g-rh (04/23/83)
I promised myself that I wouldn't get involved in these net discussions; however the discussion on omnipotence/omniscience/ free will/predestination/determinism is interesting and I do know something about the issues involved, so I will toss my two cents in. As a side note, let me first add that you don't have to be a Christian to find these concepts comprehensible; I am not a Christian and I do. If I can, I would like to try to clear up some of the confusion. One difficulty is that many people confuse predestination and determinism. Determinism is the idea that the state of the universe at any particular time is a complete specification of the universe. I.e., given the current state of the universe we could, in principle, calculate the state at any other time. (It can be shown that this cannot, in principle, be done in real time.) Determinism implies predestination. To properly understand the concept of predestination you must differentiate between being in the system and being outside the system. An analogy may be useful here. Think of the output from a computer program. While the program was running you may not have been able to predict what it was going to do. Suppose, however, that the run is completed and you are looking at a complete trace of the run. You can tell what would have happened at any point in the run simply by looking at what did happen. A better analogy may be a novel which you have already read; the characters in the story don't know what is going to happen to them, but you do. To you, their fate is predestined. Their "flow of time" is static to you because you are outside of their system. If there is a God who is outside the system then everything is predestined (from God's viewpoint) because God can look at the universe over all time as a completed whole. There is a similar confusion about omniscience. There is no particular difficulty about the idea of a being outside of the space-time system knowing everything that happened within the system. (Being outside the system does not, ipso facto, imply that you can know everything that happened within the system.) There are real difficulties with the concept of time-bound omniscience, on the other hand. If you can know the future, what is to prevent you from changing the future. The trickiest part of Christian theology is the concept that God can put himself into the system and that we correspondingly have a part that is outside of the system. Think of it this way: Suppose I have a large computer program. I run it and look at the output. I am dissatisfied so I put some patches in and rerun it. I keep doing this until I am satisfied. Think of the final run as reality; the patches are, if you will, miracles. This much is straightforward. The tricky part is that the program is interactive. I.e. God not only views the system from the outside but also participates within it as a time bound participant. This is not, as it might seem, paradoxical because God is not really time bound; God is a completed infinity. God cannot change His mind because change implies submission to time. Think of the universe as multi-dimensional tapestry with time as one of the dimensions. God's actions are simply part of that tapestry which is (from God's viewpoint) static, external, and unchanging as is God himself. The issues of free will and choice can be resolved in the same manner. They exist within the system (i.e. from a time bound viewpoint) but not from outside the system. If I understand the matter correctly, the Christian view on souls amounts to the belief we have a timeless component that appears time bound to us.