Dinesh D’Souza versus Guillaume Bignon Calvinism Debate Statistics

For the record, I do no recommend watching this debate. There are better ones out there to engage with.  

Goal: An attempt at an objective analysis of the debate.

I’ve gone through the debate slowly, without including the introductions or the Q&A at the end. Here’s the overall statistics that I cared about for the debate…

Dinesh D’Souza (DD) versus Guillaume Bignon (GB)

	Dinesh D’Souza (DD)	Guillaume Bignon (GB)
Questions He Asked	18	14
Questions He Answered	4	18
Times he Interrupted	7	1
Concessions he made	5	0
Fallacies he made	4	0
Questions he Dodged	1	0
Promises He Made	2	0
Promises He Kept	1	0

There are my notes for how I arrived at the above accounting of the debate:

DD – 46:08-46:47 …

1 Question (“this description, of strong sovereignty on God’s part that I gave, do you agree with it or not?”)

GB – 46:48-48:08 …

Question Answered Directly (“you gave a lot of different things and there’s certainly some things that I would say differently, but let me be very clear I affirm the theological determinist position”)

1 Inferred Question (“So it seems like on your view you want to say the disaster comes to a city but it’s not the Lord who has done it because we don’t want to blame God and God in the Bible says it’s not about blaming me. I still have good purposes behind this evil but it doesn’t come to the city unless I have done it.”)

DD – 48:09-49:16 …

1 Promise (“Well, I want to address that issue of the biblical passages, but before we move to that…”)

1 Question (“60 million abortions in the United States. Most people, I think probably you included, would agree that this is a grave moral evil, right? … Did God decree, which is to say, order, mandate, create a system and a world in which this would take place? And so to that degree, God is fully responsible. … God caused 60 million abortions in the United States in the last few decades. True or false?”)

GB – 49:17-52:55 …

Question Answered Directly (“So I affirm that he’s causally responsible because he is determining everything and that that follows from that. The problem is that when you say he’s responsible for those things, people hear morally responsible and blameworthy for this evil. And that is the part that I say does not follow.”)

The 1 Inferred Question Reiterated (“God has good intentions he’s got good purposes. He’s absolutely not blameworthy for this evil. But the Bible does tell us that he brings them about, right? … I think that your view doesn’t dodge this a whole lot more because it is still facing exactly the same question for all the things that are not brought about by human free will. … So obviously the tsunami didn’t have free will, right? So you can imagine me presenting exactly the same line of argumentation and indignation that you brought against my view of divine involvement in evil against your view of a god who would allow a wave to kill 227,000 people. So I obviously refrain from doing that because I know exactly what the answer is. The answer is God has a good reason behind the evil that he allows and I don’t know what those good reasons are at all times but he does not follow that those reasons are not there.”

DD – 52:56-53:09 …

1 Question asked (“I see you slipping into libertarian language of allows, but you don’t mean allows. You actually mean that he prescribes and decrees. Correct?”)

GB – 53:10-13 …

DD – 53:14-53:23

1 Interruption

1 Question Restated (“you said. He allows as if to say as if to say that the laws of nature produced the tsunami and God allowed it is a whole different thing from God decreed it from the beginning of the world. Which is it?”)

GB – 53:24-55:32

Question Answered Directly (“the idea is that on the moment of choice the person has already a past that inclines them in one way or another. So it is perfectly meaningful for God even on determinism to say that the immediate action on the moment of choice is asymmetrical between doing the good or doing the evil. And he can um we can meaningfully speak of it being allowed even if all of this is still determined from eternity past.”)

1 Question Asked (“I want to like take a step towards you like yes, I do affirm that it’s determined, but it’s determined just like you would probably say that the tsunami is determined, right? You don’t probably interpret the tsunami as being some sort of quantum physics that God could not determine to prevent the wave and therefore it slipped out of his hand and killed all those people. Right? You affirm deterministic natural processes behind the wave. Wouldn’t you?”)

DD – 55:33-56:48

Question Answered Directly (“So my view would be that God’s sovereignty is to some degree to some degree delegated sovereignty. … these natural calamities are in fact the product of those laws.”)

