God, come out, come out wherever you are!

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

@ teaearlgreyhot,Surely you do not see me as Calvinistic, there is no way I believe in predestination or double predestination or most any other Calvinistic view. As a matter of fact, it's your view that is Calvinistic, this is the reason you believe that witnessing does not matter and this can be the only reason, predestination. I'm Southern Baptist and believe all will be given a chance at salvation. Let me clarify this, God will and can use those He desires because of His foreknowledge, Judas and Pharaoh are two examples. God is love, and there is no way I can believe that God would predestine anyone to eternal punishment.

I'm really not sure what you are. But if you say you're not calvinist, I'll assume you're not.

I was never calvinist, and the view that I was originally attacking isn't calvinist. If you think it's calvinist, I think that's only because ultimately, free will isn't at all compatible with theism. But many theists think it is, so to avoid getting into debate about libertarianism verses determinism, I thought it would be fun (perhaps I'm a masochist) to poke at some problems I noticed within Christian libertarian (not at all related to the political libertarian) views on witnessing and the destiny of the human beings.

I'm Southern Baptist and believe all will be given a chance at salvation

And I assumed that they would in the view I'm critiquing.

God will and can use those He desires because of His foreknowledge, Judas and Pharaoh are two examples.

Foreknowledge is precisely the the attribute of God that poses the greatest problem to libertarianism. If God is perfect, all-knowing, and has complete foreknowledge, then everything that he knows will come to pass, must come to pass, otherwise he isn't perfect, all-knowing, and all-foreknowing.

Libertarians use middle knowledge which I have assumed in my original posts to get around this problem. I don't think this solves the problem, but I'll just play along. In middle knowledge, it is thought that God imagined all logically possible worlds he could create with free beings. In all worlds, it is inevitable that evil would exist because for some reason, free beings always would start trouble. If it were possible to create a world in which all free beings would never freely do evil, he would have created that one, and we would be having a great time right now in some utopian paradise instead bickering about hell, evil, predestination and killing each other, etc. But that world isn't possible, so he created the next best thing which is the world were in now. Also supposedly, this world has an "optimum" number of free beings going to heaven and going to hell (as there is no possible world in which every free being would go to heaven and none to hell). Now, I really can't see how this solves the problem because ultimately God created the world after he "pictured" it in his mind among the various options. He could have just chose not to create the world. It seems to me that God is still ultimately to blame for the existence of evil and suffering in the world because he started the chain reaction that led up to it all. After viewing all the possible worlds, and seeing that evil happens in all of them, he should have said "Well, I'll be damned. Guess I can't make a universe after all. I guess I'll just watch TV instead." I would prefer non-existence as opposed to hell if given the choice. So if my criticisms sound similar to problems posed by deterministic views, it's not because I'm assuming Calvinism, it's because alternatives seem to boil down to determinism eventually.

God is love, and there is no way I can believe that God would predestine anyone to eternal punishment.

You may believe that if you wish, but it's ultimately God who made the universe and he knew what would happen.