Predestination

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Could you elaborate on that?

Predestination in it's rawest sense is a Clockwork God theory. God makes things and it's all planned out very well so that God only has to intervene when he's planned God is going to intervene, if at all. Schroedinger's Cat teaches us that when the system works in a way where you can never know the true answer say, "F#$@ IT" and just stick to what you know and just acknowledge the possibilities,
I can see a clear series of cause and effect in my life, it's very evident, but I don't know if a higher power planned it that way, so oh well.

"You know what always cheers me up? Laughing at other people's misfortune. Hahaha!"

Predestination (at least as the Calvinists define it) is a false doctrine anyway. Just because you're obligated to follow God's plan for you doesn't mean you actually will. You can fail through your own bad choices.

I don't understand why there has to be a "first cause" or "initial conditions". Isn't Eternity eternal in both directions? Is time even one-dimensional from God's perspective?

The fact is that there are things that act, and things that are acted upon. People act.

Free will cannot be absolute if there exists even a smidgen of predestination. Likewise, predestination cannot be absolute if there is even a smidgen of free will. Only an infinite mind, ie. God, could understand the interplay of free will, predestination, space and time. If your mind is anything short of infinite, you're just blowing smoke out your ass when you claim to understand this.

Unless you're an Open Theist, I'll go ahead and say that any non-Calvinist doctrine is false because of absurd internal contradictions. Give me a half-way decent explanation of free will and I will be more inclined to consider your viewpoint.

And no, Predestination is not a false doctrine. It is the only doctrine consistent with an omnipotent God.


People act in response to a combination of external stimuli and internal motivations that are themselves driven by previous external stimuli (such as upbringing) and genetic factors. How do people act outside of these forces driving them? If they do so, would it not just be random action? If an action is acausal, it must necessarily be random, for otherwise where do your choices come from? The idea of libertarian free will is, quite frankly, a load of bull that has no justification other than that people like to believe that they are the "masters of their fate, and captains of their souls." It can't just be posited with no basis.

I don't claim to understand these things, though I do have theories. Obviously this is beyond human knowledge and is entirely rhetorical.

Good point.

Implicit "IMO" added to every comment in my above post.

There are phenomena such as those around radioactivity that cannot be predicted and quantum theory indicates the impossibility of predicting some things. But if time is accepted as a dimension and even if it is possible to accept multiple outcomes through event forking through multiple universes, nevertheless, the unpredictability has no effect on the fact that the future exists as firmly as the past.

By the Calvinist definition of "predestination" this appears to be absolutely true. This doesn't, however, rule out the possibility of a non-Calvinist foreordained life work or mission. If you look at "predestination" as merely as a goal, obligation, plan and opportunity rather than the only possible outcome, then you can have a destiny and still have free will. This also means, of course, that you could defy, fail, or fall short of this destiny. Is seems then, that in order for free will to exist, then at least some aspects of destiny cannot be absolute. Open theism? Are you referring, perhaps, to the paradox between omniscience and free will? (Does that paradox have an accepted name btw?) It's true that some conceptions about God are completely nonsensical. I don't interpret that to mean that God is nonsensical or utterly incomprehensible, just that the conceptions are at least partially wrong. Surely some aspects of God are beyond mortal understanding, but that doesn't mean God is self-contradictory. God is a God of order, after all.

I think that particular paradox comes from a misunderstanding of Time and Eternity. The premise of the paradox is as follows: if God is all-knowing, knowing the past, present and future, then there can be no free will, because the future is already known, therefore the future has already been determined. Worse, God can't also be omnipotent, because if God knows the future with certainty it cannot be changed. Since God is supposed to be both, it's a contradiction!

The resolution is actually pretty simple though. Omniscience doesn't mean God is all-knowing, but rather that God knows all. The distinction is subtle, but important. All-knowing means perceiving past, present and future in the past. Like a memory. There is an implicit assumption in the above argument that the past cannot be changed, even by God. It is fixed, absolute, static. I see no reason why God must be subject to this limitation.

The other option, that God knows all, means God perceives the past, present and future in the present. Like a sense. That means that just because God sees (not saw) you doing something (even if it's in the future from your perspective), doesn't mean God made you do it. That also implies that the past is as mutable as the present from God's perspective.

But wait, mutability, one might say, requires the passage of time, and therefore a past? Not necessarily, I say, it seems God exists outside of time as we know it, but that does not imply stasis. Some principles of time may still apply, just not the limitations of endpoints (a beginning and end) or even a single temporal dimension. I'll call this underlying reality Eternity, and the one dimensional fragment of it Time.

I therefore must reject the notion of a completely static immutable God as nonsensical and contradictory to the true principles of free will and omnipotence of God. While I'm certain that there are aspects of perfection that God will never choose to abandon (making God unchangeable in certain respects), there are other aspects of God that continue to progress. God may continue to create, for example, and thus continue to progress and change that way.

Before you reject the notion of multiple temporal dimensions as absurd, consider that string theory posits the existence of multiple extra compactified spacetime dimensions (beyond the 3 space and 1 time we are familiar with). It is still not clear how many of those extra spacetime dimensions are space, and how many of them are time. (Or are they something else altogether?)

The possibility occurs to me then, that for us to truly have free will, a part of us must also be Eternal, or exist beyond the limitations of this bounded, one-dimensional Time as we know it.

Yes, that is what I was referring to. It's called Newcomb's paradox. The issue is that if God is not subject to the constraints of time- which is an aspect of the universe which He created- than he must not be limited by it, and thus knows the future. Then some pseudo-game theory comes in with a game called the "Predictor" (look it up in the Wikipedia for Newcomb's Paradox) and demonstrates the nonsensical nature of prediction without determinism.


OK. I'm starting to get confused reading the rest of your post, so I'm going to take a break to study Russian history.

Ditto!


I read somewhere that that is the only important search; finding out who or what is doing the looking on.

And the zen buddhists put it wonderfully with questions like " Who is dragging this corpse around?", and " Who is eating?".

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The mind was developed and elaborated as an instrument of the body. There's all sorts of stuff going on that the mind has little or no consciousness of. It's the body that's dragging around the mind.

I think that the point of the question "Who is dragging this corpse around" is that the answer is not the mind, ( being a product very largely of the body ) the self, the "will" or whatever that we are so fond of thinking it is. The "who" becomes ( wonderfully ) moot.

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That's one of the arguments I've been making. I believe that a sort of "human physics" exists which governs every act a human takes, several orders of magnitude more complex than the current science of physics that is studied today.

You are, of course, entitled to believe anything you want. Whether it has any relevance to reality is another matter entirely.