Prayer and Predestination

If prayer has a purpose, if prayer is more than a useless anachronism, then your prayer must cause a specific action of God to work in and through the particular network of constraints which are bringing some outcome into being and bring some succession of events to a different outcome than would otherwise have been.  Your prayer must unleash the power of the Holy Spirit in space and time.  Your prayer must change the flow of history.  Your prayer is a message to God sent by a first-cause agent of choice exercising free will and assisted by God’s grace. 

Some believe prayer can change the outcome of nothing because God from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass.  The “unpardonable sin” of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is defined (Mat 12:31, 32; Mark 3:29, 30) as attributing the goodness of the Holy Spirit to Satan.  Calvinists have found an additional path to blasphemy by attributing all Satan’s evil to God.  But the greatest havoc created by the “blueprint” theology of Augustine, Calvin and their theological progeny may be a distortion of the purpose of prayer.  If, before the universe was formed, God unchangeably ordained everything, then your prayers can change the outcome of nothing.

The Calvinist believes life is like a scripted full length movie with you playing the part you were ordained to play.  You are merely an actor reciting your lines and doing precisely those things specified by the film writer/director. The Arminian believes life is like an “interactive life-game” video in which the designer allows you, as actor/player, to make free will decisions that change the outcome.  Furthermore, the designer of the interactive life-game video cares about the choices you make.  He encourages you to make the right decisions and grieves when you do not.  He became so concerned watching mankind spiral down a path toward destruction that He inserted Himself into the game, absorbing the consequences of our bad choices, nudging us to a different path and trying to help us avoid ultimate disaster.

The Calvinist argues that not one speck of space, time, matter, energy or human thought can be outside the continual control of God; otherwise God would lose control of his creation and we have no guarantee that a single one of God’s promises could be fulfilled.  For the Calvinist, control requires foreknowledge and foreknowledge requires “foreordination.”  God must be the first-cause of all things if His foreknowledge is to be preserved.  Otherwise, according to the Calvinist, God would not have been able to know, in eternity past, what your decisions would be in the future.  Embracing this position erases the free will exercise of prayer. 

The Arminian responds it is difficult to conceive of a less majestic God than One who is limited to a deterministic mode of relating to His creation.  It is hard to conceive of a weaker God than one who would be threatened by events occurring outside of His exhaustive control.  What is praiseworthy about controlling events simply because you possess the innate power to do so?  What is truly praiseworthy about God’s sovereignty is not that He exercises a power He obviously has, but that, because of His character, He does not exercise all the power He could.  Perhaps the greatest testimony to God’s sovereignty is that God created beings who possess the power to say no to Him.

Furthermore, God’s exhaustively definite foreknowledge does not require foreordination.  As John Wesley wrote centuries ago (Works, VI. 226-7): “God foreknew those in every nation who would believe,” and “In a word, God, looking on all ages, from the creation to the consummation, as a moment, and seeing at once whatever is in the hearts of all children of men, knows every one that does or does not believe, in every age or nation.”  Wesley saw no conflict between human moral freedom and divine foreknowledge.  He affirmed that although God knows the future, He does not determine it.  Wesley believed we must not think that things are because God knows them; rather, God knows them because they are.  Could this reasoning retain its validity in the 21st century?  Reconciliation of human free will with God’s foreknowledge is not possible using our finite human intelligence.  But it is possible from the perspective of an “infinite” God.   

Consider the meaning of infinity.  The smallest infinity is called aleph-null; its cardinality (n) is the number of elements in the set of all positive integers.  This infinity is, by definition, "countable."  After aleph-null, each element of an infinite set is a subset of elements from its predecessor.  The cardinality (number of elements), for each successive infinity, is the number of subsets in the set of all possible subsets constructed from its predecessor.  For example, the next infinity after aleph-null is aleph-1 or the continuum; its cardinality ( n' = 2n ) is the number of subsets in the set of all possible subsets constructed from the positive integers.  This happens to be the same as the number of elements in the set of all real numbers.  Aleph-1 is not countable.  The next infinity is aleph-2; its cardinality ( n'' = 2n' ) is the number of subsets in the set of all possible subsets constructed from the real numbers.  Consider the possibility that God can easily process at least n'''''''....  bits of information where the number of  ' marks is n.

But wouldn’t the sheer size of the known universe -- 100 billion stars in each of 100 billion galaxies -- overwhelm even the most infinite God?  To put in perspective the overwhelming sovereignty of God’s infinitude, consider the following illustration.  Imagine the universe is constructed around a deformable cubic lattice such that the smallest identifiable physical entity is a region called a “voxel” which is bounded by eight vertices, twelve edges and six flat faces.  The universe is thereby divided into an ordered (numbered) array of volumes.  The volume enclosed by a voxel is on the order of the cube of the local Planck Length (e.g. 1.6 x10-35 meter).  When a voxel is deformed by force, matter or energy, the eight vertices retain their identities but may change their positions, the twelve edges remain straight but each may change its length and each of the six flat faces either remains flat or deforms into a minimal surface with zero mean curvature (e.g. soap film).  13.7 billion years after the beginning, the deformable cubic lattice is no longer perfect but contains line and surface defects analogous to dislocations and stacking faults.

Assume the state of each voxel is 1 or 0.  Then the state of the entire universe is defined by a countably infinite sequence of binary digits or, in other words, a single real number.  The possible 3-D geometric arrangements of 1’s and 0’s would be more than sufficient to accommodate the complexity of any “Theory of Everything” that might be devised.

Now imagine God allows the state of each voxel to change at time intervals equal to the Planck Time (5.4 x 10-44 seconds).  At the end of each time interval, a new real number defines the state of the universe.  Nestled among the elements of aleph-3 are particular subsets of aleph-2 that track all possible histories of the universe from the big bang onward.  An immanent God would only have to comprehend infinity at a cardinality of n''' to track all possible histories and futures.  The Christian God understands infinity at least to a cardinality of  n'''''''....  where the number of  ' marks is n.  This is so overwhelming that our human intellect cannot grasp it!  The infinitude of God permits Him to instantly track all possible histories and futures of you, me and the universe with no more difficulty than it is for us to count the wheels on a bicycle.  Comprehending the cumulative consequences, of all contingent first-cause, human free will decisions on subsequent events, is infinitesimally trivial for God.  Couple this concept with the idea that God has inserted Himself into all levels of the “interactive life-game” video.  As the life-game designer, God knows all possible paths your life can take from birth to death.  God not only knows all contingencies but He has entered the game as your advocate and He wants you to win.  He has given each of us the prevenient grace that brings salvation.  He works in each heart, intellect and will.  Given His intimate involvement and the infinitude of his knowledge and intellect, what could surprise God?