Predestination

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Well, I am Calvinist (Presbyterian to be specific) so I guess I will jump in here. In my Confirmation class, sin (and the fall) were explained as an absence of God in the individual; that is, when an individual alienates/separates themselves from God, there is the potential for sin. Thus, God can't be considered the cause of sin, as we are free to respond to or ignore God's will as we choose. Predestination was always difficult for me to understand (if all our actions are pre-ordained, how can we be held personally responsible?) but the gist of it is essentially that, although God does not make our decisions for us, God knows what will happen in the future.

i dont know how anyone can believe in free will or predestination. or think that predestination is somehow free will

Well, if you believe in neither free will or predestination (as you have seemingly indicated is the only sensible view) you are left with... what other options exactly?

unscriped chaos? why are there only two options? do you believe rules always follow the rules? i dont. and i dont believe someone is predestend to do anything

The way I see it is that God knows the events, past, present, and future, but that they are, more or less, still being made.

Well, it seemed to me that you were rejecting both determinism and free will, which are generally the two concepts here. If everything is just random, then there is no sense or order to anything, and makes all human activity rather pointless. I generally agree with iamnotaparakeet's most above post.

I think free will is what we have compared to other animals; the freedom NOT to follow our instincts.

And i think god knows "all possible endings". All of them.

I don't know about "god" knowing that, but God certainly does.

In Grudem, God's attribute of Knowledge is defined as God fully knows Himself and all things actual and possible in one simple and eternal act. Some scriptural support is 1 Samuel 23:11-13

1 Samuel 23:10-14
(10) Then said David, O LORD God of Israel, thy servant hath certainly heard that Saul seeketh to come to Keilah, to destroy the city for my sake.
(11) Will the men of Keilah deliver me up into his hand? will Saul come down, as thy servant hath heard? O LORD God of Israel, I beseech thee, tell thy servant. And the LORD said, He will come down.
(12) Then said David, Will the men of Keilah deliver me and my men into the hand of Saul? And the LORD said, They will deliver thee up.
(13) Then David and his men, which were about six hundred, arose and departed out of Keilah, and went whithersoever they could go. And it was told Saul that David was escaped from Keilah; and he forbare to go forth.
(14) And David abode in the wilderness in strong holds, and remained in a mountain in the wilderness of Ziph. And Saul sought him every day, but God delivered him not into his hand.

Saul's coming and the Philistine's treachery were events that would have happened, if David had not listened and acted.

But are we free to respond or ignore God's will if he chooses one over the other? I think that goes back to compatibilism. Honestly though, I think that a part of TULIP is Irresistible Grace, if God chooses then we cannot not choose him. I think that responsibility really goes back to efficient causes, even if you were scripted to do the bad, you were still the doer of bad, and doing bad was still a part of your nature.

I think that Calvinism is the most logical theological position as well, and yes, one of the frequent arguments against it is that it does make God out to be an a**hole. Really though, with Romans 9 and Deuteronomy 28:15-68, God really will tend to look like an a**hole.

I tend to disagree with that conceptualization because if the future is known, then the events aren't *really* still being made. They are consigned to their destiny and thus determined. Because God is the creator who started this whole mess, then it logically follows that God is the determiner. Not only that but as we see in Isaiah 46:10 God basically says that he declared what would happen in the future.

Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure: (Isaiah 46:10)


God knows the events on our timeline because He is a timeless being. It is sort of like recalling memories for Him, but for us it is not so. We exist in space and time; He exists outside and all throughout. Both realities are *real*, it is just a matter of how they are viewed. If you pretend to see things from God's perspective, all things exist that shall. If you acknowledge your own finite perspective, what is done is done, what is occurring you may effect, and the future is a consequence of all corporate actions of both God and mankind. He know the actions that we shall and would take because He sees them all vividly, but we still make the actions we chose and decide the path we go (whether to give Him glory or just to live for ourselves.)

well durr

Yes, I know that the perspectives are different, but the issue with that is that it really does not solve the entire problem of free will. Essentially, if God is throughout all of time to an equal extent, then all events are at the same time for God. This means that from God's perspective every damned soul goes to hell at the same moment when he says "let there be light" and creates the animals he chooses to create, creates the man he chooses to create, lets the serpent tempt that man and the woman he created, etc. He knew at the world's foundations all that would happen and could have chosen to make it all happen differently, but he chose not to, however, because all of our choices hinge on his first choice because God has perfect knowledge, all of our actions are not variate but rather knowns. If free will is the freedom to be a variable then perfect foreknowledge is a denial of free will as we have choices that we MUST make. Thus God is the only variable, and all else is simply a reaction to God as God is the only being that can know.

As well, another issue is that having libertarian free will demands an open future, but a God who knows what will happen in the future demands that this future be closed. If the future is closed then there is no real difference between it and the past, and libertarian free will cannot be upheld. If the future is open though, then any foreknowledge is impossible, for foreknowledge denies the ability of the future to branch based upon individual choices as it eliminates the possible branches that we can choose. Essentially, God cannot logically exist in a future we have not created by our choices. The issue of libertarian free will vs God's knowledge is really one that causes theologians to have to deny one or to deny the other, and I believe this tension is what caused Open Theism to split off from classical theology.

I've only studied Grudem and Pentecostal Theology, you seem to know more on the subject though; where did you learn from?

I learned it from various debates with friends(one of whom is now an Open Theist) and also from a book on Wowio.com called "Time, Change, and Freedom" about the metaphysics of time, specifically chapter 10 I believe. I learned more from the former than the latter though.