Scribe may be right about that, but that also brings me to my own question. It's a question that is derived from my own idea, 'the Connect Law,' which says that everyone is connected to everything else, and that no matter how we life our lives, if we are connected to these things, we're going to influence absolutely everything else to one degree or another no matter what. I'd recommend reading my article on it for a deeper understanding.
http://www.youngprer.com/articles/013.htm Basically, say there's thousands of people who knew Jesus. Because there's thousands of people who knew Jesus, and then told their friends about Jesus, and then some of their friends met Jesus too, and then they told several friends - it begins to add up and suddenly Jesus has made all these bonds and connections, which in turn, begin to indirectly influence absolutely everyone else.
None of these people during the time of Jesus' life had to actually go to the Roman council or leaders and say, "Hey, we're producing a revolution." Of course not, anything that has ever happened like that in the past has been because of something that the people did on their own, and in turn, despite not directly taking any particular action, indirectly influenced the opposing force to have a reaction.
So, I guess my question is this:
If Peter is connected, like everyone else is, how did he not have an impact on Jesus' ressurection on some level? To what degree anyone may have had, we'll never know, and there's no way we can actually figure out how everything played out just from reading the Bible, because we weren't there.
There's another point I'd like to add to all this. Even if everything was predetermined, what difference does it make if we have no way of figuring out everything we're going to do in advance? It's like the idea behind quantum physics of how when you measure something, the act of measuring it can change its actual form! If we saw everything we were going to do in advance, we'd be in a continuous paradox trying to change whatever mistakes we hadn't even made yet.
Personally, I view time as something that is absolute. There is no past, there is no future, there is only now, and now is eternity. There was also someone who once said this same thing and remarked, "to say yes to now, and say yes to this one instant, is to say yes to all of eternity." The problem, he said, was that most many people have a hard time trying to get around to saying that 'yes.' That yes that says, "I accept! I give in!" In finality, every single religion seems to have this kind of surrendering nature in common.
But okay, let's say you did find a way to calculate everything out in advance, and your whole life became one big prophecy that was being fulfilled. What's wrong with that? Put yourself in that situation for a minute. Does it really mean that you didn't have free well, or that there really is no God? What if God created time, and if he did, that would mean he even threw in your ability to see time before you were in that particular point of it. Either way, your choices were made by yourself, and were in a particular sequence according to time. Any prophet, or person who has supposedly seen the future puts themselves in a strange position - they live in time and their prophecies were seen in accordance with such.
There's also the idea of self-fulfilling prophecy, which is quite simply - seeing something that you believe is going to happen, and then usually beyond your conscious awareness, you subconsciously impact those particular actions and events in order for that occurance to occur. Psychologists and psychological therapists have used this with people for years, showing them that most of their life has been a self fulfilling prophecy, according to what they percieve, and believe of now, the past, and the future. This falls into place with the 'Connect Law,' too, because it means that even a person's indirect actions take place as part of a big picture to influence an outcome. A self fulfilling prophecy will involve others, because we live our lives with others, whether it be directly or indirectly.
No matter what, you'll notice, none of these truly prove or disprove the existence of God, but simply rearrange the current ideas about both God, and the concept of free will.
During the dawning days of science, people began to believe in all of these different fundemental physical laws that would compose their lives. The Laws of Physics, chemical laws, and so on and so forth. Whether it's God setting everything up in advance, or just some big deterministic machine that works by means of individual components known as these physical laws, it starts it seem like you're about to just say, "To heck with with it!" and decide neither way matters.
I would write more, but I've spent a lot of my free morning minutes writing this, and I'll be off to school soon. Write more later.
-youngprer
