Even when I was a Christian, I found the concept of predestination horrible, and completely rejected it.
However, Calvinists, and other predesitinationists, bring up some hard-to-reconcile points:
1. In the Christian religion, God's the one who created you like you are: he made your nature, whether you are more skeptical, or more likely to believe. He chose where and when you were born, and who your parents were. Basically, your nature and nuture, the two things considered to form a unique human being, were determined by God. Accordingly, right off the bat, some people are either by nature more likely to believe, or by nuture, given greater opportunity to believe.
2. There are a couple of pretty suspicious Bible verses:
Acts 13:48: When the Gentiles heard this, they were glad and honored the word of the Lord; and all who were appointed for eternal life believed.
Rom 8:29-30: For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. 30And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.
John 6:44 "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day.
And then we have this huge passage:
Rom 9:10-24 Not only that, but Rebekah's children had one and the same father, our father Isaac. 11Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad—in order that God's purpose in election might stand: 12not by works but by him who calls—she was told, "The older will serve the younger." 13Just as it is written: "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated."
14What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! 15For he says to Moses,
"I will have mercy on whom I have mercy,
and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion." 16It does not, therefore, depend on man's desire or effort, but on God's mercy. 17For the Scripture says to Pharaoh: "I raised you up for this very purpose, that I might display my power in you and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth."18Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden.
19One of you will say to me: "Then why does God still blame us? For who resists his will?" 20But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? "Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, 'Why did you make me like this?' "21Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use? 22What if God, choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for destruction? 23What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory— 24even us, whom he also called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles?
I mean, how do you explain all that? The fact that a) God decides basically who we are, and b) it sounds like we can't accept God, unless he gives us the first nudge
