Free Will Vs Predestination: Does God Know Your Choices Before You Make Them? - Softcover

Johnstone M. D., Theodore R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1490794883 ISBN 13: 9781490794884

Verlag: Trafford Publishing, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

A little more than five hundred years ago, Martin Luther should have nailed ninety-six theses to the church door instead of only ninety-five. The ninety-sixth could have been about predestination, wherewith Luther could have prevented a schism developing in Protestantism over the Doctrine of Predestination. John Calvin, another Reformer who followed Luther quite a few years later, mistakenly taught that predestination, as described in the New Testament, applies to individuals instead of to the Christian Church as a whole. As a result, no one can choose eternal life or eternal damnation because every person has been predestined by God for one or the other. It is the church as a whole that was predestined by God ahead of time and not the individual. However, each individual can choose whether or not to join the church. This book shows Calvin's mistake.

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Born in 1930s, Ted Johnstone, son of a country doctor, grew up on a farm near the small town of Hanford California. Ted was the third of four children, the eldest of whom was Dorothy, who had graduated from medical school and finished her internship just before their father's untimely death at age 56 in 1949. She took over the medical practice and Ted, at 17, took over the family farm, running the dairy, growing cotton, and attending school all at the same time. Six years later in 1955, he graduated from college with a B.A. degree with a major in chemistry and a minor in physics. Graduation from medical school occurred four years later in 1959, followed by a rotating internship. From there he joined his sister, Dorothy Johnstone Smith, M.D., in practice back in Hanford. Dorothy died unexpectedly in 1965. Ted and his wife Kitsy, then decided for him accept a position as a medical doctor overseas and she as a nurse. They served together in two countries, Nigeria and Ghana, for 18 months. Then Ted, Kitsy, and their four daughters returned to the U.S. and in 1968 settled in Madera California, where Ted went into private practice. Kitsy, after more training as a family nurse practitioner, later joined him in a practice limited to pediatrics. Ted is a member of the Fresno-Madera County Medical Society, and on the medical staff at Madera Community Hospital. All four daughters have college degrees and between them have four master degrees, one RN, and one PhD... They also have presented their parents with six wonderful grandchildren.

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Free Will vs Predestination

Does God know your choices before you make them?

By Theodore R. Johnstone

Trafford Publishing

Copyright © 2019 Theodore R. Johnstone, M. D.
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4907-9488-4

Contents

Preface, vii, 
Chapter 1 Man's Free Will and God's Sovereignty, 1, 
Chapter 2 Man's Free Will and God's Sovereignty (Part Two), 19, 
Chapter 3 Man's Free Will and Romans 9, 31, 
Chapter 4 Prophecy and Man's Free Will, 53, 
Chapter 5 Science and Man's Free Will, 67, 

CHAPTER 1

Man's Free Will and God's Sovereignty

Many devout Christians and their clergy rarely consider the effects that would accrue on God's omniscience, all knowing (see 1 John 3:20), and omnipotence, all powerful (see Genesis 17:1), if God decided to give all intelligent creatures the ability to make independent, uncoerced, freewill choices before they were created. However, two questions regarding this decision beg to be answered:

1. When intelligent creatures were created, either angelic or human, did God choose to allow them to make independent, uncoerced, freewill choices, not under His sovereignty, in order to give them freedom to choose?

2. Would all their choices need to be unknowable to God until after they were made to guarantee that Deity could not be accused of originating the evil?

If God could create the universe, then He certainly would have possessed omniscience and omnipotence, meaning that He had infinite knowledge and power. Therefore God, if He wanted, would have had both all the knowledge and power needed to create intelligent creatures with choosing mechanisms, the choices of which He could not know until after they were made. Any contrary notion would place a limitation on what God would have been able to create. From a human perspective, an increase in knowledge frequently has a direct, positive effect on power, indicating that an increase in knowledge often produces an increase in power. As an example, with increased knowledge of the atom, physicists learned how to tap into the energy of the atomic nucleus. With this knowledge, they soon produced the atomic bomb and the release of its huge power. However, before creation, God's omniscience and omnipotence were already infinite, so the simultaneous use of them would have resulted in a perfect creation.

