Why does Obama believe weird things?

I get the title of this post from dueling headlines found on my morning surf.

First, from RCP: "Obama Pushes Jobs Bill: God Wants To See Us Put People Back To Work"

Second, on Science and Religion Today: "Why Evangelicals Believe Weird Things"

Put 'em together and what do you get? Although I do have to admit that I know that Obama has never characterized himself and an evangelical Christian.

New Atheism: New Irrationality

British sceptic Daniel Came of The Guardian takes New Atheist Richard Dawkins to task for refusing to debate with " intellectually rigorous theist" Daniel Craig.

Given that there isn't much in the way of serious argumentation in the New Atheists' dialectical arsenal, it should perhaps come as no surprise that Dawkins and Grayling aren't exactly queuing up to enter a public forum with an intellectually rigorous theist like Craig to have their views dissected and the inadequacy of their arguments exposed.

Ironically, there is nothing substantively new about the New Atheists either. Despite its self-congratulatory tone, The God Delusion contains no original arguments for atheism. ...

As a sceptic, I tend to agree with Dawkins's conclusion regarding the falsehood of theism, but the tactics deployed by him and the other New Atheists, it seems to me, are fundamentally ignoble and potentially harmful to public intellectual life. For there is something cynical, ominously patronising, and anti-intellectualist in their modus operandi, with its implicit assumption that hurling insults is an effective way to influence people's beliefs about religion. The presumption is that their largely non-academic readership doesn't care about, or is incapable of, thinking things through; that passion prevails over reason. On the contrary, people's attitudes towards religious belief can and should be shaped by reason, not bile and invective. By ignoring this, the New Atheists seek to replace one form of irrationality with another.

That's because New Atheists are ideologists, not honest inquirers.

Update: Dennis Prager shows how university professors are more irrational than evangelicals.

The Tim Tebow Prophecy

"Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me" - Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 5.11.

NFL Analysts: Tim Tebow Hated Because of His Faith

Outspoken Christian athlete Tim Tebow, now the starting quarterback for the Denver Broncos, has been widely criticized by many in the media. NFL analysts are starting to admit that criticism, in large part, has been because of his faith.

''Inside the NFL'' analyst and former Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Cris Collinsworth concluded that much of the hatred against Tebow was based on his religious beliefs. Responding to a question from fellow host James 'JB' Brown, Collinsworth showed his disgust for Tebow's treatment: ''It's unbelievable, though, JB, that one of the best kids - just pure kids that's ever come into the NFL - is hated because of his faith, because of his mission work, because of the fact that he wears it on his sleeve, because of the fact that he lives his life that he talks about.''

This isn't the first time the issue has come up. Many sportswriters and fans have mocked Tebow and hoped to see him fail - in large part, his defenders have argued, because of his strong Christian beliefs. Other football analysts are starting to agree with that assessment.

NBCsports.com commentator Jelisa Castrodale argued: “The NFL's other backup-turned-starters don't generate this type of negativity.” And CBS analyst and former 49ers offensive lineman Randy Cross blamed the media for anti-Tebow coverage: ''People, especially the media, root against him because of what he stands for.''

After the twilight of the gods, only the devil remains

The death toll of atheism as state apparatus:

As the death toll mounts—as many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and on and on—the authors systematically show how and why, wherever the millenarian ideology of Communism was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression. An extraordinary accounting, this book amply documents the unparalleled position and significance of Communism in the hierarchy of violence that is the history of the twentieth century.

And it is the actual position of "American Atheists" regarding fundamentalist Christians that, "They don’t respond to lawsuits, letters, amicus briefs or other grass-roots campaigns and they must, must, must be eradicated."

Makes you wonder, in light of what atheists have done when they gained political power, what exactly does American Atheists mean when it writes that fundamentalists "must, must, must be eradicated."

And just why is he named "Steve?"

Okay, it's time for a trivia contest: Why is this joke funny? This appeared on the WSJ's "Best of the Web Today" page today.

This is very subtle humor that took (even) me a moment to get. Really very clever! Can you make the connection here? Take a guess as a comment, please read commenting rules.

Homily for Sept. 11, 2011

My homily this morning was entitled, "Where is the cross in violence?" You may read it on Scribd here.

The photo above was taken by James Nachtwey. Another frame of this scene plus many other never-before-published photos he took on that day, are well worth clicking to.

A 9/11 Memorial Video Reflection

Best viewed full screen.

"Bill Keller’s Idiotic Questions"

The Captain's Journal » Bill Keller’s Idiotic Questions: Herschel Smith nails the ignorance behind Bill Keller's questioning of Michele Bachmann. The question in question:

You have said that watching the film series “How Should We Then Live?” by the evangelist Francis Schaeffer was a life-altering event for you. That series stresses the "inerrancy" ­— the literal truth — of the Bible. Do you believe the Bible consists of literal truths, or that it is to be taken more metaphorically?

Herschel goes on to disassemble the simplistic presumptions behind Keller's question, observing, among other things, "Any thinking Christian has to answer Keller’s question, yes and yes. It is both-and, not either-or."

Quite. But Keller doesn't know what he's talking about in another way,too. Keller thinks biblical inerrancy means "the literal truth." That is, to believe that the Bible is inerrant means that its texts must be read at face value only. And of course, fundamentalists do stress that.

But inerrancy does not have to mean only that. I believe the Bible is inerrant but I do not believe that literalism is a faithful reading of the Scriptures in every case or verse. In fact, literalism is not even possible in countless cases because of translation nuances. In many cases we cannot know what the verse "literally" says, and in countless others the cultural contexts are so lost that we can only guess what they might mean.

