There’s a danger in posing an “unanswerable” question, or in trying to answer it for that matter. If the question is “unanswerable,” then it seems you have rejected any possible answer in advance. And you might be right in some sense and desperately wrong in some other.

I would like to explore one sentence you wrote, though. “There is no reason to assume that either of them have any sinful or demonic influence in their life.”

Scripture says that all have sinned. Therefore, there is reason not to assume, but to know that both of them have some kind of sinful influence in their lives. And I would equate sinful influences with demonic ones.

In my youth, I thought the Bible was full of contradictions. The longer I have studied it, the harder it is to find any. I am persuaded that the Bible is without error and that, in principle, it contains the answer to any question about who God is and what he expects.

Identifying that definitive answer requires not only fully understanding every verse of scripture (difficult enough), but fully understanding how it relates to every other verse of scripture.

And everyone who attempts to arrive at an answer is a sinner! Sin, by the way, is an old archery term that means missing the target.

So can you know definitively that either Calvinism or Arminianism is correct and the other wrong? No. They both come from the teachings of men who missed the target. They had much better aim than most of us.

So compare scripture with scripture. Prayerfully find out why things that seem on the surface to be contradictory in fact both point to different aspects of the same absolute truty. Along the way, compare various theologies with your study of Scripture. (I use the capital letter to refer to the whole Bible and lower case to refer to any excerpt.)

You’ll come up with an answer that works for you — provisionally. In that welter of theological constructs that do indeed contradict each other, you’ll find some ideas helpful and others not. As an old preacher once said, chew the hay and spit out the sticks.

Everyone else you know who bothers to devote that much time and energy to that level of study will come up with different answers at some point. When you speak with them, defend your thoughts with an open mind. You may learn something and change your views.

As for people who try to use one scripture to negate another or who otherwise try to tell you not to trust the Bible, close your mind to their arguments (but not to them as people created in God’s image) like a trap. They’re the false teachers Scripture warns about. They proclaim what Scripture calls “doctrines of demons.”