Quote Originally Posted by steelish View Post
MY theory - and it is JUST a theory of mine - is that God was the meaning of creation, and just as compared to the universe, our lives on earth are just a blink of an eye as far as "time" goes. God created life to allow good and evil to wage against each other, and it is up to each individual to wage their own war against evil. Some lose, others win.
I can understand this, even accept the possibility of it. But it is NOT Jehovah you are talking about here. The god you hypothesize would not be likely to intervene in human affairs, would not really care whether or not people believed in him, would not be interested in having people worship him. He would have started the universe and let it go.

As to predetermined fate; my theory on that is that the decisions we make in life (and the decisions of the people who surround us) lead us to a moment in time where the continuation of our life or our death might occur. I believe we make myriad decisions daily that could easily effect whether we live or die.
Obviously this statement holds true as far as we can know. We do make decisions every day, and they do affect our own future, however minutely, and the futures of those around us. I have no problem with this.

And again, I am dealing with the traditional definition of the biblical God. As an omniscient being, by definition, he knows the entire path of the universe, and every particle and beam of light, from creation to destruction. Since the bible places him outside of the universe, infinite, he knows everything about everything even before he creates it, again by definition. So regardless of how we may believe our actions are performed by our own free will, those actions were written in the mind of God, if you will, even before the creation of the universe. That is predestination.

Now I don't believe any of this. I don't find any need to hypothesize beings who have no interaction with the universe, beings who do not help or hinder us along our paths. As far as I can tell, such beings have no real meaning in our lives.