Even so, one can hold the Scriptures to be inerrant in the way that John Wesley did, but focusing on what he called the great chains of interconnected spiritual truths throughout the Bible.

Another point, that Herschel touches on as well: the form of the literature of the passages concerned is crucial to interpreting them. Historical passages should be taken at face value, For example, the story of young David slaying Goliath is a straightforward, historical account and there is no reason to doubt that it happened pretty much the way it is presented. But consider Jesus's parables throughout the Gospels, for example the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15. Is the parable literally true? Or did Jesus tell a stylized story to drive home a religious teaching? The story is parabolically true without regard to its "actually happened" truth. We do not have to take the Bible literally to take it seriously.

Tell ya what, Mr. Keller: I assert the inerrancy of the Bible a lot more confidently than you can assert the inerrancy of the New York Times.

Nietzsche was right about Europe

A long essay by Edward T. Oakes, "Atheism and Violence," discusses and refutes the recent books of Richard Dawkins, Chris Hitchen, et. al., that if all humanity would only renounce religious belief, then violence would cease and permanent peace would result. Curiously enough, the rant-filled Friedrich Nietzsche, who claimed that "God is dead" and originated the germanic idea of the Superman, offers the best argument against these arguments, claims Oakes.

The point, rather, is that Nietzsche saw. However much he (usually) advocated what ought to be most abhorred, he at least recognized that true morality and Christian belief are siblings. Moreover, in tones redolent of Jeremiah he saw the consequences to civilization as a whole when its citizens lose their faith in God. For what will take the place of God will be only a passionate—and largely empty—politics:

For when truth enters the lists against the lies of millennia, we shall have convulsions, a spasm of earthquakes . . . the likes of which have never been dreamed. Then the concept of politics will be completely dissolved in a war between spirits, all authority structures of the old order will be blown into the air—one and all, they rest upon a lie; there will be wars the likes of which have never existed on earth. From my time forward earth will see Great Politics.

Such are the contradictions of atheism. With hope in progress gone, with the lessons of the twentieth century still unlearned in the twenty-first, with technology progressing, in Adorno’s words, from the slingshot to the atom bomb (a remark cited in Spe Salvi), with a resurgence of religiously motivated violence filling the headlines, all that the new atheists can manage is to hearken back to an Enlightenment-based critique of religion. But they find their way blocked, not so much by Nietzsche (whom, as we saw, they largely ignore) but by the ineluctable realities he so ruthlessly exposed. Not Nietzsche, but the history of the twentieth century has shown that godless culture is incapable of making men happier. All Nietzsche did was to point out that no civilization, however “progressive,” can dispel the terrifying character of nature; and once progress is called into question, the human condition appears in all its forsaken nakedness.

Comes now Greg Sheridan, foreign-affairs editor of The Australian, in, "European model a wretched failure."

Anarchy and chaos in Athens one week? Cars beyond number burned in Paris in another season? And now this terrible, senseless, causeless violence in London and many other British cities?

And everywhere across western Europe, governments bankrupt or nearly so, living beyond their means, unable or unwilling to tell their people the truth about their finances.

And beyond this the strange, undemocratic and illiberal mechanism, vast and inescapable, but also creaking and slipshod and unreliable, of the European super state, unable to help anything but always able to interfere, taking decisions without any irksome recourse to democracy or national sovereignty, adding a new layer of illegitimacy to societies robbed of trust. London burning like the Blitz, and all of it inflicted by the pride of British youth. ...

The European model right now is a wretched failure. ...

But the European model, and the British version of it, certainly include a lavish welfare state, multiculturalism, a high level of economic regulation, the eclipse of any special place for religion (especially Christianity), and political correctness.

The last is a shorthand term for a general sense of shame and guilt about the true inheritance of Western civilisation, of shame and guilt for British history, and of a postmodern desire to forever subvert the allegedly dominant narrative of the generation before the baby boomers. ...

Western Europe is also perhaps the least religious society on earth. Christianity, in Britain as in much of Europe, is forever "subverted", which in truth means it is defamed, reviled and mocked. ...

The secular mind may rejoice at the post-religious moment of Europe, and especially of Britain. But an unemployed youth, with no tradition and no real education, with enough money more or less but not many prospects, with no source of moral authority and no help in understanding any basis for right and wrong, nothing to control an impulse, and knowing nothing of British history except that it was shameful and sexist and racist -- how exactly does this youth become integrated and whole, and indeed happy?

Why exactly is it that he doesn't help himself to a night's entertainment attacking ambulance officers and stealing TVs?

The British malaise, the European sickness, have no single, simple cause and no obvious answer.

But whatever it is that the gnomes of Brussels have been selling these past few decades, it doesn't work and it has toxic side effects, as Europe shows.

Clairvoyant science and the Deep Blue God

Can computational physics inform us of the foreknowledge of God? An Answer I call "Deep Blue Theism."

On July 1, my wife and I drove to Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tenn., to pick our daughter up from her completion of the Governor's School for Computational Physics. There are 12 Governor's Schools every summer in Tennessee at various state university campuses (see here). They are for "for gifted and talented high school students" who have just completed either their sophomore or junior years.

During the closing ceremony, Dr. Jaime Taylor, dean of the College of Science and Mathematics and professor of physics, explained briefly that a growing field in computational science is what he called "clairvoyant science."

"Clairvoyant science" is a term so new that Googling it in quotes yields only four results and none of them are relevant to what Dr. Taylor meant. Even so, almost certainly you are already familiar with clairvoyant science and encounter it frequently.

Dr. Taylor's example was Netflix. When he logs on to Netflix, he said, the site always recommends unviewed movies for him based on what he has already watched. This is a crude form of clairvoyant science.

