In bullet points:
- God causes the act of sin, because God causes all positive ontological attributes given divine universal causality. Remember: Nothing apart from God can exist without God causing it. (Also here.)
- However, God does NOT cause the sin itself, because God does not cause the privation which makes the act sinful. For example, if a person shoots another (innocent) person with a gun to seize their pocketbook, everything positive about that act exists only because God imparts being to it: The bullet, the finger which pulls the trigger, etc.
- However, the creature alone, because they are free in the libertarian sense (libertarian free = “if and only if the agent performs the act intentionally and voluntarily and either the act is not determined [i.e., there is no factor both prior to and logically sufficient for the act], or the act is determined and the agent’s responsibility for the act derives from the agent’s voluntary and intentional performance of some prior act that was not determined”), because they failed to consider the moral standard when it comes to means of acquiring money. It is what is MISSING from the act (the consideration of the moral rule) which makes the act sinful, and God does not cause that and could not cause that, because it does not exist, and so there is nothing to cause, primitively speaking. Remember: Sin is a surd, an objective falsehood. It corresponds to no real, positive feature of reality, but refers to something that should have been there, something that is due to a particular judgment/action, but absent. Accordingly, sin doesn’t need an ontological cause, but merely a bogus judgment. We make that bogus judgment and God (in many, but not all, cases) permits us to follow through on the action by upholding all the positive acts of existence associated with it.
- God knows the sinful act by 1) knowing the act in virtue of knowing his own activity in causing the act, and 2) knowing the moral standard and that the act He is bringing about lacks conformity to it. That Gods action is inherently cognitional is supported by the agency model of extrinsic divine knowing.
- God is not “surprised” by sin because the creature does just what God causes him to do, though the creature could have done otherwise (all antecedent conditions the same) and holds counterfactual power over God. This is supported by the doctrine of divine concurrence and Matthews Grant’s Dual Sources defended in his book Free Will and God’s Universal Causality. Either way, God’s knowledge of contingent entities/events is extrinsic to God and can change without any real/intrinsic change in God. This – and libertarian freedom itself – is supported by the extrinsic model of divine simplicity as defended by Grant but also Alexander Pruss and others.
All this seems right to me: It is coherent and entailed by independent commitments (such as God being only rationally but not really related to creation, God being pure actuality, God being ontologically simple, etc), even if there is mystery to how it works, which is to be expected. Either way, with the above account we can preserve divine innocence, libertarian freedom, and divine sovereignty, simplicity, and universal causality. What more could a classical theist ask for? What more could anyone ask for?
See also: