along with it constitute these several genera, and which possess equal rights of existence with it and make similar claims to perfection, each after its own kind. It differs from them not as one species differs from other species, but as a perfectly developed representative differs from an imperfectly developed representative of the same species. There are not many kinds of theism, religion, evangelicalism, among which men are at liberty to choose to suit at will their individual taste or meet their special need, all of which may be presumed to serve each its own specific uses equally worthily. There is but one kind of theism, religion, evangelicalism; and the several constructions laying claim to these names differ from each other not as correlative species of a broader class, but as more or less perfect, or more or less defective, exemplifications of a single species. [xiv]
By committing to presuppositions about the nature of God, the good, and the purpose of God in creating, people produce a situation where they have intuitions about libertarian free will being the only true understanding of free will. This is what we should expect when theism is not well developed. The result is that the human will is made the focus and center and the activity of God is subordinated to it. This is accompanied, although not necessarily, by the claim that heaven and the beatific vision are the highest good to which humans can aspire. In making this claim all of the revelation of the glory of God in creation and providence is set aside.
The benefits of keeping what Warfield called the more perfectly developed form of theism in mind is that we can not only avoid the mistake of relying on faulty intuitions but also that we can be teleological in our fixed purpose of knowing the glory of God. On the one hand the distortion of free will presupposes misconceptions of knowledge, God, and the good and leads to distortions about the doctrines of the fall, atonement, work of Christ, and final judgment. This doxological approach keeps at the center God and the knowledge of God and from that perspective correctly understands the rest of the creation, fall, and redemption worldview.
[1] 75
[2] 77
[3] 76
[4] Vs libertarianism or any claim that things could have been otherwise as consistent with the WCF
[i] Warfield, Benjamin B. Calvinism www.reformedliterature.com/warfield=calvinism.php
[ii] Hume, David. Dialogues Converning natural Religion. Philosophical Horizons: Introductory Readings. Ed. Steven Cahn and Maureen Eckert. Second edition. Wadsworth Centgage, Boston. 73.
[iii] Swinburne, Richard. “Why God Allows Evil.” Philosophical Horizons. 98
[iv] Swinburne
[v] Swinburne
[vi] Plantinga, Alvin. “The Free Will Defense.” Readings in Philosophy of Religion: Ancient to Contemporary. Editd by Linda Zagzebski and Timothy Miller. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford. 358.
[vii] P 356
[viii] MA 393
[ix] Adams, Marilyn Adams. “Horrendouse Evils and the Goodness of God.” Readings in Philosophy of Religion: Ancient to Contemporary. Editd by Linda Zagzebski and Timothy Miller. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford. 394.
[x] Westminster Confession of Faith: http://www.reformed.org/documents/wcf_with_proofs/
[xi] Warfield, Benjamin B. What is Calvinism? http://www.reformationtheology.com/2006/07/what_is_calvinism_by_b_b_warfi.php
[xii] Warfield, Benjamin B. Calvinism. http://www.reformedliterature.com/warfield-calvinism.php
[xiii] http://www.reformedliterature.com/warfield-calvinism-today.php
[xiv] http://www.reformedliterature.com/warfield-calvinism.php
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