Predestination
…it’s not just for Calvinists. I’ve been reading Carl Sagan, the astrophysicist, and remembering that there is no shortage of scientific materialists who don’t believe that we have any free will. I wouldn’t have thought they would really have anything in common; but there it is. Two communities that I mostly have a lot of respect for, holding as one of their core beliefs something I would really rather be false. Would you rather be a puppet held by physics and chemistry, or manipulated by a more traditional deity?
I wish I were a real boy!
June 10, 2007 at 12:58 am
IMNSHO, there’s too much randomness in the universe for Calvinists’ version of predestination.
June 11, 2007 at 2:33 am
I’ve heard this general idea from you before Daniel.
In what sense do you mean randomness?
Are you talking about chaos in the natural world, say the craziness of quantum mechanical theory, or of the apparent randomness of people?
June 13, 2007 at 10:17 am
Both.
June 16, 2007 at 2:41 pm
Great post!
Myself, I do not understand why proponents of strict determinism expend such a great amount of thought and work to justify a worldview that is essentially an intellectual cop-out. When I say cop-out, I mean the attitude that “If events will happen like they are fore ordained to happen then why bother trying to understand or influence them?”
And to those who insist that determinism is necessary for a sovereign deity I say, God is sovereign, and He could have created Cybertron if He wanted to. But no, He did not create a shiny planet full of robots, He created earth.