GB – 56:49-58:00

1 Inferred Question (“He could have miraculously stopped the tsunami and on your own view he did not. So I think you and I would both be committed to say God has good reasons behind evil even tremendously absolutely incomprehensible evil with 227,000 people dead. But we don’t know what all those good reasons are and we just have to trust that he has them and he tells us that he does. Those that we know about because the Bible tells us and those that we don’t and I just treat them the same. That seems to me there’s no incoherence here.”)

TECHINCAL DIFFICULTY 58:01-1:00:38

DD – 1:00:39-1:02:00

Question Dodged (“…moral evil is produced by moral agents. So I want to focus really on evil that is produced by purposeful agents not by buildings collapsing or by it raining uh too much.”)

2-part Question Asked (“Did God decree that false teaching that Muhammad became you may say the instrument of and what was his good reason for doing that?”)

GB – 1:02:01-1:06:13

First-part Question Answered Directly (“…on determinism. God determines all the evil in the world. Right? My claim is that he’s got morally sufficient reasons to do that.”)

Second-part Question Answered Directly (“Now you asked the very next question, why does God allow this? Which is the exact same question that the atheist asks the theists about any instance of evil. What are God’s good reasons behind them? Sometimes I know the answer and this is great. Most of the time I don’t. The only claim that I’m making is that from my ignorance of those good reasons, it does not for a second follow that therefore there are no good reasons. … [SUMMARY]: “I’m saying God has a uh greater good that he’s after. That’s a morally sufficient reason for allowing this evil to take place. and he has good purposes. So he is righteous even though what we mean for evil, God means it for good.”)

DD – 1:06:14-1:06:34

Promise (“Um let me sort of continue a little bit with this sort of examination and then I’m happy as I say to switch and have and have you do this do the same thing.”)

1 Question Asked (“Would you consider yourself a moral relativist?”)

GB – 1:06:35-1:06:37

Question Answered Directly (“No not at all”)

DD – 1:06:38-1:06:45

1 Question Asked: (“You believe in objective objective morality? Correct? Certain things are inherently good or inherently evil.”)

GB – 1:06:46-1:06:47

Question Answered Directly (“Yes I think so.”)

DD – 1:06:48-1:07:07

Question asked (“I’m not specifying a particular act. You just believe that there is such a thing as objective evil.”)

GB – 1:07:08-1:07:14

Question answered (“Correct. But I would carefully moderate exactly what you think follows from that because it does not quite…”)

DD – 1:07:15-1:07:19

1 Interruption (“Why don’t you let me decide what follows from that?”)

GB – 1:07:20-1:08:26

(“right, but just to clarify one clause that you’re throwing in there that I don’t think I agree with. … I do think that there are some evil that are evil when we do them but not when God does them. And I think that you’re committed to the exact same principle. … so this is just to temper the conclusion that you had that somehow it doesn’t matter who does it.”)

DD – 1:08:27-1:09:56

Concession (“of course it does and I think what you’re saying is that there are some things and some situations in which we would say that if a human being did it, it’s evil because the human being doesn’t have a right over that person. … I agree with that.”)

1 Question Asked (“But by saying that there are some of these cases, would you agree that there are other cases? … you would agree that the evil is evil in and of itself. if God, for example, if God decided to give false teachings to everybody in the world and send them to hell, right? That would be evil because the teaching is false. And God would be directly decreeing falsehood leading to universal damnation. … So the fact that God may have some rights to do things that are not evil, quote, if he does them, doesn’t mean that all evil falls into that category. Correct?”)

GB – 1:09:57-1:10:30

Question Answered Directly (“Yeah, that’s right. … I’m not shying away from this view, but you sounded like giving somebody a false teach false teaching. … And I’m not saying that God does that, nor is my view committing to God doing that.”)

DD – 1:10:31-1:11:23

1 Question Asked (“But since God has decreed everything, everything that happens, it would be accurate to say that evil in the sense that we’ve now clarified. I’m talking about evil that is evil inherently whoever does it that all of that evil is decreed by God in the Calvinist framework. And therefore, does it not follow that the Calvinistic doctrine of total depravity – and by depravity here I mean decreeing and carrying out evil – is an accusation more accurately directed at the Calvinist God than at any human being whose portion of evil is obviously infinite decimal compared to God who has decreed all I repeat all the evil in the world from the beginning of time?”)

