http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/12/opinion/teaching-calvin-in-california.html

Confronting the doctrine of predestination is a kind of psychological experiment. Nothing else can “suffice to make us as humble as we ought to be” as “a taste of this doctrine” of predestination, as Calvin put it. Exactly here, in this rejection and anger, Calvin insists, you finally feel in your gut the greatness of God. You finally feel the difference between his Majesty and your limitation.

Believers in the classroom feel the bite of this argument in their own ways, often struggling to keep the first premise but to deny what seems to follow from it. Even the students who don’t believe any of this, though, can feel the power of the argument, if only in the disgust that it fosters in them. Of course you feel disgusted, Calvin would say, that’s exactly how an atheist should react!