In other words, the replicants sense that it is a grave evil, a cosmic injustice, for them to be capable of making a judgment about the quality of their own life, to find in themselves a desire for truly meaningful life, and yet they are destined to menial, degrading labor for a period of four years, after which they die without hope. They sense that this is something wrong, something evil, something worth fighting against, even if ultimately in vain. Here is a further point to make: for God to create human beings for the mere purpose of serving as some means to an end that doesn’t concern them, that doesn’t benefit them, in which they cannot find happiness or fulfillment would be gravely immoral. It would be more than immoral; it would be positively pagan, more like the gods of Babylon than like the LORD of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In this way, we can learn from Blade Runner that the traditional Calvinist doctrine of predestination is gravely mistaken. Indeed, like Isaac the Syrian says at one point, it is a childish way of thinking about, and even worse, it is blasphemy that calumniates God. On such a view of things, God does not respect the autonomy of the human person, nor does he create every person for a destiny which is good for him. Some persons are created and God has determined never to save them; instead, they are fuel for the fires of hell forever. There is a further aspect to consider here. Some of the replicants are created with false memories, so that they begin their four-year lifespan convinced that they have been alive for quite some time, that they are normal human beings with a mother and father, etc. When one of the main characters of Blade Runner discovers that she is in fact a replicant and not a human, she is utterly devastated. And rightly so, for she had been entertaining delusions about herself; she had a false sense of her own identity. Now she was confronted with the deeply disturbing truth: she is not who she thinks she is, and she is going to die very soon, without the hope of realizing any of her long-term plans. This is exactly the fate of some number of human persons, if the traditional Calvinist doctrine is true. At some point, these persons will have all of their illusions about themselves dispelled, and they will come to discover that they are not who they thought they were. Worse than that, their goals and plans for a life meaningfully lived — even those whose intentions are not malicious and misanthropic — will forever go unfulfilled. Instead, they can only await a fate worse than death: unending torment.