Glenn wrote:
> I must have mis-communicated or maybe my thoughts in this area aren't
> completely tied together yet. In the case of the dot on
> Sierpinski's gasket,
> his behaviors are not predictable. But the outcome of his
> motion over a
> 'lifetime' is most assuredly predictable--Sierpinski's gasket
> is produced.
> What I have been trying to say is that free will is not
> incompatible with
> a pre-programmed result of our lives. The control of that
> overarching output
> is via our genes. We are perfectly free to behave in any
> fashion we want
> (like the dot) but at the end of our lives, God gets from us
> exactly what He
> requires, what he preprogrammed. In this fashion, one can
> unite Armenianism
> [SIC?] and Calvinism. I used to not accept much of Calvinism
> until I studied
> systems like Sierpinski's gasket. Now I am much more
> Calvinistic in the
> sense above in which God can control the output and at the
> same time we
> maintain our personal responsibility for our individual actions.
If we control every one of our individual actions and yet God still wills
the final outcome, then would you say that God is in effect placing some
constraints on the range of possible individual behaviors such that as long
as the beheviors fall within that range (which they must given the
constraints), the outcome is most certainly forced into a particular
direction?
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Apr 04 2000 - 11:21:16 EDT