Sean Meslar- Student Choice 5

For my final philosophy of religion post, I'll be talking about predestination and free will. Setting aside the scriptural support for either position, about which I neither particular care nor do I feel there to be strong evidence for either side, I’ll look at the logical support of the two stances. Predestination is in most ways the stronger of the two logically, particularly based on the assertion that God is a perfect being. Without touching too much on the formerly discussed problem of evil, there is little room for variability within the expression of perfection. Conceptually, perfection is an absolute; we do think that we could have two equally good instances of a thing (because if they were completely identical, they would be only one thing). This becomes a problem when considering free-will; how can there be room for expression of God’s perfection if humans are allowed to act in a manner completely untouched by divine influence? If we concede the existence of predestination, while the expression may not always make sense to us, the tenant of faith can assure us that everything is unfolding according to God’s plan. In many cases, free-will advocates also take this position (and in so doing ignore the logical difficulties associated with the immanence necessitated by holding both of these to be possible). Furthermore, allowing humans to act for themselves without His divine guidance is a sort of moral negligence, why should God allow us to act in any way we want when he can dictate our actions in accordance with divine reason?
The opposite and more popular stance in contemporary Christianity is to assert the gift of free-will. Advocates of this position hold that a person acting freely is both a gift from God in light of the previously discussed divine wisdom and an enabler of a much greater good (coming to God willing rather by compulsion) than would be possible in a pre-destined universe. Furthermore, free-will escapes one of the more frightening concepts of predestination Christianity, the predestination of the afterlife. Assigning humans to heaven or hell without ever giving them a chance to act morally or immorally seems unfair and downright wicked in some cases, which is certainly not the impression one should feel in regards to his or her God. Again, this is responded to by predestinationists by entering into the much larger discussion of God’s relation to the linear perspective of time which is not going to be addressed here. Suffice to say that being potentially doomed to hell or heaven leaves the individual with very little inclination to religious practice (sorry, Max Weber) and even less toward moral action. Thus, in order to maintain viability as a business, Christianity made its mainstream stance about personal morality and the good that can be accomplished through involvement in religion rather than about God and the apparent implications of omniscience. It certainly afforded a lot of people a lot of power, regardless of the actual motivation behind the trend.
As a final disclaimer, for anyone who thinks that the topic of God shouldn’t be explored through logic, I must reply that no reasonable deity would create humans with a means of arriving at apparent truth merely to tell them to ignore it and send them to hell if they didn’t.