Ep. 530 Responding to Dinesh D’Souza on the Alleged Problems of Calvinism
On Twitter and YouTube, Dinesh D’Souza has been criticizing Calvinism (i.e. Reformed theology) for weeks, leveling both scriptural but also philosophical and moral objections. Bob adopts his version of Molinism to argue that God’s sovereignty can be reconciled with man’s free will (and hence moral culpability).
Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest:
- Dinesh D’Souza’s critique of Calvinism.
- RC Sproul’s YouTube series introducing systematic Reformed theology.
- William Lane Craig quick intro to Molinism.
- The BMS ep. 158, A Geometric Analogy to Reconcile Paul and James.
- Installments one and three in the BMS series on an Interdisciplinary Commentary on the Gospels, laying out Bob’s view of free will vs. determinism, and how to reconcile Arminianism with Calvinism.
- Help support the Bob Murphy Show.
About the author, Robert
Christian and economist, Chief Economist at infineo, and Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute.
I hate to be offtopic but this article is for you. If you’re short on time feed it to your LLM for the tl;dr first, but I think this is a real candidate for an austrian journal.
The competence crisis in advanced civilizations:
https://fackel.substack.com/p/complex-systems-and-the-competence
The empiric evidence may be too anecdotal and it might need more embedding in prior work, i don’t know, but it really sank in deep for me. Thank you.
OK I’ll check it out thanks.
Unfortunately, I don’t think you’ve successfully dodged the accusation that the Calvinist conception of God is evil.
Here’s the problem: If George Lucas knew that by writing Star Wars, all the pain and suffering inside the Star Wars universe would be *real* and experienced by *real* beings, I believe that George Lucas would choose to simply not write Star Wars. The reason George Lucas isn’t evil for writing a story in which his characters suffer is because he has very good reason to believe that no real being is actually experiencing it, and he is using the stories as a tool to help us people out here in the real world avoid, cope with, or otherwise mitigate the suffering that we experience.
I simply don’t buy that a universe with mass murdering dictators and all the other horrors we know about is “the best possible universe.” In fact, the whole concept of such a thing smacks of utilitarianism. Why is the universe where Bob Murphy is saved but Dave H is not saved better than the exact same universe but with Bob and Dave swapped? Sure, it’s better for *you*, but what has that got to do with anything?
Dave I understand your objections. If I respond to either/both specifically, should I mention you by name? If so, call you “Dave H”?
Sure you can mention anything you want that I leave here. Thanks.