My Netflix account does that, too, of course, but I would say that Amazon is much better at it because it encompasses many different products or services than Netflix and seems for me to do a better job at the clairvoyance part.

But Dr. Taylor's department carries clairvoyant science a step further. They have developed the computational skills to offer students a refined curriculum of classes based not only on what courses they have already taken, but on the grades they received. Furthermore, their educational clairvoyant science can predict, plus or minus one letter, what grade the student will earn in those courses.

Now, I would say that plus or minus a letter grade is a huge variance. I could achieve the almost the same accuracy just by predicting everyone will receive a B. But the point is that the computational methodology will only become evermore refined and accurate. One day it will be able to predict a student's grade not to within a letter, but within a point or two. And yet the computer model itself has no effect whatsoever on the determining the student's grade, of course, even though it "knows" what the grade will be.

This kind of technology helps us understand how God can know the future without predestining it. If we are to understand what does it mean to say, "God knows everything," it is critical coherently to invalidate the proposition that God's knowledge of the future necessarily predetermines the future.

When most Christians say, "God knows everything," they are imagining "everything" too narrowly. "Everything" in fact encompasses much more than they think it does.

Now put on hold hold for a moment the predictive ability of the implications of these computational methods and let's turn our attention to the game of chess.

Supercomputing and predictive ability

In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer became the first computer ever to defeat a world chess champion by beating Garry Kasparov, who held the title at the time.

On February 10, 1996, Deep Blue became the first machine to win a chess game against a reigning world champion (Garry Kasparov) under regular time controls. However, Kasparov won three and drew two of the following five games, beating Deep Blue by a score of 4–2 (wins count 1 point, draws count ½ point). The match concluded on February 17, 1996.

Deep Blue was then heavily upgraded (unofficially nicknamed "Deeper Blue") and played Kasparov again in May 1997, winning the six-game rematch 3½–2½, ending on May 11. Deep Blue won the deciding game six after Kasparov made a mistake in the opening, becoming the first computer system to defeat a reigning world champion in a match under standard chess tournament time controls.

Whether the tournament was actually a fair one is still disputed (just as IBM's Watson computer victory in Jeopardy last February was not really fair, either). Deep Blue was designed and programmed only for chess. It's strengths were its brute computing power and programming customized for nothing but playing chess.

It was capable of evaluating 200 million positions per second, twice as fast as the 1996 version. ... The Deep Blue chess computer which defeated Kasparov in 1997 would typically search to a depth of between six and eight moves to a maximum of twenty or even more moves in some situations.

Deep Blue could not predict absolutelywhat move Kasparov would make next, but it could calculate the hierarchy of possible moves in likelihood order because its database included the complete move sequences of 700,000 grandmaster games. Deep Blue simply outcalculated Kasparov. The wonder, perhaps, is not that Kasparov lost but that he lost so closely.

What if clairvoyant-science computational methods had been built into Deep Blue? Not only would the computer have been able to draw upon the record of 700K games to assess Kasparov's possible moves, it would have been specifically able to refine the likelihood of moves based upon Kasparov's actual play so far in that very tournament, not just the Russian's games among the database. Deep Blue would have learned as the games progressed, knowing more in, say, the third game than its vast database initially contained before the first game. Had that been the case, surely Kasparov's defeat would have been more pronounced.

However, even a computationally clairvoyant Deep Blue could not have exercised deterministic control over Kasparov's moves, even though as the game progressed and he steadily lost, his possible moves certainly did decrease in number.

Which simply means that the flow of such a game would be free, bounded only by the rules of the game, but the outcome would be certain. Deep Blue would win without question but Kasparov's moves would be his to decide. No move would be directly predestined by Deep Blue. Even at a game's end, when Kasparov might have been down to only his king, Deep Blue could not have predestined whether Kasparov would move his king one more time or simply tip it over and concede, though Deep Blue might have been able to offer very profitable advice to onlookers on which way to wager.

I am wondering whether a combination of clairvoyant science and Deep Blue analysis of enormous numbers of potentialities can provide new insights to understand what it means to say, "God knows everything."

My thesis is that God indeed does know everything, but that "everything" in God's knowledge is infinitely greater than theology has classically conceived and Christians have conventionally thought.

God's knowledge, human will and future events: the classical position

Classical theism is probably the dominant theology among most Western church people. In classical theism, God “is believed to have created the entire universe, to rule over it, and to intend to bring it to its fulfillment or realization, to ‘save it,’” wrote Langdon Gilkey in Christian Theology, an Introduction to Its Traditions and Tasks. However, classical theism is based on Greek philosophy at least as much as Scripture and perhaps even more. Most church people do not realize that classical theism's main claims about God - God's changelessness, power, knowledge and goodness - are derived from Plato and Aristotle as much (or more) than from Genesis through Revelation. The historical reasons for this are not relevant to this post; perhaps another time.

Long before the Protestant Reformation, Catholic Scholasticism developed Aristotelian formulations of God as absolute, changeless, eternal being or actuality. Tthe dominant theology of the RCC was that of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who had taught at the University of Paris. His theology of God derived heavily from Aristotle's development of the Unmoved Mover.

The idea of God's impassive immutability remained in the Reformation, though the Reformers, especially Martin Luther, revived Plato's philosophy to buttress their arguments, mediated via the writings of St. Augustine (354-430), who had been trained extensively in the Platonic school. The Reformers emphasized God’s sovereignty as unchallenged, his power as absolute, his knowledge as unbounded and God's character as wholly righteous and gracious. (This last point was of course affirmed by all sides.) Hence, the Protestant Reformation was almost as much a continuation of the centuries-old squabble between Aristotelians and Platonists as between Christian apologists.

