Carnal Reason

I recently commented on the relationship of God’s omniscience to human free will. Francis Porretto of Eternity Road was kind enough to reply; here is part of what he said:

God created Time. He stands outside it. Indeed, only He knows it for what it really is. We humans cannot, at least while we’re on this side of the grass. To posit that God’s relation to Time is as rigidly linear as ours is to commit an intellectual arrogance that precludes the resolution of the “problem” of Divine omniscience.

We who are trapped in one-way, linear time, who confront choices that cannot be unmade, see only one set of consequences from a human decision: the set that we “actually” experience. If the Divine consciousness were like our own, that would indeed place the doctrine of omniscience and the doctrine of free will in irremediable opposition; one or the other would have to give way.

Therefore, God’s relation to Time must differ fundamentally from our own. Perhaps He sees Time not as a linear progression from each instant to the next, but more like a two-dimensional map, where the consequences of every possible human choice are depicted, while men are free to select among them. Or perhaps we are not what we naively see ourselves to be: linear creatures continuous along a single, infinitesimally wide strand of moments. Perhaps we really do make every available choice, and live through the consequences of all of them. The thread of our consciousness would in that case be a single fiber in a multidimensional tapestry of existence: a supreme work of Art by an Artist inherently beyond all appreciation or criticism.

We think we know ourselves. We do not. We think the tools with which we have learned to reason about our physical realm are sufficient to unlock the mysteries surrounding the nature and character of God. They are not.

I don’t think that the nature of time sheds much light here. I did not, and do not argue from physical determinism. Physics is a detail of implementation. My point is that God’s omniscience and omnipotence logically entail that no created agent or process is free.

Consider the universe in its entirety as a single 4 (or n) dimensional object, one of those dimensions being time. This object is an artifact created by God. Each and every one of its features could have been different had God so chosen. How the universe evolves over time, the mechanisms of physical law, these are simply design features. As you say, God created time.

But the artist creating ex nihilo leaves no detail unspecified; to do so is to leave it uncreated. Everything was chosen, everything designed. The unspecified is exactly no thing.

Is there some feature in the creation that crept in against the will of God? Where did it come from, and what sustains it? What does Orlando say that Shakespeare did not write?

Posted on October 11th, 2006 by pwyll
Filed under: religion