God's Sovereignty in Election: The Logical Argument

You all thought I would never update this, did you not? To be sure, I have been sadly tardy. I have thought of writing posts on here often, but schoolwork and novel-writing always conspired to intervene. Let us hope this post makes up for lost time, at least in some small way.

As I said, I am going to post about the question of God's sovereignty. Far be it from me to claim that I have sounded this topic to its depths (no one can), or even to the depths so far reached by human endeavors. But I shall do my best. If I say anything spurious, please correct me.

So far as I can see, there are two primary camps on this subject. The first is the Total Sovereignty view, i.e., that God elected some (not all) to salvation, based on no merit or potential of their own, entirely in His own foreknowledge. The rest He condemns to Hell for their transgressions.

The second camp or position says that the above view actually portrays an unloving God--and since an absence of love is contrary to God's character, this state of affairs cannot be the case. The most common argument for this position is that God--pardon me for using an old and tired phrase--'looked through the corridors of time' to see who would choose Him, and, based on that choice, then saved them.

My allegiance is with the first camp, and the purpose of this post is to answer, as best as God may enable me, the objections of the second camp.

This can further be divided into two categories, however: an argument from logic and an argument from Scripture. I'll tackle the logical argument in this post, and the Scriptural one in the next, though of course there will be overlap between both.

So first, I think it is safe to assume that those in the Corridors of Time camp believe all things came from God. Those who do not need more than a post from me on God's sovereignty. Assuming that, then, an inevitable problem of causality arises. They say that God looked and saw who would choose him. But for moral choices to be made, they need a causer. The immediate causer of that moral choice is the soul. But the creator of our souls is God. Souls are things; all things come from God; therefore God created the soul. And so the ability to choose God must have from from Him.

Some may object to this as mere hair-splitting, but it is not. Simply trumpeting effects without establishing a cause is no argument at all. I believe that, at rock bottom, a so-called "circular" argument is necessary--i.e., God exists because He says he does--but then I also believe that God is above logic and that circularity is no longer a problem at that point. But more on that, perhaps, in another post.

On this level, as I said, trumpeting effects without establishing a cause is no argument at all. It would be like this. Suppose you have a son with blue eyes. You and your wife both have brown eyes. A neighbor notices this and says, "Oh, John has blue eyes, and neither of you do--it must be a recessive gene, huh?"

"No," you reply. "There is no history of blue eyes in our family. He chose them at birth."

That would be, of course, absurd. Infants--or anyone, for that matter--cannot choose their eye color. To say that young John could do as much would be ascribing to him a power he does not possess.

And, if the implications are faced squarely, that is the same thing the Corridor of Time campers are, no doubt mostly unconsciously, doing. To say that God saw who would choose Him, i.e., independently, is ascribing some power to mankind which the Bible (see, told you these would overlap) gives no room for. We have no more power to choose salvation than we have to choose our own eye color.

Again, their purpose is not usually to undermine the notion of God's power. There are many sincere Christians in that camp; in fact they are trying to "protect" God from what they see as an attack on His loving character. But they can only do that by ignoring the cause and concentrating only on the effects. And, as I hope I can show in some way in Part II, this "protection" is not needed at all.

~Connor, the Musing Protestant :-)