Free Republic
Browse · Search
Religion
Topics · Post Article

To: blue-duncan
No, what I am asking is can a person change his mind and choose differently than what was known before he was born? In other words, can one be said to have chosen freely if his destiny was set by choices he was forseen to have made before he was born?

A person can change his mind--but that would also have been foreseen. The difference is that man was created to make that choice--not to be sent to hell for the sole purpose of revealing God's glory. Omniscience does not imply causation.

It seems to me that in your definition of sovereignty, all that is happening now is just a rerun of a movie that was seen in eternity passed and everyone’s destiny has been dertermined before they were born.

That is more like the calvinist view. I am arguing against that. People's destinies, while known beforehand, are not caused beforehand. We make those decisions.

171 posted on 03/02/2010 8:07:02 AM PST by ShadowAce (Linux -- The Ultimate Windows Service Pack)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 170 | View Replies ]


To: ShadowAce

“That is more like the calvinist view. I am arguing against that. People’s destinies, while known beforehand, are not caused beforehand. We make those decisions.”

Whether you are right or Calvinists are right, in either position the number of persons condemned to hell was fixed before the foundation of the world and as history plays itself out, nothing can change that number. A person can only make the choices he was forseen to make before the foundation of the world. Since God makes the rules, doesn’t his omniscience then have a deterministic component to it? If He knows, it has to be true.

Your interpretation of sovereignty is similar to a Deists understanding since God can’t intervene in history since that intervention could be construed as “causation”; again, history is just a rerun.


172 posted on 03/02/2010 8:37:18 AM PST by blue-duncan
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 171 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
Religion
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson