The Wrong End of the Telescope

From the rest quarters at the hub at the building, I walk outwards. Then hit a curved wall. The stairs have rotated away. So, I slink untethered through darkness, coiled snake power cords above and cold ground below, until the stairway looms, then climb to where mirrors fold billion-year light into sensors and screens flicker numbers. A little white dome rolling under the big black dome, feebly tracking pinpricks of light. I look down at my equations and wilt. When will it end?

Fear creeps up on you at night. And I had a fear of eternity—the sheer unlimitedness of it. Pews of permed heads swim in stained glass light and smile as the Father speaks of eternal life, and I panic. Forever?!

Perhaps it is wrong to interpret time without limit as infinite time. In flat, Euclidean space, a line without limit has infinite extent. But on a sphere, like the Earth, a line without limit joins up with itself. Maybe time is similar. But I don’t know. No one knows. And still, there’d be no escape. Round and round in dementing repetition.

Pulsars and quasars went on and on, black holes turned in on themselves out of this world—and went where? If there was a fence at the end of universe, what was on the other side? There was always more universe. I’d never wrap my head around it all. None of us would. Kierkegaard wrote in Sickness Unto Death that we are the “synthesis of the infinite and finite,” [1] and God, I had learned, put eternity in our hearts. I often wished he hadn’t. Systemised, certain and complete is how I like my knowledge, and you don’t get that with eternity. Confined to space-time, our awareness soars beyond it to something we are aware of but cannot reach.

Like the electron. It was there, at that slit, until someone looked, then it wasn’t. However we try, we cannot reach it. Science had promised big things. Not suitably chastised by the twin revolutions of relativity and quantum mechanics in the 1920s, physicists in the 1980s and 90s had risen from the ashes of the logical positivists and promised me “theories of everything.” I’d been seduced. But sitting in the book-smelling seminar room of the ANU Physics department, I realised science had led me back to the same place Christianity had left me a decade before—mired in infinities and uncertainties.

In 2009, I returned to church. The sermon theme was Election and Predestination. Thirty minutes later I ran from the building furious and terrified, my fear of eternity exacerbated tenfold. Either I was Elect or I wasn’t; there was nothing I could do either way. My looking for God was futile. What about my family, my friends, the poor child about to be murdered on the other side of the planet? My first church service in decades had given me a view of God’s sovereignty that eclipsed his love and also human freedom, leaving me in a fatalistic despair. I’m not Robinson Crusoe. I know many, over millennia, have struggled with Predestination, specifically, and God’s sovereignty in relation to our level of free will and responsibility more generally. But however many times we have come across the topic before, I plead we never forget the pastoral impacts of what we espouse and teach in this area.

John Lennox’s 2017 book, Determined to Believe [2] engages with this pastoral dimension of teaching on Predestination and God’s sovereignty. “Divine sovereignty is a great and undoubtable fact,” wrote the ever insightful Charles Spurgeon, “but human responsibility is quite as indisputable” [3]. The salient question, Lennox asks as the main thrust of his book is: “just what does God’s sovereignty involve?” [4] And how does the truth of human responsibility constrain how we understand human freedom? As hinted at in Lennox’s title, it’s the determinism so often entangled with teaching around God’s sovereignty that troubles Lennox. And me.

Determinism has the general meaning that everything that happens is the result of something that has already happened. So, the hurricane forms because the butterfly’s flap caused wind which then caused convergence which then caused enough extra pressure drop for the hurricane to form. The already can be temporal, like with the hurricane, or logical: A=B and A=C, therefore B=C. Give me the initial cause or first premise, and I’ll tell you the outcome, based on either on the laws of nature or the laws of logic. Chaos dictates had the butterfly been 1mm to the left or a bit tired that day, the hurricane might not have formed. But, theoretically, specify the first cause, and you trigger a deterministic chain reaction of effects that unfold according to governing laws, like falling dominoes. Theistic determinism reaches beyond natural causes and logic and is, as the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) relates in its section Theological Determinism, “the view that God determines every event that occurs.” [5]

The theological dilemma flowing from understanding God’s sovereignty as deterministic is well known; it tends to turn us into either fatalists or heretics (or Arminians, I was told). Thrust into the perennial free-will debate, it seems we must choose. Either God is sovereign and we are not free, or we are free and God is not sovereign. But a non-sovereign God is clearly anti-biblical. So, to be Christian, we must not be free. Lennox quotes a hypothetical person seeking faith: “I wish I had your faith in God. But it just hasn’t happened to me. Maybe God will give it to me one day, but in the meantime I have heard in church that there is nothing I can do about it.” [6]

