Santa’s Bizarre Delivery – Christmas is Forever

Above part of the 1000+ original memes (mostly about soteriology) at https://scottthong.wordpress.com/2020/10/27/my-soteriological-memes/

Souls & Hardware

Is there already a named view whereby all souls are fully functional, but their performance is restricted by the physical interface (the human brain) that they are operating?

Like when a mentally challenged believer (due to genetics, accident, old age, etc) or young child dies, lots of people assume they will be fully intelligent and cognizant in heaven or the resurrection body. Their souls are no longer restricted by bad hardware.

Or to apply it to Christology, the Son’s perfect soul was nonetheless underclocking for years with a baby or child’s brain housing it. Jesus grew in wisdom and stature in the sense that the slowly developing organic interface became more capable of handling His infinite gb of wisdom.

And yes, that last part was inspired by WLC’s explanation of his Neo-Apollinarian model.

PS. Suddenly I realize this is basically the Necrons from Warhammer 40k, the Lords got better Necrodermis shells which allow for a full display of sentience, while lower grade soldiers only got low-processing power robot bodies which can’t fully process their souls, so they have low effective intelligence.

UNTETHERED FREE WILL / MIDDLE KNOWLEDGE

What if creaturely decisions are NOT AT ALL tethered to antecedent conditions? They can be influenced by e.g. genetics, environment, randomness… but even at a 0.0001% probabiliticness they would pick A, it remains within full possibility they pick B instead – and this is due to some mystery, miracle, whatever in the human soul.

This means that when God creates the universe with the initial parameters, it does NOT predestine all events and (free) creaturely decisions like a chain of dominos. In this respect, it differs from Molinism where God (via MK) uses the initial conditions of creation to predestine all things including free creaturely decisions (this was actually my early misunderstanding of how MK works, it is actually more akin to how God knows the outcomes in some models of Open Theism). Molinism frontloads everything into the moment of creation.

How does God get what He wants then? Through knowing perfectly how the future will play out (again, mystery and miracle NOT omnisupercomputing) FOR THE EXISTING UNIVERSE WITH EVERY FEASIBLE VARIABLE (via MK). Thus to get what He wants, God HAS to intervene at various points of history. This explains why God directly interacts to eg Flood the Nephilim, confuse at Babel, harden Pharaoh, etc. Instead of frontloading onto the moment of creation, God continually directs the destiny of the universe.

The difference between Molinism and this proposal is in the former, God interacting with creation is purely voluntary – God could easily have made a universe where history falls into place exactly how He MK planned it.

Whereas in this proposal, since initial & current conditions don’t lock in any creaturely decisions, it is necessary for God to intervene directly at various points in order to change/select the outcome. MK is still needed to know in ‘real time’ what outcome would happen if God affects this or that (just not MKing via “People will do exactly this if places in that situation”, but via mysterious miracle). Call it Untethered or Dynamic MK or something.

This proposal is similar to the variants of Open Theism where God knows all possibilities but does not select or determine most of them (only the crucial ones like the Crucifixion). It is more like Molinism. It is the polar opposite of those variants of Open Theism where “God doesn’t know the future” or “God learns new information” – God knows everything possible and real, no new information to Him.

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But if Untethered MK, why call it Middle?

Molina called it Middle because it comes logically between Natural and Free. God used MK at the moment of creation to set up all of history.

Untethered MK might as well be God blindly tossing the dice (outside of physically necessary, fine tuning of the universe parameters so that human life can develop) and then sorting out history in real time.

But it is still a form of MK because God knows everything that is NOT already chosen (already guaranteed will happen = Free Knowledge), and chooses from among the everything possible.

HOT TAKE: JAMES WHITE IS NOT THAT AMAZING OF A DEBATOR

Yes, he has plenty of debates where he is clearly several steps ahead of and above the opponent in terms of preparation, skill and cogent points. I can vouch for this, having listened to many of them myself. In his own words, he often prepares for a debate by listening to hours upon hours of his opponent’s material while bicycling. He is very well versed in certain subjects and has had over a hundred public debates IIRC.

But if you notice a pattern, his best performances are where he is arguing from a position of strength – and this is a condition where anyone can look good to a certain extent. For example, where the preponderence of facts are on his side such as debating on the divinity of Christ or what the Bible has to say about homosexuality (together with Michael Brown, both of them cited passage after passage while their opponents almost exclusively appealed to emotion).

Or debates where his opponent is relatively inexperienced – the (in)famous debate with Leighton Flowers on Romans 9, for example. It’s the common perception that White out-exegeted Flowers there, but note that it was Flowers’ first (or one of the first) public debates; you can see how much better Flowers holds his own in his subsequent debates with e.g. Tyler Vela & Sean Cole, Sonny Hernandez & Theodore Zachariades, Joel Webbon, or Gabriel Hughes. (And since I mentioned position of strength, recall how the latter two had to twist themselves into knots avoiding the plain meaning of passages about faith preceding regeneration! The snippets are on my channel.)

Again, White’s most recent debate was against Tim Stratton – with it being the latter’s first debate, the cross examination ended up strongly in White’s favour. Now compare the debate immediately preceding that, on a similar topic but against William Lane Craig – one of the few Christians with more debates under his belt that even James White! – and White couldn’t play semantic tricks at all (nine times dodging the simple question of whether he thinks God is the author of evil!). Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics by Richard A. Muller, anyone?😜 Remove the advantage of experience, and White clearly doesn’t fare quite as well.

In fact, I have noticed this tendency of White’s – he will pick out someone way below his public-awareness, professional weight class to use as an attempted punching bag. Names like David Pallman (regarding Bahnsen) and most recently J.P. (a God who is trying His best to save everyone) come to mind.

Or back to the preponderence of facts – the worst I have ever seen White fare is when he debated Robert Spencer on Islam (the only one I’ll directly link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD3KHyyp1Y8 ). Spencer had by then written a swathe of meticulously researched books about Islam. During the debate, he cited Islamic jurisprudence to show how orthodox Islamic authorities interpreted their own scriptures. Meanwhile, White was basically arguing that all that vast majority of Muslim experts didn’t know what Islam really teaches! White was clearly straying out of his own field of expertise and blundering into someone else’s.

(In mentioning the above, I mean that it is the worst which White has fared points-wise… The worst he has ACTED in a debate was the even more mocking than usual tone he took together with Jeff Durbin against atheists Greg Clark & Dan Ellis, juvenile behaviour that made even other Calvinists cringe, and the fact that he prefaces the video with ‘Incredible’ says everything about his attitude.)

So in summary, yes, White is an above-average debator. He might even be a great debator. But when the odds are not stacked in his favour, he doesn’t fare nearly as well. That’s all I have to say, really.

NB: I feel that this is exactly the kind of post where if White catches wind of it, his injured pride will drive him to devote a tweet or even a whole rant on The Dividing Line to steamrolling over a yet another amateur with an opinion!