I agree totally with this part. The narrative changes with conservative Biblicists who make the Bible say what they psychologically need it to when confronted with an obvious discrepancy. You really need to be an expert at cognitive dissonance, and mental linguistic gymnastics to be an evangelical Biblicist. Just constant excuse after excuse defending a work that when treated as inerrant helped create thousands of different denominations and where it’s followers can disagree on almost every page and internet some passages 5–10 different ways that may be mutually exclusive. Even if the Bible was inerrant, it’s hard to see how that doctrine is not be functionally useless given the state of the Church and the propensity of Christians to make it agree with their worldview. For U.S. folks, just look at all the marvelous exegesis in defense of slavery by Christians in the 1800s as an extreme example.
Not inerrant. And even if were, not infallible because the human language in which it is written is very far from being infallible.
In a similar vein I’ve been told (so I can’t swear to the accuracy) that Jehovah’s Witnesses believe heaven will commence right here where we are on this planet once all the sinners are thrown in the incinerator. Supposedly when they come around offering copies of the Watchtower they are also sizing up your house since they expect quite a few to be empty on that ‘glorious’ day. So they’re also looking to trade up when the time comes.
Very appropriate question. Personally, I found the most convincing explanation in “Reality: A Synthesis Of Thomistic Thought”, the masterpiece of Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, in the chapter on “Providence and predestination”. Here the dominican friar reasons about the mystery of predestination, which “lies chiefly in harmonizing God’s universal will of salvation with the predestination, not of all, but of a certain number known only to God”. To be extremely synthetic – and necessarily incomplete –, the answer lies in the Revelation, like in Rm 9,14 (among other passages), where it is written that:
What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! For he says to Moses,
“I will have mercy on whom I have mercy,
and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”
As St. Thomas explains, in the predestined, God manifests His goodness under the form of mercy. In the reprobate, He manifests His goodness under the form of justice.
Fr. Lagrange then continues:
Both the splendor of infinite justice and the glory of infinite mercy are necessary for the full manifestation of God’s goodness. Thus evil is permitted only in view of a higher good, a good of which divine wisdom is the only judge, a good which the elect will contemplate in heaven. To this doctrine Thomists add nothing. They simply defend it.
The mystery remains, and maybe it is even deeper than before, but that is where the Revelation stops. The duty of theologians is to try to solve the apparent contradictions and shed more light where doctrine apparently gets more obscure.
This however is just a part of the entire discussion on the topic of Predestination (why, by the way, at least from a Catholic point of view, is always predestination to heaven, never to hell), a matter that even faithful christians fail to adequately study and meditate.
Welcome to the forums. Let me clarify something about your understanding of predestination. God alone decides who will be predestined to heaven, yes? And if he wants everyone to be saved, why not predestine the whole world? But if God chooses to save only some, then what does he intend to do with the rest? God knows they have no other option other than hell, right? So why not say he predestined them to hell?
If you consider that God is outside of time (timeless, or ‘timeful’ – omnitemporal), predestination is in the past tense and doesn’t really apply. In fact, since all of our language is tensed, none of it accurately describes the relationship of God to us in time. Jesus said, “Before Abraham was born, I AM.”
It would not be inaccurate to say that all of his decisions are instantaneous, and that his choices work in conjunction with ours. And we have free will. So we are predestined… and not. It is a mind-bender, and a wonderful mystery.
“We have to believe in free will, we have no choice.” I.B. Singer 
First of all lets get a quote of the Catholic position.
The Catholic Church permits a range of views on the subject of predestination, but there are certain points on which it is firm: “God predestines no one to go to hell; for this, a willful turning away from God (a mortal sin) is necessary, and persistence in it until the end” (CCC 1037). It also rejects the idea of unconditional election, stating that when God “establishes his eternal plan of ‘predestination,’ he includes in it each person’s free response to his grace” (CCC 600).
I don’t know if the Catholic position makes a whole lot of sense to me, but it is fully affirming both predestination and human free will. How these are logically reconciled is something on which a range of views is permitted. I think the above implies that “predestination” simply doesn’t mean the same thing as it does to a Calvinist. Perhaps it means that God works and plans for a positive result and yet for this to work out our cooperation is required.
After falling down the stairs:
Calvinist: “Boy, I’m glad that’s over!”
Catholic: “I wonder what I did to deserve that?!”
Thank you.
I’m no theologian, but I will try to address your doubts.
if he wants everyone to be saved, why not predestine the whole world?
