Perspectives: Foreknowledge - Part Two

After a mentally exhausting week trying to achieve a deeper understanding of the meaning of life in relation to predestination and free will, I may have arrived on a uniquely modern analogy that helps me to synthesize most of the things I know to be true.

For a long time we have tried to describe the universe as a book that God has written, with characters, events, a plan that He has for the arc of the story and so on. While this has been a useful picture for me in the past, it falls flat when one needs to consider issues like free will, for characters do not possess free will as much as the illusion of it, because the author is ultimately the one determining their decisions, even if a character's thought processes and emotional balance are given adequate realism. In the last few weeks, I've been able to give this authorial picture one last useful wring to contribute to the meaning of life. Why is it that we are able to find meaning in stories? It is not because the characters are free moral agents, making independent decisions, because they are not. If you wanted to you, could skip right to the end of the book and see what key decisions they have been forced to make. It is because we ascribe meaning to the characters and what they do, even if they are fictional, even if they are not really making those decisions. We supply the meaning to stories because we find value in their illusory choices within the framework of the story, which gives us context within which to understand the meaning of Daneel's Zeroth Law or the multiple names of Estel.

If meaning comes from an external power that supplies meaning by creating a context for it and placing value on the decisions made within that context, we might extend that to how God relates to this creation. He has made a world with genuine free moral agents, who make decisions in a framework that has consequences based on what is chosen. He values our decisions, in the same way that He valued the names that Adam gave the animals, or that love towards Him must be chosen. He supplies our actions with meaning. So why do we feel as though our actions, if governed by an enigmatic law of the will as it were, come to mean nothing? We do choose, and even if God already knows those choices, we derive the meaning of those choices not primarily from the fact that we are making those choices independent of any outside influence; that they are my choices, but because the Father above has constructed this universe in such a way that our choices have consequences, for ourselves, for others, for the environment and for our relationship with Him. Thus I have distanced the idea that if choices are predetermined, even if God created our wills by a set of laws behind the curtain and does not presently intervene to overstep that system, from the idea that such choices are meaningless.

To phrase this in an alternative, potentially more intelligible way, if someone were to ask me now, 'Assuming that God has made a free will and understands its properties, did God create Lucifer, Adam and Eve in such a way that He knew that they would fall away from Him?', I would answer, yes, He did. Does that mean that their choices have been predetermined and have no meaning because God is therefore ultimately responsible for what they chose? I would then respond in the negative, because all that God did was to make their wills and then give them a framework within which to make choices which He provided meaning to, because He valued them. They are responsible for the choices that they made and God did not force them to chose as they did. Again, foreknowledge does not equate forced decisions. This is something that the authorial analogy cannot hope the capture, and so I was prompted to look for another system of understanding.

What I would like to do now is to move from a picture of God as the author of a book or novel, to a picture of God as a game designer of a game which is far beyond the classification of any genre. It is at once a role-playing game, a music game, a management game, a simulator, a skill game, a sports game, a tycoon game and so on. It is the game of life. God has constructed this game, with physical laws, social laws and various other rules which players are constrained by. In the same way, a game designer places a player in a situation where they can make choices, As in life, those choices are limited by what has been programmed into the game. I can no more fly than Mario can move back to the now-out-of-view left, because that's the way that the designer has made it. 

Moving on to a more sophisticated game, Will Wright's Spore is a great example of the co-creative purpose which God has made us for. The game of Spore provides simple tools for players to make all sort of creatures, buildings and vehicles, the same way that God has provided us with avenues of expression in technology, the visual arts, music or dance. The game then leaves it up to the players to fill the database with content, and takes what they have created and animates it, gives it distinctive properties, allows it to be shared with other players and populate their games. The game has been constructed to foster this creativity and encourage players to find meaning in designing and sharing their creations. Most certainly, the designers look on the game and find meaning in the avalanche of content that the players have created. Yet, the designers did not determine what the players would do. Again, we simply see that meaning is generated by a framework and value placed on what is done within that framework.

I admit that this game designer analogy also has its flaws, but it does offer another helpful way for me to understand the dynamic between God and the beings He has created. For one, no game designer would claim to be making the players in the same way that the author constructs characters, game designers however, do make characters within their games and players then supply that mystical element of free will into the mix. Does Chell solve the chambers and receive the insults of GLaDOS or does the player? The video game is probably the closest creative expression that we have to approximate the creative act of God in this present day.

Perspectives: Foreknowledge - Part One

I'm having quite a bit of trouble processing the teaching that some of the speakers here at YWAM have either stated explicitly or which their words appear to imply to me. I acknowledge that I may be taking things the wrong way, but in any case I feel the need to process this on the blog, so here goes.

