God’s Will or Yours?
By James Fielding
Something interesting happened on the first Tuesday of November. You may have noticed it on the news. Besides all the obvious rhetoric from both sides, one very interesting pattern emerged from people upset about the votes seeming to turn against the President. All of a sudden, my Facebook feed was flooded with posts about “praying for God’s will to be done.” Let’s explore that.
Predestination
The question I immediately started asking my religious “friends” was a simple one — “How are YOU deciding what is God’s will?” The concept is simple. If a being is omni-whatever, how is anything outside its control? If a god wanted a candidate to win, wouldn’t it be a foregone conclusion that it would happen? How could the outcome be anything but the will of that all-powerful deity?
Free will comes up often as an explanation. One commenter used the crucifixion as an example. God did not force humanity to kill Jesus. We had a choice. It wasn’t his will but was in line with his overall plan. I retorted with this argument: if a blood sacrifice were necessary for redemption and that was the entire reason for Christ coming to Earth, how could have things gone any differently? Wasn’t it predestined that Jesus die? They claim it was prophecy. So, how did humanity have any other choice but to kill Jesus? At that level…