GB – 1:11:24-1:12:42

Question Answered Directly (“So once again, we have the transfer of the evil of the human act onto the evil allegedly of the God who decrees the act. And that is the part that I’m saying doesn’t follow. And I’m not just saying it does not follow. I’m saying your own biblical commitment forces you to say it does not follow either.”)

Inferred Question (“I think you and I would both say, ‘No, he does this, but he has a good purpose behind this. And therefore, he’s not guilty from the fact that he’s brought about this evil event, even if the Bible tells us very clearly that he predestined those things to take place for his righteous purposes.’”)

DD – 1:12:43-1:19:03

Concession (“Now first of all again to establish some common ground in this debate I am not arguing that there are no cases of predetermination or um uh on God’s part in the Bible.”)

Trinitarian Error (“I would also obviously agree that God… before the fall God um God predestines Jesus part of God Himself to come into the world.”)

Argument from Popularity (“I’m with the 96% of Christians who aren’t Calvinists.”)

Question asked (“You said that God inspired the Bible, right?”)

Gish Gallop (Freedom of the will, Bible Inspiration, Abraham, David, Job, etc)

Question asked (“You seem to say that they’re still free even though they couldn’t do otherwise because they have the capacity to do otherwise because if they had a different brain state, they would have done otherwise. Is that what you’re saying?”)

GB – 1:19:04-1:21:09

Question Answered Directly (“No, I’m saying because moral responsibility does not require the categorical ability to do otherwise.”)

1 Question Asked (“Does blameworthiness and praiseworthiness, right, moral responsibility, does it require the categorical ability to do otherwise?”)

Two arguments followed – God is praiseworthy for acting righteously and cannot have the ability to act unrighteously; fallen human beings lack the ability to live a fully sinless life, yet they are blameworthy for their failure.

Question restated (“So how would you unpack God’s inability to do evil and yet the fact that he is praiseworthy for not doing evil?”)

DD – 1:21:10-1:22:26

(“So I would argue that that you are only able to sustain this position by a halfway jump out of Calvinism.”)

(“The difference between you and me is that I then go on to say that God is all good and yes, he is fully capable of steering evil done by others to his own good purpose. For example, I believe that Joseph’s brothers on their own decision and through their own fault sold Joseph into slavery. Now God being an organizational genius figured out how to turn that captivity by relocating Joseph into Egypt. And through a set of circumstances, Joseph then becomes a powerful figure in Egypt. God does in fact turn it for good. It’s a whole different thing to say that God did the evil that he then himself manipulated to produce a good result.”)

Moderator interruption on behalf of GB

GB – 1:22:48-1:24:30

Question restated (“What I’m asking is how do you interpret the fact that God is uh unable to do evil himself, right? He’s categorically unable to act unrighteously and yet he is praiseworthy for doing the good. That does immediately reject the thesis that moral responsibility requires the categorical ability to do otherwise.”)

Argument follows about God’s promise to Abraham and fulfilling it.

DD – 1:24:31-1:26:53

Concession (“I agree that in God’s case you are right.”)

(“yet you said, and this was the whole point of my opening statement, that God directly decrees. He doesn’t decree in general. He doesn’t allow. He specifically decrees every evil act ever committed since the beginning of time. So you have the problem, don’t you, of explaining how this god, I mean this good God that you have defined as good is in fact, as I said, the author of all evil.”)

Gish Gallop (John 3:16, God doesn’t want everybody, “I am answering your question,” John Wesley, etc.)

1 Question Asked [already answered] (“…isn’t the interesting question not so much why does a good God do good things but how can you reconcile a good God with a God who is truly totally depraved in the Calvinist meaning of the term utterly responsible for all the evil that has ever existed. True or false?”)

GB – 1:26:54-1:27:55

1 Question Asked (“God is praiseworthy for acting righteously. He’s categorically unable to act unrighteously. You admitted that this means I’m philosophically right that moral responsibility does not require the ability to do otherwise. Do you see that this logically right? But that means in any person’s case, right? So okay, so let’s apply it to Jesus. He’s also a man, right? So this is closer to home. But Jesus is not able to sin and yet he’s praiseworthy. So we have a human being. Yes. A very special one that shows in a unique case that the general principle is false. Therefore, right, it takes one counter example to show that the universal principle is false. So moral responsibility does not require the ability to do otherwise from which it follows that incompatibilism is false and therefore libertarian free will is false.”)

