Do you ever wonder about fate? Ever wonder if everything that happens on this rock has already been determined and we're just going through the motions?
I have. I do. I think about this kind of stuff all the time. It seems to me that how you think about this is going to affect your life in pretty significant ways. If you think everything has been fated, or predetermined, you may have a tendency to feel okay with some pretty morally questionable actions because, after all, it was predestined. It comes down to this: if it's fate that a person acts in a morally evil way, is the person morally culpable?
If you are an atheist, I suppose the question would be; as a person are your actions the only possible actions you could have taken due to the circumstances you were in or were you acting in response to internal instincts. Are we trapped in a world that is the only way it could be, or are we just programmed meat? An accident of evolution...
Personally I'm a theist. I think there's a creator that made us and everything we see. Further, I'm a Christian so I think the Bible is a good place to look for answers about that question. The problem with that is, there's just so many different things the bible says about free will, God's will, election, etc, that Christians just can't agree about what the Bible teaches.
Personally, I think free will is a thing. I think the bible spends a lot of time making a big deal about what people do, and it seems pretty ridiculous to me to criticize people for only doing what they were made to do. Why tell people they have a choice if they don't?
I've been encountering a lot of reformed Christians lately, and I can't really get a good answer about this issue. How does this work out under Calvanism? How can people be held morally responsible for being evil if they didn't have a choice in the first place? How can it be just for God to create people for the sole purpose of damning them?
Even if you throw Eternal Punishment out the window you still have some very serious problems reconciling the world as we know it with a good God. How can you justify child abuse, genocide, rape, torture, etc? People all over the world live their whole lives in abject poverty and suffer horrible violence then die young never hearing the gospel. Now you tell me it was good for God to do that to them.
It just doesn't make sense. I know some will say it's good because everything God does is good, but that just doesn't work for me. How can God be good for doing things He tells His people are evil?
The idea of human morality just seems logically inconsistent with determinism, or Calvinism.
Any thought?