Immovable Object, Irresistible Force

Though it's been a while since I wrote and found publishers for my two books on the subject, the concept of multiversality remains a significant part of my theology.  It's a cosmology that has explanatory power, that's startlingly compatible with Christian faith, and that...as a scientific proposition...is peskily burdened by inherent unprovability.  

Well, that, and the propensity of corporate media conglomerates to use the idea as a way to squeeze an tedious infinity of narratives out of a single intellectual property.  As manifested by our crass capitalist culture, multiverse storytelling just kinda feels like a flowery tessellation in the ever deepening rot of American moral decay.  I'm lookin' at you, Deadpool.  But then, that's pretty much everything around us these days, and hardly fair to a perfectly lovely way of understanding both the nature of being and the Divine self-expression.

Anyhoo, when I woke yesterday, I came out of dreaming thinking about immovable objects and irresistible forces.

There's a child's challenge to the existence of God, one that I remember from boyhood.  "If God is all powerful, can God create a rock so heavy that God can't lift it?"  Oooh, gotcha, says the newly minted middle-school atheist.  Because, you know, then God isn't powerful enough to lift it, or, like, there are, like, limits, you know, which means, like, he also isn't powerful, right?  Checkmate, dude!

This is just a variant on the "what happens if an irresistible force meets an immovable object" thought exercise, of course, and you can smack it aside as an abstraction, one that is inherently unanswerable.

But that's no fun.

Because, sure, "irresistible force/immovable object" is a self-annihilating proposition.  The two concepts are, in relationship, unable to co-exist if set against one another.  Like, say, matter and antimatter.  In our spacetime, such a thing cannot be.  But in a multiverse, well, things are different.

Such a physics could be put into place within a pocket universe, but it would be inherently unstable, and destroy itself.  In a theistic Multiverse where God's creative self-expression is limitless, this could have been done in infinite variety, forever.  So, boom.

One could argue, easily, from intent.  In immovable object would only be created with immovability as its intent and purpose.  If God makes something that God cannot move, then the Divine intent would be immovability.  Moving an object made to be immovable would imply a dissonance in purpose and action, or imply an absence of knowledge about future intent.  Like, say, if the Creator made a universe where the physics was only space or forms of matter, but did not include time.  Such a universe would be unmovable, because without time, there could be no change, ergo, no "motion" would be possible.  It would be set like a diamond into being, beyond God's desire to change through the workings of force.

But why would God do such a thing?  I mean, why would a being of infinite power intentionally create something that it could not change through the application of said power?

You know, like the human will.

Tribes and Tribal Gods

It's peculiar, of late, the degree to which the idea of tribalism has been surfacing in the world.  With every act of brutality on the part of ISIS, every act of monstrousness from Boko Haram, every dark and unpleasant bit of nastiness out there, it seems tribalism is to blame.

"It's these backwards monsters and their tribal God," or so goes the refrain.

"Tribal" becomes shorthand for insular, stunted, and ignorant, snarling clans of highlanders ever butchering one another, the Hatfields and the McCoys firing potshots.  It is juxtaposed with the deep virtues of modern and "postmodern" thinking.  We are, after all, the ones who make decisions based on reason and enlightened self-interest.

We're not tribal.

Perhaps that's true.  But as much as the concept of the tribe has been getting bad press lately, I think it's not entirely deserved.  I think that, mostly, because of my recent doctoral research into the dynamics of small faith communities.  Sure, little gatherings can be bitter, unpleasant, and toxic.  Tribal relations can be messy.  But not every church-tribe is Westboro Baptist.

Small communities can also be healthy and warm and gracious.  They can be places of learning and mutual support. They are places of belonging, of the interrelationship of persons on a profound level.

Tribes are the intimate communities--by affinity or by kin--that constitute one of the most elemental forms of human relationship.  They're missing, to large degree, in our broader society, where we are fragmented off into demographic silos, or regimented into systems and structures that are resemble industrial production.

These are certainly effective and efficient and convenient.  But they are not organically human.

As Carol Howard Merritt pointed out in her book  (can I call it her "classic book" yet?  hmmm) those alternate systems of organization tend to leave us hungry for ways of being together that resonate more with our essential humanity.  In this shattered, diffuse, scattered age, that's a major problem.

So when I hear "tribal" described as functionally synonymous with "ignorant" or "violent," I rankle a wee bit.

Sure, a "tribal god" is a problem.  But only if the tribe is the god.

It is equally a problem if a nation is the god.  Or an ideology is the god.  Or if we ourselves are the focus of our worship.

Six of one, half dozen of the other.

The One Who Writes with Fire

It came in a moment of reflection.  It was a brief meditation over a concept, or rather, a meditation over the interplay between two ways of conceptualizing the divine.

On the one hand, the concept--often troubling--of God as a consuming fire.  Generally, we do not want to be burned.  Burning is bad.  Burning hurts, a bunch if it's you encountering a hot pan, rather more so if you're Servetus after a particularly contentious Presbytery meeting.   Despite all the emo-Jesus Christian Contemporary Music that tries to make it seem romantic, fire-language still feels more than a little bit too reminiscent of Tomas de Toquemada.

Plus, there's a strong negative theology of burning.  Burning is what happens to bad people.  Lakes of fire!  Hot coals!  Sinners get the weeping and gnashing, plus, did we mention you'll be on fire?

Mysticism, of course, has always embraced the divine fire.  It is that light that is kindled in us.  It is the light that awaits, and that we will embrace as it consumes us.

This is the mystic vision, in both Christianity and every other human religion.  It's what Jesus brought and lived out, and what Paul affirmed and spread.

But America is not a very mystic place, and the idea that we will be subsumed into anything annoys us.  That'll destroy our individuality, we grump.  America has always been fiercely self-oriented, but now, it's reached a fever pitch.  Our consumer culture needs us to be distinct and separate and conveniently trackable, more than any culture in human history.

Consumed by the Numinous?  Really?  How will Netflix know our preferences in heaven if it can't pigeonhole our demographic profile?  Think what being indistinctly suffused into the nature of the Holy would do to Amazon Divines business model!  And the Google AfterLifeAds?  They'd be completely random!

The horror.

To my reflections on this idea came another image of the divine, that of God as Author.  I like this image, for reasons that are very slightly transparent.  Yeah, I like to write.  So sure, I see God as an author.  And yes, there's a wee bit of projection involved.  I get that.  But I'm aware of the limits, and aware that it's metaphor.

It just happens to be an excellent metaphor.  The very best.  Ahem.

