There Is No Single Divinely-Appointed Marriage Partner

For quite some time it has been a popular Charismatic Christian belief that God creates one perk perfect mate for each person. I have long believed that this is not true but I now believe it could not be true for additional reasons.

The first reason why I did not believe this to be true is the nature of free will. This is to say that Christians would agree that we humans have free will to procreate or to not procreate. Accordingly if we  have free will to decide to have another child, if God creates a one perfect mate for every human, man’s decision to have another child there for obligates God to create another perfect mate for that child which a man decided to create. That introduces a theological contradiction in that humans, as lesser entities than God, cannot force or obligate God to take or not take any specific action. Therefore, the human free will to procreate cannot force God to create or designate any other human as a perfect mate. It then follows that there must be a range of compatible mates from which we humans also exercise our free will to choose or not to choose.

Another reason that I now do not believe this to be true is again free will. If one believes that God designates one perfect and only one perfect mate for every person then it follows that divorce is a sin or a failure to follow God’s direction. However this introduces another theological problem because if one person or rather if two people marry incorrectly and failed to find or to obey God’s leading to their perfect mates, that means that one or two other people now do not have the chance to find their designated perfect mates and they therefore suffer the consequences of another person’s actions. This of course would be analogous to someone who suffers a loss when a family member is murdered. No one would ever say that God condoned or orchestrated the death of that individual at the hands of another person. Clearly we would say that God does not desire nor direct that any person be murdered, which is consistent with the sixth commandment, thou shalt not kill. So free will can contravene God’s direction and plan for our lives but it is not the nature of a just God that innocent people suffer the consequences of wrongdoer’s actions that flow from the wrongdoer’s free will. So if God creates one and only one perfect mate for every human, and with a American divorce rate of roughly 50% that would mean that at least half of the country is caused to suffer the consequences of other people’s poorly-exercised free will. Therefore it would be unjust of a just God for that many people to suffer if God created one and only one perfect mate for each and every individual. Moreover, if one person’s perfect mate mismarries, must the partnerless person be forced to be single? Didn’t got say in Genesis that it was not good for [hu]man[s] to be alone? Here again, there must be a range of compatible mates for every person from which we may exercise our individual free will to select, hopefully wisely.

The final reason comes from the passage in the Psalms stating that God foreknew us in the womb and that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. This passage does not say that we are uniquely made, which is to say, made completely different from each and every other person in existence. With a world population of 8 billion, and a finite number of physical and mental permutations, it is stochastically improbable that there be no duplicate unordered permutations of mates. In other words, there are a finite number of variations of physical traits and personality traits. The world population is too great for there not to be a repetition of those variations.

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