Why would God create a bunch of puppets? Whether predestination or knowing the outcomes of our free will is not logical. The only reason He would create beings with free will is so that they could surprise Him. I see God as a master statistician - He know in general what His Creation will do, but not exactly what each individual will.
When He created the the first beings, He knew that it was possible that some could disobey His Laws and He watched it unfold, as each generated their own fate, through their specific disobedience of His Laws.
A great reminder, thanks @Christy. Iāve always loved the way that the Heidelberg Catechism articulates similar ideas:
Question 26: What believest thou when thou sayest, āI believe in God the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earthā?
That the eternal Father of our Lord Jesus Christā¦ is for the sake of Christ his Son, my God and my Father; on whom I rely so entirely, that I have no doubt, but he will provide me with all things necessary for soul and body and further, that he will make whatever evils he sends upon me, in this valley of tears turn out to my advantage; for he is able to do it, being Almighty God, and willing, being a faithful Father.
Or indeed, Psalm 62:1-2, for that matter:
Truly my soul finds rest in God alone,
my salvation comes from him.
Truly he is my rock and my salvation;
he is my fortress, I will never be shaken.
One of my favorite books, and sadly overlooked on the question of theodicy (problem of evil). My summary:
Prophet: Why donāt you answer my prayers? Why do you tolerate violence and evil?!
The Lord: I am raising Babylon to dispense my justice.
Prophet: But how can you - a good God - use evil men to accomplish your purpose?
The Lord: The plunderer will become the plundered. Evil will not go unpunished forever. Meanwhile, the righteous will live by faith.
Prophet: Although I fear the worst is yet to come, I will rejoice in the Lord. The Lord God is my strength.
Roger Olson had an interesting take on things yesterday:
Even with God outside the space-time continuum, we can still be other than a book already written. The picture we have in quantum physics is that things exist in a superposition of possibilities until a measurement is made. Likewise, our future is a superposition of possibilities. It is actually the only logically consistent way we can have a God which interacts with the universe. The future is only written as God participates and until then the future is only knowable as branching tree of possible outcomes. Otherwise, how can God do anything if the future is already fixed. And if it is just like a book which God can edit, going back and forth then it is absurd to think of the characters of His book as being any more real or alive than the characters in our own books. Having a future of possibilities to choose from is the very essence of life and consciousness.
Yeah, I really feel like a puppet in those two accounts I gave as illustrations of his sovereignty. NOT! You missed the part about him being timeless and having a dynamic relationship to us.
These are very important questions, and the implications of how you sort them out can go far. I think that free will and predestination are not compatible ideas logically.
So on one hand you have a reformed or Calvinist view that emphasizes predestination, and then you have the other end of the spectrum with open theism or process theology. And in the middle, you have probably most people who try to mix the two somehow (which is an impossible task).
I subscribe to something like open theism or process theology, where the future is not determined. God knows everything there is to know, it is just that the future is not written and can only be known as possibilities. However, God is able to accomplish whatever he declares in one way or another. He usually prefers to allow his creation to cooperate with him to bring about his plans.
I believe in a God who truly interacts and responds and loves, not just follows a script.
They are not, given that the extent of our ability to understand is completely limited to sequential time. But our God is bigger than that, and I am willing to not try and confine him to our sequential time limited thinking box and to accept the reality of the wonderful mystery of the dynamic relationship he has with us, illogical as it seems to us if we feebly try and explain. The Bible teaches both concepts quite clearly, Godās absolute sovereignty and our freedom and responsibility.
That is an excellent picture of how our thinking is limited to sequential time.
That too is illustrative of how we limit God to sequential time ā all of the verbs are tensed. That is the only language we have.
Free will is not an illusion, it is real, but so is Godās absolute sovereignty. Limited to sequential time, yes, they are incompatible, but God is not so limited. Can we get our heads around Godās dynamic reality and put it in a box? No, we cannot, but we can accept and enjoy the mystery, if we are in his family.