God is the storyteller, the one who spins out the narratives of our existence and of time and space.  He tells not just our story, but ourselves, writing us into being.  He has authorship over us, and authority, and yet allows us to participate in the telling of the tale, like a master DM spinning out an elegantly complex D&D campaign for a circle of dear friends.

Two different images.  There's the One who Writes.  And the One who Burns.

When I was a little child, those would have been very different metaphors.

But what struck me, in my reflection, was that "burning" and "writing" are now interchangeable words.  They have become synonyms, in this digital age.  Burning is how we write, how we set data into a physical medium.

The two wove up in a reflection, of a God who writes us out with fire, burning the truth of our life into creation.

All this before my second cup of coffee.  What a productive morning.

The Five Names of God

In poring through commentaries for my preachin' this week, I wound up with a fascinating little fragment that just didn't fit anywhere.  Pretty much every week, this happens, as the ideas come pouring out.

Oh, sure, I could have shoehorned in a paragraph or two, plugging it in there somewhere even though it had nothing to do with the thrust of the message.  But it didn't really fit, so best to leave it here, where it can stand in its own.

In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus talks a great deal about what the Reign of God will look like.  It's the point of most of those pesky little parables he insisted on telling us.  In John, the spin is different.  It's a more intimate Gospel, drawing from a separate but harmonious oral tradition, one in which Jesus describes his identity.  I am this, he says.  I am that.

But I'd not noticed, not until I bumbled across it in a commentary, that there are only five direct descriptive statements about God in the New Testament.  Meaning, these are statements that fill in the following:

"God is _________."

Seemed like an interesting little datapoint, and worth attending to, if the Christian witness nature of our Creator is of any relevance to our faith.  So here they are, in no particular order.

1) God is Spirit.  (John 4:24)  That's pneuma, in the Greek used by John.  Like its Hebrew linguistic analog ruach, it can mean "breath," or "wind," or, "spirit."  However you slice it, it is a living and dynamic thing.  It's the stuff of life, a creative energy that isn't just churning and purposeless chaos, but that gives form and shape to being.

2) God is Love. (1 John 4:8)   From the Johannine tradition, we famously hear that God is love.  That doesn't mean wuv, or infatuation, or erotic hunger.  The term used by that tradition is agape, a form of love that involves a radically selfless participation in the other.

3) God is Light.  (1 John 1:5)  Again, from John's tradition, we hear that God is light.  That's phos, in the Greek, and it speaks to both purity and illumination.  It's worth noting here that John's paradoxically complex simplicity weaves the identity of God the Creator up with the identity of Jesus here, as Jesus is also given this name in John 1:7-9.

4) God is a Consuming Fire.  (Hebrews 12:29)  We take a break from John, and get a little blort from the author of Hebrews.  It's a difficult letter for us now, as it attempts to articulate Christian faith through the lenses of sacrificial temple worship.  But in claiming that understanding of God as fire, it plays off of a longstanding sacred tradition.

5) God is Love. (1 John 4:16)  Yeah, I know.  We already did this one.  But it's sorta like New York, as that impossibly cheesy old 70's song goes.  So good they named it twice.  It bears repeating, because it's absolutely core to what we Jesus folk are saying when we speak about God.  

Somewhere, in the dance between all of these elements, is the God that we as Christians proclaim.

"Is God Dying?"

A few weeks ago, with my son ensconced in his drum lesson, I settled in at the library across the street to do some light magazine reading for pleasure.  It's still satisfying reading things that aren't screens, although I'm one of an increasingly small number of folks who actually do this.

The magazine in question: the December issue of Scientific American, which teased me in with an article written by a couple of psychologists on a recent study tracking the impact of internet use on the human capacity to remember.  It was...well...about right.  The author suggested that humans evolved to rely on distributed social memory, meaning, if you didn't know something, your friend would.  That's just part of the way human beings think and store information.

Now, our "friend" is Google, and we're increasingly using it to store our memories.  I've written about this before, of course, but I also live it out.  That's the point of this blog, after all.  It's my cloud-memory, set to "share" so that it can be yours, too.

But that article led me to another article.

"Is God Dying," it asked.  

It was an article by an atheist/skeptic, writing on the varying different studies showing a decline of religiosity in developed countries.  It was, to be fair, not a polemic at all, just a teaser title to suck in the reader.  Because the idea of God dying because certain human faith traditions are diminishing/changing is absurd.  If God exists, our faith or lack of faith is immaterial to that existence. 

But the concept underlying the question sent my mutant brain on a related but unintended path.

God is not dead or dying.  But is God alive in the first place?

I mean, sure, yeah, we Jesus folk will talk about the Living God...but when we think about life, and what it means to be alive, I'm not sure our statements about the Divine really mesh with the way that we understand what it means to be a living being.

In a biological sense, living systems have certain characteristics.  As we look out into the immensity of our universe, humankind hopes that somewhere, somehow, we might find that we're not the only ones here.  And as biology has struggled to come up with ways to understand what fundamentally constitutes "life," so's we'll have some clue of what it is when we stumble across it out there in the vastness, they've come up with some fundamentals.

Like: Life changes.  Life grows.

Has that ever been a part of the way we understand God?  I'm not sure that it has.  The idea of immutability, unchangeability, and permanence are kinda sorta core concepts when we consider God's identity.  Even if we factor in the radical generativity and "fecundity" of the divine, that change and growth is bounded by God's atemporal nature.

Like:  Life reproduces.

Yeah, I know, we say Jesus is the Son of God, but Christianity has never meant by that anything like the whole "Zeus as a Goose doing the humpty-hump with Leda" thing.  God creates and begets.  God doesn't reproduce in the same way that organic systems reproduce.  You want to quibble with that, I'll invite you to engage with the millennia of orthodox Christian exploration of the concept.  When you're done, come back and let's talk...in about a hundred years or so.

I think, ultimately, that the idea of God being "alive" seems to be a category error, particularly if we understand life in biological terms.

Stephen Hawking and The Alien God

In thinking about Stephen Hawking's ongoing "the multiverse means no need for God" schtick, I found myself the other day reflecting on something else he'd pitched out there a few years back.

Looking out at the great sprawl of intergalactic space, Hawking said that he was convinced there was alien life out there.  He was also a bit concerned at our noisy efforts to make contact.  Why?  Because if life out there was as much a mess as life on earth, the most likely outcome would be that our shouting out into the great deep would just call attention to our stuff.

"Hey aliens," we'd be saying.  "Look at all the complex organics we have!  And we're delicious!  We taste just like t'chiK'nnn!"

And they'd show up, and it'd be like that closing scene in Apocalypto.  It'd be the end of everything.  We'd be outmatched, outgunned, and out-thought.  A universe as vast as ours has surely spawned beings who are dangerously more powerful than humankind.

