We received a delightful response from Elder M (she heads the South American WLBOTT Rapid Response Team) in an outcome to one of our Emily Dickinson blotts:
I enjoyed The Programmer’s Guide to Emily Dickinson, particularly the divine kismet of the hexadecimal verse. Really fascinating. Makes me consider how the whole universe is basically math, and all that we experience is just the perceived overlay and interplay between things toggled on or off in infinite combinations.
Elder M
Our response: Your wonderful note and our ignorance has led to an interesting rabbit hole today. We didn’t know the word “kismet“, but our research quickly led to Qadar (Islamic predestination), and then things started getting weird.
Predestination / Islam
Qadar (Arabic: قدر, transliterated qadar, meaning literally “power”, but translated variously as: “divine fore-ordainment”, “predestination,” “divine decree”, “decree” of Allah”, “preordainment”) is the concept of divine destiny in Islam. As God is all-knowing and all-powerful, everything that has happened and will happen in the universe is already known. At the same time, human beings are responsible for their actions, and will be rewarded or punished accordingly on Judgement Day.
Predestination/Divine Destiny is one of Sunni Islam’s six articles of faith, (along with belief in the Oneness of Allah, the Revealed Books, the Prophets of Islam, the Day of Resurrection and Angels).
Some early Islamic schools did not accept the doctrine of predestination; Muʿtazila argued that it was “unthinkable” that God “would punish man for what He himself had commanded”.
Sadly, it was slim pickin’s in the Google kismet marketplace. Perhaps an opportunity in increase shareholder value?
We did find a few off-the-grid places….
Predestination Among the World’s Major Religions
Semi-Sequitur: WLBOTTism
The international practice of WLBOTTism.
Elder G gives us a summary:
Many religious traditions eventually encounter some version of the same problem:
How much of my life is genuinely open, and how much has already been determined by God, fate, karma, cosmic order, previous causes, or conditions beyond my control?
And within many traditions, thinkers have answered that question at surprisingly different points along the freedom-to-determinism spectrum.
Tradition
Predestination-ish concept
The tension
Christianity
Providence, election, predestination
God’s sovereignty vs. human freedom
Islam
Qadar, divine decree
Allah’s decree/knowledge vs. moral responsibility
Judaism
Divine providence, foreknowledge, sometimes fate
God’s knowledge/governance vs. human choice
Hindu traditions
Karma, divine grace, fate/destiny in some schools
Past causes/divine sovereignty vs. present action
Buddhism
Karma and dependent origination
Causal conditioning vs. intentional action
Sikhism
Hukam, divine order
God’s will/order vs. meaningful human action
Jainism
Karma understood with extraordinary rigor
Accumulated karmic causation vs. liberation through effort
WLBOTTism
Whatever Elder G tells us to believe
None – we don’t care
Predestination
Wikipedia gives us a more crisp definition of predestination.
Predestination, in theology, is the doctrine that all events have been willed by God, usually with reference to the eventual fate of the individual soul. Explanations of predestination often seek to address the paradox of free will, whereby God’s omniscience seems incompatible with human free will. In this usage, predestination can be regarded as a form of religious determinism; usually predeterminism, also known as theological determinism.
With regard to free will, there is an interesting overlap between theology and neurobiology/physics.
Elder G2 nets it out for us.
Concept
The Scientific Version
The Theological Version
Hard Determinism
Your biology, environment, and physical laws dictate your actions. Choice is an illusion.
God’s sovereign decree predestines all events. Human agency is completely subservient to divine will.
Compatibilism
You are “free” if you act according to your own desires, even if those desires are the result of neurochemistry.
You are “free” because you choose what you want, even though God sovereignly ordained those desires.
Moral Responsibility
How do we punish criminals if they are just faulty biological machines?
How does God punish sinners if He ordained or foreknew their actions?
Neuroscience of free will
The illusion of free will is itself an illusion
The Neuroscience of free will Wikipedia article describes the debate within the scientific community, and lists experiments intended to shed light on decision making and free will.
Neuroscientist, philosopher, and author Sam Harris argues that we are mistaken in believing that intention initiates actions. Harris criticizes the idea that free will is intuitive and believes that careful introspection will cast doubt on free will. Harris argues: “Thoughts simply arise in the brain. What else could they do? The truth about us is even stranger than we may suppose:The illusion of free will is itself an illusion“.
Apparently some of the free-will tests done by neurologists require removing the brain and sprinkling with Parmesan cheese.
The neuroscience of free will encompasses two main fields of study: volition and agency.
Volition, the power of using one’s own will, is difficult to define. If human actions are considered to lie along a spectrum based on conscious involvement in initiating the actions, then reflexes would be on one end, and fully voluntary actions would be on the other. How these actions are initiated and consciousness’ role in producing them is a major area of study in volition.
