God: Author or Chess Grandmaster?
Lars Walker has a pair of fun, thought-provoking posts over at Brandywine Books about Calvinism and predestination. Predestination is another catchword in the debate over free will. Predestination is foreknowledge with the perspective flipped towards us: God foreknows ones action A iff one is predestined to perform A. I hope that I have atoned for any sin of omission that I committed in my previous post.
In the first post, Lars is drawn to the analogy of God as an author and humanity as the characters in Gods book. He writes:
The analogy comes close, but ultimately fails because the hypothetical author has causal powers over the actions of the characters. In the question of CC, causation is unimportant. Note that if Tony Blair knows beforehand that I will eat pancakes, Tony Blair does not in any serious sense cause my eating of pancakes. I tried to address the problem of causation in my first post. The only addition to the discussion is a implicit premise that omniscient causation is an appropriate power for God to have. The conflation of foreknowledge and causation tends to reoccur in theological discussions. In addition, the difference between punishment and moral desert is also often conflated, as I think Lars does here.
The proper analogy for the predestination claim is that of a reader (not an author) to a book.
Id like to comment on Lars' second post, but my head hurts too much after reading it. I suggest that you read it and see what you think. My only aside is that if this scenario is true, I think the dragon of theodicy rears its head even more strongly than usual. I do not know that even the wisest of Men can slay it.
Amanda Witt reprints a passage by Phil Yancey about the power and knowledge of God. The critical part is this:
Yancey, I believe, describes the middle path between open theism and Calvinism much better than I could. Many of our actions are not determined, but our freedoms cannot significantly alter the way history ends. Here, PAP and the sovereignty of God can both be preserved. We walk through the garden of forking paths and are free to choose our route, but all paths will get to the gazebo. (I hope I'm not carrying the metaphor too far.) In this view, God is still omniscient, as well. While he does not know which path we will take, God still sees all the paths. To take a whimsical view, imagine God writing a book of every action on Earth. It would look a lot like a logic book written entirely in conditionals. The final page would be say: "Jesus returns on the white horse and sets up a second heaven and earth. QED." QED of course means quod erat demonstrandum, or what was to be demonstrated. All of history, despite being written in conditionals, ends up with the same conclusion, logically and historically.
In the first post, Lars is drawn to the analogy of God as an author and humanity as the characters in Gods book. He writes:
It occurred to me that when I build characters Im extremely ruthless with them. If I create a character to be evil, evil he is. And if I bring him to an evil end, I feel no guilt whatever at punishing him for something I caused. Every evil deed of his sprang originally from my own mind, but I punish him anyway. And it feels perfectly right.
The analogy comes close, but ultimately fails because the hypothetical author has causal powers over the actions of the characters. In the question of CC, causation is unimportant. Note that if Tony Blair knows beforehand that I will eat pancakes, Tony Blair does not in any serious sense cause my eating of pancakes. I tried to address the problem of causation in my first post. The only addition to the discussion is a implicit premise that omniscient causation is an appropriate power for God to have. The conflation of foreknowledge and causation tends to reoccur in theological discussions. In addition, the difference between punishment and moral desert is also often conflated, as I think Lars does here.
The proper analogy for the predestination claim is that of a reader (not an author) to a book.
Id like to comment on Lars' second post, but my head hurts too much after reading it. I suggest that you read it and see what you think. My only aside is that if this scenario is true, I think the dragon of theodicy rears its head even more strongly than usual. I do not know that even the wisest of Men can slay it.
Amanda Witt reprints a passage by Phil Yancey about the power and knowledge of God. The critical part is this:
Although I had complete freedom to make any move I wished, I soon reached the conclusion that none of my strategies mattered very much. His superior skill guaranteed that my purposes inevitably ended up serving his own. . . . When a Grand Master plays an amateur, victory is assured, no matter how the board may look at any given time.
Yancey, I believe, describes the middle path between open theism and Calvinism much better than I could. Many of our actions are not determined, but our freedoms cannot significantly alter the way history ends. Here, PAP and the sovereignty of God can both be preserved. We walk through the garden of forking paths and are free to choose our route, but all paths will get to the gazebo. (I hope I'm not carrying the metaphor too far.) In this view, God is still omniscient, as well. While he does not know which path we will take, God still sees all the paths. To take a whimsical view, imagine God writing a book of every action on Earth. It would look a lot like a logic book written entirely in conditionals. The final page would be say: "Jesus returns on the white horse and sets up a second heaven and earth. QED." QED of course means quod erat demonstrandum, or what was to be demonstrated. All of history, despite being written in conditionals, ends up with the same conclusion, logically and historically.
posted by Joshua Frear at 4:26 PM
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