So his recommendation?  We should lay low.   Be vewy, vewy quiet.

I found this interesting on a couple of levels.

I do wonder, quite frankly, why any spacefaring sentient being would bother making the trip just to take our [stuff.]  Yeah, we're impressed with our planet and all, but what's most interesting about our world is...what?  I mean, the universe is chock-full of hydrogen for fuel, carbon, and metals.  There's not exactly a shortage out there.  It's an impossibly generous cornucopia, our universe is.

The only thing interesting on this little rocky world, frankly, is life.  And possibly sentience, although many days I find myself doubting it.

But I also find it neat that he sees the logical likelihood of alien life in our time and space.  It makes sense, and I agree with him.  We may never know such beings, given the distances involved.  But they are likely there.

Where I diverge is when we step outside of time and space, and suddenly the same mind that can imagine impossibly advanced alien beings can't quite wrap itself around the idea that perhaps in the vastness of all that is lies a Mind that underlies all being.

Maybe if he visualized God with little antennae.  Hmmm.

Stephen Hawking, Specks, and Elephants

In a recent talk at Cal Tech, Stephen Hawking reiterated his cosmological assertion of a multiverse from that agglomeration of theories loosely called "M-Theory."  As he is wont to do, he then followed it with the attention-grabbing assertion that God is not necessary for the creation of our universe.

I am, of course, thankful to Steve for keeping this issue fresh, particularly given that my book on faith in the multiverse is soon to be released.  But I've also been thinking lately about scope and scale in the multiverse, and in particular the place of our time and space relative to what quantum theory suggests might be the actual nature of existence.

From that gazing out at the vastness, I find myself wondering about the wisdom of such an assertion.  God?  Not necessary?  Based on what?  Based on observations of the mechanics of our time and space, one might say.

But what does that really mean?  Oh, sure, our spacetime seems big.  And on the scale of humanity, it is really rather quite intimidatingly large.

From my musings about that, I find myself then forced to what would seem to be a logical assumption about how the entirety of our observable universe fits into the Many Worlds.  It is infinitesimal.  Small beyond smallness.  One of a minimum of ten to the five-hundred universes, Hawking himself has argued.

It's like observing one solitary lepton against the scale of our own space-time.

Given the wildly variant qualities of subatomic particles, and what may well be the wildly variant physical constants of universes, I found myself wondering at Hawking's certainty.

It's like the classic blind-men-describing-the-elephant story.  Remember that one?  What does an elephant look like, they are asked, as they each explore a different part of the creature.  "It looks like a snake," says the one observing the trunk.  "It's like a wall," says the one at the flank.   "It's like a tree," says the one at the leg.  "No, no, it's definitely a snake," says the one who...wait.

Oops.  That's not the version I meant to tell.  Ahem.

Anyway, you know the story.  As we observe our spacetime in this elephant of a multiversal creation, it's like we're observing a single electron in a water molecule in a fatty cell in the elephant's posterior.

From this, atheism's proudly certain proclamation of a godless multiverse seems an absurd overreach.

Remaining humble seems the best approach.

Another World, Another Me

Over the past few days, I've picked up another game for the PS3.  It's a bit outside of my usual pattern.  I rarely play JRPGs (Japanese Role Playing Games), but the reviews had been so good that I felt like I wanted to give it a try.

The game is Ni no Kuni, which translates into English as "The Another World," or "Second World."  It's a delightful little fable about a young boy who loses his mother after a tragic accident, and his journeys into a magical world that exists in parallel with our own.

What made the game super-extra tempting was that it was the first foray into gaming by Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki's brilliant anime shop.  Ghibli has produced beautifully imaginative works like Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, My Neighbor Totoro, and others.   I loves me some Ghibli, I do.

I've got about four hours of play in over the last week, and what's been most striking about this game is...well...it's just so kind.  It's one of the kindest, gentlest games I've ever played.  It took a bit of getting used to, actually.  Given that gaming tends to involve headshots and your character tearing out the still-beating hearts of your adversaries, encountering a game where your main character tries to mend the broken hearts and minds of those around him is just...different.

The protagonist is a boy, and a gentle hearted soul, not some jaded soldier or vindictive demigod.  Your missions involve bringing reconciliation to families, encouraging a soul out of a deep depression, and driving off the demons that have consumed a bitter, self-isolated workaholic.  How?  You use magic to borrow the joy and hope and enthusiasm from souls who have an overabundance and are willing to share, and then you pour those healing things into the hearts of the broken.  As a pastor, I could seriously use some of that magic myself.

It's a deeply Christian game, even if it's hidden behind wands and wizards and faerie kings with lantern nose-rings.  George MacDonald and CS Lewis would have approved.

Playing this game about a parallel world as I'm working through the edits of my forthcoming book on the theology of the multiverse is also interesting.  In Ni no Kuni, souls are "paired" across worlds, sharing experiences.  Their destinies are not the same, but they are linked.

In my own meditation and prayer life, one recurring and idiosyncratic element is my awareness that within the infinite complexity of God's creative self expression, I do not have a single destiny.  I exist, in all of my possibility, before my Creator.   This is both liberating and terrifying.   When I pray, and I do, I ask not simply for God's will to be done.  I know, within the knowledge of my Maker, that there rests the living knowledge of who I might be if I remained most true to the teachings of Jesus.   For God, I am there in that place already.

What I seek in prayer is to be conformed to that self that brings the greatest hope and joy into the world.  Not my most materially prosperous self, because material prosperity can come at a cost, and guarantees no happiness.  Not my most ferociously partisan self, because that self does harm it doesn't yet understand.  But that self that is most generous, most kind, most gracious.  That self whose scars have healed, and whose heart is whole.  I know that I exist there, that I can inhabit that place.

Faith, Prosperity, and Probability

Before wandering into some reading of Rob Bell, I'm taking a detour.

My recent completion of statistician Nate Silver's book clued me in to the existence of Thomas Bayes, an 18th century Presbyterian pastor/theologian/ mathematician/ wakeboarder.  Well, the wakeboarding thing is admittedly speculative, but we know so little about Bayes.  He is largely lost to history, having left us only two written works.  Even this picture of him isn't certain.  It might be him.  It might not.   It is also possible that he looked like this.  We're just not sure.  That this image is possibly him is sort of ironic.  Why?

One of those works gave the world Bayes Theorem, the probabilistic equation that has become the touchstone for all modern predictive statistics.   Bayes Theorem helps us account for the inherent uncertainty in all prediction.  I'm not so much interested in that one, not because it's not cool, but because it's not what floats my boat.

