Donny Osmond on ABC Enough Rope on Predestination

[Born Free]

ABC here is Australian Broadcasting Commission, whose Monday night top-rating compered guest appearance this week went to Donny Osmond. Andrew Denton is the host.

At this point in the interview, they were discussing when he had to reinvent himself and escape the child-star mindset that prevailed, and the very difficult phase as he went through when he was a has-been.

This was a short dialogue around predestination:

"ANDREW DENTON: Do you think what happened to you was part of God's plan for you?

DONNY OSMOND: I think that's pretty presumptuous to say. That's predestination and I don't believe in predestination. Yes, there's a plan. I firmly believe that our Father in heaven has a plan for us, but I firmly believe that he has given us free agency to exercise and we live with the consequences and the decisions that we make. But I believe that you create a lot of your own fate based upon your work ethic, your plans, your goals, your aspirations, but you have to have reality in those goals as well. I could say I want to recreate the adulation of the '70s: That's not a realistic goal, you know? But I won't say that it was God's plan for me."

The transcript for the whole interview is at:

http://www.abc.net.au/tv/enoughrope/transcripts/s1692101.htm

So what's the difference between predestination and God's Plan? Predestination is where you don't get to say 'No', you just do it, or else; where as God's Plan is where the Big Fella had it all mapped out, and if you are worthy you get in step and if evil, you depart from the Plan and you get else anyway!

The difference is so huge, who can you not see that? :duh

I am reminded of all the times I sat there in my younger years trying to figure out a way, where coercion wasn't coercion. It didn't %uck with my head much, much, much!!!

Anyone else recall getting their head messed trying to make sense of this nonsense?

Daryl

[helemon]

So what's the difference between predestination and God's Plan?
Daryl

Mormon's view of "God's Plan" is a very general concept consisting mainly of coming to earth, being tested, then being resurected to your appropriate glory. Yes some people may have some "fore ordination" for greatness but the majority of us schmucks are just down here trying to do our best to get along. Mormons don't hold to a Calvinist view of predestination.

[puff]

Mormon's view of "God's Plan" is a very general concept consisting mainly of coming to earth, being tested, then being resurected to your appropriate glory. Yes some people may have some "fore ordination" for greatness but the majority of us schmucks are just down here trying to do our best to get along. Mormons don't hold to a Calvinist view of predestination.so why did the osmond family go bankrupt so quickly

[Born Free]

so why did the osmond family go bankrupt so quickly

Its in that interview. Do a search and you will find it.

[caskade]

Wow this is cool that this topic came up because it's been bothering me recently. Thinking about my own departure from the church has brought up thoughts of what it means from an lds perspective. And I wonder if what I'm doing now wasn't part of my "plan," or if it was then what does that mean? Leading me to think in depth about what exactly "free will" is. So I approached my family the other day asking them an issue I was having with the atonement and free will, which basically stems from this predestination business, ie: "how can all of your sins be known before they happened." They didn't have an answer for me that made sense, except for something my brother said which he heard from some authority in the church (sorry i dont have a reference). It was basically an analogy of a man trying to explain the existence of god to another man, and that it would be the same as trying to explain how salt tastes to a person who has never tasted salt. In that instance how would you explain how salt tastes? "Well it triggers taste bud region X and stimulates nerves in the left perrinneal cortex...." you get the idea. Explaining such a thing has no meaning, you can only experience it. So he basically likened that explanation to the "eternal" properties of the atonement, because we cannot "fathom it with our finite minds" as he put it. I was intrigued, the first logical, albeit non-testable, explanation I had received on the subject. Still though, I cant help but think, I would rather have the non-sensical explanation of how "salt tastes" and try to make make my own leaps of reason on my own. Even if I couldn't fathom it, I would have a certain comfort knowing that the answer is right infront of me.

[helemon]

"how can all of your sins be known before they happened."

I guess I never saw it like that. I saw the attonement not as a finite amount of payment for mankinds sins but as an infinite payment. Therefore, the account can never be overdrawn. It's not a tit for tat sort of thing. But then there are scriptures in the PGP that say Moses or Abraham? saw everyone of us before we were born. Either way, it doesn't make much sense.

[caskade]

But then there are scriptures in the PGP that say Moses or Abraham? saw everyone of us before we were born. Either way, it doesn't make much sense.

Agreed, that's exactly what I was getting at. The themes of fate and destiny in the scriptures dont make much sense against free will. I guess god's plan is exactly that, just a plan. It doesn't have some kind of eternal enforcer making it so, only people who choose to make it so.