The Devil likes to confuse, and there are, I have learned since 2009, different definitions of determinism and freedom. And this is where Lennox’s critics tore him down. It’s also where—for the purposes of trying to keep this mingled review-personal-story as brief as possible—I will focus. Don Carson, whose writing I have often appreciated, wrote in his review, Are Some Determined to Believe the Worst about Reformed Theology? [7] that “Lennox acknowledges different types of determinism (but comes nowhere near what a Reformed theologian would say).” Similarly, James N. Anderson, in his review Determined to Believe? The Sovereignty of God, Freedom, Faith, and Human Responsibility, [8] criticises Lennox for assuming “theistic determinism (…) entails theistic causal determinism.” Lennox, they imply, has made rookie mistakes.

So, what exactly is a determinism that is non-causal? And what would a Reformed theologian say?

To the first question, both Lennox and the reviewers acknowledge the difference between physical (or natural) determinism and theistic determinism. While physical determinism locates all causes within the physical world, theistic determinism includes a God that, says Lennox, “is not constrained by” our familiar “causal nexus” [9] (which renders confusing Anderson’s claim that Lennox “seems to think that theistic determinism entails intramundane causal determinism”).

A non-causal determinism like that Anderson references is an esoteric concept. Although, theoretically, something can be determined without being caused—and we might want to so define determinism since, in the words of philosopher of physics, John Earman, causality is “truly obscure” [10] and not something on which we’d want to hinge another concept, like determinism—practically speaking, disentangling determination from cause is fraught. Though some theologians (for example, see the IEP, section 1) [11] try to make this distinction, especially in arguing that God not be considered a cause, many others (see Moreland and Craig (Ch 15) [12], Taylor (Ch 5) [13], McCall [14] and Yandell (Ch 14) [15]) take theistic determinism to entail theistic causal determinism. However God determines, we are embedded in space-time and, in Craig’s words, [what happens] “is causal because God makes it happen.” [16] Definitions of determinism, including theistic determinism, are littered with time heavy terms, like antecedent, past, time t, future, and event. Calvin himself wrote in the Institutes (which Lennox quotes) that “God’s will is said to be the cause of all things.” [17] That Lennox assumes theistic determinism is [non-intramundane] causal determinism only puts him in the company of many other theologians and philosophers who consider this valid or even necessary.

To the second question, there are probably as many answers as theologians, but Anderson somewhat clarifies his view: “Calvinism is an expressly non-fatalistic form of determinism, since it affirms that our eternal destiny does depend on the choices we make.” Fatalism and determinism can be distinguished: fatalism means something must happen, determinism that it will, given prior conditions or causes. “Fatalism,” writes Craig in the The Only Wise God, “does not necessarily hold that everything is causally determined.” [18] So, a non-causal determinism is like fatalism, and I don’t understand how Anderson’s first criticism, that advocates for a non-causal determinism, fits with his second that advocates for non-fatalism.) Many theological determinists and Calvinists are, in fact fatalists: Craig points to Martin Luther, Jonathan Edwards and Paul Helm. Like with non-causal vs non-causal determinism, the distinction between fatalism and determinism is, in practice, an interpretative minefield and, for Taylor at least, “enormously contrived” (Metaphysics) [19]. The distinction hinges on the word ‘choice.’ By being able to choose, what happens is not inexorable (fate) but dependent on our choices. Choice implies freedom. Yet the freedom espoused by theological determinists like Anderson is not accepted as actual freedom by opposers to theistic determinism (more later).

That I, a layperson, am confused by these arguments and counter arguments carries little weight as an argument against theistic determinism. That many deeply intelligent and committed theologians also wrestle with them, and sometimes come to different conclusions about the merits of theistic determinism as a model of God’s sovereignty—and have for millennia—does. As do the observations of both Lennox and myself that strongly deterministic teachings of God’s sovereignty turn many away from the church.

What Lennox does that both reviewers (and, in my experience, many pastors) do not, is engage with the pastoral impacts of teachings on God’s sovereignty as determinism. Lennox is not just making theological claims (or presenting a body of theological claims to a general audience) but also highlighting how the theology of God’s sovereignty is taught in our churches and how this teaching is interpreted by and affects churchgoers. His hypothetical churchgoer quoted above is based on real people with real questions, worries and angst whose questions prompted him to write the book.