God, the Reformers insisted, has absolute priority and sole decisiveness in events of the created order. Always known as powerful in the Jewish and Christian traditions, God was now understood as absolutely omnipotent, able to do anything God chose. This, of course, required that God's knowledge be unlimited, for the exercise of divine power necessitates that the deity be unrestrained in knowing just what he is exercising power about.

This connection inevitably led both Martin Luther and John Calvin to reject entirely the notion of human freedom. They both insisted (independently, they were not theological collaborators) that God's power cannot be divorced from God's will and that God's will cannot be divorced from God's knowledge. Hence, God's power = God's will = God's knowledge.

According to John Calvin in his book, Institutes of the Christian Religion,

All events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God [who] so overrules all things that nothing happens without his counsel. Events are so regulated by God, and all events so proceed from his determinate counsel, that nothing happens fortuitously.

In Calvin's theology, human beings are inherently unable to make free choices. The world proceeds along a path preselected by God and has no role to play except to follow a divine script that is unchangeable down to the tiniest detail. In this view, human beings are puppets on God's strings. We are "free" only to do what God has already ordained to be our nature.

Though not a systematic theologian like Calvin, Martin Luther came to basically the same conclusion. Luther wrote in Bondage of the Will,

God knows nothing contingently, but that he foresees, purposes, and does all things according to his immutable, eternal and infallible will. This bombshell knocks ‘free-will’ flat, and utterly shatters it.

Classical theism, then, views the past, present and future as equally concretized in God’s knowledge. Thus, God’s omniscience equals his omnipotence, since unless God determines every detail of the world, something might happen that was not immutably known to God in advance. But a God who can be surprised, classical theism insists, is no God at all.

But this is a very narrow understanding of what it means for God to know something.

A closer look at God's omniscience

When the claim is made, "God knows everything," a faithful Christian or Jew would be hard pressed to say otherwise. There are ample Scriptural references of the knowledge of God. Psalm 139 is perhaps the most complete single reference, in which the Psalmist observes with wonder,

O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away.
You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.
You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.

Yet to say, "God knows everything" begs, What is "everything?" This is the question that tripped up Luther. Having adopted the Platonic view that there is no difference between the past, present and future to God (a view that I don't think is very Scripturally supportable), which means that there is only an "eternal now" to God, Luther equated the "eternal now" with everything.

But that means necessarily that the eternal now can consist only of what is real. Consider the question, "Does God know Santa Claus?" Well, God knows our Santa Claus story and all its lies we tell our children every December. God knows the man who dresses up in a red suit and sits in the mall the day after Thanksgiving. But how can God know Santa Claus? There is no Santa Claus for God to know!

So: That which is not, is not knowable.

What then does it mean to say, "God knows everything?" It can mean nothing except that God knows everything that is knowable. This is possible only for God, of course, but the fact remains that the knowable is what is, not what is not. God knows the Santa Claus actor in the mall as a thing in itself because the actor is real in himself. God does not know Santa Claus as a thing in itself because Santa Claus is not real as a thing in itself.

Please note a distinction I am making. I might say with equal validity that God does not know my grandchildren because I do not (only yet, I hope) have any grandchildren. But my grandchildren, though they do not exist, do not exist in a critically different way than the way that Santa Claus does not exist.

I can envision a future in which I have grandchildren. I can also envision a future in which I do not. I do not know either future absolutely, but I know them both potentially (or as Luther would put it, "contingently"). And if I can know them potentially, so can God. Luther is thus so simply proved wrong: if I can know something contingently, then necessarily God does, too, else we are left with the stunning proposition that I can know something God cannot know.

Therefore: God knows contingencies (potentialities) as fully as actualities.

Though God does not know absolutely my grandchildren, because they do not exist, hence are not actualities, God does know the nearly unlimited permutations of possibilities of a future in which my grandchildren are born (or not). Since clairvoyant science helps us understand how God can foresee a future event - say, my grandson's first home run - without predetermining it, it is self evident that God can also know every possible alternative to that event, such as a groundout instead of a home run, or a walk, a ground-rule double, game called because of rain, whatever.

All of these things God knows contingently, to use Luther's word, because none of them have yet occurred. Because God knows every possible alternative as the future unfolds means that it is not necessary for us to postulate that whatever God knows must come to pass as the Reformers thought. Their concept of God's knowledge was far too narrow. God knows in advance not only the potentialities that will become actualities, God knows every possible alternative to each actuality. God conceives of what might not happen as fully as he conceives of what does happen.

God therefore cannot be "taken by surprise." No matter what happens, God has already fully foreseen it and is just as prepared for it as if he had directly caused it.

Back to Santa Claus. My grandchildren are potentially real as things in themselves while Santa Claus is not. Thus, my grandchildren are potentialities that may become actualities, while Santa Claus is not. God can envision and prepare for a future in which I have grandchildren. But this cannot be said of Santa Claus.

The Reality of Time

"Time flies like an arrow," goes an old joke, "while fruit flies like a banana." Because classical theism holds that God lives in an eternal now while human beings and indeed the entire created order exist within the arrow's flight of time, in which there is a definite past, present and future, then some thoughts about time are in order.

Both modern science and the Bible agree that the universe had a definite beginning in time. The universe is expanding. The predominant view among scientists is that the universe will continue to expand without ever stopping and then falling back together. That is, we have had the Big Bang but the universe won't have a "Big Crunch." Time is unidirectional, it has no "reverse." Time moves only forward.

It is within that structure of time that human being live, move and have our being. Classical theism holds that God is outside time. Yet if God is to interact with his creation then God must be able to operate within time's arrow; God must be able to enter into time's arrow as well as be apart from it.