A very basic one is scripture ā the Bible teaches both free will and predestination/election/chosenness/etc. As has already been made abundantly clear and accepted by all comers, including myself, they are incompatibleā¦ in linear sequential time. (I say ālinearā because we know from physics and relativity that time can be bent, compressed or warped ā the twin paradox is a good example. It should not be too surprising nor difficult then to understand that our sequential time is not an absolute.)
The other major reason is my life-experience, I guess. The first āco-instantsā that knocked me over is the one below. There was another whole set of co-instances that I realized in retrospect that was far more significant to my lifeās path ā my chasing my future wife around the country, unbeknownst to either of us, at the time, and finally catching up with her (she reminds me that I still am sometimes ). Part of that set had already occurred at the time of this story:
Back to scripture again, there are numerous examples of Godās providence for his people in both testaments, and they correlate well to Godās extra- or supra-dimensionality, shall we say, as I have described it.
I wouldnāt say itās an impossible task ā I think it just depends what you mean by āmix.ā Like Dale said, I do believe scripture teaches Godās sovereignty, but it also teaches free will. I just canāt get behind any ideology that requires me to choose between one or the other ā it would be like cutting scripture in half.
I donāt buy into Molinism, either, which to me is an academic and intellectual exercise that tries, with limited success, to meld the two (libertarian free will and Godās absolute sovereignty). Itās been described as turning God into an epistemological calculator, and I see basically zero scriptural support for it ā a lot of unjustified inference and projection or extrapolation is required.
if God transcends everything including you he has no chance of not knowing everything that happens everywhere at any time. Thus the term "predestined " is meaningless in the context of God. To God what you do as an act of free will is already known to him as he has already been there. That does not deprive you of free will to do something utterly stupid - or not. It just means that you canāt fathom that someone already knew yesterday what happened to you tomorrow. It definitely does not excuse the stupid action of you xxxxx (fill in what silly thing you do tomorrow) as you could not possibly see that it caused YYYYY because of ZZZZZ 5000 years ago.
Just imagine you seen the happy end of a film. Does it mean that there could be no wrongdoing on the way to that ending, or incredible acts of love or hate? Does it mean that everything on the way to that ending was morally justifiable because of that ending? It could have arisen from an infinite number of actions in between.
The bit of fate that is predestined or ādead certainā, as we say, is, that there will come the day where you have to justify yourself and your actions. That is ofcourse only if you do not live in denial of that possibility and hope that all the memory of you, including yours, is erased with your death and there is no time to reflect upon it. The bad news is that there is an infinite time for that when you lose time at the point of reentry into the metaphysical world. So yes, you have free will and you are predestined to justify how you used it. It does not mean that your actions are predetermined as by the chemical positioning of the molecules in your brain and you could not do otherwise or God determined what you were going to do as you live,e.g.you have control over the movement of energy or matter yourself. Just that God already knew yesterday what you did tomorrow but did not stop you from doing it or not (particularly because he loves you) does not excuse your actions. In fact denying you your free will would deny you being your self which would be the ultimate act of not loving you. Telling you that it would be a stupid thing to do AAA would allow you to change your mind - which is what God does, but he canāt force you to do it as it would be incoherent with his love for you. He can always help you to pick up the pieces, if you let him
Upon futher review of my views of free will I have noted that I am of open theist free will and go along with this statement:
open theism says that since God and humans are free, Godās knowledge is dynamic and Godās providence flexible. While several versions of traditional theism picture Godās knowledge of the future as a singular, fixed trajectory, open theism sees it as a plurality of branching possibilities, with some possibilities becoming settled as time moves forward.
Indeed it does and that is the confusion, what is more emphasized? Human free will or Godās sovereignty? That has been the issue that has plagued as the Bible does seem to support free will and predestination. I often consider Godās sovereignty in terms of election a mystery but donātā negate human free will as a person of Wesleyan-Methodist theology do believe that humans do have free will in terms of salvation.
You missed the part about him being timeless and having a dynamic relationship to us.