Thomist theologians make a distinction between sufficient grace and efficacious grace. Sufficient grace is really sufficient for salvation, and Gods gives this grace to everyone. It makes fulfilment of precepts really and objectively possible. It can however be resisted by the free will of humans, which is the reason why God wants the salvation of everyone but not everyone will be saved.
Efficacious grace instead allows for actual and infallible fulfilment of the precepts. It is not given to everyone: it was assigned to Saint Paul, whose conversion God wanted infallibly from eternity, but it was not given to Judas after his guilt. Fr. Lagrange says: “He permitted Judas to remain, freely, in final impenitence. What higher good has God in mind? This, at least: the manifestation of infinite justice.”
Therefore God gives the possibility of salvation (sufficient grace) to everyone, but many will not be saved due to their own resistance to grace. Those that are saved are so because God chose to give them, freely and without any merit from the human part, the gift of the efficacious grace. Why so? It is a mystery. There is no answer but the divine pleasure.
To clarify a bit more: the distinction between sufficient grace and efficacious grace is based on the concepts of antecedent will and consequent will. Antecedent (or inefficacious) will is a conditional will, which wills good abstracting from its concrete circumstances. It is the source of sufficient grace. Through sufficient grace God gives every man the possibility to follow all commandments, and therefore be saved.
Consequent will instead is the one by which He wills some good with all its concrete circumstances, so it is infallible. It is the source of efficacious grace.
The concept of antecedent will and consequent will lies on the distinction between potency and act.
To illustrate better the difference, Fr. Lagrange makes the following examples:
Now this conditional, antecedent will remain inefficacious because, in view of a higher good of which He alone is judge, God permits that this or that good thing does not come to pass, that defectible creatures sometimes fail, that this or that evil comes to pass. Thus, in view of that higher good, God permits, to illustrate, that harvests do not reach maturity, that the gazelle becomes the prey of the lion, that the just suffer persecution, that this or that sinner dies in final impenitence. Sometimes we see the higher good in question, sometimes we cannot. In permitting final impenitence, for example, God may be manifesting infinite justice against obstinacy in evil.
Therefore, when we say that God wants everyone to be saved, we say so necessarily referring to His antecedent will, not His consequent will.
By consequent will Gods wants to save all men who will in fact be saved. This is the plan of divine providence.
What I found, having conversations with Christians and religious leaders, is that God and Hell is all fair and just, as long as you are expecting to be in heaven after you die. Then, whatever God does is all good.
But, when you are the one thrown in Hell, then God’s justice becomes questionable at best.
Well, here we have a problem. How is it fair that some humans get a personal visit from God while others have to listen to the silence all their lives? It’s also ironic that Paul himself considered nature sufficient revelation from God, while he himself required a supernatural appearance. So many questions and so few answers.
God’s justice is not questionable, neither for the damned. They curse God and His justice, but they don’t think it was not deserved. They may wish they had used their time on the earth to convert and do penance, they may also wish to have never been born, but they recognise that their destiny is entirely appropriate for how they conducted their lives. If you remember the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Abraham says to the rich man that his agony was well deserved, and the rich man has no objections to this point, all that he asks is to warn his brothers still on the earth.
The vast majority of people have to listen to silence for all their lives, even saints. Spiritual aridity is a frequent condition of the soul who tries to purify herself and progress in the path of spiritual perfection. Personal visits of this kind are extremely rare, and usually are not given for personal enjoyment, but for the conversion of others. The same can be said about the revelations of St. Paul.
As the Lord explained in the parable of Lazarus, miraculous manifestations are not usually necessary for the conversion of sinners, since the Revelation is sufficient.
And as St. Alphonsus notices in Uniformity With God’s Will, "Lest St. Paul become vain on account of the spiritual gifts he had received, the Lord permitted him to be tempted to impurity: “And lest the greatness of the revelations should exalt me, there was given me a sting of my flesh, an angel of Satan to buffet me.”
one could think you are bright doing nothing to ensure to create hell 
considering that all the work wasted is his work there should not be a problem with that unless you think it is not his work.
If you do nothing you can’t sin either. It takes the active decision to sin, e.g. reject to be with God to end up in hell. Just think how much effort it takes on your behalf to deny the existence if God. Is it mainly because he does not behave like big Santa and makes reality to perform to your expectations?
Not according to the Epistle of James.
4:17 So for one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, for him it is sin.
The concept of doing nothing is incompatible with life, and defiance is an act of doing, which is why “to defy” is a verb. Its a bit like some people declaring their ignorance about a subject as “absence of belief” but then wanting to debate the subject they declare themselves to be ignorant about, e.g. a classical Dawkins 
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