Originally posted by 80sU2isBest:
I don't believe in Purgatory, but I must agree with you if you don't believe the Calvinist viewpoint, either. I believe that God knows where people will spend eternity (simply because he knows the future), but he does not make that decision for them.
For hundreds of years (since John Wesley, if not earlier) theologians have used this doctrine to make Calvin's doctrine of "the elect" seem less offensive, and I don't buy it.
If God, observing our space-time universe that he keeps in a little jar, "foreknows" that Bob will die an unbeliever 50 years from now, then our universe is not open-ended. There really is no possibility that Bob will follow God instead of rejecting Him, and any of Bob's conceptions of free will with respect to this matter are an illusion.
So does God really "foreknow" the eternal destinies of every human soul? The apostle Paul seems to think so (cf. Romans 8:29-30).
But consider this: God didn't have to create man. He could have been perfectly content with a universe filled with animals and plants that don't rebel against Him, but he chose to create man anyway. Did God really "foreknow" that man would rebel against Him, plunge into sin and wreck his beautiful universe? If so, why did God make man into the first place? Genesis 6 says that God was grieved that he had made man on the Earth, which seems to me to indicate that before the fall, man did indeed have absolute free will--that God had intended for man to use his free will to live in harmony with Him and His creation, but man turned against Him.
Also consider this: the pages of the Bible are filled with the prayers of intercessors. These men and women prayed as if their prayers could make a difference in the world. Now if the entire fate of the universe is "foreknown" by God, then intercessory prayer is nothing more than a form of therapy, but I don't see it described that way in the Bible.
The Bible is full of prophecies, so there must be some room in the universe for "predestined" events, but I don't think it's so obvious that every single event in the universe up to and including the eternal destiny of every human soul is "foreknowable".
That's about all the metaphysics I can handle for now. Good night.