So I have a half hour before my bus comes and (when I began to write this this was true; I have since edited and amended this post) I thought that I might start a conversation about predestination. I was raised to believe that God knew who was going to be saved, as opposed to God choosing who was going to be saved. I now attend a presbyterian church which believes that God chooses who will be saved, and not only that, but that salvation is only offered to those he chooses. The argument in a summed up form, is that it would diminish God's soveriegnty if we were able to resist his offer of salvation, therefore, salvation is an irresitable offer. If not every person is actually a christian, then salvation must not be offered to everyone. Now it has come to my attention that C.S. Lewis writes in his book Perelandra about predestination and that his views seem to be closely aligned with mine. I almost dislike that this is true, because it is harder for me to be sure that these thoughts are my own, and that I am not just a C.S. Lewis fan-boy. The scene is the hero, Ransom, is wrestling with the thought of a physical confrontaion with the villian. The quote goes thus: "...The future act stood there, fixed and unaltered as if he had already performed it. It was a mere irrelevant detail that it happend to occupy the position of time we call the future instead of that which we call the past. The whole struggle was over and yet there seemed to have been no moment of victory. You might say, if you liked, that the power of choice had been set aside and in inflexible destiny substituted for it. On the ohter hand, you might say that he had delivered from the rhetoric of his passions and had emerged into unassailable freedom. Ransom could not for the life of him, see any difference between these two statements. Predestination and free will were aparently identical. He could no longer see any meaning in the many arguments he had heard on the subject..."
Now I will admit that I am reading into this quite a bit and I do not mean to speak for Lewis, who has likely amply spoken for himself. For quite sometime I have been of the mind that the only real differenece between how I was raised, and how my church believes now, was the words 'knows' and 'chooses'. Some prefer to think of God knowing; some prefer to think of God choosing. I have tried to develope a slightly more sophitcated idea about the issue, but my opinion has not changed much to date. On the one hand it is imposible to read the new testement without encountering the word 'predestined' or some synonym used in the context of a christians' salvation. Also, no christian I know has a hard time thinking about the Children of Israel as God's chosen people. God chose people in the old testement. It could stand to reason that He would chose the people with whom he enters into the new covenant. On the other hand, free will has such an intuative appeal to it. I am responsible for the bad things that I do. I chose to do them. The one good thing I did was to choose salvation, not that I was smart or brave or strong enough to do it, but that the Holy Spirit enabled me to choose it and then I did. I don't know enough theology to know if there is a belief structure that suggests that a man chooses independant of the will of God to allow him that choice. I'd bet that there is, but that is not what I am talking about here. Also, its hard for me (it may not be hard for others) to believe that God does not offer salvation to everyone. The whole issue raises many questions. -Even among the children of Israel, A non Israelite could join the lot. ( Forgive me for not having the reference, but if you know it, I would thank you kindly)
My point of most interetst rest on Lewis' thesis that predestination and freedom are somehow the same. It is interseting to me as a physicist because this is a phenomeon that we see in nature. Quantum mecahnics is a wildly sucessful theory that describes what happens in the regime of the very small. When you are dealing with an atom, or an electron or what have you, you have to consider "quatum effects". One of QM's chief engineers was Schrodinger, whose claims of the realities of QM fly in the face of the rigid modernist. The example of 'schrodingers cat' is this: Put a cat in a box with a vile of a toxic poison which will at some random moment in time, burst. Now for you the observer of the box, you cannot know if the cat is alive or dead unless you make a measurement; that is, you open the box. So while the cat is in the box he is best descibed, quatum mechinically speaking, as
simultaneously being in the state of being alive,
and being dead. Until you open the box, the cat is both alive and dead, and when you decide to open the box, you have destoyed the former quantum state of being alive and dead, and measured the cat to be
either alive or dead.
I think that this is not only a brilliant explanation of some of the oddities of quatnum mechanics, but more. The lessons learned are: (1) Things may exist in a state where they are best descibed as being simultaneously in two (or more) mutually exclusive states. (2) Measurment effects the outcome of an experiment. This post is getting long, so I will let you draw your own conclusions for now and perhaps put a part II with the rest of my thoughts.
