We believe that God gave us free will - that we are free to choose our own path. Yet, there are some troubling problems with that built into our own faith.
There is the holy trinity - God, the father, God, the son, and God, the Holy Spirit. They have been manifest since the beginning - since before we were created. Which means that before we were even conceived, before we'd ever fallen, Christ was alive and already headed for his death. Before we'd transgressed, before we'd betrayed with a kiss, God already knew the outcome of events. If free will does exist, how is it that God knew what was already going to happen?
I'm not casting aspersions on the idea of free will. God is far more beautiful and magnificent than my brain could even begin to comprehend. He is infinite, which according to Einstein is where parallel lines meet. So, if there is a way to know what's going to happen, and still not have a pre-ordained life, then God knows it. But I'm curious what you all think? Does Free Will exist? Does fate run our lives? Or is there some other explanation that none of us can fathom?
7 comments:
So, if there is a way to know what's going to happen, and still not have a pre-ordained life, then God knows it.
Yet another paradox of our faith.
Although God may know what we are going to do and what we ask Him for, we DON'T know what is going to happen next in our lives. We choose the decisions that we make and God does not interfere - unless we ask Him to.
Bottom line - we can't fathom God's majesty. We need to accept that we make choices without knowing what the outcome will be, and trust that God will help us.
Ow. My head hurts.
The way chaos theory works - if you take four beans and put them in two enclosed boxes, without opening the boxes you know that the most beans that can be in any one box is four. There's a probability of it occuring that it will be four, three, two, or one, or even something other than that - which is just there to confuse you. This is the system by which God created the Universe and I got to think that maybe free will applies to everything - that maybe the number of beans in any given box depends on the number of beans that want to be in that box - up to four. The laws of nature don't change. God knows the outcome - between 0 and 4 - but maybe doesn't know the particulars of how we arrive at that point. So we have free will, but we also have an inevitable outcome.
This is especially a problem for Presbyterians, whose Calvinist reformed theology gives ultimate place to the soverignty of God over any other power in the unviverse, including our free will. Yet, I think that even Calvin would agree that we have the ability to choose our actions, even if they're not what God wants.
This is a deep subject that you could study for a lifetime. On the other hand, this logical problem is so hard to wrap your mind around that after years of thinking about it I haven't drawn many conclusions. This is all I've come up with after reading what others have said and working on it on my own:
1. God does not exist in the linear time line we inhabit. God is outside of time, so God sees the beginning and the end the way we might look at a roadmap and see the whole road.
2. God predestines all to come to the knowledge of Christ. However, God respects our free will to choose not to do God's will.
That's all I've got on predestination. I think it's mostly defensible with scripture.
I have no problem with the concept of fate if you frame it as a coincidence that someone puts some kind of value on, either positive or negative. I use the word, but I don't think of it as some kind of deterministic force in the universe.
Dave, I think you nailed it in comment # 2 - God has given us a choice to accept or not to accept His gift of grace and faith in Christ.
Christ Himself said in John 20:29:
29Then Jesus told him, "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."
My own quasi-scientific theory is that spacetime are created at the same moment. Therefore, just as the length and width and height of the Universe would be known at the time of the Big Bang, so too, would the length of time. If you believe in the expanding and receding view of the Universe then every 100 billion years or so, the Universe would collapse in on itself, and get so super heated that when it reached the point of singularity, again, it would explode. Sort of a yo-yo affect of the Universe. If you were outside this effect, you would see the Universe continually created and then destroyed. The outcome would never be different, but the events that led to those outcomes would be.
Haven't the Great Minds who decide these things decided that we're in an ever expanding universe?
The Great Minds don't really know what to think. There's evidence still both ways - though they are definitely leaning that direction now.
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