I return once again to the thorny issue of predestination. I have no real idea where this post is going, but I'll begin with the foreknowledge of God and branch out from there. If you recall my previous post on predestination, you will remember that I believe that God has foreknowledge of our decisions. To be clear, this means that I believe that God in His omniscience, knows what we will choose when presented with the fork in the road, whether the road often taken, the road not taken, the path going back or off the roads and into the yellow wood. This is what was directly contradicted by, so far, two of the lecturers, who hold that God does not have this foreknowledge. The justification for this conclusion is that if God has foreknowledge, then there is no free will for the future must already be set in stone and predetermined.

Is there some reason why God knowing the future necessarily means that he is actively determining the future? Consider an example, which I have been using in several discussions around this topic. If you know me in person, you might eventually find out that my favourite colour is blue, or make the connection based on the predominant colour of my attire. So if I were to step into a clothes shop intending to buy a shirt, you might, based on what you know about my disposition, deduce that I would probably walk out of the store with a shirt in some variation of blue, whether lapis, navy or cerulean. Did you in any way determine what shirt I would have bought? I wouldn't say so, unless you had the maternal trump card to play, but other than that, if you were a friend of mine, no, you did not influence my choice of shirt colour. What you anticipate I will do is based on what you know about me, but what I do is ultimately up to me to decide. By extension, if God has perfect knowledge of who we are, He can predict perfectly what we will do in any given situation. Does this mean that He has chosen what we will do for us? No. No more than you made me choose a blue shirt by knowing my favourite colour is blue. Free will can be maintained within the context of God's perfect foreknowledge.

Furthermore, the decisions we make may not be in God's will, or His best for us. He may desire something else for us, but He cannot force us to choose that path. If we choose otherwise, then out of respect for our free will, He must not alter our decision. This is why it is still possible to sin, to rebel, that suffering should have entered the world by the consequences of sin. This is God's only limiting factor, His respect for the free will which He has imbued us with in order that we may love Him personally.

This brings us to another issue, which is: 'Did God create Adam and Eve knowing that they would sin and there would be all this suffering in the world?' or even, 'Did God create Lucifer, which is such a strangely latinate name but anyway, knowing that the most beautiful angel would rebel against Him?' To which I answer, yes, I suppose He did. But here is where my argument runs into an apparent contradiction. If God created a being in such a way that He knew that being would rebel, then is that being truly responsible for the rebellion that results? Could God not have made that being in such a way that when presented with a choice to rebel, that being would be able to resist? If He did that, would there be no free will because there was no possibility to rebel? If God was able to see things deterministically like this, then why bother with the farce of grief and regret or such when the creation fails to honour the creator?

It comes to the mystery of the will, and how we choose. To be honest, no one really knows. I may be pushing things to a Newtonian extreme to assume that the laws which govern how the will works are deterministic. The will is a mystery hidden within the heart, which is something I also noted in my previous post. We have examples of people who come from the most dire and dismal circumstances, and yet choose God and forsake all else, while we also have examples of people in perfect communion with God, namely Adam and Eve, who choose to rebel. 

So coming back to the original question, we can now express in further detail: 'Does God know the mysterious law which governs the will? Is there a mysterious law that governs the will? If He does and if there is such a law, then has He constructed us according to that law, knowing we will disobey? If He does not, then He can He still have perfect foreknowledge?' An attendant question might be 'If will is governed by anything at all, can it possibly be free?'

For the moment, let us turn to the other side of the argument now and explore the implications of God not knowing the choices we will make, if the Will is a mystery beyond the control of God. For one, this destroys my previous post's argument of predestination, as He cannot know that Sodom and Gomorrah are filled with people so far gone that they will never be able to choose Him. He cannot know when to stop the drama of this world because there is no one left who will yet come to choose Him, because He cannot determine that moment. Perhaps this is why I am experiencing such resistance to this idea promulgated here. 

If God cannot know, then the next best thing He can do is to plan for all possible decisions which we may make. Going any further than this appears to me to imply that God is reacting to our prayers and decisions in them most uncontrolled way. The speakers have implied that this is the case, that when we miss a decision, God realigns His plans to work with the new situation. One thing I certainly do not accept is that God changes His mind in such a fashion. That makes Him the receiving one, the one without the initiative, the one who responds. It makes Him the amateur chess player who desperately tries to ward off a checkmate move by move without any sense of mastery of the game. I think that God already knows how to win the chess game, but depending on how obedient we are to Him, He may win that game in more or less moves. He has a plan for whatever we present to Him, and will execute accordingly, but He has already made up His mind about how to respond.

