Re: I have some questions and a kind of rant to christians on this site.
I used to be very bothered by the predestination question, until i actually sat down and started reading papers on metaphysics and time and considered things in detail.
The essential factor is even if! with unlimited information (as God presumably has), it would be possible to predict exactly what will happen to a person or to an event, that prediction is itself based on the idea of the fact that the agents themselves do not have complete information. If I go to a restaurant and I choose to have the steak instead of the chicken, the ultimate cause of me choosing steak for dinner is that I happen to prefer the steak, and given the choice I have chosen the steak. Even if it were possible to predict (or perhaps for a divine being to be certain), I would choose the steak, my choice of steak is in fact just based on the fact that there is more than one choice available to me, indeed me being the bloody minded person I am if some psychic came along and told me I would choose the steak, I'd probably choose the chicken just to be contrary, although if said psychic were actually really! a psychic they would also know that and give me the opposite advice (I'll stop now before this goes into a spiral but you see what i mean).
If I end up choosing steak just because the restaurant is out of other things to choose and I have no alternative, well the fact that I chose steak isn't really a significant fact at all, sinse fundamentally you cannot have a belief in predestination unless! you actually have a belief in choice anyway.
This is actually why, while I still did believe in God I disagreed with the existance of hell or divine punishment, sinse if God automatically knew which way people would choose anyway, then we are left with a system of "the elect" as indeed John Calvin speculated, that essentially sinse God already knows who is and is not going to be punished for all eternity God has created people just! to punish some o f them eternally. Calvin thought this was okay, I do not, so I personally reject (or at least did when I was still actually a theist), the idea of divine punishment at all, I much prefer some of the ideas of realization or understanding.
I'll also add that there are intrinsically better ways of interpreting religious good/evil. William Booth the founder of the salvation army himself said that to serve God was to serve one's fellow man, which is sort of a point, in that the better class of religious believers and the people who I find I can respect are those who use their belief in God to inform their attitudes about other people, not those who do the opposite. Indeed as someone who has studdied ethics for a long time there are plenty of other ways of interpreting good and evil than either just "it is what god says", or even (as some atheists do), "it's what we are evolved and socially talered to do" sinse neither of those are particularly co gent reasons or arguements in favour of moral action or attitudes, where as playing on factors such as human empathy and compassion work far better.
Btw, with god I am currently an agnostic. I am quite aware with the falacies and human inherent errors in believing that the materialistic, hyper evolutionary focused view of the universe many believers in scientism (particularly with it's elevation of evolution to an almost devine level of explanation for what is essentially a quite minimalistic theory). Equally I have had experiences of what I could call "the divinity of creation", or at least something other to the universe that was not my own consciousness.
However, I have found myself losing all faith and credence in the idea of divinity as taking an active part in the lives of humans or in what happens in the world. God (if I can still use that term), might exist, but whether God loves us or whether God takes any active part in people's lives othe r than experiencially I really don't know.
That there are people who perform both very moral and very immoral actions based on beliefs in God or beliefs from some religious text I do not doubt, but I don't really see that as providing much evidence for the actual intervention of such a being in the world at all. That is why I respect people's religious beliefs, ---- albeit less so the immoral actions and attitudes that some people claime religious justification for, but why I am simply not certain myself.
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