Quotes of popular Reformed teachers abound that would reasonably push listeners towards fatalism or causal determinism and Lennox presents some of these. Take, for example, Edward H. Palmer: “He [God] causes all things to happen.” [20] Or Paul Helm: “not only is every atom and molecule, every thought and desire kept in being by God, but every twist and turn of each of these is under the direct control of God.” [21] Or R. C. Sproul: “The movement of every molecule, the actions of every plant, the falling of every star, the choices of every volitional creature, all of these are subject to his sovereign will.” [22] If theistic determinism is not physical (intramundane) determinism or at least causal, why are physical causal examples so often (nearly always, in my experience) used to explain it?

I understand the need to analogise —I do the same—but the secular scientismists seem not the only ones that have been seduced by science’s heyday. That heyday is over. Billiard ball bits of localised matter moving about deterministically under chemical, electromagnetic, and other forces has been on the way out as a model of reality for decades. It’s just no longer a good model of what we observe. Quantum Mechanics, deterministic or indeterministic but always non-local, weird and non-intuitive, instead predicts with great precision what we observe. But the extent to which it also undermines our assumptions about reality is still being processed. The “enormity of the conceptual change wrought by quantum theory in our basic conception of the nature of matter” [23] is often underestimated, said quantum physicist, Henry Stapp, in Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics, demanding “metascientific,” or philosophical, analysis.

If we are going to use analogies from the scientific world, then we could learn from Polkinghorne, physicist and theologian who argues that Quantum Mechanics gives us an inkling of how God might be sovereign without being deterministic (as we commonly understand the word). He writes:

“The world is something more subtle and more supple than a clockwork universe. The role of metascientific decision in interpreting quantum theory in terms of open process shows that we can take with due seriousness all that science has to say without being condemned to think of ourselves as automata or that God is confined to the role of an externally interfering Clockmaker. The Creator can be believed to be providentially active within the open grain of created nature. Science has not established the causal closure of the world on its reductionist terms alone.” [24]

Scientific knowledge, of course, is never set. Rather its theories, as McGrath highlights in The Territories of Human Reason, “remain hypotheses” or doxa, not episteme [25], always corrigible and provisional.

For Polkinghorne and also McGrath, the evolution of scientific theories serves as a warning for our theological models: they’re not complete renderings of reality. They will, as such, be limited in explanatory power and also change and adapt through time. This is not to make science trump God, but to recognise that science exposes our methods of understanding complexity via conceptual models—methods that we also use in theology.

Some well known theological models are of humans as mind, body and soul, of Jesus as both man and God, of God as the Trinity, of sovereignty as determinism. A model, as Alister McGrath articulates in his typically clear way in Enriching our Vision of Reality: Theology and the Natural Sciences in Dialogue, is indispensable as a “simplified way of representing a complex system” that allows us to fathom understanding of “at least some of its many aspects.” But, warns McGrath, “it’s only a model.” There is always a “serious danger,” he says, of “reducing reality to what we can manage.” [26] Categories of understanding are prone to overleap their conceptual bounds and become ontological categories of the world itself.

So often we assent to the beyondness of God but forget this beyondness necessarily applies to our theology as well. While the encoding of Christian belief in creeds and doctrines is vital for clarifying and unifying (we hope) the faith, it’s never a complete rendering of reality. Trying to contain God in our theological systems is like trying to hold shadows in boxes, and risks alienating many.

Conflating fatalism with God’s sovereignty is hardly new, or only something Lennox has raised. Rather, Lennox echoes Andrew Fuller, Charles Spurgeon and other Evangelical Calvinists of nineteenth century England in their battle against hyper-Calvinists and their hyper-focus on God’s power. “Stretching what are usually called the doctrines of grace, beyond the scripture medium,” writes John W Morris, friend and biographer of Fuller, hyper-Calvinists formed a system that “extended its baleful influence over nearly all the churches, and covered them with a cloud of darkness.” [27] Though 19th century hyper-Calvinists differed from many modern Calvinists in their insistence that preaching be only directed towards the Elect, they are similar in emphasising God’s power over his love and in claiming that the Elect can be identified via assessing evidence based on human feelings and behaviour.  But such teaching, argues Iain H. Murray when summarising Spurgeon in Spurgeon vs Hyper-Calvinism, shifts the “only sure warrant for trusting in Christ, namely the objective commands and invitations of gospel” to our fickle selves, where we look for “subjective experience [that] is thus made a kind of necessary preliminary and qualification before anyone can trust in scriptural promises.”[28] Opponents of the hyper-Calvinists saw, like Lennox, that over-emphasising God’s power and sovereignty in the confined structure of human theology minimised His love and human responsibility, leaving behind a suffocating fatalism.

