God in Paradox and Pennsylvania Politics

  GEORGE TEMPLETON: COMMENTARY  

By George Templeton
Rim Country Gazette Columnist

Pennsylvania Republican candidate Rick Saccone and author of God in our Government accused liberals of hating the USA, our President, and God.

Patriotism fueled by religion is dangerous.  God, duty, and obedience are like peas in a pod.  We are too easily misled by the desire for power that ministers to self-interest.

Robert Penn Warren captures our President in his novel, All the Kings Men.  “… Fellows like (Trump) are born outside of luck, good or bad, and luck which is what about makes you and me what we are, doesn’t have anything to do with them, for they are what they are from the time they first kick in the womb until the end.  And if that is the case, then their life history is a process of discovering what they really are, and not, as for you and me, sons of luck, a process of becoming what luck makes us.”

A preacher warned that your mind could get you in trouble, but only in Paradise is ethics not necessary.  Lack of a mind can get a nation in trouble.  Why should eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil be mankind’s “fall”?  Does it warrant God’s punishment of pain, evil, and suffering for evermore?  Isn’t evil more clever than described here?  What we know about good and evil is not what they are but rather what is exposed by the kind of questions we ask.

Emotion impairs judgment, but what kind of person has no empathy?

The left brain understands god rationally.  Ramanujan, described in the Netflix film The Man Who Knew Infinity said, “An equation has no meaning for me unless it expresses a thought of God.”  Real mathematicians don’t solve equations.  They want to know if a solution can be found.

The right brain understands emotionally.  Chagall said, “If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.”

If God is beyond human understanding, why do we persist in trying to describe him that way?  We see God as having both character and personality.  What about a sense of humor?  The 1977 George Burns movie, Oh God portrayed God in comedy, but we cannot make sense of that.  What could God be?

The Holy Trinity

The simultaneous Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, codified by the Council of Nica in 325 C., wrestled with controversy.  The Trinity is a relational definition, missing from Saccone’s “us versus them” diatribe.  It was emphasized during God’s surprising court appearance.

Court Clerk:  Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

God:  So help me, me.

Judge:  So help you, you?

God:  If it pleases the court, and even if it doesn’t please the court, I’m God, Your Honor.  I know how hard it is in these times to have faith.  But maybe if you could have the faith to start with, maybe the times would change.  You could change them.  Think about it.  Try.  And try not to hurt each other.  There’s been enough of that.  It really gets in the way.  If you find it hard to believe in me, maybe it would help you to know that I believe in you.

A Creative Force

Is God the invisible creator who is the absolute authority, unchanging, infinite, holy, perfect and just?  Belief in God is a choice, but the laws of physics are not!  Is God a force like electromagnetism, obscure, but at the same time our partner, personal, eternally loving, forgiving, and our best friend, available in times of need?  Can we know God by understanding something without understanding everything?

Jerry:  People are always praying to you.  Do you listen?

God:  I can’t help hearing.  I don’t always listen.

Jerry:  So then you don’t care?

God:  Of course I care!  But what can I do?

Jerry:  What can you do?  You’re God!

God:  Only for the big picture.  I don’t get into details.

Jerry:  Whatever happens to us…?

God:  Happens!

Most of us have difficulty defining God, but we know him when we see him.  Our narrow views are restrictive.  Our broad views are open-ended.  A specific God is less ultimate.  We think of God in terms of inerrancy and infallibility, but what does this really mean?  Is God Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omni-benevolent, and Omnipresent?

Omnipotent

George Burns:  Anybody who could turn Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt, incinerate Sodom and Gomorrah and make it rain for forty days and forty nights has got to be a fun guy.  

Can God create a rock so heavy that he or she cannot lift it?  If yes, God is not all powerful.  If no, God is not all powerful.  Does an inability to make nonsense statements true subtract from God’s power?  Did God create everything including the logically consistent physical laws and their constraints?  If he was the cause of all things, the first cause, did he cause himself?  Did God create everything from nothing?  How can nothing become something?  If he was constrained by the available raw materials at the time of the creation, he was not omnipotent.  Why would God want to violate his own laws?  Are the regularities in the universe simply because God is making things behave that way in every instance or did God just wind up Newton’s clockwork universe and let it run?  Why stop?  Did God need to rest after the six-day creation?  Wouldn’t God create as much as he could?  If God had a plan, why didn’t he make a universe where it was already achieved?

Omniscient

God controls the future.  God knows all things entirely, past and yet to come.  True omniscience does not learn.  It has always known.

Is God looking over our shoulder to see the grand view of history evolving, a consequence of our free will, a limitation of his omnipotence, or are we just puppets?  Our problem is that free will is only possible in a deterministic universe where we are the cause of effects.  An undetermined universe, without cause, has no laws, no rhyme or reason.

Jerry:  There’s no plan?  No scheme – to guide our destinies?  A lot of it is luck.

