There is a very strict principle of selection at work here, which looks rational to us, being strict. Obviously, to invoke the will of God to explain anything, to the exclusion of other ways of accounting for it, would be to disable the knowledge-acquiring, problem-exploring brilliance that for Calvin and his tradition were proof of the existence of the human soul. But for the positivist model of reality humanity itself is not really a given. Indeed, the positivist exclusions of articulate experience, the report we make of ourselves, is as rigorous as its exclusion of theism. This is generally
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