If God changes His course of action based on our decisions, it means that He may have made up His mind, and we still have an impact on the outcome of the future. Rephrasing a little, just because God has made up His mind, it does not mean that our choices have no impact and that our prayers are futile against a fatalistic universe. God changes His course of action based on what we do, and obedience commands blessing while disobedience comes with curses. What appears to have been done, is to say that if God's course of action changes, it implies that He has changed His mind. This I disagree with, because of God can change His mind, He is easily fickle, unfaithful and capricious.

What have I concluded so far? I had better summarise for your and my sake.

First: God does not change His mind, He has a plan that He has decided on, but His exact course of action is dependent on how we respond to Him. Thus our actions and prayers still have an impact on the outcome of the future, and are significant.

Second: If God can know our decisions in advance, it seems as though there must be a governing law of the Will. If there is such a governing law, then the will cannot ever be free because it will be deterministic according to that law and God is running a clockwork act.

Third: If God cannot know our decisions in advance, then He cannot choose to bring judgement prematurely on someone or some nation because you never know if maybe, just maybe, they might come to salvation before He destroys them.

The Second and Third points are mutually exclusive, and so in there must be a flaw in the argument somewhere. I'll leave it there for now, but perhaps I ought to end on a final thought. Is Will a particle or a probability? By this, I mean, is there a definite result when we are presented with a choice in terms of what we will choose, or is it a probability of say, 35% and 65%? It seems an awful lot like quantum mechanics. If that is what our wills are based on, which would seem terribly arbitrary. I do not like the idea that my life is a series of probabilities, it seems too evolutionary. So I ask now, what is choice?

Perspectives: The Purpose of Eden

As part of the course materials here on my discipleship training program at YWAM Lausanne, we are reading the book 'Futureville' by Skye Jethani. His premise is that God created humanity in order to represent Himself on this created world, and we still preserve that impulse to establish order, create beauty and live in abundance, even in our fallen state. I've found his argument quite compelling so far, partly because it resonates with the ideas which I have had for Eldwan's primeval garden. Furthering this was the point which Ms. Maureen Menard made about how we as human beings are to learn more about God as we mature, and as we do so, bear out His image, and that this process is able to happen without the interference of sin, if we are obedient.

Analysing the Genesis account gives us greater clarity on this pre-peccata state. The whole world is not in a blissful state of Eden, only the garden is. If Genesis 2: 4-24 is interpreted as a detailed account of day 6 of creation, we see that on that day, the Lord Himself plants a garden in the east, setting up a precedent for what the rest of the earth is to look like, a template for man's creative work. In our world, we have little evidence that this process went too far before it was derailed.

In Eldwan though, by whatever virtue that differentiates humans in my universe from ours, or that has arisen from deviations of Eleyon's character from YHWH's, they do not make that fateful decision to rebel quite as quickly. So humanity establishes several cities in the garden, their population grows, and things appear to be going well. When the rebellion does split the population, Eleyon decides that He will isolate the problem and thus creates the cradle, raising the mountain range perimeter and removing the garden to the recently isolated 'New World' of sorts, where they can continue their original purpose, relatively unaffected by the sinful nature of their fallen kin.

Perspectives: Foreboding Confirmations

Two lectures into the discipleship training course here at YWAM has already been insightful, for they have constructed a wonderfully logical way of approaching the faith. I am hearing profundities I have vaguely deduced articulated with refreshing clarity and precision. 

The first series of lectures is by YWAM veteran Paul Hawkins, concerning the character and nature of God. It is a vivifying distillation of theology derived from biblical and practical experience. Which, after reading Sophie's world, I would call a twin approach of knowledge by perception and language, for written records fall under the avenue of linguistics for me. 

He has thus far spoken on how God is a person, or as a trinitarian perspective might suggest, three persons relating in perfect unity. Paul suggests that a person must have intelligence, emotion and volition, three delightfully latinate words. Intelligence is further delineated as the qualities of self-consciousness, reasonability, imagination and memory. He went on to prove that since God has all these qualities, evidenced by the biblical record, we can be confident of His full personhood.