So, whatever the doctrinal stances of Carson, Anderson, and other well-known theistic determinists, theistic determinism is not the only model of God’s sovereignty. It is also highly complex and often preached in a way that conflates it with fatalism. Appealing to terminology perhaps understood in cloistered seminaries without sympathy for the impact on and interpretation by churchgoers seems insular and unloving. The result is to leave the apparent non-Elect gnashing our teeth in fatalistic despair across a gulf from God.

Lennox’s admonition:

 “when some of the core teaching that is presented… moves so far towards the deterministic end of the spectrum that it appears to many to call into question the love and goodness of God, and in consequence alienates people who are beginning to think about Christianity, then we surely need to audit the validity of the interpretation of Scripture that lies behind such teaching” [29]

is valid.

I know, at least at my local level, it’s often not intentional. My loving preachers weren’t trying to tell me I was irrevocably damned. They were exhorting me to rejoice in God’s glorious power and grace that overcomes human failure to turn to Him. But, since they’d also told me God caused everything, including the neuronic activity in my brain that led to my decisions and feelings of Faith, and I knew I didn’t have such feelings, hence that I wasn’t Elect, I deduced “damned” is what they meant.

As with determinism, so with freedom: there are many definitions.

Lennox assumes human freedom as depicted in the Bible is libertarian. Human responsibility, he reasons (in the company of many others) must mean we have libertarian freedom. Not just freedom of spontaneity, or we do what we want to do, but a freedom to have done otherwise. He asks (as have many), “How can God, whose love and justice are impeccable, hold guilty those who were incapable of doing what he commanded them to do?” [30] If we are guilty of not doing something, then we must actually have had the ability to instead do that something. Critics, like Carson, say that by insisting on libertarian free-will, Lennox has “domesticated” God’s sovereignty. It’s like forcing our limited human understanding of morality onto God. This certainly gives me pause.

Human responsibility, say Carson and Anderson (whose Reformed views are dominant in the churches I have attended since the Roman Catholicism of my childhood), does not entail libertarian freedom. We are not that free. We are free to do what we want to do but we could not have been free to do otherwise, because what we do is ultimately determined by God. Since everything is determined by God, we can only be as free as is compatible with this determinism. Herod and Pontius Pilate did “conspire against” Jesus [Acts 4:27] because they wanted to. They also did what God’s “power and will had decided beforehand should happen.” [Acts 4:28]. Yet they were still responsible. Lennox rejects this compatibilist view, as do many. Yandell, for example, in Philosophy of Religion, refers to compatibilist freedom as “so-called freedom,” [31] and Craig states: “the compatibilist thinks that free will is compatible with my choice’s being causally determined by factors outside me… I deny that.” [32] They don’t believe freedom is libertarian just because human freedom is for many of us, sacrosanct, but because, in Olson’s words in Against Calvinism, they “believe it is everywhere assumed in the Bible.” [33]

Anderson takes exception to Lennox stating his libertarian view of freedom and rejection of compatibilist freedom upfront, but libertarian freedom is usually defined in opposition to determinism, to which Lennox is clearly opposed. Write Moreland and Craig in Philosophical Foundations For A Christian Worldview: “Libertarianism claims the freedom necessary for responsible action is not compatible with determinism.” [34]

A compatibilist that is also a [physical] causal determinist (which, to be clear, neither Carson or Anderson claim to be) falls into the same “domesticated” trap as Lennox. To insist God’s sovereignty is equivalent to God controlling every causation on the way to the determined end—God had to make sure every butterfly flap and molecular movement on the mechanistic way to Jesus’s arrest was just so—is to insist God fit into our model of understanding as much as does Lennox or other libertarians. Assuming divine sovereignty equates to physical causal determinism is to confine God to our limited human understanding of time and logic.

