Thor's Day: Predestination

John Calvin (1509-1564)

Thursday of the week is devoted to airing out religion and religions. Thor (from Old Norse Þórr) is [or was] a hammer-wielding god associated with thunder, lightning, storms, oak trees, strength, the protection of mankind, and also hallowing, healing, and fertility.

Predestination, rightly comments Wikipedia, is

in theology, the doctrine that all events have been willed by God. John Calvin interpreted biblical predestination to mean that God willed eternal damnation for some people and salvation for others. Explanations of predestination often seek to address the so-called "paradox of free will," whereby God's omniscience seems incompatible with human free will.

You may not have noticed that if free will is an illusion, then there's no paradox—or at least not that paradox. We're either damned or saved, and the choice isn't ours to make.
    That in itself, of course, is quite a paradox for believers. How can I be damned without regard to my choices? Isn't making the "wrong" (the sinful) choices what damnation's all about?
    It seemed to me, even as I was reading Sam Harris's little book Free Will for the first time, that not only Harris but also other people from time to time—even including John Calvin—could have had a sense that everything that happens to us, and in us, is going on without our conscious intervention. Other people than Harris (perhaps yourself from time to time?) have had the sense that where we're headed is determined by our inheritance, our upbringing, our circumstances, the sum total of everything that has gone before and impinges on us—the sense that our lives are in some sense predestined.
    Harris's sense of this is informed by experiments in neuroscience that demonstrate that "choices" are made microseconds prior to our becoming aware of them; they were not conscious choices. Because his book is short and written for the layman, I assign it to you for homework rather than excerpt one of its more technical passages dealing with functional MRIs.
    But I will quote the following as an eloquent expression of that "sense of predestination":

Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn't choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime—by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas. Where is the freedom in this? Yes, you are free to do what you want even now. But where did your desires come from? [p. 40]

I take it that no theist, if he will be so good as to agree that we don't have free will, will nevertheless insist that we are on track to be damned or saved. That would be so unfair as to appeal to no God deserving to be so-called.
    What seems to be true, though, is that some people, because of their particularly unfortunate circumstances (born to a heroin addict, molested by an uncle, dirt poor...) are already damned from the moment of conception, damned not in some future time, but right here and now. And conversely for the child lucky enough to be born to healthy, loving parents of means, and so on. But, even then, the good sometimes die young. (And the most wretched is sometimes pulled into a lifeboat. Them's the breaks.)
    Rejoice as ye may, as your circumstances permit, and sympathy for you if you have nothing to rejoice in.
    May you, even in the meanest circumstances, find someone to love and be loved by, a rose to smell, a dog to lay his paw across your elbow.