That God interacts with humanity within time's arrow is well attested by the Scriptures. The movements of God within human history in the books of the Jewish Scriptures attest to it. Peter's sermon in Acts on the day of Pentecost also makes no sense unless God is accomplishing his will within human frameworks of time and understanding.

There are ample biblical passages that can reasonably be read to indicate that God either admits or implies that he does not know something because the arrow of time has not reached that point yet. That is, of all the potentialities God is preparing for, none have actualized as concrete events, hence are not knowable absolutely, only potentially. Here are examples, all using the NIV:

Gen. 2.19

Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.

The implication is that God did not know what names Adam would give the creatures.

Gen. 6:5-6

The LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The LORD regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.

Other translations say that the Lord "repented" that he had created human beings. The implication is that God did not know in advance how rotten people turned out to be, else why would he regret or repent of creating us? Why would he be troubled if classical theism is right - that everything always turns out exactly as God plans it?

There are many other places in the Bible where God repents of what he has done, for example, 1 Samuel 15, where the Lord repents that he had made Saul king of Israel. Again, if God exercises the meticulous control over creation that classical theism insists he does, then God must be repenting over things that he knew in advance would happen.

Deut. 8:2

Remember how the LORD your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands.

This verse says that God sent the children of Israel into the wilderness to discover whether they would be capable of being God's people. Of course, the 40 years in the wilderness had another purpose, to teach the people humility before God. But is there not clearly the implication that at the end of the 40 years God would know something he did not know at their beginning? If the verse does not mean that, what does it mean?

Isaiah 5:2-4, in which Israel and Judah are the vineyard of the Lord (see v. 7)

He dug it up and cleared it of stones and planted it with the choicest vines. ... Then he looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit. 3 “Now you dwellers in Jerusalem and people of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. 4 What more could have been done for my vineyard than I have done for it? When I looked for good grapes, why did it yield only bad?

Clearly, God expected his chosen people to produce good fruit, but they did not. In this passage, God wonders what else he could have done for them and expresses puzzlement at why they turned out bad.

Can we take these and the many other passages like them into account and still maintain that God is in control of human and cosmic destiny?

Can we postulate that God does not know everything, past-present-future, absolutely and yet is still absolutely going to accomplish his cosmic purposes?

I think we can, and I think we can in a way that honors both the Scriptural teaching of human free will and still affirms that "God's power = God's will = God's knowledge."

The Clairvoyant, Deep Blue God

Having asked earlier how much more lopsided Kasparov's match would have been with Deep Blue had Deep Blue's programming included computational clairvoyance as well as database analysis, I am prepared to try to answer how we can affirm the (at least apparent) biblical teaching that God does not absolutely know absolutely everything in advance. So permit me to explain my premises.

Premise 1
"But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day" (2 Peter 3.8).

However within time's arrow God operates when dealing with his creation, God's understanding of time is nonetheless radically different from ours. God's "now" cannot compare to what now means to us mortals. As the Psalmist wrote, "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain."

So we must be mindful of the fact that our own knowledge will always be woefully incomplete and our language inadequate to the task. But we must do the best we can, always in humility.

Premise 2
God knows everything that can be known and knows it absolutely. Everything that can be known includes all actualities and all potentialities. God's knowledge of what happened during the Exodus is just as certain as what happened on your last birthday. And God's knowledge of what is happening with the remotest hydrogen atom in the most distant galaxy is just as complete as what is happening in your mind while you read these words. But God does not know Santa Claus because Santa Claus is neither actual nor potential.

Premise 3
Because God's knowledge of the future includes all its potentialities, human beings really do have freedom to choose among multiple potential courses. The possible choices are neither unlimited nor unbounded. That is, our freedom is finite in potential and limited in actuality. Kasparov did have freedom to choose how to move his pieces, but only within the rules of the game.

"Choose this day whom you will serve," Joshua admonished the people before they crossed into the Promised Land. The choice is real, and so is the choosing.

Premise 4
Every event, no matter how minute, is influenced in passing from "potential" to "real" by three things:

A. Its antecedents in time, the past events that created the finity of possibilities. But the past cannot be the only influence because then there would be no novelty in the world.

B. The nature of the thing in question. This nature both opens and closes potentialities: things must be and become what they are but cannot be or become what they are not. There is freedom in the becoming, though. "Birds gotta sing and fish gotta swim," but they do not all sing or swim the same, even within the same species.

C. The will of God for each potentiality. In every event, no matter how minute, God is willing the event to its finest possible fulfillment. As the Isaiah passage above indicates, God's will does not always come to pass, at least not wholly or perhaps not yet.

Because God foresees every possibility, God's will is always active and always present. Not everything that happens is God's will, but God's will is present (hence, can be sought) no matter what happens.

This is a key point: Just as the more stuff you buy from Amazon, the more accurate Amazon predicts your next purchases, God learns as time passes, as the verses cited above indicate (and there are others). That is, God's "certainty" range of knowledge of future events is increasing while the "potential" range of his knowledge of future events is decreasing, enabling God to be more effective in shaping events as they transition from potential to actual.

Premise 5
God adjusts to circumstances as they become, which are not always as he intended. Example, Matthew 19, in which Jesus says to some men who had questioned him about divorce, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning."

The Law of Moses was a gift of God and explained God's will. Here Jesus says that God did not intend "in the beginning" that husbands and wives should divorce but permits it because of the intractability of human sinfulness.

God makes temporal adjustments to his will to account for the facts of creation. God's ends do not change, but his means for accomplishing them do, based on how creation's freedom plays out within the parameters God has set for it.

Shakespeare must have figured this out: "There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will—" (Hamlet, Act 5).

