If we believe, with Aristotle and all the Scholastics that God is the First Cause and Prime Mover, then even rape is the result of His (permissive) will. As Bañez says “God, respecting the nature of things, moves necessary agents to necessary, and free agents to free, activity – including sin, except that God is the originator only of its physical entity, not of its formal malice.” For “every act and every movement of the thoroughly contingent secondary causes or creatures must emanate from the First Cause, and that by the application of their potentiality to the act.”

Again, “Inasmuch as the Divine influence precedes all acts of the creature, not in the order of time, but in that of causality, the motion, emanating from God and seconded by free intelligent agents, takes on the character of a physical premotion (proemotio physica) of the free acts, which may also be called a physical predetermination (proedeterminatio physica), because the free determination of the will is accomplished only by virtue of the divine predetermination.”

In this sense, God eternally decrees, not only the things that come to pass, but the causes of them and the order in which those causes operate

David, while Amy hasn’t got it quite right regarding a child conceived in a rape situation, neither have you. You forget that while God certainly did not ‘intend’ a child be conceived by a rapist, neither did he ‘intend’ that Adam and Eve sin, but He most surely DID ‘allow’ or ‘permit’ it to happen due to the fact He endowed us with free will. He doesn’t force us not to sin neither does He ‘plan’ for us to sin.

Amy Sullivan is making an admirable attempt to be fair. But it seems to me that it is difficult to maintain that if God intended a life to be conceived as a result of a rape, he would have had to intend the rape in some sense. I don’t see how a Christian can conclude that God intends everything that happens. Did he intend for Adam and Eve to sin?

There is a difference between saying a human life is so precious that we never have a right to deliberately end one, no matter how it came into being, and saying that God intended for a particular conception to take place.