Chris begins his response by agreeing that "God did not transcend his nature when he decided to create." Yet, he follows this up by claiming that God exercised libertarian freedom on the occasion of creation. Many of God's actions are predetermined by his own word. As an example, it is not an option for God to forgo the second advent. At some point, however, we arrive at a point where God is not so constrained. He could have decided not to come at all. Chris has identified creation as one of these points where God's decision is equally unconstrained. I won't argue the point; however, I do object to calling this 'libertarian freedom.'
My objection is not to the notion that here God is acting as an absolute free agent. It is that this free agency does not costitute an exercise of libertarian free will. The will itself is a faculty. No matter how we answer the question of the relation between person and nature, whether a person must act in accordance with his nature, it is still the case that the person's faculty of choosing is limited by what the person desires to do. [Yes, I could have replaced 'desire' with 'will,' but this is an altogether different sense of the word. In the larger context of this discussion, which includes Clifton's claim that monergism implies monothelitism, I am concerned to identify precisely the kind of will of which Christ has two.]
I do reject Chris' assertion that deliberation does not involve "taking action that might indirectly fix my inclinations upon a final choice." Nor do I have any problem seeing this as a side effect. Chris writes, "When I deliberate 'should I go left or right' the content of my deliberation is not 'should I increase/decrease the strength of this or that inclination of my will?' The content of my deliberation is simply 'should I decide to go left or right?' And it seems I can directly make this decision, without first altering the relative strengths of my inclinations." I won't argue appearances. In fact, I can't recall a time in my own deliberations when I thought of them as "altering the relative strengths of my inclinations." Nevertheless, if it is the case that the will is exercised according to strongest inclination, then deliberation either alters the relative strengths of the inclinations or it is unrelated to the final decision. What may seem to be happening at the moment is beside the point. As to Chris identifying some cases of deliberation as consent rather than choice, I disagree. Deliberation is a cognitive act. Once he has found himself deliberating, it is a matter of choice whether or not to continue. And I fail to see the efficacy of any deliberations that are accomplished before he's aware of them.
Chris effectively demonstrates that if Adam always acts according to his strongest inclinations, then the fall was ultimately necessitated by the way God made Adam and the situation in which he placed him. But that point was already established once I accepted the WCF III.1-"God from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass:". Assuming that he accepts the confession at this point, I leave it to Chris to demonstrate how identifying such a chain of events (in which the only thing necessitated is Adam's faculty of choosing) makes any less likely the subsequent portion, which reads-"yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established."
I have made the claim that Adam's nature before the fall was just that of any believer after the fall. While I doubt that Adam's motives for the act that caused him to fall were "just because it was wrong," it would not surprise me to find that these motives were what we would now term 'sinful.' This would not be possible under the traditional view that the fall involved a change in nature or constitution. But this is no longer true if the fall is seen as nothing more than a change in forensic status.
One reason I have given for denying any change in Adam's nature after the fall is that a perfect nature before the fall is incompatible with the will always operating according to its strongest inclination. Such a will would have no inclination to sin. Chris ends his post by listing possible ways in which " the tree of the knowledge of good and evil [was] more attractive than any other at the moment when Adam and Eve sinned." Nothing he mentions- proximity to the tree when the Serpent came along, curiosity, or the desire for knoweldge- serves to refute Edward's thesis. These can be read as a litany of strongest inclinations. On the other hand, they fail to explain how someone with a perfect nature could have sinned. Chris, as would any one else, may feel more inclined to eat what is placed before him than any thing else. Nevertheless, the analogy is somewhat lacking. If Chris had been told by a credible source, "This steak is for someone else," then his eating it anyway would have evidenced his sin nature. If Pandora had had a perfect nature, the box would have remained shut.