Premise 6
If there is anything that God does not know absolutely, as the Scriptures seem to indicate, God's knowledge of the future is infinitely greater than human knowledge of the present. Which is to say that even God's uncertainty of future events is indescribably superior to our certainty of past or present. Paul would seem to affirm this in 1 Cor. 1.25: "For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength."

No matter which possibilities of billions or more turn out to become reality, the "clairvoyant science, Deep Blue" God has already entirely foreseen them in all their permutations. Gregory Boyd put it this way in Satan and the Problem of Evil:

God perfectly knows from all time what will be, what would be, and what may be. And he sovereignly sets the parameters for all three categories. Moreover, because God possesses infinite intelligence, his knowledge of what might be leaves him no less prepared for the future than his knowledge of determinate aspects of creation. ...

Because he is infinitely intelligent, he does not need to “thin out” his attention over numerous possibilities as we do. He is able to attend to each one of a trillion billion possibilities, whether they be logical possibilities, what would be, or what might be, as though it was the only possibility he had to consider. He is infinitely attentive to each and every one. Hence, whatever possibility ends up coming to pass, we may say that from all eternity God was preparing for just this possibility, as though it were the only possibility that could ever possibly occur. Even when possibilities occur that are objectively improbable – and to this extent surprise or disappoint God – it is not at all the case that he is caught off guard. He is as perfectly prepared for the improbable as he is for the probable. [Italics added]

God has a will for the universe and everything within it. Yet everything within creation has a will, too, even if only a mechanistic one. Freedom is real but always exists and is exercised within the boundaries inherent in the created order. God, having created this order to begin with, is greater than it is. Nothing can happen in the universe that God cannot foresee, but to foresee is not to know absolutely in the sense that classical theism conceives of it.

Even so, from our human perspective perhaps it is a distinction without a difference except for a very critical one: we are not predestined at birth either to heaven or hell as the Reformers believed. Of all the freedoms we have to choose or not, there is only one that matters eternally. It is simply whether we will say yes to God. It is God's will that no one should perish (2 Peter 3:9) but we do have the ability to reject God's grace.

Just as Kasparov's choices of potential moves was diminished by the loss of every piece, eventually the universe's potentialities are narrowed until the only possibility that is left is the final fulfillment of God's will. Then it truly will be that "the old order of things has passed away" (Rev. 21).

The problems

Classical theism protects the unbridled sovereignty of God at the expense of human freedom and morality. While one might like to assert, "God is in his heavens and all is well in the world," the world is manifestly not well. The book of Job strikes directly to heart of the problem: if God is as classical theism describes him, why do the innocent suffer? Whence come war, disease, massively-destructive natural disasters and all the other evils of life?

In God at War, Gregory Boyd posits,

Assuming (rightly) that God is perfectly loving and good, and assuming (wrongly, I hold) that divine omnipotence entails meticulous control, the problem of evil ... becomes simply unsolvable.

Resolving the problem of evil is far beyond the scope of this post, but classical theism is unable to answer its basic conundrum: if God is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good, then Job is right - God has some 'splaining to do. The usual approach, as Rabbi Kushner explained in his bestselling Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People, is to adjust one's concept either of God's power or knowledge in order to protect at all costs God's goodness. For if God is not purely and absolutely good, then we are lost. We would have no basis to trust God and while we should fear him there would be no reason to worship or love him.

My concept, rough as it is, of "Deep Blue Theism" avoids this conundrum, though certainly difficult questions remain. Chief among them is that Deep Blue theology must allow for God's direct intervention in human affairs and into individual human actions, of which there are many examples in Scripture (notably, for example, God's convincing Joseph not to send Mary away but to take her as his wife). If I allow for these and other Scriptural examples, why not allow for it all around?

Another problem: I have expressed that there are natural constraints on human freedom built into how we are created. In what sense, then, are we meaningfully free before God since God has already limited our freedom by the way he created us?

Finally, I wrote that "God's 'certainty' range of knowledge of future events is increasing while the 'potential' range of his knowledge of future events is decreasing, enabling God's will to be more effective in shaping events." If that is so, then we would expect the world to be conforming evermore to godliness. But that seems a hard claim to support empirically.

All this is to say, however, that human freedom in relation to God is difficult to understand. Classical theism does not even try and this is, I think, its fatal failing. Classical theism is all about God and not much about God's creation. But self-evidently, God is not about himself but about his creation - in the giving of the covenant at Sinai, for example, in John 3:16 and in Matthew 20.28, "the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." God is deeply and personally involved in the world in the most intimate ways possible to the extent that he is willing to accept that his will can be thwarted in order to preserve our ability to love him back (understanding that God's will can only be thwarted temporarily).

But a question lingers: Could God choose to exercise the meticulous, micromanaging control over every instant that classical theism says he does but that Deep Blue Theism says he does not? The obvious answer is yes, God could do that if God wanted, but an even deeper question is thereby provoked: would it be loving of God to do so? "Yes" is far from an obvious answer to that. Love is inherently relational. A puppeteer may love his puppets but most assuredly they do not love him back. Love desires willing responses, not robotic role playing. So no wonder that God advised his people, "You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart" (Jer. 29.13).

1 John 4.8 says, "God is love." 2 Timothy 2.13 says that even if we are unfaithful to God (hence unloving), God remains faithful (hence loving) to us "for he cannot deny himself."

God is love. God cannot be not-God. Hence God cannot be unloving of his creation. And so, wanting each of us to seek him all our hearts, God does not close the future, but opens it to permit us to shape it along with him and all the attendant uncertainties that go along with that - and he cannot be or do otherwise, "for he cannot deny himself.

