Does God purpose evil, or does God merely allow evil inasmuch as it serves his purpose?
"Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that but not with all those flies and death and stuff." --- Mariah Carey
After the tangents into reading disabilities and just plain stupid people (whom you deftly handled), let me make one effort to get this discussion back to the article as posted.
I believe your comment is basically correct in one respect(setting aside the Calvin-centric presumption of which is a 'variant' from which). It is most important to the Arminian to find a way for God to know the future without causing it.
The choices are:
1. God has complete foreknowledge because He caused it all ('purposed' it as you put it). This, of course, is the determinist view. But I think you sell it short that this view also has God outside history (as the author argues).I personally thnk that the author may have aimed his sights at open theism, because it is such a hot topic today and because it is the only one of the four that argues that God is inside, not outside history. The appeal of this 'inside-history' argument from a Scriptural standpoint is that, as its proponents argue, it allows a straightforward acceptance of Biblical language about God planning and considering and even changing His mind. Calvinism, of course, cannot tolerate the Scriptural language and has to spiritualize or humanize it in some way. While the 'simple foreknowledge' approach can theoretically tolerate it better than Calvinism, it still makes no sense. Why would God adopt interim positions which He knew He was going to change?2. God has complete foreknowledge because He understands all possibilities and their respective probabilities to a certainty. This is the 'counterfactual' approach. I believe this is largely an RCC approach and the leading exponent today is Alfred J. Freddoso of the University of Notre Dame. I am not sure I understand this approach, but the advantage would be that God could jump in and out and 'cause' some aspects of history, but not all -- thus avoiding the 'author of evil'problem of the Calvinist view.
3. God has complete foreknowledge because He is outside history. As indicated above, this is the Wesleyan view because it allows God to know all, without causing it. This is often known as 'simple foreknowledge.'
4. God has limited foreknowledge; complete as to the things He is going to do, but not what the Devil is going to do and not the result of decisions of human will which haven't yet occurred. This is your old bugaboo, 'open theism'.
Like so many of these theological constructs (which all have), it is usually a question of which view does violence to the fewest number of important Scriptural texts. Since even if we could agree on the counting of the 'fewest' we would probably never get agreement on which are the most 'important'.
In any event, I am surprised that in almost 300 posts, no one has brought up the issue.