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You see, a lot of people are ignoring the totality of what Calvin referred to when he said that all things happen because God ordained that they take place. This means that all things, every vibration of every quark, every apparently random movement of this or that subatomic particle, every thought or impulse or action, every word spoken, every action that seems to spring from choice or unconditioned volition, every instance of self-sacrifice, every instance of what appears to be our recognizing what is right and submitting ourselves to it, every sin (though even that in a determined universe has no meaning) to every degree with every outcome, everything is determined. This is worse than anything dreamed up by physicalists or other forms of naturalists who seem to think that in quantum indeterminancy there may be some hope of liberation for the ghost in the machine.

Some seek to escape this by asserting that God simultaneously ordains the whole of creation and everything that takes place in it at the same time that he creates a free will that actually exists and works itself out through time. But this cannot rise above the level of an assertion because it is contradictory. They rely on imagery like someone in chapel did at a Calvinist college I attended who said, "We clearly see free will and we clearly see God's predestination. Up close they are like railroad tracks that seem forever separate. But when we look off into the distance of eternity, we see they do come together." Man, that's just painful to see someone try to use that kind of intellectual emollient to soothe the dissonance caused by simultaneously holding mutually contradicting views of reality and human nature and then punting everything onto God:

"We say, then, that Scripture clearly proves this much, that God, by his eternal and immutable counsel, determined once for all those whom it was his pleasure to doom to destruction. We maintain that this counsel, as regards the elect, is founded on his free mercy, without any respect to human worth, while those whom he dooms to destruction are excluded from access to life by a just and blameless, but, at the same time, incomprehensible judgment"
(Calvin, Inst. Book iii, chap. 21, sec. 7).

In other words, Hey, we know that it all happened because that's the way God willed it and God is good, therefore, anything he willed must be good. But in a completely determined universe, we cannot know anything, especially since every thought, and each chemical antecedent to those thoughts, lies in an unbroken chain of cause and effect that stretches back either through an eternally existing, though incomprehensible, non-personal being known as the physical/material universe or to the incomprehensible judgment of an eternally existing personal being called God who devises a temporary, equally determined universe for purposes of "glory" and "goodness," terms that in a deterministic universe have no meaning whatsoever, especially since such qualities are, in God, subordinate to his will which is exercised with no condition whatsoever, the outcome, made without respect to anything in the creation, a perfect expression of that will.

Competing with those two deterministic philosophies there is only dualism (eternally existing opposing forces) and pantheism (all that which can be named is illusion--there is no separateness; all is one). Oh, and the idea that God created a real universe with a cause and effect nature peopled with beings said to have been created in his own image with the capability of making free moral choices that are not determined by their surroundings but which are made with the same conative freedom experienced by God himself so that they and God could live in fellowship with each other even though such a state of affairs carried with it the risk of alienation and suffering due to free exercise of the will of the created against the will of the creator.

We could say that this is also incomprehensible that an eternally existing perfect being would bother creating out of nothing other immortal creatures with free wills that, at first in principle and later in fact, could defy the will of the creator and result in an eternal separation from the creator in spite of the fact that he chose to be born into that same creation and experience death in such a manner that it opened up a way for the rebels to return to their creator if they would only turn and believe and yield their will to his. Some things still do appear incomprehensible, such as why would anyone not return to the loving arms of the Father or why was there no such provision made for angelic beings who rebelled? But everything else, the freedom of will that true moral action requires, self-sacrifice, love, and even rebellion and the concept of punishment, is real, rather than just apparent.

Some seek to escape this by asserting that God simultaneously ordains the whole of creation and everything that takes place in it at the same time that he creates a free will that actually exists and works itself out through time. But this cannot rise above the level of an assertion because it is contradictory.

It is not contradictory. It is true by experiential perception. If I am of the elect then God ordained me to come to Christ from the foundations of the world. And when that point came I asked Christ into my heart with a free will. No one forced me to pray the prayer. I experienced no force of any kind. For me it was absolutely real. What was unknown to me at the time was how much God was behind it. That does not subtract from my experience though. It was real to me. That is how both can be true at the same time.

Those who demand that man is autonomous and sovereign will disagree and say it doesn't count unless man moves wholly separately from God, but that's ridiculous. To them reality is DEFINED by man's autonomy. What a man knows and experiences only matters to the extent it is APART from God. This is not Biblical thinking, and clearly does not glorify God. It only builds man up at God's expense.

They rely on imagery like someone in chapel did at a Calvinist college I attended who said, "We clearly see free will and we clearly see God's predestination. Up close they are like railroad tracks that seem forever separate. But when we look off into the distance of eternity, we see they do come together." Man, that's just painful to see someone try to use that kind of intellectual emollient to soothe the dissonance caused by simultaneously holding mutually contradicting views of reality and human nature and then punting everything onto God:

Actually, I don't see that as a half-bad analogy at all. :) The rails represent God's and our perspectives and experiences. They are different, but both are real from the respective points of view. In glory they will eventually become one. Not in essence of course, but there will no longer be any difference between experienced realities.

We maintain that this counsel, as regards the elect, is founded on his free mercy, without any respect to human worth, while those whom he dooms to destruction are excluded from access to life by a just and blameless, but, at the same time, incomprehensible judgment" (Calvin, Inst. Book iii, chap. 21, sec. 7).

All this means is that we cannot know how or why God chooses some as His elect, and passes over others. We just know THAT He does it. If anyone agrees that God is sovereign, then what is wrong with that?

But in a completely determined universe, we cannot know anything, especially since every thought, and each chemical antecedent to those thoughts, lies in an unbroken chain of cause and effect ......

No, we can know what is given to us in God's revelation, we just can't know all there is to know. It is God's revelation that gives us the Calvinistic view.

But everything else, the freedom of will that true moral action requires, self-sacrifice, love, and even rebellion and the concept of punishment, is real, rather than just apparent.

Yes, it is real, depending on what one wants to consider as real.