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More Than 9 in 10 Americans Continue to Believe in God

More Than 9 in 10 Americans Continue to Believe in God

So says Gallup, down only slightly since 1940. But, as UMC Bishop Ken Carder wrote, belief in God is not the real issue. The real issue is the nature of the God in whom one believes.

I am reminded of the story of a UN mediator who went to northern Ireland during the Troubles, the internecine combat between the Catholics and the Protestants there. During a community meeting, someone asked the mediator who was right about God. The mediator replied that since he was not a Christian at all, being from Asia and raised in ancient Asian religion, he had to admit that he himself didn't believe in God in the first place.

A woman arose from the audience and demanded, "Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants you don't believe in?"

Just believing beliefs is of no value. What difference they make in our lives is of enormous import.

Fall back and regroup, end timers!

Billboard shot of the day:

Meanwhile, gird up your loins for October 21:

Israel to be invaded Friday. World to end Saturday.

What an interesting conjunction of events. First: "Facebook Groups Call for Mass Invasion of Israel on Friday."

The Third Palestinian Intifada on Facebook seems to have at least twenty different groups or pages, each with hundreds or thousands of fans. One group has 365,000 fans. According to Yedioth Ahronoth (YNet), these sites are now urging all Arabs to “rush the Israeli borders” after Friday prayers on May 20.

Look: This could be the work of one nerdy Palestinian in a basement in Ramallah. The fans could also be people who exist only in cyberspace.

But, these Third Palestinian Intifada websites could also be the work of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hizbullah, Syria, and the Palestinian Authority, all of which have problems of their own and for whom a diversion would be mighty fine. In fact, I think they are. Thus, this promised new aggression must be taken seriously and stopped in its tracks.

In any event, these Third Intifada facebook websites are suggesting that armed and unarmed hordes, masses, mobs of incited and hate-filled Arabs invade–“surge”–into sovereign Israel (as they have done for years to India.) The Indian press and police are too afraid to report it or to stop them. Israelis have no choice but to do so.

I do not think that the "surge" will be nearly as great at this piece's author, Phyllis Chesler, fears. But the turnout will still be high. There was, after all, a rehearsal held only a few days ago.

Palestinians rushed Israel's borders at Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza, which resulted in the deaths of 15 Palestinians and many more injuries.

The Israeli Defense Force was caught by surprise but was able to defend the borders. But the crowds got what they came for: heaping more bad publicity on Israel. Most of the international media dutifully complied.

Interesting event number two: Christian Premillennialism, a variety of "end times" lore, insists that Isarel will be invaded by mortal enemies and that to save Israel, Jesus will return in person. And he won't be nice.

Third: Harold Camping, founder of Family Radio Worldwide, with a wide listener base, says that God closes the book on human history this Saturday.

May 19 (Reuters) - The U.S. evangelical broadcaster predicting that Judgment Day will come on Saturday says he expects to stay close to a TV or radio to monitor the unfolding apocalypse.

Harold Camping, 89, previously made a failed prediction that Jesus Chris would return to Earth in 1994.

But the head of the Christian radio network Family Stations Inc says he is sure an earthquake will shake the Earth on May 21, sweeping true believers to heaven and leaving others behind to be engulfed in the world's destruction over a few months.

"We know without any shadow of a doubt it is going to happen," said Camping, whose Family Radio broadcasts in more than 30 languages and on U.S. and international stations.

So: invasion of Israel Friday? Second coming Saturday? I personally think I'll go long on oil.

A fellow named Hal Lindsey wrote a novel in 1970 called The Late Great Planet Earth, though the publisher presented it as "non-fiction." It sold many millions of copies. It was a highly imaginative account of why Lindsey thought the world would end in 1988. Lindsey’s fictional account of the end times had the Warsaw Pact invading Israel from the north and the Chinese army invading from the east, and the United States in the middle, defending Israel. Nuclear war followed, which would have killed every human being except for the direct, personal return of Christ to Jerusalem.

It didn’t happen, of course. The Warsaw pact is gone. For that matter, 1988 is gone, too, and we’re still here. Jesus hasn’t returned yet. The Late Great Planet Earth is in its forty-plus printing; not a word has been changed and it still predicts the end of the world and the second coming in 1988. The track record of everyone who has predicted the end of the world has been one hundred percent in error. One supposes, though, that eventually someone will get it right.

According to the 24th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, we cannot know when comes the end of the age: "You do not know on what day your Lord will come," Jesus admonished his disciples. So we should not even try to predict. Jesus will come in judgment at an unexpected hour. Keep spiritually awake, Jesus cautions, don’t be asleep. Followers of Jesus are to spend their time announcing the Good News and being the body of Christ in this world, not in apocalyptic speculation.

The real pity of Mr. Camping's May 21 prediction is not that it will be wrong, but that it has inexplicably received so much media attention. His is a fringe movement, not even a flicker on the Church-o-meter. So why does his forecast get such media attention? Well, it gives pop culture another reason to dismiss all the Church and all its teachings.

The pity is that so many people will think that Camping-ism is normative of the Christian faiths. But it is not a message of hope nor a position of confidence. Campingism - and "Left Behind-ism" generally - is a theology of fear, and poor theology at that.

Vigilance for the day of the Lord is a spiritual condition. It means that we remain open to what our relationship with God demands. Let God take us in judgment, for that judgment is liberation and freedom. Whenever judgment comes, we should live now in faith, staying spiritually awake. Our Lord will break into our ordinary lives with extraordinary power, even when we don’t expect it.

Update: Here is a convenient flow chart on whether you will be raptured Saturday.

Is Osama bin Laden in Hell for eternity?

Where would Dante or Rob Bell, or You, put Bin Laden?