Edit - I just had an interesting thought. To make some sense of god's plan I imagine there are levels of abstraction to different goals in the plan, higher level goals are static, while lower level goals are changable and calculated "on-the-fly" by god's eternal computer. For instance, at the very top level, god has the plan to "bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man" this goal remains static throughout time, while at a lower level it might change. For instance if a particular goal is to convert a certain region of the globe into believers, and a missionary who was supposed to serve that region decided against it (excercising his free will) and went home, that goal would be delayed until a later time when it could be fulfilled, other potential missionaries would be calculated into the equation and sent to the region. So going back to Abraham, he could have been shown an early estimation of how things would turn out from god's "simulation" using this idea.

I know this isn't a pro-mormon forum but I'm just musing on the idea of how it could be believable. After all, I wouldn't be here if I didn't think freely.

[lunaverse]

What you are describing is similar to what Chaos/Complexity Theory attempts to describe. Some of the conclusions made in the mathmatical study of complex systems (turbulence in air and water, population growth in ecosystems, weather, and changes in society) indicate just what you are saying -- Many times we can predict the larger system with accuracy, but not the individual components.

For example, it's easy to know that next winter will be cold. Based on past years here in Seattle, I know most days the tempreture will be in the mid 40's, or possibly the 50's. It might snow once, and it will rain a lot. Meterologists could get a little bit more specific than that, but they still are predicting the whole winter, not specific days. In fact, I can predict that winters 10 years from now will probably follow the same trend, with a slight chance that something really weird will happen.

However, if you were to ask me what the weather will be like on December 14th, 2006, I will not be able to tell you with any accuracy.

It is interesting that even sci-fi predicted these types of predictions. A writer named Isaac Asimov included this in the plot for one of his most famous tales, The Foundation series, which he first published in the 1940's. In it, a mathmatician invents the mathmatics of prediction and calls it "Psychohistory". With this science, he is able to predict the fall of civilization, which he is not able to prevent. However, he does set up a Foundation of people, who will do just the right things at just the right times to restore civilization within 1000 years. In a sense, Asimov predicts the science of Chaos Theory about 30 years before computer technology allowed it to exist.

I think (and some studies have been done to back this up) that human intuition is somewhat capable of picking up on these trends. Just as we can compute the calculus required to predict the arc of a baseball in order to catch it (well, ok *I* can't, but baseball players can), I think there are other things we can predict in similar ways.

Before I moved here, for instance, I was able to predict weather fluctuations, for example that we would have a couple of years of flooding. Since I had lived in that area all my life, I had lots of rough data, and when we had a little bit of flooding early one year, I predicted the next year would be much worse. And it was. The bridge to my small town was taken out by a flood.

But I haven't lived here long enough to even try to guess climate trends, because the weather here is much, much different.

In one study, they sat people in front of a computer with a program that would give them numbers about existing weather conditions, and then they would have to guess the following day's weather. For one group, they explained what the numbers meant, and how to guess the weather based on them. For another group, all they did was show them the answers for 50 iterations. i.e. here are the numbers, now here are the results. They didn't explain the rationale at all.

The group that was shown instead of told, predicted the weather with an accuracy of 80%, while those who were told instead of shown had a much lower percent accuracy (sorry, I don't have the book in front of me -- I got this info from the book A General Theory of Love by.. some people. :) )

This indicates that our subconsicous learning can make calculations of prediction much better than our consicous, especially when we don't have years of training. (If any of those participants had been an actual meterologist, she probably would have a higher rate of accuracy than the lay people, because she would have much more training PLUS the intuitive experience to draw on).

So I don't think we can discount out intuition's ability to make predictions about the future. We're just learning how to get computers to make those predictions -- in the rough sort of way people can, too. i.e. sometimes the computer is right, and sometimes it isn't. For computers it's about probabilities, and for human intuition, it seems to be the same. Some people seem good at calculating those probabilities and being somewhat, if not always, accurate.*

However, when it comes to One Organization or Leader telling you they know the future, the chances are higher that they are merely trying to defraud you out of your money. ;)

Luna

*Footnote for Helemon: I'm not talking here about Nostradamus-type predictions, where it's all in code that could probably mean anything. I'm speaking more about personal intuition, like getting a feeling it's going to rain, or deciding its time to move to a new job, or getting a vibe that doing X on day Y is not safe. Nor am I claiming any of this can be proven statistically -- yet. ;)

[caskade]

My intuition tells me you're right-on. :) Now the question is why are those smaller systems (freewill, etc.) so unpredictable? You don't have to answer that, I'm sure there isn't one. Probably one of those mathematically indeterminable problems like the infamous P=NP problem that arises in complexity theory.