I am reading Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology for my Theology Proper class at TCS and am finishing up the chapter about God's Providence. It is an excellent treatment of the sovereignty of God and would heartily recommend it to any desiring to learn more about this doctrine.
In the latter part of the chapter, he is arguing against the Arminian position (which says that God does not determine every specific detail of every event that happens). The specific claim of the Arminian position he is refuting is that choices which are ordained by God are not real choices. His conclusion is both convincing and hilarious. I quote at length:
Much of our difficulty in understanding how God can cause us to choose something willingly comes from the finite nature of our creaturely existence. In a hypothetical world where all living things created by God were plants rooted in the ground, we might imagine one plant arguing to another that God could not make living creatures who could move about on the earth, for how could they carry their roots with them? And if their roots were not in the ground, how could they receive nourishment? An "Arminian" plant might even argue, "In order for God to create a world with living things, he had to create them with roots and with the characteristic of living all their lives in a single place. To say that God could not create living things that move about on the earth does not challenge God's omnipotence, for that is simply to say that he cannot do things that logically cannot be done. Therefore it is impossible that God could create a world where living things also have the capacity of moving about on the earth." The problem with this plant is that it has limited God's power by virtue of its own "plant-like" experience.
On a higher level, we could imagine a creation that had both plants and animals but no human beings. In that creation, we can imagine an argument between a "Calvinist" dog and a "Arminian" dog, where the "Calvinist" dog would argue that it is possible for God to create creatures that not only can communicate by barking to one another but also can record their barks in marks on paper and can send them silently to be understood by other creatures many days' journey distant, creatures who have never been seen by the sending creature who first marked his barks down on paper. The "Arminian" dog would reply that God cannot do such a thing, because essential to the idea of creaturely communication is hearing and seeing (and usually smelling!) the creature from whom one receives the communication. To say that there can be communication without ever hearing or seeing or smelling the other creature is an absurd idea! It is beyond the range of possible occurrences and is logically inconceivable. Therefore it is impossible to think that God could create a creature with such communicating abilities.
In both cases the "Arminian" plant and the "Arminian" dog are in the wrong, because they have incorrectly limited the kind of thing God could create by deriving what was possible for God (in their opinion) from their own finite creaturely existence. But this is very similar to the Arminian theological who simply asserts (on the basis of his own perception of human experience) that God cannot create a creature who makes willing, voluntary, meaningful choices, and that those choices are nonetheless ordained by God. Similarly, the Arminian theologian who argues that God cannot ordain that evil come about and not yet himself be responsible for evil, is limiting God based merely on observation of finite human experience.
[Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 346-7.]
Well said. I think he must have been chuckling in writing this. But it illustrates the fundamental flaw so well: that we ought not make doctrinal decisions on the basis of reason in the face of clear evidence to the contrary in Scripture, of which mistake the Arminian camp is guilty.
