[net.religion] Notes on predestination and free will

g-rh (04/23/83)

     I promised myself that I wouldn't get involved in these net
discussions; however the discussion on omnipotence/omniscience/
free will/predestination/determinism is interesting and I do know
something about the issues involved, so I will toss my two cents
in.  As a side note, let me first add that you don't have to be a
Christian to find these concepts comprehensible; I am not a Christian
and I do.  If I can, I would like to try to clear up some of the
confusion.

     One difficulty is that many people confuse predestination and
determinism.  Determinism is the idea that the state of the universe
at any particular time is a complete specification of the universe.
I.e., given the current state of the universe we could, in principle,
calculate the state at any other time.  (It can be shown that this
cannot, in principle, be done in real time.)  Determinism implies
predestination.

     To properly understand the concept of predestination you must
differentiate between being in the system and being outside the
system.  An analogy may be useful here.  Think of the output
from a computer program.  While the program was running you may
not have been able to predict what it was going to do.  Suppose,
however, that the run is completed and you are looking at a complete
trace of the run.  You can tell what would have happened at any
point in the run simply by looking at what did happen.  A better
analogy may be a novel which you have already read; the characters
in the story don't know what is going to happen to them, but you
do.  To you, their fate is predestined.  Their "flow of time" is
static to you because you are outside of their system.  If there
is a God who is outside the system then everything is predestined
(from God's viewpoint) because God can look at the universe over
all time as a completed whole.

     There is a similar confusion about omniscience.  There is no
particular difficulty about the idea of a being outside of the
space-time system knowing everything that happened within the
system.  (Being outside the system does not, ipso facto, imply
that you can know everything that happened within the system.)
There are real difficulties with the concept of time-bound
omniscience, on the other hand.  If you can know the future,
what is to prevent you from changing the future.

     The trickiest part of Christian theology is the concept that
God can put himself into the system and that we correspondingly
have a part that is outside of the system.  Think of it this way:
Suppose I have a large computer program.  I run it and look at
the output.  I am dissatisfied so I put some patches in and rerun
it.  I keep doing this until I am satisfied.  Think of the final
run as reality; the patches are, if you will, miracles.  This
much is straightforward.  The tricky part is that the program is
interactive.  I.e. God not only views the system from the outside
but also participates within it as a time bound participant.

     This is not, as it might seem, paradoxical because God is not
really time bound; God is a completed infinity.  God cannot change
His mind because change implies submission to time.  Think of the
universe as multi-dimensional tapestry with time as one of the
dimensions.  God's actions are simply part of that tapestry which
is (from God's viewpoint) static, external, and unchanging as is
God himself.

     The issues of free will and choice can be resolved in the
same manner.  They exist within the system (i.e. from a time
bound viewpoint) but not from outside the system.  If I understand
the matter correctly, the Christian view on souls amounts to the
belief we have a timeless component that appears time bound to us.