Calvinism, Materialism, and Determinism are Demonstrably False

John Calvin wasn’t a terrible man. In fact, as far as men go, he was one of the better ones, which is really saying something given that he was French. He was, however, a terrible philosopher; and while his religious work did much to amend the excesses of early Protestantism during his own era, the legacy he left behind was the noxious theology of Calvinism.

What Calvinism attempts to accomplish – like all religion – is to resolve the impossibility of finite man encountering an infinite of God. Unfortunately, it does this poorly. It starts by noting an apparent contradiction in reality. Given that God – since He is infinite – is therefore Omniscient – how can we square that with Free Will? Furthermore – given that Good is likewise infinite, and we are finite – how is it that man can ever choose the Good? “Quite simple,” says your modern-day Evangelical. “God knew, from the moment He created the world, whom would be saved and whom would be damned. It is by His will – not human will – that you come to him and receive grace. Ergo, the entire universe is a giant, cruel test, where you free will is useless, and your arrival at the gates of eternal bliss or eternal torment was not just predetermined, but also utterly outside of your control.” He beams proudly while pulling out a knife, “And I’m one of the saved, and you aren’t, so it doesn’t matter how I carve up your flesh. It’s not like I’m capable of willing the Good anyway!”

Thankfully this doctrine is clearly contradicted in the Genesis 2:19 “And the Lord God having formed out of the ground all the beasts of the earth, and all the fowls of the air, brought them to Adam to see what he would call them: for whatsoever Adam called any living creature the same is its name.” This is what is meant in Genesis 1:26 when God – the Logos, the Word which instantiated reality – created man “to our image and likeness.” The naming of the animals wasn’t some arbitrary thing – names are only arbitrary on the surface. The act of naming is to summon something into being; just as God summoned the universe, so does man summon the meaning within the universe by naming the things which he chooses to see. Without names, without categories, without willed heuristics, the universe is nothing but an infinitude of meaningless, disordered facts. It is through sight and speech that the universe comes into being, and God created man so that we might be co-creators with Him – He’s curious as to what we’re going to do.

We needn’t just rely on the Bible to prove that Calvinism, with its cynical assertion of predestination and determinism, is false. We can further prove it through the study of mathematics and nature.

While Calvin drew his inspiration from theology, modern-day Determinists are inspired by Materialism. Materialism contains two explicit premises which are (probably) true, and one implicit premise which is demonstrably false. The explicit premises are:

1. Causality exists (an untestable hypothesis, which nonetheless seesms reasonable enough).
2. All that exists follows immutable laws (likewise a faith-based axiomatic statement).

Therefore: given that there are laws, and given that causality dictates no exceptions to these laws, then all that exists right now, will inevitably result in a future state of existence deterministically, and it can be no other way. All that ever happened, all that ever will happen, is as solid and immutable as book which is already written. This is the same argument as John Calvin, incidentally, just with sciencey-sounding terms. Just replace Causality with God, and Immutable laws with finite man.

It is a dolorous philosophy; that free will is nothing but an illusion, the ‘experience’ of being a cybernetic system, which is ultimately no more meaningful or morally significant than any random series of pulleys and levers – morality being nothing more than the illusion we feel inside our own systems. The best we can hope for, if this is true, is that the mind – while not irreducibly complex – is nonetheless so complex that we lack the ability to map it. Therefore – although we know, ontologically, that free will doesn’t exist, our inability to dissect it allows us to pretend like we have it. If we are able to map it, however… all joy, meaning, and suffering becomes nothing more than a string of ones and zeros.

Thankfully this is not the case, because of the third premise, stated implicitly, which Materialism requires:

3. The immutable laws of existence are theoretically discernible within the universe.

This is where the whole enterprise collapses like the Tower of Babel. Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem proved that any system of mathematics, reason, or logic – logos with a lower-case ‘L’ – which is sufficiently complex to be useful in some manner (anything more complex than Tic-Tac-Toe) will be girded in by limitations so that there will be true statements within the system which cannot be proven true by the system itself – the only way for a complex system to prove all of its true statements true, is to render it so loose and sloppy that it also proves many false statements as well, thus defeating the purpose. In other words, no complex system can fully know itself within itself. Therefore – the immutable laws of the universe cannot be fully discerned from within the universe.

For natural logos to exist, supernatural Logos must exist above and beyond created reality!

This is where the flesh touches the spirit, where finite man makes contact with the infinite. It is through our God-like ability to see and name reality that we ascend above the animals; this is where the operation crudely referred to as ‘free will’ by modern philosophers makes itself manifest. It is how an infinitude of meaningless facts becomes a discernible narrative, allowing us to manifest this divine potentiality, giving us dominion over all of nature.

John Calvin, the Materialists, and the Pharisees were all wrong. Christ, it turns out, was right.