DD – 1:27:56-1:31:33

1 Interruption

Question Answered Directly (“I think the problem that we have here is you are making a leap from one case to the general case.”)

1 Question Asked (“So here’s what I’m I want you to admit to and I hope you will because I think this is what you believe that even though God determines our brain states. God determines all our past our past events. the family we’re born into, the books we read, the influences inside my brain. God determines everything on the inside. And therefore, my very desires, my preferences, my wishes, including my desire from God, ultimately is determined internally by God himself. Is that true or is that false?”)

GB – 1:31:34-1:31:43

Question Answered Directly (“Are you asking me again if I affirm theological determinism? because I understand I have a French accent, but I thought I really repeated this a number of times.”)

DD – 1:31:44-1:32:17

(“So, your answer is yes. Your answer is yes.”)

Just not debating (“I think that there are a lot of people who agree with you but don’t see the implications of what you’re saying.”)

1 Question Asked (“That’s why I think it’s very refreshing in this debate that you’re admitting that the inner brain state that caused Lindsay Clancy to strangle her children was frankly not caused by a voice. It was not caused by the devil. She wasn’t demonically possessed. It was actually caused by God. Correct?”)

GB – 1:32:17-1:32:48

Question Answered Directly (“God has a morally sufficient reason for preferring the scenario in which evil takes place. And we’ve seen in a number of biblical cases that is telling us that he’s bringing it about himself.”)

1 Question Asked (“I am the Lord and there is no other beside me. There is no God. I form light and I create darkness. I make well-being and I create calamity. I am the Lord who does all these things. What do you mean means I am the Lord who does all these things?”)

DD – 1:32:49-1:33:38

Half answered? Talked about the light and dark, but not the calamity.

GB – 1:33:39-1:34:00

Argument

DD – 1:34:01-1:34:05

Interruption

GB – 1:34:06-1:34:51

Question asked (“I argue that it’s categorically impossible for a fallen sinner to live a perfectly sinless life and yet they are blameworthy for their failure to live a sinless life. I argued that if you affirm that moral responsibility requires the ability to do otherwise then you either say that they can live a sinless life and that’s palagianism or they cannot live a sinless life and then they therefore they should not be blamed for it which means that universalism obtains. So between those two horns of the dilemma between palagianism and universalism I would like to know how you avoid those horns if you affirm that ought imply can as you’ve tweeted and argued.”)

DD – 1:34:52-1:39:00

Argument: “I’m going to give another one involving human beings where I am making a moral choice even though I don’t have an alternative. … So it seems to me that we do have free choices almost all of the time. Although I agree we can find particular scenarios where your special condition applies.”

Argument: In Calvinism, God is a hit man who hires sinners to do sin.

GB – 1:39:01-1:39:06

Question Answered Directly (“it’s nonsense obviously I’m saying that God is not blame worthy I’m saying he’s causally responsible.”)

DD – 1:39:07-1:39:18

3 Interruption (“Why not in this case?”)

GB – 1:39:19-1:40:12

Question Answered Directly (“No, I’m saying that he has good purposes behind this evil. and he also has special access obviously, right? he has good intention and good purposes the evil takes place serves his purposes and he’s praiseworthy for the good that he brings about in it even if we don’t know what those purposes are. That’s the idea.”)

DD – 1:40:13-1:41:18

“let me just press you on that point.”

1 Question Asked (“if God is infinitely benevolent, God could have a purpose that will bring evil out of good, but God has resources not available to you and me. God is omnipotent. God is omnisient. Are you saying that? Let’s take for example, let’s assume that there is some unseen good that is possible that will come out of let’s call it 50 million plus abortions. There’s some unseen good and what you’re saying is you don’t have to specify what it is. God in his great wisdom might know what it is, right?”)