What I've found fascinating in doing more research on Bayes is that his work on probability appears to have arisen from a monograph on the sovereignty of God.   Back when I was a lad, obscure 18th Century monographs used to be hard to find, but Lord Bless The Internet, this is now some seriously public domain stuff.  So I went out and found a free eBook version and downloaded it to my Kindle.

It's got a typically catchy 18th century title:  Divine Benevolence, or an Attempt to Prove That the Principal End of the Divine Providence and Government is the Happiness of His Creatures.

Rolls right off the tongue, doesn't it?   Not quite sure that'd pass muster at Harper Collins these days.  "You know, Tom, we've been thinking about your title.  We need something that pops.  Our marketing guys have come up with this one, you'll love it, seriously, 'God is Cool: Seven Reasons He Wants You To be Happy.'  Oh, and that picture?  Do you have something better?"

The work itself is remarkably dense, a gleeful thicket of words piled one on top of the other.  We were wired differently in the 18th century.  With some adaptation, you can get into it.  As I've begun reading it, I can already feel how Bayes thought theologically.  Honestly?  I like the guy.

One of the questions he is clearly asking himself is data related.  Assuming we want to genuinely answer the question, what metrics would be reliable measures of Divine Benevolence?   Meaning, what would tell us that God is loving and good?

What's striking is the thing he immediately dismisses:  Material blessings.  As he reasons through it, he asks himself whether the giving of rewards is an inherent sign of goodness.

The answer: No.  No it isn't.

As Bayes sees it, rewards can be given by the manipulative to curry favor, or by a tyrant to cement their power.   They are not, in and of themselves, a reliable data point informing our assessment of another being's love or compassion.   So as he develops his argument for the probability that God is good, he rejects material blessings almost outright.

Fascinating.   Perhaps someone should tell Joel Osteen.

"The Second Amendment is From God"

That slogan leapt out at me in from a recent Associated Press article, one chronicling a series of pro-gun demonstrations in state capitals around the country.   It was purportedly emblazoned on a sign, along with other slogans of the gun-rights movement.  "Come and Take It," said one truculently, emblazoned with a farkled up sniper rifle.  "An Armed Society is a Polite Society," said another.  "God, Guns, and Guts," said a third.

But though there were plenty of reiterated claims of that "Second Amendment" phrase, there were no images of the sign bearing that theological assertion.  I just couldn't find it, either in traditional semi-objective media or the propagandist provocateurs of left and right wings.  Huh.

But still.  It was a striking phrase.

Such a statement certainly seems in keeping with the ethos of firearm ownership that has come to define the American conversation on the subject.   Owning a firearm is a "sacred" right, or so the language of that movement tends to go.  It's woven up with theologies of conflict and nation, of struggle against tyranny and the defense of freedom.

All of that might ring bright in the ears of those who want that to be real, who desire that affirmation.

But the Second Amendment is not from God.  That is simply not true, not in any rationally defensible sense of the word.  That reality goes beyond the deep tension between the ethic of violence and the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

The Second Amendment does not arise from the Sacred.  Here, I understand the sacred as that which involves some direct engagement with the Creator of the Universe.  To be sacred, a text must have been drawn and spoken out of a covenant relationship with God.  A sacred text is a signpost to the holy, to the deepest purpose of humankind, revealed from a deep connection to the One who forms and shapes all of being. It endeavors to articulate eternal truths that transcend place and culture and nation, and that speak instead to the deepest purpose of existence.

The Torah, the Prophets, and the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as found in the Gospels are sacred texts, for example.  They are explicit articulations of that form of relationship.  Even if you do not view them as sacred, that is their clear purpose and intent.

But the Constitution of the United States is not a sacred document.  It importantly does not presume to be.  The Founders explicitly did not intend it to be.  It is a self-aware product of human reason, founded on the mutual consent of the rational individuals who comprise the citizenry of our republic.  It begins with the assertion that it does not derive itself from revelation, but is instead the creation of human beings.  "We the People" have chosen to be part of this republic, and to create these guidelines for life together.  God is not to be found in the Constitution, not directly.

Our Constitution accepts, within itself, that it is a contingent and modifiable document.  It integrates into itself the particular rules for making changes as reason and mutual consent dictate.  That's the entire purpose of Article V, eh?  Amendments can be added.  Amendments can be repealed.  Again, this is not a quality of a sacred text.

Let it be said that this is a system of governance that I voluntarily support.  As a free individual, I see the Constitution of the United States of America as establishing a form of life together in which I choose to participate.  Were I not American, I would choose to be.

Let it be also said that this is how forms of political governance best express themselves theologically.  No form of government is perfect, and none should be cast in stone.  Always reformed and reforming, eh?

Let it also be said that I hold human reason to be a gift from God.  The capacity to be reasoning beings is one of the highest gifts of sentient life.  As such, a document formed and shaped by reason is a result of God's work in us.  It is not a revealed truth, but there is truth in it.

It's just that this truth is not an absolute, nor does it have the quality of the sacred.

Connections, Probability, and God's Judgment

Yesterday, as I threw a leg over my bike to ride through warmish mid-December weather, I reached down to plug my heated gear into the side of my bike.  Snap, it went, as the SAE to BMW dongle failed.  The connection was broken.

There would be no connection between my heated insert and the bike's electrical system.  There would be no toasty warm glow about my torso, making it one of those rare days I was a little bit thankful for global warming.

And why?  Why did this happen?  Well, many reasons.  The part wasn't particularly well machined, and this is the second time one has failed.  The plug is right by my left leg, meaning I bump it on occasion, which torques the internals.   And I use it a whole bunch, not being one of those leather-bound "bikers" who only take their garage candy out twice a year.  Wear and tear is a factor.

Taken in combination, those factors establish a probability of failure.  When precisely they'll combine to cause that failure, however, is simply dependent on too many things to cleanly predict.

But the part did not fail because I had two craft beers the night before, or because I'm reading a book on quantum physics, or because I prayed the Lord's Prayer twice this morning instead of my usual once.   It did not fail because I'm raising my kids Jewish, or because I chose to go for a long walk yesterday.  Oh, sure, maybe in some sense they did have an impact, in that those things contributed to that moment...but they were not significant in establishing the likelihood of that event.  The flapping of a wing of a butterfly two meters away doesn't significantly increase the probability of you being blown off your feet.

I have some sense of the connections that created that disconnection, and why things failed.

As inevitably happens after horrible events, those among us who are Jesus folk and who have a sense of connection to our Creator are struggling for a sense of why things went wrong in Sandy Hook.  How can God permit a room full of innocent children to be slaughtered?  How can it be?  How can God do that to those parents, and to the first responders...moms and dads themselves...who must gather up those broken little bodies?

