The Religious Predisposition and Predestination

A UK reader e-mails:

In your recent post My Relation to Catholicism, you write; "For a religion to take root in a person, the person must have a religious nature or predisposition to begin with."

If this is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of becoming, let's say, a Christian, it seems very close to the idea of predestination. Those who have the necessary (and inherent?) predisposition are among the few who have been "chosen" by God. Many others who neither have nor can acquire such a disposition, have no hope of salvation because they cannot will themselves to believe. This seems like an affront to divine justice. Maybe you'll say a few words about the "affront" of predestination as you expand on your religious views.

The truth of what the reader quotes me as saying was brought home to me once again yesterday over lunch with a friend. He is the same age as me, comes from a similar background, and also has a doctorate in philosophy.  From the ages of 6 to 16, he attended a school run by Jesuits .  So, starting as an impressionable first-grader, he was exposed to the full-strength pre-Vatican II Catholic doctrine sans namby-pamby liberal dilution.  And this was in the '50s when distractions and temptations were much less than they are now.  He was an altar boy, indeed the 'head' of the altar boys; he memorized all the Latin responses, and was so good at this that he was paid for his services at weddings and funerals.  But despite the rites, rituals, and indoctrination from an early age, none of it took root in his inner being.  It is not just that he sloughed it off later when pretty girls and other earthly delights proved to be irresistible; he told me that he never took it seriously in the first place.  It was all just a load of hocus-pocus and mumbo-jumbo.

And now I am reminded of Tony Jones from high school days.  He like to invert a favorite saying of St. Dominic Savio.  The saint said, "Death before sin."  Tony wrote in my graduation year book, "Remember my motto, 'Sin before death!'"

So I say that to take a religion, any religion, seriously one must possess an inner disposition, an inner religious sensibility.  Some people are just inherently irreligious in the way others are unmusical or illogical or amoral or not disposed to appreciate poetry.  No amount of indoctrination can make up for the lack.  If you are illogical, no logic course can help you; all such a course can do it is articulate and make explicit the implicit logical understanding that must already be present if one is to profit from the formal study of the subject. If you cannot think in moral categories, if you have no nascent sense of right and wrong, no ethics course can help you.

One consequence of this is that there is no point to discussing religion with the irreligious.  It cannot be anything other than superstitious nonsense to them.  You may as well discuss colors with the color blind, music with the tone deaf, modal logic with those who are blind to modal distinctions. 

Since my point is a general one, applying as it does to any religion, it is distinct from any Christian predestination doctrine.  But if the religion in question is Christianity, then the reader makes an excellent point.  Suppose that salvation is predicated upon one's acceptance of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Obviously, one cannot even begin to take such a notion seriously in the interior manner alone here in question without having the religious predisposition.  In a theistic framework, a providential God is responsible for whether one has the predisposition or not.  So what I am saying, when situated in a Christian context, does seem to smack of predestination.  I'll end with a quotation from G. R. Evans, Augustine on Evil, Cambridge UP 1982, p. 134, emphasis added:

Augustine sets out for their [certain semi-Pelagians'] inspection the obvious truth that many people hear Christian truth expounded to them, and while some believe, others do not.  There must be a reason why their responses differ.  Augustine suggests that the reason is that God has prepared some but not others (De Praed. Sanct. vi 11). Those who receive the truth are the elect, and those who do not have not been chosen to be Christians.

 That there is predestination, however, strikes me as morally dubious as that guilt is inheritable.