Article January 13, 2020 Issue

A way out of deterministic theories

George Moffett

A cartoon that appeared in The New Yorker some time ago depicts God sitting at a desk. On one side of the desk is an in-box filled with people wearing giddy smiles and exchanging high-fives. On the other, an out-box filled with people weeping and wailing. In front of the desk, a throng awaits God’s judgment. The cartoon, which evokes the intended smile, speaks to the old theological doctrine of predestination, by which God arbitrarily selects some of His children to be saved while the rest are consigned to eternal damnation.

Although this doctrine has largely been abandoned by the churches, other secular forms of predestination, or “determinism” to use the current philosophical term of art, hold sway in human thought to the end of placing man under conditions—fatal health laws, beliefs associated with heredity, threatening environmental trends, for example—over which he supposedly has no control, circumscribing his progress or even his chances for survival.

All forms of determinism—genetic, cultural, biological, economic—derive their sanction from human theories that define man as material. But determinism in every form, as well as the underlying belief that man is material, is challenged by the understanding Christian Science imparts that God, defined as wholly good, alone governs man, and that man’s destiny can therefore be characterized only by that which is good and harmonious. Instead of the doom and fatalism of deterministic theories, Christian Science points to the bright promise of the Bible’s assurance of man’s eternal salvation. “What God knows, He also predestinates;…” Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes in her pamphlet No and Yes (p. 37). Thus, man—every one of us—is destined only for good, not unavoidable suffering.

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