God:  A lot of it is luck.

Jerry:  Luck!  Just luck?  You don’t control our lives?

God:  I gave you a world and everything in it.  It’s all up to you.

Jerry:  You don’t care!

God:  I do care.

Jerry:  But, then, do something about it!

God:  I did.  I got you to carry the ball!

God believes every proposition that is true and none that are false.  But it is not possible to know everything about something that does not exist because there is nothing to know.  Thinking takes time.  God must exist within time if he is to believe.  Knowing can be timeless, but that does not allow the changes that define time, cause, and effect.

Is God the unmoved mover, existing in a single eternal moment?  When we speak of a “living God” we see him acting within time, developing, changing, and personally involved.  Scientists know that time and place cannot be separated.  God cannot plan and act without them.

Jerry:  When you said everything would work out, uh, I thought you could tell the future.

God:  Absolutely, I could tell the future, the minute it becomes the past.  I said, everything could work out, if that’s everybody’s choice.  People have to decide on their own what’s to be done with the world.  I can’t make a personal decision for everybody.

Our understanding is distorted by anything we are part of, are involved with.  We can’t teach what we do not know.  In teaching we understand more.  If we could see the future, we would change it.  As in Robert Pen Warren’s novel, we would discover ourselves.  This is the strange loop of consciousness depicted by the Dutch graphic artist M. C. Escher who understood infinity as a loop, an endless process originating in mathematics, paradox, illusion, and double meaning.  

Omni-benevolent

Free will lets us be ourselves.  We have no choice but to believe in free will, because without it we can have no moral responsibility.  But a mandatory choice is not freely made.

God never does what is evil or less than perfect.  If God cannot do wrong, how can he deserve praise for doing what’s right?  And if God’s actions cannot be celebrated, how is he morally perfect?  If God cannot do wrong, how can he be both all-good and all-powerful?

The eighteenth-century philosopher Leibniz argued that God had to create the best possible world.  He was not free to do anything else.  Any other choice would have resulted in more evil.

Predestination seems incompatible with human free will, but it is also incompatible with divine free will, even if God is outside of time.  Causality requires the existence of time.  Absolute foreknowledge makes it impossible for God to do other than what will be done.  At least we have the illusion of free will, but that is not available to God. 

Perhaps God could do evil acts, but chooses not to, thus retaining omnipotence and moral perfection.  But if God knows everything then there is no moral choice to deliberate.  If evil is against God’s will, then he is not omnipotent.

We wish to live a life which values morality above wealth, power, and pleasure, but there is nothing guaranteed to reward the good or punish the wicked.  Justice does not always win in the long run.  The crisp and concise version of the Ten Commandments may be the least culture bound moral code ever written, but for modern man morality may be more a process than a verdict.

Jerry:  How can you permit all the suffering that goes on the world?

God:  How can I permit the suffering?

Jerry:  “Yeah!”

God:  I don’t permit the suffering.  You do!  Free will.  All the choices are yours.

Jerry:  Choices?  What Choices?

God:  You can love each other, cherish and nurture each other, or you can kill each other.  Man and women, persons, their existence means exactly and precisely, not more, not one tiny bit less, just what they think it means and what I think doesn’t count at all.  I want to say to everyone that everything around them, that they can see and smell and feel and hear, they should delight in all this.  That, what is here, is some of my very best ideas.  And I want everyone to try very hard to make sure it doesn’t all go down the drain.

Omnipresent                

George Burns:  I worried about playing God.  We’re about the same age but we grew up in different neighborhoods.

If you have ever been nowhere in particular, you will know what alone is.  How can God be everywhere, in the shape of things, yet always present at a particular time and place?  In the beginning, God was present in the volcano, the tent, the Arc, and the temple.  In the end, God has become a rule and a prayer.  Some find him in all things, not separate from his creation.

Can God be found in the “big bang” that started the universe 14 billion years ago?  Its evidence, the pieces of our puzzle, leads us to an infinitely small and dense point where time, space, and physical laws did not yet exist.  That was the ultimate unknowable, the simplest thing, the interface between the natural and supernatural.

Paradox

Whenever we try to cloak zero and infinity, never and forever, all or none, within the confines of our experience we are walking on thin ice.  In science, we remove objects to a never-ending distance, shrink them down to a dimensionless point, and make them infinitely long, infinitesimally small, thin, or infinite in number, until they fit.  We forget that statistics are only a mathematical abstraction lacking particularity.  These idealizations help seeing.  Real infinities and God’s Omni’s have paradoxical qualities.  The Omni’s are interdependent ideas, like God, self, society, and nature.  They are not quantifiable like length, width, and height.  Properly understood, they stand only within the context of total personal experience.  As such they are relative, situational, and limited.  To make them simultaneous and absolute is to make them impossible.  Realizing this is not a hatred of God.