It's not an easy question, and the answers are not straightforward, lying deep in the shadowy admixture of our mortality and the way we free beings betray the freedom God has given us.

There is a strong tendency among some souls to see in the impossible horror of such tragedies evidence of God's displeasure with us.  If all was well, and the heart of our nation was righteous, or so the argument goes, then this horror would not have been inflicted on us.  But because it is not, the Lord has smoted us with a big smitey smiting.

And so, inescapably, we have the linking of the murders of those innocent children and teachers and the mother of that troubled young man to something wrong in the national character.  There is a connection there.  God is punishing us, or so some feel compelled to say.

But what is the nature of God's judgment?  What do we know about it, those of us who haven't entirely abandoned the concept?  Here, I think it's vital not just to deconstruct and critique and attack.  That's easy, but it's also lazy.   Yeah, it might feel pretty dang awesome to our angry monkey-selves.  But on some fundamental spiritual level, attacking and tearing apart seems less like a gift of the Spirit, and more like a gift from the Accuser.

Instead, it seems we should provide a clearer picture of the truth we know about our Maker.   What do we affirm?  To what can we say "yes?"

What we know, those of us who follow Jesus and attend to his teachings, is that suffering and death are not a sign of sin in the one who is suffering.   Suffering is not to be automatically equated with God's judgment.  The cross disabuses us of that, as do the deaths of those Christian witnesses who, guided by the Spirit, refused to take up the sword even in the face of violence.  They proclaimed peace and forgiveness, even as the world broke them.

We also know from the witness of scripture that the wicked do prosper, and that the oppressor does live in comfort.  That ain't right with God, but there are times when it does happen.  Rain falls on the righteous and unrighteous alike, as they say.

But what we also know is that where we violate the law of love, there are consequences, just as there are consequences if we think we're immune to the law of gravity.  That law of liberty is etched into the nature of all creation, as fundamental to sentient beings as the laws of physics are to inanimate objects.  It is the metric against which we are judged, both individually and collectively.

That judgement bears consequences.  Systems based on violence and injustice always fail.  Systems where power is concentrated in the hands of a few, be the power of the sword or socioeconomic power, those systems are radically out of balance.  They will tear themselves apart, and fall.  Scripture's pretty clear on that, as clear as it is on the ramification of our individual sin.

And what we also know is that just as love is its own reward, so too sin's reward rises from the nature of the sin itself.  The cup we pour is the cup we drink, as both the Beatles and a dear friend of mine once said.  Though the precise nature of God's justice is beyond us, it is ultimately not something that exists in the realm of magical thinking.  The events that create the probability of tragedy and horror, complex as they are, are not radically abstracted from their fruit.

Meaning, rather simply, that when a nation arms itself to the teeth, creates a climate of social isolation and fear, and stigmatizes the broken of mind, that is the cup we have poured for ourself.  It is the furrow we have dug into the surface of being.  When the storm comes, and the torrent flows down the path we've made for it, we shouldn't act surprised.

We may not know the fullness of the "why" of anything.  Creation is simply too complex.  But we can know enough to act, through the blessings of reason and the whisperings of the Spirit in our hearts.  And we can certainly know enough to act in ways that meaningfully reduce the likelihood of future horror.

Whether we make the way straight for God or prepare a path for sorrow is entirely our own responsibility.

Gay Marriage and The Flip Flopper In Chief

No, this isn't about Obama.

It's about God.

We Jesus folk know that God is unchanging and eternal, of course.    God's Law...which can't be meaningfully parsed out from God's self...remains constant, sure, and absolute.  God never, ever, ever changes God's mind.

So we say.  It's true.  Up to a point.

Because that's not quite what the Bible describes.  God does change God's mind.  When Israel was whining in the desert, and God had seriously had it up to here, and was so going to smite them, Moses persuaded God to change.  If someone is wrong with God, showing injustice and predatory disdain for others and an unwillingness to show grace to the broken and the stranger, God is perfectly willing to change God's mind about that person, too.  So long as they change, that is.

God's relationship to us is not fixed, and God's attitude towards us is not unwavering.  To argue that it is would be fundamentally in opposition to the Biblical witness to the nature of our Creator.  But what makes for or stirs that change?  What causes the shifts we perceive in the relationship we have with God, and in God's attitude towards us?

The answer to that question, if we're being honest, is that God changes God's mind towards us based on how we live in covenant.  The key to change in our relationship to God is covenant.  If we're living in covenant relationship with God and one another, then God's attitude towards us is one of grace.   If not, then all is not copacetic.  But change in the character of that relationship is entirely possible.  Mutual change in our relationship with God is, in fact, the entire point of Christian faith.

So what does this have to do with gay marriage?   I mean, doesn't the Bible say that being gay is an abomination?  Torah does say that, I'll admit.  But given that the same term in Torah is applied to remarriage, popcorn shrimp, buying a dog, bacon double cheeseburgers, and jeans for women, I'm not sure that quite cuts it if we're trying to get to the heart of the matter.

If we're coming at this from a Jesus perspective, the heart of the matter is living into the Great Commandment, which is itself the highest principle of Torah.  You know, loving God with heart and mind and soul, and neighbor as self.   This is the highest order principle of our relationship with God, and it radically defines every other moral and ethical demand or expectation.

If this is the lens through which we understand God's covenantal attitude towards us...and it must be, if we are to follow Jesus...then what does this mean relative to God's relationship to same-sex marriage?  From what we know about God from this covenantal foundation, why might this...um...cause an "evolution" in God's mind?

Well, it does represent a real and significant shift in that "homosexual lifestyle" that some folks are so eager to go on and on about.   That lifestyle has been one forced deep into marginality and shadow by culture, and places of hiddenness and shadow can create some unpleasant psychological and spiritual dynamics.

Those dynamics are not manifest in the relationships gays and lesbians are now seeking in both church and culture.  Those relationships are of a very different character.  They are, in point of fact, covenant relationships.  When gays and lesbians seek to live in open, respectful, loving, and mutually committed relationships with one another, this is a new thing culturally.  When those open relationships are seen and understood as worthy of being blessed and guided by the love of God as expressed in a faith community, this is also a new thing culturally.

Covenant relationship is, in essence, the core of what gays and lesbians are seeking, both culturally and within the communities of faith that welcome them.   So here we see a change of life, a movement towards embracing precisely the dynamics of existence that are at the foundation of right relationship with God.

Why, then, given that most fundamental understanding of how God changes in response to us, should we not expect that God would not joyously flop the doors of grace open to such a new thing?