These are several of the points which I found as confirmation of what answers I arrived at as I had meditated on the nature of God and creation. After going to the series of lectures on the nature of the Trinity in 2013, I learnt about the Father, the Son and the Spirit, and the perfect communion that unites them. I felt that while I was never explicitly stated, the reason why God created us to was to extend that perfect source of love and joy to other persons. I had heard previously that we were created in order to worship God. To some extent this is true, but more importantly, we were created to have intimate, personal relationships with Him. To be sure, worship is an essential and beautiful aspect of our relationship with God, but I almost feel that the full realisation of our relationship with God will be more than the word 'worship' can do justice to. I daresay we are called to be more than worshippers, we are called to be children of God, fellow partakers in that inheritance which Christ has already received.

Second, he spoke about the intensity of God's emotions, which I am very glad to have assurance on now. I had sensed that as one comes to know God and to understand Christ, one does not approach a sort of tranquil enlightenment, at utter acceptance of the world. Conversely, we move into greater and stronger emotional and motivational states, for God is a God of crazy love, of impartial compassion and righteous anger. As we know Him more, our hearts likewise imitate His perspectives and emotions. Just as the opposite of love is not hatred, but apathy, the opposite of God's emotional intensity could be viewed as an emotional insensitivity, which is wont to develop if one is detached from God for an extended period of time, living a purposeless life, where emotions are not a boon but a bane. The tranquility of monastery life and buddhist apotheosis seems appealing, but it resolves the suffering of the world in a philosophical sense, not in the practical sense which will compel positive action which God desires. It is an answer that appeals to the world, that we must come to accept the suffering and distress as part of a grander whole, that there is no good and evil, but only oneness where duality is a refracted dispersal of unity. There is a mysticism to it, but it is not what a believer in the Christian God is drawn to. The Christian God calls us to fix what is unjust, to work against exploitation and disease and poverty, to do what we can to heal the brokenness of this world, instead of denying our sense of morality in a series of noble, but misguided, mental gymnastic manoeuvres.

Third, his central point was 'What you believe about God will affect what you believe about everything else.' This reminds me very much of a much loved quote from C. S. Lewis 'I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.' It ties in with a principle that I have experienced in my own life, that once I learned about the nature of God, through bible studies and prayer, personal experience and the testimonies of others, I become increasingly able to make sense of an otherwise inconsistent and irrational world. When one learns about one aspect of God, it augments one's faith in all the other characteristics one has already observed. And the more one learns about Him, the more one can say 'There is none like You.' without a sliver of doubt.

A Biennial Review

I began conceiving the world of Eldwan as a vast work of synthesis, a creative platform for me to wrestle with the twin giants of Biblical record and modern scientific knowledge. These past two years have afforded me the time to reflect, acquire information, and weave ever more of what I have learnt into the fabric of my sub-creation. I am glad for them, for I doubt that I will have such leisurely temporal abundance when my education resumes in eight short months.

It has come a long way, though I suppose in retrospect, many of my earlier posts seem juvenile and poorly informed. In particular, the ones on language, for which I was certainly inadequately versed in the vernacular of grammar and linguistics. As such, the development of Tas Eldwaraj is suspended until I have studied a few more languages; a checklist of which now includes Hebrew, French, Chinese and Greek, and perhaps German and Japanese. Just as how one must play and familarise oneself with pre-existing music before innovating with compositions of one's own, it seems sensible to me to immerse my mental faculties in ablutions of existing languages before returning to construct my own.

The history of Eldwan has been greatly enriched through my readings of non-fiction history, a newfound love of which is making me question my former myopic academic affinity with the natural sciences. I never imagined what it would spiral into when I first began to carry those central characters in my idle thoughts.

My writing encountered quite an obstacle with the influx of new information received from the faith bible institute creationism class. In particular, the relationship between continental drift, extinction and the deluge. I had constructed the movement of Eldwan's elves around the idea that continental drift occurred at the time of the fall of humankind, while the flood was a local event occurring between the ages of light and water. This is not in alignment with the suggested interpretation of the Noahic flood from the creationism class, and so I was caught in a dilemma between abandoning what I had developed for Eldwan, or accurately representing what could approximate the Biblical account in an alternate universe. I have resolved, as of the writing of this post, to remain with my original ideas. This does risk misrepresentation and confusion with regard to the literal creationism and flood account, which I feel sorely, for I would hate to add another poorly supported idea to the general confusion surrounding this topic. However, I also feel the need to write something distinct, something apart from what has happened in this universe. I find myself prone to mixing what I would like to be true with what actually is, and in writing something so similar to the development of this world has admittedly, been confusing for me. 

Eldwan is not the universe we live in, it takes elements of reality, but not all of it, and that is one of the quintessential charms of fantasy. I hope you'll have patience with me, dear reader, as the metamorphosis of Eldwan from inconsistent ideas and pre-fabricated characters to a coherent mythos continues this solar revolution.

