Ben Wallis’s counter-apologetics blog

We wish to show that every individual event which occurs in God's creation is willfully caused by God, where we understand God to be the omnipotent and omniscient creator of the whole universe, i.e. the creator of everything that exists outside of God.

In my last blog post I presented an argument that if God has the omnipotence and omniscience typically ascribed to Him by God-believers, then he is in control of our choices. [ 1 ] There I carefully avoided using the terms "determinism," "free will," "compatibilism" and "libertarianism," and for this present post I would like to discuss my reason for keeping distance from them. In short, with a few possible exceptions, I no longer wish to use those terms because I find them all enormously problematic insofar as I cannot ever easily identify any coherent content behind them.

Introductory remarks Here we offer, in accordance with our title, an argument for the doctrine that God controls the choices of all agents, which I regard as the key underlying principle of Calvinism. So, by the term "God" we have in mind the creator-deity Yahweh from Judeo-Christian tradition. The argument is deductive, with seven premises, each intended to cause comparatively less controversy than the conclusion. Defenses of the premises are not given in this document. However, we do present an initial set of six points, along with a rhetorical appeal for each, intended to elucidate the reasoning behind the argument. These points do not themselves make up any deductive argument; rather, each one, save the last, will serve as an aid to rhetorical defenses for subsequent points, and suggest strategies for defending the premises of the final argument.