I don’t actually think I can resolve the conundrum of human free will versus God’s sovereignty that has perplexed minds and fuelled debates for centuries. My main gripe is why we so often set it up in such stark terms in the first place. How God is sovereign and we are free (and exactly how we are free) is not something I understand or necessarily expect to understand (however much I might want to). Certainly I lean towards the non-determinists since how God is deterministic and we are free (in the commonly understood use of the word—we all act as if we were libertarianly free) is not just a paradox, but a seeming contradiction. Whereas how God is sovereign and how (and how much) we are free is just unknown. Though I don’t expect to understand all, God does invite us to use our minds to understand and explain, and minimising contradictions is commonly understood as informing the choice of best explanation.

The Reformed theology and Calvinism of Carson and Anderson is not Scripture and not a creed. Carson’s insistence that determinism and compatibilist freedom are “exegetically unavoidable,” is an opinion based on a certain interpretation of Scripture. There are biblically committed, intelligent, well-credentialed theologians who come to a different conclusion based on different interpretations of Scripture and have done so for centuries. Carson’s dismissal of McCall’s argument [35] in I Believe In Divine Sovereignty against compatibilism (which Lennox quotes) as symptomatic of secular humanism and being “in line with that of much contemporary philosophy… essentially a mechanistic analysis” is to try and highlight his opponent’s philosophical assumptions while ignoring his own. Say Walls and Dongell in Why I am Not a Calvinist, “The reality is that Calvinists no less than Arminians rely on controversial philosophical judgements and assumptions. When this is not understood, contested philosophical judgements are sometimes passed off as simple biblical truth.” [36]

This applies to the other topics outflowing from determinism that Lennox engages: the Ordo salutis, God as the author of sin, communal versus individual soteriology and Election. I do concur with Anderson and Carson that some of Lennox’s word studies in this latter part of the book were not beautifully executed and, I think, could have done with some more references and shortening. In Lennox’s defence though, this is a popular level book.

In Determined To Believe, Lennox adds his voice to that of many theological authors, from Augustine to Maimonides and McGrath: it’s so easy to take our human analogies too far. I see that we gloss meaning onto words like sovereignty and responsibility and—I’ll admit it—freedom. God is omnipotent and omniscient—sovereign. Since we are not, we don’t fully understand what those terms mean. Any understanding of ours is necessarily from within space-time to which we are confined. But God is not so confined. God “inhabits eternity” [Isa 57: 15]. Perhaps God can see all time at once, which would certainly mess up cause and effect as we know them and hence all our definitions of determinism and free-will. C. S. Lewis nailed it when he said in The Great Divorce:

 “Time is the very lens by which ye see—small and clear as men see through the wrong end of the telescope—something that otherwise would be too big for ye to see at all.” [37]

I’m sorry to say, but both review closings come uncomfortably close to mocking. Carson writes that Lennox’s book “may win some who have never wrestled deeply with the arguments.” I have wrestled so deeply in my layperson life that I watered my bed with tears for five years and drove more than one pastor cross-eyed. In a similarly dismissive vein, Anderson writes, “we never chose to believe the gospel” rather “many of us were taught from our earliest years that the Bible is the word of God…” This smacks of parochialism. I was not one so lucky and, like Pascal and Lewis before me, I do in some sense choose each day to believe the Gospel. (Whatever is going on behind the scenes of reality—are my thoughts being controlled/caused in some way?) From my time-bound experience, I see I am able to make this choice because people like Lennox saw my pain and met me in it, teaching me you could be a Christian without being a theistic determinist or, indeed, a Calvinist. I am grateful for Lennox’s book and believe others will be too.

The theologians who drew me closer to Christ never let God’s love recede when preaching God’s sovereignty. Aquinas wrote, “The reason for the predestination of some, and reprobation of others, must be sought for in the goodness of God,” (Summa Theologica, Art 5) which concurs with Ephesians 1:5: “In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ.” [38]

This is a place to sit that doesn’t alienate. God, driven by love, controls in a way we don’t understand; we are free, in that our actions matter and seem to be libertarianly free; and we are responsible. My fear of eternity was borne of assuming my experience in eternity would be simply an extension of my experience now. But things taken to their limits are not the same as the things themselves—infinity is not a number though it is the limit of all numbers. Similarly, God’s love and ways of determining are fundamentally different to ours. All of God’s ‘without-limits’ qualities are fundamentally different to the — of those qualities in us. My mantra in the depth of the night can be: “this I declare about the Lord. He alone is my refuge, my place of safety.” [Ps 91:2] He is not all will and power. I don’t need to run from Him, but I can run to Him because in those tear-stained nights, I think he reached out to me.