Vignette: Mere Meaning 1

There was a crone who used to visit the town library, the building I was privileged to live just across from. So I noticed her, a hunched wrinkled devotee of the written word, always in a pastel blouse with a black skirt and shoes, entering and exiting between the Ionic columns of that noble edifice. She brought a trolley with her, which changed its contents like the clouds gracing the sky, that is, frequently and never the with repetition. If she was really reading at such an astonishing pace, I thought that she must have broken a Guiness record for speedreading. Then one day she simply didn't show, nor the next. I looked out for her in the obituaries, but her face never showed between all the comforting verses and condolences. She came over to exchange words with me sometimes, that's how I knew her appearance. I supposed that she must have exhausted all the books in our library and moved on to graze on greener intellectual pastures.

A year passed. About the next September, and I decided to take a longer route for my evening jog, so ended up running through a neighbourhood I didn't know all too well. There, I saw her again, sitting on a bench out on a veranda. My curiousity broke my run, a conversation like a beckoning golden apple to Diana, and I walked up to her fence and rang the doorbell. There was no response from her. I thought she might have suffered a stroke; that would explain her sudden literary cessation. Panting, I watched her for awhile, earphones still tuned to Dvorak's New World. A crescendo reminded me that I might want to put aside the music to catch any faint utterances from her lips, so I did. Yet she was motionless, as still as a terracotta footsoldier, and as silent as one too. Poor dear, trapped in that body. What good was acquiring all the knowledge of the world if it could not be articulated?

The door to her house opened, and a middle-aged man emerged. He wore slacks and an oversized T-shirt; a thin, anaemic man, who looked like he might evaporate at any moment. He walked over to her with a tray of food, then lifted his head and saw me by their gate. Be amiable, I thought, so I waved to him. He traversed the short path to the gate and greeted me.

'We don't get many visitors,' he said, 'My name is Alef, but most people call me Al, I'm her eldest son.'

He told me she had a stroke some time ago, I suppose that must have been when her mobility was compromised. I asked about her trips to the library, telling him I used to see her cart volume after volume out of those holy halls. He told me she was a linguist by training, that she enjoyed cataloguing the way that written languages developed and how they were used. She had been working on a massive project during the sunset of her life, he said, and the stress must have got to to her during those final frenetic weeks. One morning she had become as mute as Zechariah, and things had deteriorated from there.

'She hardly communicates now. I just feed and clothe her, my siblings help me to support her financially, but they're all preoccupied with their own affairs.'

'Well,' I said, 'at least she has you. I was puzzled by the disappearance of a fellow ardent of our town library. I'm sorry to hear she's like this now.'

'She was a kind mother, sharp-tongued but well-intentioned. She'd always complain about how none of us could understand her because we children only conversed and comprehended in one language, and not to mention in a language like English that obscures meaning so.'

'It must have been interesting to be raised by a linguist. '

'I don't think so, at least, not by her. She kept most of her work separate from our domestic life. What she did try to do was teach us nouns and verbs in multiple languages as we were growing up, we three children took to that with varying degrees of affinity.'

'My family only utilises English.'

'My mother would not approve, that I can say for certain. You mentioned the library, do you enjoy reading?'

'Indubitably. Anything from Homer, Cicero and Dante to Melville, Asimov and Dickens or Sun Tzu, Murakami and Narayan to Tufail, Khayyam and Oz.'

We heard a clatter as I uttered my statement. Turning in its direction of origin, I saw Al's mother, teeth grit, trying to bend down for her culinary utensils. Al responded with fluid attentiveness and went into the house to obtain a replacement set. I moved beside her and lowered myself to pick them up.

Standing where I was, I became aware of two letters which she had fashioned by arranging her rice on the plate. 'L' and 'A'. She waved for the chopsticks, but Al soon emerged and passed her a clean pair. She got to work, forming 'T' and 'I', and as she was working on the last letter, Al said to me, 'She wants you to go and learn Latin.'

'Learning languages has never been a high priority for me.'

She frowned, and turned her face away like a schoolgirl offended by the ignorance her class' resident unscholarly clown. Al chuckled, 'She doesn't wish to see you again unless you do so.'

'I'll get to it someday then. I'd best be off, sorry to have taken up quite a bit of time!'

'Not at all, I'm enjoying this disruption of monotony. Goodbye!'

'Goodbye!'

As I ran back to the pavement, Al called out, 'You might want to check the origin of that word 'Goodbye''. I snorted, vaguely amused. Waving to them both, I resumed my jog and reflected on the oddity of this encounter.