Wednesday, April 22, 2026

The Logical Incorrectness Of Calvinism

The logical flaw with Calvinism is not that God shows some people mercy and others none.  By its very nature, mercy only means someone is not punitively given what they deserve (what they truly deserve, not what they "deserve" according to emotional impulse, subjective persuasion, or social convention).  Mercy can be arbitrarily given to some and not others without injustice, since those who do not receive mercy would still be treated justly, as long as they are not in any way punished too severely.  Rather, the logical flaw with Calvinism is that God would be the sole being responsible for sin, for he does not simply allow other beings to sin for a time on this theological philosophy, but he actively forces their wills.  The murderer is not truly guilty of murder, nor does any other sinner really have moral culpability, but God punishes him or her in hell and potentially on Earth anyway, despite God himself being the one responsible!

A Calvinist may object, but this is precisely what Calvinism entails.  God, by predestining all human activity (not foreknowing, but predestining), chooses to deliver some people from sin and its eschatological punishment.  They cannot choose to free themselves by voluntarily seeking God or repentance; their turn is decided by God and not the humans themselves.  Obviously, this would require that, since people cannot make their own legitimate choices and have only the illusion of free will at best, God alone is the causal reason for why their is evil perpetrated by humans.  But then God cannot be righteous, because he is solely at fault, but then if God is evil, there cannot be such a thing as morality, because there is nothing to logically make anything good or evil (as opposed to subjectively pleasant or unpleasant, objectively helpful or harmful, and so on) other than the divine character.  Without God having a moral nature, there could be no metaphysical anchor for ethical obligations.

The clear logical error of Calvinism, then, is that God is supposed to be morally perfect while, as the entity truly making decisions that people carry out as mere puppets devoid of autonomy, he literally forcing people to sin.  If they lack free will, it would also be illogical and unjust, if morality exists, to then punish them for what they have no control over, but then this contradicts the only possible grounding for morality in the first place (God's character).  As unbiblical as Calvinism is, the more severe problem, due to being more foundational, is that it is logically impossible for Calvinism to be true.  Had the Bible really put forth as simultaneously true both divine moral perfection and divine fatalism, where all events (or more pertinent here, at least all human thoughts and behaviors) are caused strictly by God, its theology would have to be false.  Both of these things could not be true at once, though an amoral deity and divine fatalism are logically consistent.

All the worse, the seemingly most popular forms of Calvinism are tied to the idea of eternal torture being justice, a heresy against logic and Biblical philosophy.  Sure, Calvinism is compatible with annihilationism (what the Bible really teaches about hell) in that theological determinism and annihilation in hell do not contradict each other, but Calvinism still has its own massive errors independent of the exact version of hell paired with it due to the deprivation of free will and simultaneous "guilt" of the people who on one level carried out the wicked deeds, but in another sense could not possibly be at fault.  Eternal conscious torment would make Calvinism even worse, of course.  This is what many Calvinists loudly hold to.  The ultimate negative and unjust fate (if evil exists) would be to come into being only to be controlled by another entity, forced by that very entity to perform acts it despises, and then be perpetually tormented in an afterlife for those acts they were unable to avoid carrying out.

Calvinism is simply logically impossible.  Not even God can transcend logic because it is inherently true, and thus logic is on the contrary the one thing that transcends and dictates all other things.  But if a Calvinist was to examine the Bible without the irrationalistic folly of their assumptions and biases, they would find it actually posits doctrines entirely at odds with the determinism they espouse.  God wants everyone, not just a group of predetermined elect, to repent (1 Timothy 2:3-4, 2 Peter 3:8-9).  The Biblical Jesus did not die for only the elect—those, on Calvinism, predestined to be saved—because this is plainly contradicted by 1 Timothy 2:5-6 and 1 John 2:2.  And people do have free will, as is provable by logic and experience (or at least it is true that I have free will and that other beings like me can know they possess it [1]), and as is affirmed by the Bible (Leviticus 22:17-18, 21, Revelation 22:17, etc.).  Calvinism is just false all around!


[1].  See here, for one such post where I address this:

No comments:

Post a Comment