Predestination and determinism

February 23, 2009 at 3:17 am (Uncategorized)

Predestination is not determinism. Determinism is the doctrine that whatever happens in time is determined by what happened at a previous time. In this view, a free action  is only possible at the beginning of time. Predestination makes no claims about the causes of things in time, except those that can be inferred from the actions of the Saints.

Determinism and predestination do not entail each other. There is no contradiction in a believer in predestination insisting that history is really contingent, and that there is no determinate truth value for future events as such. Predestination is not a statement about causes existing in time; a fortiori, it is not a statement about the possibility of real contingency in history. In fact, so far as predestination only applies to the free action of the saints, it seems that the believer in predestination is required to deny determinism

(about a hundred years ago, this would have been a very difficult and stark denial- one would have to deny several hundred years of very well established, very clear Newtonian science, which made the idea of any undetermined action very unreasonable. It’s hard for us to appreciate how difficult this denial would have been. Newtonian science was far more proven in 1900 than any science is proven now.)

To confuse predestination and determinism is easy enough: one starts thinking “what difference does it make whether I am determined in relation to the past or determined in relation to God?” The question, its seems to me, answers itself. Since God is not a temporal cause, any statement about his causality does not speak to the nature of causes in time, whether we are speaking about free act or not.  What does predestination tell us about the possibility of free acts or determined acts in history? Little or nothing, and what little it tells us seems to require that one deny determinism.