God Fearin'

In an interesting piece of  bloggery, Carol Howard-Merritt finds herself wrassling with the concept of "fearing God."  It is, or so our sacred tradition speaks it, the root of all wisdom.  Her struggling with that concept mirrors my own struggling with that concept, which generally takes two tacks.

Tack number one is theological.  If God is love, as we Jesus folk consistently and relentlessly insist, then why would we fear God?   It seems illogical and emotionally inconsistent.

Tack number two is sociopolitical and anthropological.   Within human institutions and cultures, fear of punishment is used to enforce conformity within autocratic cultures and family systems.  Do what I say, because you fear that if you do not, I will verbally abuse you and/or hang you, cut out your intestines in front of you, and then pull you apart with horses.   Generally, the former is family systems and the latter is...um...hopefully not, although I will grant that some families are worse than others.   If that is the character of the fear we are meant to have of God, then God would be little better than an abusive parent or medieval despot.

So is this a salvageable theological concept?

I tend to think so, with some notable caveats from the Apostle Paul.  Here, I'm talking about Paul, the author of the seven letters, not deutero-Paul, the follower of Paul who wrote in his name.  In his letter to the churches in both Rome and Galatia, Paul makes it clear that the purpose of Christian faith is not fear.   We are not meant to be slaves, living in fear, he tells the Romans.  If the Spirit of God lives and moves in us, then our connection to the gracious nature of our Maker frees us from the fear of coercion.  Christian faith is antithetical to "power over," both in our relationship to others and in our relationship with our Creator.  It is not a vassal/liege arrangement and not a social contract, with all the punishment/protection dynamics that such things entail.  That's the heart of the joyous anarchy of grace Paul proclaimed.

Fear of God, then, needs to be decoupled from the idea of social obedience and legalistic interpretations of Christianity.

But when it comes to our encounter with God...those transforming moments that take our faith out of the realm of ritual and abstraction and into the realm of the existential and experiential...fear takes on a different character.

Fear of God arises from the knowledge of God.

First, there is the fear that comes with unbidden theophany.  This does not happen often.  Being in the presence of the Numinous Other is the sort of thing that causes hair to stand on end, buckles knees, and leaves you unable to speak.  I've heard it described as a feeling of vertiginous awe, like looking out over a vast precipice.   That's close, but in my experience it's a bit more like that feeling when the railing you're leaning against gives way.  You are not observing the vastness from a distance.  It is grasping you, utterly present to you.

Fear?  Yes. When there is nothing between your face and God's face, yes.

Second, those moments when we feel most frequently connected to our Maker, at least in my experience, are moments of immense grace and calm.   We get there through prayer and meditation, through contemplation and self-stilling.  Emptied of self, we feel no terror, because we are consumed and suffused with God's Spirit.  "Feeling," in the sense of emotional affect, almost disappears in that great radiant wash of peace.   As a still fledgling and semi-competent mystic, I cherish those moments.  They are the existential anchor points for my faith, just as I'm sure they were for dear brother Paul.

That said, I don't live every moment that way.  I get angry.  I get confused.  I become lustful, and bitter, and impatient.   I get lost.

And in those all-too-frequent moments, I recall that depth of connectedness.  The light of that grace is a fearful thing when you are in the thrall of something...else.  Seeing how deeply the brokenness in yourself impedes your ability to live into the grace you have come to know is frightening.  Loss of that connection, of that grace, of the hope and strength it entails...that is a terrifying thing, because God as Other is a terrifying thing.  Not just because you're lost.  But because you know how deeply your lostness is incompatible with the grace you have known.

That fear is the root of right action, even in the separation.  Feeling the loss, and in the throes of the dark night of the soul, you nonetheless conform yourself to the grace you cannot feel.

And as wisdom is right action, that form of fear is, as I see it, the root of wisdom.

God's Sense of Humor

Humor is odd.  The things that we human beings laugh and snort and giggle at tend to be those that strike us as incongruous, the combination of one thing with another thing to absurd effect.  Laughter in homo sapiens sapiens is typically stirred when something is utterly absurd, when our expectations about causality are shattered, when our social norms are transgressed against, or when someone emits a flatus.

My wife, for instance, simply could not stop laughing when I showed her Russian Rick Roll guy, whose video is above.  I also may have chortled at it a time or two.  It's so utterly absurd, so impossibly jauntily doofy, that I swear she was in peril of passing out.  My boys often accuse me, on the other hand, of being without a sense of humor.  It's true.  It's hard to get me to laugh, particularly at jokes.  I'm too cynical.  I know what to expect.  On the other hand, I find collections of bloopers and videos of people falling down to be insanely funny

This Sunday, on the way to church, I wondered at humor and God.  If we find the unanticipated and the peculiar to be amusing, then it seems impossible that God might have a sense of humor.  How can you ever find anything surprising or unanticipated if you are Alpha and Omega?  It seems unlikely.  And yet I'll often hear, as faithful folk encounter some of the more ironic and bizarrely coincidental events of life, that God must have a sense of humor.

Like, say, this Sunday in my service.  I was reading the passage from 1 Timothy 6 about the dangers of wealth.  My entire sermon challenged the ethic of consumerist aquisitiveness that defines our culture.  Yet as I prepared to read it, I discovered mid-service that my Bible had...well...it's an old Bible.  It's kinda falling apart.  And at some point over the week prior, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus had just plain old fallen out.  They weren't there. 

So I had to get up in front of the church and read the scripture condemning our idolatrous hunger for possessions from the screen of my shiny new iPhone 4. 

Though I don't for a moment imagine that the Numinous Font of All Being was snickering, for in His Radiant Glory He Snickereth Not, I certainly appreciated the effort.

The Touch

Earlier this week, I attended a seder. Not one a them Christian seders that progressive congregations love to dabble about in as a sign of their general openness to things. Those are fine, I suppose, but I prefer my funk uncut.

This was a seder at my wife's synagogue. It's an extremely progressive and inclusive Jewish community, but also one that is deeply connected with tradition. There's a strong preponderance of unapologetic Hebrew both sung and spoken, mixed in with singing and geetar and an openness to all. I enjoy it.

One of the things that struck me during the service was the use of a phrase during a prayer to describe those who really understood the value of the Passover event. It articulated thems who deeply get it as folks who have known "the Touch." The Touch, as it was used here, described that awareness of G-d's presence, that connectedness to the Creator that goes beyond abstract theological concepts and ritual formalism and doctrinal frameworks and into the existential reality of a person.

I found myself musing on that, and on how it relates to being a pastor. For many years, I struggled with my connection to Christian faith, which had...for all of it's flaws...so much deep and abiding grace that I found it intellectually and morally compelling. As annoying as I found much of fundamentalist Christianity, I could see even in my annoyance that the core of the faith had ethical validity.

But that conceptual and ethical connection just was not enough for me to feel called to pursue the ministry. It was an appreciation. A sense of being simpatico with the teachings of Christ. But not call, either to be a disciple or a pastor teaching the faith.

Call was different. It came in moments of intense awareness of God's presence that turned my agnosticism's doubt in on itself. Then, in more moments, some vast and deep and infinitely calm. Or in dreams from which I awoke trembling and changed.

Without those, I would most likely still be attending a church. I enjoy the community, introvert though I am. I would certainly still be volunteering time to care for those in need. I've always valued that. But in the absence of that sense of God, that paradoxical connection with the infinitely transcendent grace of our Creator, I know I would never have pursued ministry. It would have felt inauthentic.

So, yeah, I'm a pastor because I'm a little "touched." No surprise there for anyone who knows me.

How important is an awareness of God's presence for those serving as pastors? Is it essential? Trivial? What thinkest thou?

Sin Tastes Better With Bacon

After many years of wheedling and cajoling from the boys, my family appears headed down the road towards getting a dog. I never had pets as a kid, mostly as a function of a semi-transient continent-hopping childhood. Now that we've settled down into a stable surburban quarter-acre, it looks like our family will be adding a furry critter to our number come 2010.

Pets are, for many folks, part of the family. Cats, dogs, and the occasional hamster are deeply loved and woven into the fabric of day-to-day family life. That often goes as far as bringing them for pastoral blessings, celebrating their birthdays, and similar schtuff. When they pass, they are mourned...not as deeply as we'd mourn a human, but mourned nonetheless. Folks of faith with pets frequently express the hope that those dear creatures will have a place in God's Kingdom. I am convinced that they will, but mulling over this leads me off on two related theological tangents:

Can a human being commit a sin against an animal? Someone who beats or abuses a puppy or kitten certainly isn't showing themselves as a person moved by the grace of God. Someone who trains animals for bloodsports would seem equally reprehensible, although I'm not sure how many football fans in Philly agree with me on that one. At a certain level, our willingness to vent our anger or hatred against the creatures around us is a measure of our sinfulness. We're meant to care for all creation, not beat it into submission or abuse it. Suffering is suffering is suffering. I am convinced that the harm we cause to our fellow creatures...even the nonhuman ones...is part of the measure by which we will be judged.

So if we can sin against animals, where does that leave thems of us who chow down on less-sentient critters? We're outraged at those folks who abuse dogs, but are happy as a clam to munch on a Bacon Double Bacon Burger that's comprised entirely of the flesh of animals that have lived short, brutish existences. The factory farm pigs that give us our delicious crunchy marbled fat-sticks exist in conditions that...were they, say, Golden Retrievers...would fill us with sputtering, pitchfork wielding, Congressman-calling outrage.

But...but...they're different, say you. Pork isn't puppies. Bacon doesn't bark.

Different? Not really, not by any meaningful standard. Both dogs and pigs are omnivorous social mammals. They have similar intelligences. There isn't any valid ethical difference between the process of preparing pork tenderloin and thit cho nuong, or between what goes into gaejangguk and a Mo's Bacon Chocolate Bar.

Yet we are an integral part of a system of industrial food production that inflicts impressively vast levels of suffering on creatures that are, for all intents and purposes, just as aware as those creatures we Jesus folk cherish and hope will somehow be cared for by their Creator.

It's a good thing God isn't just, or else we might be in for a world of hurt.

Vegetarian Mosquitoes and Other Theological Absurdities

In my battles against the tiny bloodsucking beasties in my backyard, I've followed that ancient adage: Know thy enemy.

My enemy, as I blogged yesterday, is the Aedes Albopictus. She, for the men are mellow flower children, exists for one purpose. She wants to get a snack for her children, and that snack involves my protein-rich vital bodily fluids. She's very, very well designed for that purpose.

Unlike the mosquitoes who were native to ol' Virginny, Ms. Tiger is a strong and nimble flyer. She does not emit a tell-tale whine as she swoops by my ear, because stealth means you don't get squashed. What is most astounding about mosquitoes is how elegantly they do what they do. Their penetrating proboscis is sharper than any doctor's needle, and is a complex array of razor-sharp microneedles around a central tube. It causes no pain, which, again, means Ms. Tiger doesn't become a bloody splotch on your palm.

But yesterday, as I was musing over my marvelous opponent, I found myself wondering about how Ken Ham explains all of this. Ken Ham is the director of the Creation Museum, the place where fundamentalist Christianity goes to reassure itself of its own sanity. You might ask, why is the mosquito a problem for Creationists? If you're just making the argument for complexity in design as evidence of a Creator, the mosquito is not necessarily a bad place to start. Yeah, it's annoying. But when you look at it deeply, it becomes marvelously annoying.

The problem for literal Creationists is that they argue that every creature in Eden was a vegetarian. They have to. It's right there in Genesis, clear as day. It ain't just animals, neither. It's everything that has life and breath.

As a vegetarian Christian, I enjoy this immensely, because it adds to my natural vegetarian smugness. Seriously, though, I do think it speaks to what it means to live together in peace, and to our ultimate purpose in Creation. The lion cannot lay down with the lamb if mint jelly is in that lamb's immediate future.

The Creation Museum folks make this case about pretty much every major carnivore. They all have to be originally intended as vegetarians. Lions? Bears? Those big teeth are actually designed used for...um...coconuts. Or opening bags of Doritos. Even Velociraptors, who they argue lived in peace with Adam and Eve, have those huge slashing claws so they can...um...dig for radishes, which then require razor sharp fangs to eat.

But the mosquito? They do try to make the argument that mosquitos were supposed to be vegetarian. According the Creationist narrative, God, as part of the curse of the Fall, made a few minor tweaks in existing creatures. But...err...that's pretty much a total change from what a mosquito exists to do.

It's proboscis exists to painlessly penetrate the living flesh of a target. A particularly persistent creationist would assert that this could also penetrate a banana. And you don't want that banana to feel anything. Problem is, the mosquito also injects an organic anticoagulant into it's prey. This substance serves one purpose: to prevent blood from clotting as it is consumed by the mosquito. Bananas and pomegranates do not clot. They just don't. That's a nontrivial part of mosquito design. It's their entire reproductive cycle.

Quite frankly, it's not coherently explicable even within the Creationist mindset. That ain't gonna stop 'em from trying. They live for vast, convoluted and ultimately unbiblical hypotheses in defense of their pointless and unnecessary literalism.

