Perhaps it is not a "dumb" question, but (like too many things) a "fuzzy" answer to a difficult topic doesn't satisfy enough people--even if all we humans can hope for is a "fuzzy" answer.
Reformed Theology is "rigorous," that is, it presses the hard questions and seeks the clearest Scriptural answers, and receives that teaching submissively no matter how much the response challenges the natural (i.e. fallen) mind. Most people who reject, say, the doctrine of predestination don't do so because it isn't biblical (after all, the plain term is part of the text); but because they don't LIKE the facts or implications of the doctrine, and *voila* it must not be true (because, heaven knows if I don't LIKE something, it must not be so...).
But RT in its truest form has always had sufficient room to admit the limits of theology. Just because a question can be raised, thought about in relation to biblical data, and an answer offered, does not mean that a black-and-white, "rigorous" answer is available. The answer given may be "tentative," and must be "tentative" perhaps forever. How unfortunate, therefore, if the "tentative" answer is turned into a test of orthodoxy, or hardens into the "correct" answer for a given "camp" within RT. This is the objection that I believe stands behind Dabney's wistful observation that the energy expended in fighting for the "truth" of the matter is largely futile.
The infra/supra answers are essentially two ways of approaching the same question: one more "historical" (infralapsarian), the other more "logical" (supralapsarian). An argument over which of these is "better" isn't necessarily faulty, until it becomes abusive. If "logic" succeeds in marginalizing "history" as insignificant, it is a Pyrrhic victory of abstraction over creation. "History" has concrete lessons for airy constructs. If "history" marginalizes "logic," it likewise sacrifices the benefit that the Present or Future has in "informing," "judging," or "ordering" the Past. Both notions divided against one another are "linear" in their approach. But the subject with which both are interested (the mind of God) is not linear but whole (or omnidimensional), and defies human limits.
God accommodates his revelation to man, and his creaturely limitations. Therefore, it is possible to build sound and reliable theological constructions from the materials of special revelation, linear concepts slowly building a "whole" edifice, or a "whole" revelation: "For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little," Is.28:10. This is the way we gain true understanding.
But on some questions we are left (again, maybe everlastingly) with a "Heisenberg principle" or a "wave/particle conundrum" (see a physics textbook), but in the realm of theology. And why should this be "bad"? It imposes a lesson on us that we must stop at the bounds God sets for us, and not travel beyond them. In the end, the infra/supra debate ought to be a lesson in humility.
Great question,great responses.
