Fallen sparrows
Francis Poretto, the author of the very fine Eternity Road blog wrote in reply to a recent post:
The Christian mythos — I’m a devout Catholic, so don’t take this as a denigration — makes much more sense if one avoids the notion that God had to sacrifice His Only Son for the redemption of Mankind. Given his position as Chiref Executive of The Universe, He doesn’t / didn’t / never will “have to” do any particular thing. He chose to do it that way. Why? Good question. I plan to ask Him, if I get the chance.
Yeah, I have some questions too. But I don’t really understand your comment. God’s freedom is precisely what puzzles me.
God is said to be both omniscient and omnipotent. Such a being is unconstrained, and gets exactly what he wants. And there’s the rub. An omnipotent being extinguishes the freedom of all other beings. Everything that happens is as per his will. It cannot be otherwise. There can be no surprises; everything was fixed before the world was made. Calvinists understand this, as do Muslims.
The passages below have stayed with me for years. They were written by Annie Dillard, in a book called For the Time Being.
A chromosome crosses or a segment snaps, in the egg or the sperm, and all sorts of people result. You cannot turn a page in Smith’s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation without your heart’s pounding from simple terror. You cannot brace yourself. Will this peculiar baby live? What do you hope? The writer calls the paragraph describing each defect’s effects, treatment, and prognosis “Natural History.” Here is a little girl about two years old. She is wearing a dress with a polka dot collar. The two sides of her face do not meet normally. Her eyes are far apart and under each one is a nostril. She has no nose at all, only a no-man’s-land of featureless flesh and skin, an inch or two wide, that roughly bridges her face’s halves. You pray that this grotesque child is mentally deficient as well. But she is not. “Normal intelligence” the text says.
Of some vividly disfigured infants and children–of the girl who has long hair on her cheeks an almost no lower jaw, of the three fingered boy whose lower eyelids look as if he is pulling them down to scare someone, of the girl who has a webbed neck and elbows, “rocker-bottom” feet, “sad fixed features” and no chin– the text says “Intelligence normal. Cosmetic surgery recommended.”
Turn the page. What would cosmetic surgery do for these two little boys? Their enormous foreheads bulge like those of cartoon aliens, their noses are tiny and pinched, the size of rose thorns; and they lack brows, lashes, and chins. “Normal intelligence”.
Of God, the Kabbalah asserts: Out of that which is not, He made that which is. He made great columns from the impalpable ether.
And Matthew writes Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.
Posted on October 1st, 2006 by pwyll
Filed under: religion
Entries RSS
Yeah, like our editor above, I’ve got a few questions for Her too.
But I can wait, patiently contemplating Mahalia Jackson’s brief singing performance in the ’50s remake of the film “Imitation of Life.”
Our host wrote,
” God is said to be both omniscient and omnipotent. Such a being is unconstrained, and gets exactly what he wants. And there’s the rub. An omnipotent being extinguishes the freedom of all other beings. Everything that happens is as per his will. It cannot be otherwise. ”
God is assigned many properties. What exactly is “omniscient”? Have you ever tried to precisely define what it means? It is an extremely slippery notion and, I would argue, essentally meaningless. The same is true of “omnipotent”. Assigning universal properties is risky business.
I am much more powerful than my youngest son. I could force him to do exactly what I wanted each moment of the day. That is, I could turn him into my slave. I choose not to do so, since I love him deeply. I want him to make his own decisions, and grow into the man I know he is capable of becoming.
For the moment, let’s say God is 10^1000 times more powerful than the most powerful human being in his ability to control things. Perhaps God chooses not to control things. Why make that choice? Perhaps the story told is true. God loves his children, and is waiting patiently for them to become the men and women they are capable of becoming.
To borrow from one of my favorite songs, perhaps God is merely,
“Watching and waiting, for a friend to play with…”
My radically spiritual progressive libertarian colleague states above that “…God is assigned many properties. What exactly is “omniscient”? Have you ever tried to precisely define what it means? It is an extremely slippery notion and, I would argue, essentally meaningless. The same is true of “omnipotent”. Assigning universal properties is risky business. …”
Well said.
ARSPL,
I grant that both omniscience and omnipotence are slippery notions, but these are traditional ideas in theology. I did not originate them. I try to argue on the believers’ home court, as it were. If you say there are no omniscient beings, I’m with you.
It seems to me that Christianity only makes sense if you don’t think too much about it. I try to think about it.
As a kid I was sold a bill of goods, and am still trying to make sense of it. Mostly I wonder what it is other people believe, and whether they can make any sense of claims that make no sense to me.
I was sold the same bill of goods as a kid. It still does make sense to me, but the windows in the cathedral at Chartres and the Italian Renaissance made me understand that there were things I wasn’t go to understand.