Hey, welcome back to CleanCut, where we can talk about the truth about just about anything, as long as we use logic in common sense. This season, we're looking at some additional issues that I've seen brought up in various comments, replies, and requests, but which I haven't already done videos on. Last time, we talked about some problems with Lutheranism, and this time, what's the problem with Calvinism? Now it might not surprise you that as a Catholic, I don't agree with all of the beliefs associated with Calvinism. Don't get me wrong, there's definitely some overlap, but there's also a number of Calvinist beliefs that I just don't think are true. I won't be addressing all of them in this video just a few of the ones I haven't talked about yet. Fortunately, Calvinism's issues are much more closely connected than those of Lutheranism, so explaining them probably won't take long. Calvinists believe in predestination in a very definitive way. There are five key Calvinist beliefs about predestination, which can be represented by the five letters in the word, tool-ip. Total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints. To understand Calvinism and its issues, it's important to know what these mean. Total depravity means that every person is completely enslaved to sin because of the fall, they have no ability to avoid sin through any power that they possess. Unconditional election means that God chooses who He'll save on the basis of no conditions, that we have absolutely no influence over who's saved and who isn't. Limited atonement means that Jesus's death on the cross only paid for the sins of the people who God chose to save ahead of time. Irresistible grace means that if God chooses to save us, there's absolutely nothing we can do to prevent ourselves from being saved. Perseverance of the saints means that any person who God chooses for salvation will definitely persevere to the end, no matter what. Now the concept of predestination is hardly a new one. People and cultures all over the world, including in a sense our own, all have concepts similar to it. However, not many are determined to go as far with it as Calvinism does. The Calvinist belief system in one fell swoop implies a universe in which no person has any real freedom to choose between good and evil, it's chosen for them by God. If He chooses them, they can't help but choose to do good. If He doesn't choose them, their total depravity makes it impossible for them to do right and be saved. In short, when taken to its logical conclusion, Calvinism turns the entire human race into string puppets, being played with by an utterly arbitrary God who allows some to enter heaven out of his generosity and allows others to end up in hell and suffer because he chose not to predestine them. As I see it, this is the problem with Calvinism. John Calvin's understanding of God is meant to be one thing over all else, sovereign. He's in charge, completely and totally, and no one else has any say in how things go. However, because he takes the sovereignty of God to such an extreme that it makes free choices virtually impossible, there's something else that Calvinism sacrifices, the omnibenevalence of God. A Calvinist God is no longer all good. Real Calvinists would probably deny this, but there's simply no escape from the fact that whether they mean it this way or not, a God who doesn't or can't create free will while also allowing some of his creations to do evil and suffer eternally for it, is clearly not all good in any meaningful way. If by all good we mean that God only does good things, he's not all good in that way either because he created a fundamentally imperfect universe intending for it to be fundamentally imperfect. That's not a good thing to do. If we mean by all good that God despises all sin and evil and seeks to avoid them, why did he choose to create a universe containing them? Why did he choose deliberately to choose some people and not others when by simply choosing everyone he could have avoided evil in its entirety? If by all good we mean that God loves everyone, this is clearly false on a Calvinist worldview since the love that Jesus spoke of was the love of someone who sacrifices for the sake of others, agape in the Greek. And thanks to limited atonement, the Calvinist God doesn't do that. His sacrifice was only for some, not for everyone. Because of this, I think that the Calvinist understanding of God is incapable of explaining the existence of objective moral values because he's willing to allow his own creations to suffer eternally for something they didn't choose to do, don't fully know about beforehand, couldn't prevent if they did, and can't avoid without his help, which he's chosen not to give them. It's rather like throwing a Marionette into a fire because you made it pop another Marionette on the head. It's not the Marionette's fault, and anyone who does that is simply being wasteful, if not cruel. These are not the actions of a moral person, much less the very standard of morality itself. However, it gets worse because the Calvinist God isn't just immoral, he's also not omnipotent. Now, you might think that being in complete control of everyone and everything in existence is the same thing as being omnipotent, but there's a major thing that the Calvinist God can't accomplish. He can't create any being with free will. In Catholicism, we believe that God can accomplish that and did. Of course, the important thing is the question, is it true? John Calvin believed that predestination was explicitly taught in the Bible, in a sense he's right. And we know that to them that love God all things work together unto good, to such as according to his purpose are called to be saints. For whom he forenew he also predestinated, to be made conformable to the image of his son, but he might be the first born among many brethren, and whom he predestinated, them he also called, and whom he called them he also justified, and whom he justified, them he also glorified. 8.28-30 This certainly says that God predestined some people for glorification. However, what it does not say is that because of this we have no free will, or even that our decisions as human beings have no influence over our eternal fate. There are other ways of explaining these words that don't involve claiming that people are puppets. My own favorite way is to explain that the predestination of God is the predestination of the fate of a group, but we still get to decide whether or not we want to belong to that group. Is this necessarily the correct explanation? Maybe? Maybe not. However, if it's between this explanation and claiming that God caused all evil by his choices and that no one has the power to choose anything different than they do, I think the former, rather than the latter, is more likely because it holds a higher view of God's perfection. Next, do we need to be satisfied? That's all for now, so keep asking questions, and thanks for watching.