References 

[1] Kierkegaard, Soren, The Sickness Unto Death (First published1849. Translated by Alistair Hannay. London: Penguin Books, 1989), pg 43.

[2] Lennox, John, C., Determined to Believe (Zondervan, 2017).

[3] Spurgeon, Charles H., Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Vol 9, 1863, Preface.

[4] Lennox, John, C., Determined to Believe (Zondervan, 2017), pg 45.

[5] Vicens, Leigh, Theological Determinism, Sec 3.c (https://iep.utm.edu/theological-determinism/ Accessed Mar, 2025.

[6] Lennox, John, C., Determined to Believe (Zondervan, 2017), pg 68.

[7] Carson, Don, Are Some Determined to Believe the Worst About Reformed Theology? (August 15, 2018, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/determined-to-believe-john-lennox. Accessed June 2020).

[8] Anderson, James, N., Determined to Believe? The Sovereignty of God, Freedom, Faith, and Human Responsibility (https://journal.rts.edu/review/determined-to-believe-the-sovereignty-of-god-freedom-faith-and-human-responsibility/ Accessed June 2020).

[9] Lennox, John, C., Determined to Believe (Zondervan, 2017), pg 42.

[10] Hoefer, Carl, Causal Determinism, Sec 2.1 (Thu, Jan 23, 2003, substantive revision Sep 21, 2023, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/ Accessed Jan, 2024).

[11] Vicens, Leigh, Theological Determinism, Sec 3.c (https://iep.utm.edu/theological-determinism/ Accessed Mar, 2025. Section 1.

[12] Moreland, J. P & Craig, William Lane, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, 2nd Ed. (IVP Academic, 2017), Ch15, 1.

[13] Taylor, Richard, Metaphysics, Fourth Ed. (Prentice Hall, 1992), pg 36.

[14] McCall, Thomas H., I Believe in Divine Sovereignty, Trinity Journal 29/2 (Fall 2008), pg 207.

[15] Yandell, Keith E., Philosophy of Religion, Routeledge, 1999, pg 333.

[16] Craig, William Lane, Doctrine of Creation, Part 9 (October 14, 2012, https://www.reasonablefaith.org/podcasts/defenders-podcast-series-2/s2-doctrine-of-creation/doctrine-of-creation-part-9. Accessed Mar 2018).

[17] Calvin, John, Institutes of Christian Religion, I xxvii, 2, quoted by Lennox  [2] on pg 66.

[18] Craig, William Lane, The Only Wise God, (WIPF and Stock Publishers, 2000), pg 14.

[19] Taylor, Richard, Metaphysics, Fourth Ed. (Prentice Hall, 1992), pg 55.

[20] Lennox [2], pg 54.

[21] ibid, pp 54.

[22] ibid, pp 55.

[23] Stapp, Henry, P., Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics (Springer-Verlag, 1993), pg 40.

[24] Polkinghorne, John, The consequences of quantum theory, Dialogue Theology & Science, July 2012 https://www.theologie-naturwissenschaften.de/en/dialogue-between-theology-and-science/editorials/quantumtheory

[25] McGrath doxa

[26] McGrath Enriching

[27] Morris

[28] Murray, Iain H., Spurgeon v. Hyper-Calvinism (The Banner of Truth Trust, 2010), pg 76.

[29] Lennox [2], pg 70.

[30] Lennox [2], pg 157.

[31] Yandell, Keith E., Philosophy of Religion, (Routeledge, 1999), pg 309.

[32] Craig, William Lane, I, a Compatibilist (January 28, 2012, https://www.reasonablefaith.org/question-answer/P50/i-a-compatibilist Accessed Mar 2018)

[33] Olson Roger E., Against Calvinism (Zondervan, 2011), pg 23.

[34] Moreland, J. P & Craig, William Lane, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, 2nd Ed. (IVP Academic, 2017), Ch 15, 2.1.

[35] McCall, Thomas H. [14] pg 207.

[36] Walls, Jerry L. and Dongell, Joseph R., Why I Am Not a Calvinist (IVP, 2013), pg 19.

[37] Lewis, C. S., The Great Divorce (New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., 1946), pg 48.

[38] Aquinas, Thomas., Summa Theologica (Published 1265-1274. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Benziger Bros. Edition 1947. Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library http://www.ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/summa.html. Accessed 10/5/2019), Art 5.