Agency is the capacity of an actor to act in a given environment. Within the neuroscience of free will, the sense of agency—the subjective awareness of initiating, executing, and controlling one’s volitional actions—is usually what is studied.
One significant finding of modern studies is that a person’s brain seems to commit to certain decisions before the person becomes aware of having made them.
Parmesan (Italian: Parmigiano Reggiano, is an Italian hard, granular cheese produced from cow’s milk and aged at least 12 months. It is a grana-type cheese, along with Grana Padano, the historic Granone Lodigiano, and others.
left: CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=288217 right: By Wittylama – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35363383Wikipedia
Detail: Does this say “Mooo” or “1000”? I think “Mooo” is the more likely explanation.
By Naturpuur – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=141616028
“I may not have created this problem, but I’m obligated to be part of the solution.”
From Elder G: A practical example: Suppose one discovers that they have an unfortunate behavioral tendency caused largely by childhood experiences. Determinism doesn’t require us to say:
“Well, I didn’t choose it, so there’s nothing to be done.”
Quite the opposite. Learning why we behave that way changes the physical system. Therapy changes it. Conversation changes it. Experience changes it. Practice changes it.
Sola fide / “by faith alone”
<old_joke> Why do you always invite at least two Baptists to go fishing with you? Because if you invite just one, he’ll drink all your beer.</old_joke>
Something that really frosts the WLBOTT theological team’s cookies: we see this in certain Protestant denominations (mostly starting with a “B”) – individuals act atrociously and harbor horrible, hateful, destructive views, but because they have “professed” their Christianity, they are therefore saved. What’s the thinking that underpins this nonsense?
Well, they’ve distorted theology down to “magic words.”
Protestant Reformation → sola fide → justification by faith alone → hello cruel, dishonest, exploitative and completely unrepentant behavior → magaT!
Calvinism (Reformed): Teaches absolute predestination. God, before the foundation of the world, unconditionally elected some people to be saved and left others to their own sin (often called double predestination). Human free will cannot resist God’s grace.
Arminianism (Methodist, Pentecostal): Teaches conditional election. God predestines individuals to salvation based on His foreknowledge of who will freely choose to accept His grace. Human free will is central.
Catholicism and Orthodoxy: Teaches single predestination. God predestines the elect to grace and heaven, but He does not predestine anyone to hell or to commit evil. Human free will must actively cooperate with God’s grace.
Excerpts from the Christian Science Monitor Article Calvinism is back Images by Elder G
“I worship my own comfort, my own opinion of myself,” she confesses. “Like the idolatrous people of Judah, we deserve the full wrath of God.” She warns the women that “we’ll never be safe in good intentions.” […]
It is so quiet you can hear an oatmeal cookie crumble.
Now come the New Calvinists with their return to inviolable doctrines and talk of damnation – in essence, the Puritans, minus the breeches and powdered wigs. Is this just a moment of nostalgia or the beginning of a deeper revolt against the popular Jesus-is-our-friend approach of modern evangelicalism?
When people today hear the name John Calvin, they think mainly of predestination – the controversial idea that God has foreordained everything that will happen, including who will and won’t be saved, no matter what they do in life.
What people often forget is that the 16th-century French theologian transformed Western thought both by what he taught and how he taught it. His 700-page “Institutes of the Christian Religion” became the reference manual for Protestant faith. And his detailed and explanatory style of preaching – he spent five years expounding on the book of Acts, verse by verse – became an example for generations of clergy.
Detractors, and there are many, see Calvin as a harsh theocrat who punished heretics (including one who was famously burned at the stake) while molding the city where he preached, Geneva, into a model of his fatalistic and hopeless ideology.
Calvin’s influence on America’s founding is unmistakable. The nation’s patriotism, work ethic, sense of equality, public morality, and even elements of democracy all sprang in part from the Calvinist taproot of Puritan New England.
In high school, we were required to read the colonial American Calvinist Jonathon Edward’s Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, in an effort to prevent us from ever enjoying the written word again. PDF available here.
From our high school yearbook:
The Deciding Factor
With all the subtle variations with denomination, this is why it is important to make our denomination selection based on the quality of their pot lucks. If theology is inconclusive, we must look to the covered-dish. Our recent WLBOTT Predestination Symposium gave us an opportunity to sample the covered dishes.
The Calvinists failed in their proselytizing efforts with their Jello Mold of Destiny.
The Jewish community had a lively entry (the Kugel of Destiny) that encouraged a lively debate.
At WLBOTT, we weren’t showing our cards (or our ingredients). Our Mystery Dish of Destiny:
Elder KM tipped the scales to predestination / no free will: no one can resist her varenyky (вареники). The Varenyky of Destiny:
