Posted by
Dave Perkins on Thursday, November 30, 2006 12:32:10 PM
RELIGIOUS POST WARNING--
Dear reader, if religious stuff bores you, move on. If not, dig in, and maybe scroll down to some of the stuff that brought Bob and me to this apparent impasse.
Bob writes--
It looks as if you have restated your original and consistent argument, which is: we have free will, and we must make the right choice, or thereby face hell. In the timeline from birth to death, all who are born and who hear of the word of God must indeed follow His path or be damned.
I'll leave aside arguments from humanists who say that this is, ultimately, extortion (we're not going down that road after all) and focus on the -to me - unsolvable notion of the timeline.
Extortion? The entire business of free choice is argued in God's own word on the basis that He does NOT want to "compel" our submission, rather to receive our love freely given, as His is given to us. The aspect of compulsion ruins the whole thing for Him, and He says He won't do it. If you call this extortion, you put God in the position of compelling us to submit, which clearly is not the Biblical position. That means you are making it up. I'd rather start with the words in that book and then just try to see if they're right or wrong, rather than inventing a new position, out of thin air, for God to take.
This timeline, whether you percieve it linearly (Newton) or Relativistically (Kant), along with all of the actions and inactions you will make in your finite life, are still known by God before you ever exist.
As briefly as I can restate my position, God is NOT BOUND by time. He is not a Kantian or Newtonian. He is in relationship to time as inventor to invention.
If you are in His position, you will see that knowing the future does not mean the future cannot change... He simply sees the future AS IF IT WAS THE PRESENT. The great inventor stands proudly next to His invention, tweaking it, watching it work, aware of all parts of it 'at the same moment'. The future flickers like sunlight through a windy grove as the choices people make at other times of their lives alter it.
If I choose to go and shoot heroin today, He might see "simultaneously" a future where I am broke, starving, alone and sick, and then dead. If tomorrow I choose to stop shooting heroin, He could be seeing a future where I am recovered, loved, helped and restored. He has now seen two different futures, each brought about by choices I made, neither of which were immutable simply because they were seen by Him.
You have not yet let go of your notion that God is strapped down by time, as we are. You still presume that knowing the future means the future cannot be altered. But if God sees the future as PRESENT, because all things are present to Him, then He can simply see the future being altered by decisions we make. If I stand at the curb trying to decide whether to cross the street, He sees the future in which I did not cross, UNTIL I choose to do it, at which point He sees a future influenced by that choice.
Think of those experimental movies with alternate endings. God's the producer, and He knows how all the endings come out. But He doesn't decide which ending is THE ending; the test audiences do that. He knows how all the endings come out, but only one ending becomes "history".
This is far too simplified, as I still refer to "time words" like present and simultaneously and until. In His view those words have little meaning. It is not possible for me to actually understand this scenario, but it is plausible to me and it is not contrary to Biblical assertions about God. In fact God is referred to as "the great I AM", "who was and is and shall be". These are, in my view, attempts to explain the unexplainable, the fact of God's perpetual "present" relationship to all of history.
I also thought you were going to go more into the quantum physics end of this, i.e. there is no "before" per se but merely our inability to perceive everything at once. But that to me doesn't help matters, as it still does not address the conundrum. In fact, it may make it worse. If there is no "before" as we understand it, then the soul was created damned.
Again: why create something you know is damned?
Quantum physics is science. Science is about observing nature. God is outside nature, outside time, relating to them as inventor to invention. He is not observable by science.
(the following expands and continues along the Christian line, and may not be entirely relevant to the discussion of God's view of time. However, I feel like going on with it, so I will. You are warned.)
You have consistently expressed what amounts to outrage at the idea that a soul could be sent to hell by God "unfairly". But I'm here to tell you, there is NOBODY in hell who didn't prefer to be there. The bottom line of the heaven/hell thing isn't so much that God arbitrarily judges where you go, but that you CHOOSE.
The great choice in life, the ONLY real choice for all eternity, is between accepting God on His terms (as if we were somehow in a position to dictate any terms of our own!) and rejecting Him. The Bible tells us that lots and lots of people will not accept Him, not now, not ever, no way. My mental picture of the hellbound person is a man standing on a hilltop, staring angrily into the very face of the Almighty, shaking his little fist and shouting "I don't need you! I'm fine on my own! Leave me alone!" And God Almighty, having come to that hilltop to lovingly offer the man one last chance to throw away his foolish pride and come to where the eternal love is, shakes His great head sadly and moves away, saying "thy will be done" to the person who has refused to say it to Him.
Bob, you agonize over people being sent to Hell who don't want to go.
In my view of these things, that just doesn't happen. God is not "unfair". He is the author of all of our own instincts toward and understandings of justice. Justice is His nature. He cannot be unfair, as that is "sinful" and He doesn't do that.
The only other conclusion? People go to hell because they'd rather do that than submit.
If you are harboring secret hopes of being able to bargain with God, to "semi-submit", to somehow maintain some level of pride in yourself while still keeping out of eternal suffering, I suggest this is a false choice. God is what He is. You can accept it or not. But what God is demands submission, on His terms, with no part of you held back. He is holy, pure, perfect, always right, always good, etc etc. He created you so that you could have a loving relationship with Him, but not a bargain. Not a deal. Not a negotiation.
God will not say to you, "I find these three parts of your character good, not in need of change. Congratulations. Submit the other stuff to Me, but keep these. I can't improve them. You're a good guy."
Harboring a desire to continue on with some aspect of yourself without submitting it to Him leads one way only, to the top of that hill where you scream "I don't need you, leave me alone!"
And He will, if that's what you want.
/end religious rant