If God is sovereign in the Calvinist sense, then universalism should be true.

I. The problem of arbitrariness1. We're not in a position to say why God didn't save one more personI insist that Pro's argument is an argument from ignorance. He's arguing, essentially, that because we cannot account for why God doesn't save one more person (or damn one less person), or how it makes his glory one bit more or less, that it's therefore arbitrary. But that doesn't follow.Con equates "benevolence" with "goodness" because benevolence is a great-making property. I agree that benevolence is good, but goodness does not require indiscriminant benevolence or mercy. As I argued earlier, saving people by grace is a supererogatory act. Pro never responded to that point.2. Pitting God's goodness in saving people against his goodness in displaying his wrathI did get Pro's point about wrath for the sake of rehabilitation being good. I ignored it because it's not relevant. Nor is "wrath simpliciter." What's relevant is wrath for the sake of retribution. In this sense, Pro admitted that "It might be 'good' to demonstrate wrath on humans." I would make a stronger claim and say that it is good. It's what justice demands. God did not pour out his wrath on Pharaoh's army to rehabilitate them. He killed them! Nor did he pour out his wrath on Sodom and Gomorrah to rehabilitate them. Nor did he pour out his wrath on Christ to rehabilitate him. These are all examples of retribution--giving people what they deserve (or, in Christ's case, what we deserve). That is good.Pro claims that it is better to show mercy than wrath, but he never substantiates that claim. In fact, Romans 9 makes it very clear that God is perfectly justified in showing both at his discretion. Moreover, he ignores my scriptural point from Proverbs 17:15 that God detests acquitting the guilty.3. It ignores the fact that everybody who is damned deserves it, but nobody who is saved deserves it.Since Pro is atttempting to derive a problem of evil from Calvinist theology, moral obligation is absolutely relevant in this debate. One can be perfectly good if one fulfills their moral obligations, even if one does not go above and beyond the call of duty. Since God is not obligated to save anybody, he cannot be called evil for his unwilllingness to save everybody.Pro's analogy with the Father breaks down because disobeying your dad does not justify your dad in letting you drown. The punishment does not fit the crime in Pro's analogy. However, sinning against God does justify God in punishing you in the final judgment where God repays each person according to their deeds (Matthew 16:27). In the case of God's judgment, the punishment does fit the crime.As long as Pro does not dispute the authority of the Bible, showing that God's love is discriminate certainly does solve the problem of evil that Pro raised against Calvinism. Pro's argument is based on the unscriptural assumption that God's love is indiscriminate. I showed that assumption to be false. Since his argument depends on that assumption, his argument fails. He should have attempted to refute my Biblical argument, but he didn't.II. Calvinist universalism1. It again neglects the fact that people are sinners who deserve damnation and nobody deserves salvation.Addressed in I.3 above.2. It could be that God's wrath poured out on sinners enhances our appreciation of Christ's sacrifice.It is true that I took Con's argument from evil against Calvinism to be a logical problem of evil. He doesn't dispute that my argument solves the logical problem. Instead, he says it is an evidential problem of evil. In that case he's right that mere possibility is not enough to solve the problem.However, I think i did better than provide a merely possible explanation. I provided an explanation that is supported Biblically. I showed that it is essentially the same scenario that Paul explains in Romans 9:21-24. Pro ignored that point.III. The sovereignty of God in salvationI did better than offer a merely logical possibility of the consistency of these three statements: (1) God is sovereign in salvation, (2) God is perfectly good, and (3) not everybody is saved. I pointed out that all three are actually true. It follows inescapably that there is a solution to Pro's challenge. We don't even have to know what that solution is. Pro mistakenly thinks we need to know what the solution is before we can refute his argument. His argument is that if God is sovereign in salvation but doesn't save everybody, then he's evil. Or, if he's sovereign in salvation, and perfectly good, then he would save everybody. But that is false, and we can know it's false by knowing that 1-3 are all actually true.IV. God has a purpose in not saving all peoplePro seems to think this point is irrelevant because whether the Scriptures teach the doctrines of Calvinism or not, universalism would still follow from the Calvinist view of God's sovereignty, and a problem of evil would still follow from denying universalism. But that is only true if Pro jettisons his belief in the authority of the Bible on theological issues. If he means to play devil's advocate in this debate and pretend that he does not subscribe to the authority of the Bible, he should say so. From what I understand, he accepts the authority of the Bible.But anyway, he missed my point. My point was to strengthen other arguments I had made in this debate. Under III, I showed that we can know there's a solution to the problem of evil Con raised without even knowing what that solution is. The point I made in IV strengthens that case because it shows that God actually has a purpose in expressing his wrath toward sinners.It also refutes Pro's claim in I. Since God has a purpose in pouring out his wrath on sinners, it is not arbitrary that he does so. To be arbitrary means that there is no purpose.ConclusionI think I have shown quite conclusively that universalism does not follow from God's sovereignty in salvation. Neither is there an intractable problem of evil for Calvinists who deny universalism.Thank you for coming to tonight's debate. And thanks to popculturepooka for the challenge and for not forfeitting (which I was afraid of twice!).