Free Bird! Or, The World According To Mel.
Everybody likes freedom. Or if not, then the US was founded by some pretty confused people (which I suppose, considering that slavery was still extant some eighty or ninety years later, is arguable).
My buddy Steve posted on the “Uncharted” section of his blog a simple question: “Do you think there is one person we are “meant” to spend the rest of our lives with, or do you think there are many people, and we just have to eventually choose one?”
This inevitably wound up on the grounds of the free-will vs. predestination debate. A debate on which I have enough to say that I thought it deserved its own post, instead of just commenting on Steve’s blog. So here it is. 
Seminary-educated people, feel free to weigh in, here! I know some people who get so hung up on this issue that they are paralyzed, and can’t seem to decide whether they want to believe all of this Christian stuff or not. That’s no good. That’s why I’ve thought about it so much, and that’s why I have so much to say. My answer to this question might initially seem like a cop-out, but really I don’t think it is, so stay with me here.
Is it free-will? Is it predestination? I think it’s a combination of the two. It’s just something so mysterious that we’ll never be able to fully get it. In physics and chemistry, they say that electrons are both a particle and a wave. They have atributes of both, and sometimes behave like one, sometimes behave like another. The term for this is “particle-wave duality.” There is a big fancy kind of math that scientists use to try to describe this, called “wave mechanics.” I think that is what life is like for us. It’s a duality, of sorts. And like wave mechanics, I will probably never understand how it works. But, I’m ok with that. I can still live my life out, in all its day-to-day details and decisions, without understanding. I take particle-wave duality on faith. I can take free-will vs. predestination on faith, too, and not knowing the answer to which it is doesn’t stop me from living out my life and making Godly decisions.
Besides, what is the point of asking if God knows what’s going to happen before it happens, when God started time to begin with and will end it at some point? God is outside time.
Look, what we know of as scientific laws, things like gravity and entropy, aren’t actually laws at all; they are just a series of observed events. There’s nothing except probability and statistics to say that things won’t change next time. The real laws, the ones God set in place before time began (deep magic from the dawn of time?) haven’t all been revealed to us. We’re trying to look at the clock and figure out what makes its hands turn by looking at things from the outside. Ain’t never gonna happen. We’re finite. We don’t get it yet. It could be cogs and wheels and gears, or it could be fairy magic.
So, what do those “real” laws look like? I don’t know. But I can tell you what one of them is: when there is sin, there will be death. Yep, God was pretty clear about that one. He created the law, and he’s bound to obey it just as much as we are.
I think that to God, time truly is the fourth dimension. And just as we can move through, manipulate objects in, and transcend the three dimensions in which we live, I’m willing to bet that God is not bound by that fourth dimension. So these questions we’re asking make sense to us, but if only we could understand the real laws of the universe, see the whole picture, I bet we’d see that we’re asking the wrong questions based on an incomplete understanding of the universe. The questions are pretty unsophisticated and meaningless.
This kind of understanding of things is the only thing that has gotten me through the real faith-testers in life; the tough questions like, why did my Mom get cancer? Why did my friend Danielle develop muscular dystrophy as a child, before she had really had any opportunity to even do anything wrong? Why do bad things happen to good people? Life is a journey that each soul is on, to fully develop and fully become the beautiful thing God has created it to become. Sometimes pain is a part of that journey. I don’t understand that. But I know three things: God is at work. God is good. And God is bigger and grander than we could possibly imagine; bigger than the biggest mountain range could ever indicate; grander than the most exquisite cathedral could ever put us in mind of.
Someday, we’ll have all our questions answered…until then, faith like a child, baby! Faith like a child.
February 23rd, 2006 at 11:34 am
i agree, that it’s a combination of free-will and providence, and that we’ll understand it all better by and by. and that it’s not a cop-out. there’s just truth that we’re too small to understand, no matter how big we get for our intellectual britches.
i find a lot of comfort in knowing that i’m not a pawn on some cosmic chess board and that it all doesn’t depend on me. i get to be a kid in the arms of her loving Father, and i get to be an adult that makes choices. even if all of this doesn’t always make sense.
February 23rd, 2006 at 8:04 pm
The thing that I like in a predestination view of the universe is that it tends to emphasise the interconnectedness of things; we are all part of something we don’t fully understand and yet what we *do* understand is that we are *all* part of it. SUch a viewpoint doesn’t allow us to see our own journey as just that. It forces us to look outward.
I fall between both stools. But I feel like a richer human being for knowing that both have an impact on my universe. I wouldn’t like to be stuck in one camp, not able to comprehend those who choose another. That would be sucky.
February 24th, 2006 at 8:11 am
See, that’s why I love you, Phil. The ability to say something deep and profound in a very well-written way and then follow it up with “That would be sucky.” LOL!
I think falling between both stools is often the only real place we can be. :-}
February 24th, 2006 at 11:14 am
hmm… thoughtful post. i think i agree. i mean, whether or not you believe the bible is literal, there’s too much about free-will to ignore it. i don’t think god would deliberately lie to us and tell us that we can make our own decisions, while secretly playing marionettes and pulling all our strings…i belive that god is good, therefore, dishonestly would be outside of his scope.
February 24th, 2006 at 11:58 am
Your answer isn’t a cop-out, it’s just postmodern. Only someone with a modern worldview would think it’s a cop out, because Calvinism (predestination) and Arminianism (free-will) are both based in modernity. To them, it has to be one or the other because the Western system of logic dictates that. To someone postmodern, who can grasp the concept of transcendence, it’s okay to admit that something like that is beyond our comprehension. I would type more, but I’m leaving for Pittsburgh in 34 minutes and I still need to pack (granted, for me, packing means taking the stuff out of the dryer and throwing it into the suitcase.)
February 24th, 2006 at 1:43 pm
you crack me up! ah, so you had one of those phases, too? it’s interesting… college scared the crap out of me when it started testing everything i believed… then it made me angry that i’d been sheltered from so much information… than i just hated everyone and everything… but by senior year, i’d come to a peace that i’d never known before. i am so grateful for a liberal arts education, who knows what kind of a person i’d be today without it. btw, DO send me your poem!!!
February 24th, 2006 at 3:20 pm
pre-destination, free-will… tomorrow will be another day, regardless…