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I recently tussled with the idea of predestination as part of an assessment I did for my MTS program. The task was really to design a way of teaching predestination in a way that doesn’t require your listeners to have a BTh, but true to nerdular form, I ended up writing a companion essay to think through the issues more fully and get my head straight on what the Bible teaches on predestination.

The main surprise for me was that the whole doctrine is really not as hard as I thought it would be. In fact, I suspect people get hung up at one of three points and remain stuck there because predestination is one of those things that doesn’t neatly slot into our Western, rationalistic, logic-oriented minds (privately, I do wonder if this will become less of an issue as pluralism sinks in as an acceptable way of assessing ideas). The three points where I reckon most people run aground are:

1. The idea that God predestines some and not others to eternal life. This is understandable; to accept this, it requires us to defer to God and acknowledge that He has not chosen to predestine everyone to eternal life, but rather some to eternal life and some to eternal punishment.
2. The tension between God’s sovereignty (or, as Packer would argue, His Kingship) and human responsibility for sin (or, God’s role as Judge), seeing as the two are made plain in Scripture but appear irreconcilable. If God is sovereign and all our thoughts and ways are known by Him and subject to His will, how can we be held accountable for our sin? For a related difficulty, see point one above.
3. The question of falling away – specifically, if God has predestined His elect, and someone who appears to be elect falls away, were they really elect in the first place?

I could write a lengthy article about these, but I won’t (perhaps I will make my essay available, for the interested). But, I will say this – could it be that our biggest problem with predestination, as a doctrine, is not that it is nonsense, or unfair, or inconsistent, but rather that we are sometimes unwilling to adopt a position of humility and accept that God’s ways are higher than ours? The conflicting, seemingly-incompatible truths presented by the Bible may cause our minds to bristle and may spawn questions which appear to have no answer. This, though, should not lead us instantly to disillusionment. Rather, perhaps we should acknowledge that our human wisdom is finite and accept that we will not always be able to wrangle Biblical truth into a logically-consistent framework. The tensions and difficulties we encounter are no doubt frustrating, but there is also comfort in the knowledge that God would not have created such tensions and difficulties if such things were meant to be skimmed over.

What are your thoughts on predestination? What difficulties do you have with this doctrine when it is taught?

A while ago, I wrote about an annoying question many people ask when they find out you’ve studied psychology: namely, ‘So, are you analysing me right now?’. I’m still hearing it now from colleagues at work when I divulge what I spent the last four years doing. But, don’t be fooled into thinking that’s the only bit of misinformation circling about the field of psychology!

How’s about this one: ‘But, we only use percent of our brains!’

This is a common myth which gets bandied about as a general reason for things such as not knowing how memory works, savants, and just about any other facet of the human mind that you can think of. It’s even been thrown at me at church as evidence that humans did once live for up to nine hundred years at a stretch in early Old Testament times (the rationale being that, seeing as we only use about ten percent of our brains, the other ninety percent could have been excess storage for all those extra memories we’d have).

Sorry to burst the bubble, but it’s just not true. Or, as they would say on Mythbusters, this one is busted.

I guess my first question is, how do people know that we are underutilising our brains? We certainly don’t understand the brain in its entirety, but we know a lot more than we used to, and there are now all sorts of scans and techniques for observing the brain in real-time, or close-to-real-time. One thing we do know is that the brain is not made of a homogeneous mass; that is, it isn’t just a big cottony ball of worm-like cerebral cortex. The brain is made up of structures and sections. We have a brain stem, which seems to regulate autonomous functions like breathing and heart beat; we have a visual cortex, interpreting signals from our ocular nerves; we have structures like the hippocampus, which are associated with memory; we have a pre-frontal cortex, which is thought to be the centre of planning, reasoning, and impulse control. The list goes on and on and on. Moreover, these fancy new scanning techniques show all the parts of the brain being used at different times – that’s one way we have of inferring that certain cerebral structures are designed to process different signals.

As such, if we only used ten percent of our brains, then it seems reasonable to ask which ten percent we are using. Is it the ten percent which allows us to, say, comprehend and produce written and spoken language? Or the ten percent which interprets signals from the auditory neuronal pathways? If we only use ten percent, why do patients with brain lesions experience such a variety of impairments? After all, it would be highly unlikely to cause a problem with our everyday function if the ninety percent-part was damaged. People who seem to believe this ‘fact’ cannot really answer these questions, and even if they can, their answers contradict a long history of scientific evidence which strongly suggests that any sort of brain injury has some kind of detrimental effect on human function.

This is not to say that the brain is incapable of plasticity. Stroke patients, for example, often recover some of their lost functions, and it seems that other parts of the brain take over for the part which was damaged. My grandmother-in-law has demonstrated this in her ability to form relatively-complex sentences after having a stroke several years ago, immediately after which she could only repeat her doctor’s surname. The brain has an amazing capacity to compensate for neurological problems, so maybe we should marvel at this, instead of going goggle-eyed about our supposedly-underused noggins.

Someone once said to me, ‘but, it’s not like we’re only using ten percent of the physical mass – we’re only using ten percent of our brain’s potential’. I don’t really understand what that means. I’ve heard references to the other ninety percent being to do with the subconscious or unconscious, but there’s no evidence, and no way of quantifying or demonstrating this, so I’m happy to stick with what we know. Ultimately, the ten-percent myth is the result of not understanding the brain, and so is akin to the following exchange (borrowed from snopes.com):

Two people see a strange light in the sky. The first, a UFO believer, says, “See there! Can you explain that?” The skeptic replies that no, he can’t. The UFO believer is gleeful. “Ha! You don’t know what it is, so it must be aliens!” he says, arguing from ignorance.

This week, as part of my job, I visited a family where I was abused solidly for about twenty-five minutes while trying to have a civilised discussion with the parents. In the end, myself and the other worker left because we weren’t getting anywhere, and in the car on the way back to the office, I wondered, ‘Why am I in this job?’

This week, as part of my job, I held a two-week-old baby who had been born withdrawing from methadone. As he squirmed inside his tight cloth cucoon and stared at me with huge eyes which never quite focused on me, I wondered, ‘This is why I’m in this job’.

...and, before you think working in an all-female office has made me clucky, I’m soon to be making films (for Carols 06), playing live music (for Carols 06), and, hopefully, writing some more (not for Carols 06).

That’s all for now.

“A person’s steps are directed by the Lord. How, then, can anyone understand their own way?” (Proverbs 20:24)