A Divine Revelation

Now imagine the discussions and conclusions that would emerge from a make-believe group of modern-day Christians, if via an imaginary simultaneous Divine Revelation to each one in the group, God reenacted the last part of the sixth creation day in their collective presence. Suppose, in all of God's omniscience and omnipotence, the group was shown, during three successive episodes, how Adam and Eve had been made in God's image and three different but possible ways God could have equipped them to make choices regarding good and evil. But during each reenactment, keep in mind that if good or evil existed, both would have been powerless concepts bereft of an intelligent mind able to notice the differences and choose between the two. Then afterward, suppose that God made it possible for this group of Christians to observe what would have happened over time, if He had taken various routes with respect to how Adam and Eve had been equipped to choose.

But don't forget that human goodness from God's perspective always equates with unconditional love and unselfishness, both of which can be demonstrated by how we choose to place others. Goodness always chooses to place the other person first and itself last. Whereas, evil always is based on choosing to place oneself first and others last. In fact, when you violate any of the Ten Commandments, you inadvertently are placing yourself either above God or people. Breaking any of the first four places you above God and the violating any of last six attempts to elevate you above your fellow man. Placing yourself above someone else is a selfish act, which makes selfishness a disguised form of disrespect for the other person and usually has destructive effects on both the perpetrator and on the one to whom the selfishness is directed.

However, during each of the proposed reenactments, two questions should arise in the minds of this imaginary group of modern-day Christians: (1) Was disbelief in God coupled with selfish pride the root of Adam and Eve's original sin in the garden? (2) Is disbelief in God and selfish pride the foundation of every sinful choice that humans ever have made?

Each of the three reveled episodes that follow will show what might have occurred in the afternoon on day six of creation and for a time afterward.

Episode I

What would have happened if God had placed a restriction in the brains of Adam and Eve that would have prevented them from making any selfish choice rooted in pride? Keep in mind that even if their brains had not been pre-fixed, making it impossible to choose anything selfish, it would have been difficult for them to make wrong choices in the Garden of Eden anyway. Just think, atheism would have been ruled out every time God visited them in the cool of the day. Neither had earthly parents, whom they could dishonor. There would have been no one else but themselves to murder and no one with whom to commit adultery. In this environment, from whom could either of them steal or covet? To whom could they lie? In fact, a whole row of Trees of Knowledge of Good and Evil should not have tested their loyalty to God in the slightest.

Keep in mind that this Christian group watched Episode I while under a generalized epiphany. They noticed that Adam and Eve, whose brains were equipped with a limiting mechanism, made it impossible for them to choose prideful selfishness and evil. Therefore, these modern-day Christian observers were struck by the perfect unselfish living, demonstrated by this primordial pair. Since everyone in this group had experienced prideful selfish evil in their modern-day lives, they were forced to conclude that God had not chosen to place any restrictive mechanism in the human brain.

Episode II

Next, contemplate, if, under similar conditions, God had allowed the Christian onlookers to see what would have happened if no restriction had been inserted into the brains of Adam and Eve. Instead, in this situation, the newly created pair would be allowed to make independent, uncoerced, freewill choices, not under God's sovereignty, as long as every choice was foreknown to Him prior to its occurrence.

Having found that the restriction presented in Episode I had produced results that did not agree with their experience, this group of Christian observers became somewhat reluctant to accept this new condition until it could be tested against what they knew to be real in their modern-day lives.

In spite of the hesitation, one of the observers, Dave, said, "This seems more like our everyday earthly experience. We intuitively know we can choose whatever we want at any time we want, and since God is supposed to be in charge of the future, what difference would it make if He knows ahead of time every choice we humans are going to make?"

Bill, with a deep penetrating voice, then interjected. "What I have trouble getting a handle on is this: If God created all intelligent creatures with the freedom to choose anything and if He knew in advance what each person's choice was going to be, even before the person was created, then every choice would have been prefixed in His omniscient...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Trafford Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1490794883
• ISBN 13: 9781490794884
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 92
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland