God’s Writing 2: Providence
In our home group this week one of the younger members asked the question: “Does God decide everything that is going to happen to us?” He had been wondering since a Christian friend had said that he didn’t need to worry about the future because God had it all planned out for him. The question isn’t a new one, but it certainly is important. Do we have real choices, is ‘free will’ a reality, or is everything already determined? This question isn’t just one for Christian theology, within which there is a rich tradition of debate about how divine sovereignty and human responsibility can coexist. It is also hotly debated in the realms of philosophy and neuroscience, with a significant number of neuroscientists suggesting that we live in a deterministic world – our actions are merely the result of chemical and electrical processes in our brains – and the majority of philosophers insisting that free will must exist. This debate isn’t far removed from...