GB – 1:41:19-1:1:42:27

Question answered directly (“Yeah, it’s obviously that I don’t have the answer. If I don’t know what that good is, I can’t explain and convince you that that good is not achievable with fewer. Right? The claim is a blanket statement about all evil that there is a good reason that you’re quite right. … That the greater good that God is after must be both logically necessitated by uh the evil in question. Right? So that’s we couldn’t say well God could just achieve that greater good without allowing that evil. No they must be logically connected and it must be also of greater in intensity. Right? So the greater the good must be greater quite literally. … God has good reasons. He is righteous and he tells this much in the Bible.”)

Moderator interruption on behalf of GB

GB – 1:43:00-1:43:31

1 Question asked (“So ought imply can is something that you’ve tweeted and affirmed. I think you affirmed this right. Uh and so we I’m my claim is that this is both demanded by libertarian free will and false. … So would you say that we have the categorical ability to live a fully sinless life?”)

DD – 1:43:32-1:43:43

Question answered directly (“No. And because God No, we do. We do not. We do not have the ability to live a sinless life because God did not make us perfect beings.”)

GB – 1:43:44-1:43:54

1 Question asked (“So it’s categorically impossible for us to live an absolutely sinless life and yet we are morally blame worthy for that failure. Are we not?”)

DD – 1:43:55-1:45:42

Question answered (“So we are morally blame worthy because God is perfect. We are imperfect and for us to get to heaven. We are unable to do it on our own and we need God’s rescue mission for that to happen. So in that sense I agree. Human beings are not able to scale the infinite chasm between their own imperfection and God’s you may say impossible demand of humans. … so ought does imply can…”)

GB – 1:45:43-1:46:06

Argument (“ought implies can is a universally quantified statement, right? That if you have ought that implies that entails can. I given you a straightforward counter example, okay? here you ought to do something and yet you cannot do it from which it follows that the universally quantified statement is false. So the principle is shown false by your own admission.”)

DD – 1:46:07-1:46:57

GB – 1:46:58-1:48:08

Question asked (“What I would like to ask you one line of argument that I’ve used that we have not yet touched is the inspiration of scripture. I’ve argued that uh Calvinism and its compatibilist view of free will best explains how God can bring about that human beings freely write the Bible. Right? All of those authors sat down and of their own volition wrote freely all the words that we are told in the Bible. God was ordaining, right? He was inspiring them. They moved as God carried them by the spirit. So this is easily explained on the Calvinist view of free will where God is controlling exactly what they’re writing on the page. And it requires a bit of an explanation from somebody who says no matter what God does in their heart on the moment of choice, they retain the ability to write the exact opposite on the page. So how would you rescue the fact that God has successfully written the entire Bible like this even though allegedly those human beings could have written the exact opposite all things being just as they are on the moment of choice.”)

DD – 1:48:09-1:48:42

Concession (“Yeah. So I would freely admit that in specific cases um let’s just take for example the book of revelation God could have brought that about word for word in to me one of two ways one way is he could have internally controlled the brain state of John the writer the evangelist uh and he could have basically and John is freely writing these words that God put in his mind by controlling his brain state That would be one way in which God could do it. Here’s another way.”)

GB – 1:48:43-1:48:48

1 Interruption

1 Question asked “So, God is turning us into robots. And I thought it was my view supposed to do that.”

DD – 1:48:49-1:50:36

Concession (“God, no, no, no. God turned John the evangelist into a robot for 30 minutes or for however long the it took him to write that book. John otherwise did not live a robotic life. I think you would agree. When he was in Patmos, he had to go get his own food. If people came and started making fun of him, he would have to decide how to respond to that. So, I don’t even think you’re complaining that John’s entire life was programmed in the same way that his writing of divine scripture was.”)

1 Question asked (“so I guess what I’m saying is God has different resources for how to bring about that result but the I guess where I jump off the train is you go on to say that God also created the brain state of the marquee assad the marquee assad who describes the most perverse fantasies, the most abominable practices that God inspired him no less than he inspired the apostle. Isn’t that the implication of the universal decree of predeterminism that God equally decreed the brain state of the marquee assad as he did let’s say for the apostle Paul. True?”)

GB – 1:50:37-1:50:45

Question answered directly (“yes I do believe in the god who says that I am the lord and I do all these things yes we’ve established this okay all right I think that’s good enough for now”)

End