I confess to be amazed at the intricacy of a mosquito, and that amazement translates into a wonder at the vastness and complexity of God's creation. I am also give God thanks that as a sentient being, I can use what I know about the little buggers to take 'em down.

Love of Neighbor and Love of God

"Love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself."

This familiar quotation surfaced several times in several forms in my reading of Voltaire's Dictionnaire Philosophique yesterday. Though it seems pretty basic, it's worth another look. It's kinda important.

Jesus articulated this as the primary purpose of human existence, and it's a concept with traction. He did not say that the authority of the church is the point of being alive. He did not say that the universe was 6,000 years old, and that this concept must be defended at all costs because the Bible is empirically infallible. He called on his followers to do those two simple things, which are really just one simple thing, and in doing so find themselves reconciled to both the world around them and fellow human beings.

It's a pretty straightforward request, and has enough inherent and self-evident goodness about it that even a freethinking enlightenment philosopher like Voltaire can take a hard look and say, "Yup, that's a good thing. I'm up for that." He said it with considerably more grace and wit, but that's the general principle.

What is most striking about his acceptance of this axiom is not the embrace of the second part of the statement. Loving your neighbor as yourself, the ethic of radical compassion, is pretty elemental. But Voltaire embraces the whole thing, both love of God and love of neighbor.

Here's the fuddler: can you do just the latter?

Can an ethic of radical compassion exist if you say: "You know, I'm up for love. That's great. Love is cool. But the whole God thing just doesn't work for me." There are plenty of humanists who make that statement, because the inherent value in compassion just walks right up and gives you a big hug. Who doesn't like compassion and empathy? Besides Hannity, Coulter, and Limbaugh, that is.

On the one hand, I think that ethic of compassion can guide the lives of those who are not people of faith. I'd be willfully deceiving myself if I denied that many secular people live peaceful lives filled with acts of caring for others. Denying the spiritual value and validity of those acts of caring is one of the deeply irritating spiritual ticks of my co-religionists. A God who hates a kindly act because it isn't done in His name wouldn't be worth following. I think you've just got to call something good when it's self-evidently good.

On the other hand, the love of God is in a real sense necessary if you're going to love your neighbor. Why? Because truly loving God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul leaves no room for the love of certain other things. It leaves no space for nationalism, or profiteering, or racial bias, or gender bias, or partisanship. It leaves no space for all of the various categories we use to define "us" over and against "them." That mystic orientation towards something that transcends not just society and culture, but spacetime itself...if done authentically...radically enables us to see past the things that divide us. It enables us not just to love those who are part of "us," but to love across the ultimately meaningless boundaries we establish between ourselves and those we think are our enemies.

That isn't to say that a focus on the transcendent and the eternal can't be subverted and misused. Nearly every religious tradition struggles against those that would use it as a means of coercing and controlling others, or as an excuse for hating others. All sorts of narsty things make absolute claims on us, and when we yield to them, all sorts of unpleasantness occurs.

That said, I think if we are to see our neighbor as ourselves, we have to be able to look past our individual and collective expectations, past even the categorical forms and structures of reason itself. If we're going to be continually growing in understanding and compassion for the often very strange Other, and shattering the boundaries that divide us, we do that most effectively by setting our hearts on that which stands infinitely beyond us.

A Sign of The App-Ocalypse

One of the more peculiar little apps that you can buy for your iPhone these days is something called "Pocket God." It's a tiny little gamelet, in which you have absolute control over the short, brutish lives of a few primitive villager types. By "absolute control," I mean you can kill them in a variety of ways that are intended to be entertaining.

You can pick them up and drop them into the sea, where they promptly drown. You can pick them up and hurl them into a volcano, where they promptly get all nice and crispy. You can smite them with lightning. You can shake your iPhone violently, causing an earthquake. You can tilt your iPhone to one side, which alters gravity and causes them to tumble off the island into the sea, where, once again, they promptly drown. It's like Tamagotchi for the Sith.

Beyond the fact that I'm apparently unable to find amusement in tormenting virtual beings, I can't quite figure out the appeal that has made this little bit of virtual sadism such a seller. Four hundred thousand downloads? Really? I've watched the gameplay, and even with the regular updates that permit new ways to torment your virtual victims, it just seems a bit tedious.

That your only choice is killing the denizens of your world in unusual ways seems...well...a bit limiting for a god. What if you're more benevolently oriented? Or if you tend to prefer games that allow for moral choices, or for actually being moral? Teaching them to swim would seem like a good start.

And where's the challenge? Destroying things is the easiest thing in the world. It's building things that's hard.

Manifold Providence and Omniscience

Last month, I edited and reposted my own peculiar pomo-scholastic "proof" of the existence of God. Manifold Providence, as I like to call it, is a mild little heresy, an experimental jazz fusion of multiverse cosmology and classical theology. But hey, it keeps me entertained. It's nice to have hobbies.

A significant part of this little oddment rests on a theological assumption about the nature of God, and for some reason, I feel like blabbering on about it today. As a card-carrying Calvinist, I understand God to be both omniscient and omnipotent. There is nothing that God does not know, and God's creative power knows no limits or boundaries.

Given that foundation, God by necessity must know not only what is, but also must by definition know what might be. If omniscience is to be asserted in any meaningful way, then God knows not only the results of the choices we will make, but also the results of the choices that we do not make. Arguing otherwise delimits God to creation, which is a Biblical and conceptual nono. And we wouldn't want to do that, would we?

If divine knowledge is complete and not simply conceptual, then the reality of those paths we have not taken stands before God in the same manner of our current reality. That we do not and cannot know all of the different potential ways we might exist before God does not mean that God is not aware of us, in all of the ways that we both are and might have been ourselves.

For God to be God, God would be aware of an infinite array of possibilities, the fullness of all that could conceivably be. The unfathomable divine mystery would include a boundless omniverse of realities, some familiar, some impossibly strange, some with structures of physics and spacetimes that are completely different and antithetical to our own.

Omniscience, then, seems to require an infinite multiverse. An infinite multiverse, as I've argued in the link above, gives solid conceptual purchase to an ancient argument for the existence of God. The two concepts are interwoven and mutually self-supporting.

This may appear to be a delightfully cozy tautology, a line of reasoning that depends on itself for it's own proof. That's kinda the same thing fundamentalists do when they argue for the Bible's authority from the authority of the Bible. Then again, I'm fairly sure that a tautology by definition must be finite. As what is being described incorporates the infinite, it can't be a self-referential feedback loop. The conceptual integrity of the...

Oh. Wait. You're nodding off.

Sorry. I do go on and on.

I guess the broader question in all of this is...well...so what? Even if this is true, what could it possibly have to do with me? That, I think, is something I'll need to deal with another time.