Jimmy Akin expertly addresses a common Calvinist argument regarding the Book of Jonah and free will. With his trademark clarity and depth, Jimmy dismantles the argument, providing compelling counterpoints based on theological principles and textual analysis.
Transcript:
So I’ve seen videos online of Calvinists arguing that the Book of Jonah is evidence against free will. What would be the Catholic argument against that?
Well, I can’t tell you the Catholic argument because the Church doesn’t have a teaching on this, but I can tell you what I would say in response to it.
The first thing I’d say is this is an experiment where you have one test subject, n equals 1, the number of test subjects equals 1 in this argument, and you can’t build an inductive case based on one example. You would need loads of examples in order to build an inductive case, and this argument therefore has no evidential force.
There’s a second reason that the argument has no evidential force, and that is that there is a mismatch between what happens in the Book of Jonah and the Calvinistic understanding of causation.
According to Calvinists, God gives people a grace that will unfailingly ensure that they turn to Him
and remain in a state of grace for the rest of their lives. Okay, that is not what’s happening with Jonah.
Jonah, there’s no discussion of him being in a state of grace in that book, but more fundamentally, on the Calvinist understanding of how the will works, God operates on the will itself. He doesn’t do things from the outside. Calvinists will frequently say that they believe in a form of free will that’s compatible with divine determinism, and they’ll say, “You’re not forced. God is not forcing you to become a Christian. He’s not making you do anything you don’t want to do. He’s giving you the desire to become a Christian, and then you just freely follow your greatest desire.” Well, okay, so if God is operating directly on the human will and not punching you around to get you to become a Christian, that doesn’t fit what happens with Jonah.
God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh. Jonah doesn’t want to go to Nineveh. Jonah runs away, and then God has this whole series of external events to beat Jonah into going to Nineveh after all when he doesn’t want to. And Jonah even complains at the end of the book, saying, “I didn’t want to come here. I knew you were going to be merciful to these people.”
Okay, so God is forcing Jonah to act against his will. Jonah doesn’t want to be there. Jonah doesn’t want to do this. But that’s exactly not what Calvinists understand God to be doing with our wills. And so there’s a fundamental mismatch between what happens to Jonah and what Calvinists say happen with our wills. And so those are the two main points I would make. Whenever you’ve got an experiment where you’ve got one test case, you cannot make an inductive argument on that. And there’s a fundamental difference between the kind of causation that Calvinists hold happens with us and the kind of causation that happened with Jonah.
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