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[H.W. Clihor] in his writings of 1992 - 2000 explains predestination, a tenant of not only infallability but also omniscience from a somewhat different point of view. For predestination to exist in any causal system it implies deliberate structure. For deliberate structure to exist implies willful action. Since a diety in whatever system listed above has imposed deliberate action implies forknowledge of what those actions entail and their end result. This implies knowledge of outcome. In a causal sense, it implies knowledge of some future destination. In the following example what is more miraculous. A) That Moses upon hearing the Egyptian army on his heels collaspes the Red Sea to drown his attakers... or B) That a diety knowing from the be beginning of time that the Island of Thera across the Mediterrean sea would explode, sending a tidal wave across the sea to drown the army pursuing Moses days or hours later, and that it would only arrive just after Moses departed. To his mind, the latter. It implies a detailed manipulation of all matter and its interactions in the universe. However, for this causal predeterminism to exist, there must be a quantized maximum unit of unchangeable time. That is, to manipulate matter on this scale over such a long period, time must have a quantizable unit, which if manipulated below that threshold applies NO CHANGE to reality, but above does. In this argument, time must first be defined. From there the logical conclusion of what predeterminism is may be defined as knowing where the end point is by being there, and then thrust back to the beginning making it all happen again. H.W. Clihor makes this cognitive leap by illustrating the story of the Hindu God Brahma. According to legend, every eon Brahma tears himself to pieces and reality takes place while those pieces come back together over time. The astronomical big bang theory is similar. If the pieces of the universe thrown to the cosmos continue to congeal into black holes at the centers of swirling galaxies, and ultimately the galaxies succumb to attraction and fall togethre as super-black holes, eventually the universe will fall back upoon itself. While crude, the elegant simplicity of these examples illustrate H.W. Clihor's view that God comes not from the past but from our future, and that all time once defined will simply reveal that the creator is remapping the universe to get back to that seminal point. |
Predestination is a belief held by Calvinists; according to Calvinists, God's decision is by definition just, though incomprehensible to man. In their view, the doctrine is a necessary consequence of the definition of God: a being of infallibility, infinite power, and unrestricted knowledge. God cannot be ignorant of any future action of any human being including the acts of repentence or denial, but God's choices cannot be restricted in any way by that knowledge. Most importantly, his decisions are intrinsically right--they define rightness. The Calvinist viewpoint is expressed in [Jonathan Edwards]?'s famous sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." An earlier and more methodical presentation in English is the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646).
Calvinists divide on the issue of predestination into infralapsarians? and supralapsarians?. Infralapsarians believe that God chose his elect considering the situation after the Fall, while supralapsarians believe that the Fall was ordained by God's decree of election. In infralapsarianism, election is God's response to the Fall, while in supralapsarianism the Fall is part of God's plan for election.
Arminians, on the other hand, hold that God does not so much choose, as infalliably predict, who will believe and, persevering, be saved. Although God knows from the beginning of the world who will go where, the choice is still with the individual.
Lutherans also believe in predestination, but they differ from Calvinists. Lutherans believe in single predestination, in which God only chooses who to save, while those he does not choose are damned not by his intent but merely by default. Calvinists believe in what is called double predestination, that is that God chooses both who to save and who to damn. Calvinists believe that double predestination is the necessary deductive logical position from any form of single predestination that does not include universal salvation.
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