Enter Dante. Hell, for him, was a place of contrapasso, of punishment that directly correlated with sin. False prophets have their heads twisted backwards so they cannot see the road ahead; a man who decapitated a head of state carries his own head around like an oil lamp. Where would Dante put bin Laden? Probably in circle seven, with the violent against neighbors: the murderers and war-makers who, because they wallowed in others' blood during their lives, are condemned to immersion in boiling blood forever.

Did Osama bin Laden go to hell or paradise? Obviously, devout Christians and Muslims will answer this question differently. I yield to blogging colleague Daniel Jackson on what an orthodox Jewish answer would be, if he reads this post.

At any rate, one of the big bestsellers these days in America is Rob Bell's book, "Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived." I have not read the book, but the title alone strikes me as rather presumptive - does Rev. Bell really claim to know truly the eternal fate of every person who ever lived? I make no such claim and don't see how anyone else can.

Basically, though, Bell promotes another version of salvation-universalism, a theology that one way or another, everyone will be saved by God at the end of the age, that all sins will be remitted and that regardless of one's religion or spiritual state at death, heaven/paradise is everyone's eternal destiny.

And this is another version of predestinarianism, the idea that our fates are sealed and that nothing we can do or fail to do can change that fact. God being God, after all, gets what God wants. In distinction, there is the theology of Arminianism, named after Dutch Reformed theologian Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609), which holds that God's grace is not irresistible by human beings, that God does not overpower decisions of the human will.

Bell's universalism is not a new teaching at all, as Bell apparently acknowledges. Universalists were found among the post-apostolic church fathers, including bishops. Ultimately universalism was debated thoroughly at an episcopal conference (well, more than one) and finally held to be heretical. And all its adherents were burned at the stake confessed they were in error and returned to their episcopal duties.

A work of universalist theology by a Methodist scholar is David Lowes Watson's, "God Does Not Foreclose: The Universal Promise of Salvation." This I have read, several times in fact (it sits on my bookshelf). I have known Dr. Watson for years and am willing to bet that its theological grounding is superior to Bell's but that may just be my Methodist bias showing. I find Dr. Watson's arguments compelling - but alas, not convincing.

Here is how I work through the topic.

Gaia will kill you!

ThinkProgress: Storm victims kind of had it coming, didn’t they? « Hot Air

If you reject the notion of human-caused global warming, the earth will kill you. And what happened to Tuscaloosa proves it.

Richard Dawkins - Protestant Atheist

The problem with Richard Dawkins' atheism is not his atheism, per se, but that his atheism is so Protestant.

My problem with Richard Dawkins is not that he is an atheist. I admire that. It's that he's a Protestant atheist. Religion, many think, has been slain by the experimental method of science. Beginning with Galileo's experiments on free fall, science has succeeded because it is value-free, objective and proves its points not by nebulous belief but by rigorous logic and verified proof. This is a complete misunderstanding.

And as it turns out, scientists are not nearly as atheistic as some folks such as Dawkins make them out to be. More than 70 percent of scientists describe themselves as "religious in the traditional sense" or "spiritual."

"He has a demon, and is mad"

Nine years and a few months ago someone asked me whether I was surprised that 19 Islamists had hijacked four airliners and killed almost 3,000 people. The question struck me as odd. Why is anyone ever surprised of the evil men do? "There is no one who does good, not even one," said the Psalmist, and so why should we be surprised that some commit actual evil?

We have learned again, from Tucson, that we civilized people cannot constrain the devil that stalks the human soul. "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" asked the Shadow, so far be it from me to psychoanalyze Jared Loughner. Best leave that to Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, whose flashing-quick diagnosis of Rightwing Derangement Syndrome for Loughner surely was the fastest-ever solving of the "motive" side of the means and opportunity triangle. What the psychs will discover about Loughner I leave to them.

"He has a demon, and is mad."

Yet how odd that in our postmodern conviction and scientific certainty that we can easily find the answer, we gloss right over one that no one seems willing to utter, mayhaps 'cept I: "He has a demon, and is mad." Of course, that was an accusation made against Jesus, and is today an excellent summary of the mainstream-media commentary (such as the NYT's Paul Krugman's) on the Jedi mind-control that they claim the Right's "climate of hate" exercised over the hapless Jared Loughner. So we mustn't take it too far.

I retreat from such rhetorical arguments. In arguing that, "He has a demon, and is mad," I am not trying to argue the literal existence of demonic beings who actually enter the bodies and spirits of human beings, taking "possession" of them and controlling their actions. The modern mind has no room for that. I refer instead to sickness of the mind and of the soul, a spiritual sickness that aligned itself with the evil that is out there.

Evil is within us, but not only within us

French philosopher Paul Ricouer argued in his book, The Symbolism of Evil, that one of the things taught by the temptation stories of the Bible is that evil resides within the human breast but not only there. There is an "externality of evil," as he put it, symbolized in Genesis by the serpent. Within these texts is a strong subtext, not only in the Bible but in cultural myths around the world that there is a seduction of the human mind and the human body by the "tragic" of creation into which we are born, "which is already there and already evil" (his emphasis). There is, he says,

... a mystery of iniquity which is not reducible to the clear consciousness of actual evil, of the evil beginning in an instant; it points toward an underlying peccability which, as Kierkegaard says in The Concept of Dread, endures and increases quantitatively. That underlying peccability is like the horizon of actual evil... .

"Peccability" means that we mortals are temptable. Because of this fundamental fact we will be tempted by an externality much and yield to it often - usually, happily, on harmless things like another piece of chocolate but not infrequently to evil itself. When we yield to the harmful rather than the merely frivolous it is sin, indeed, too often mortal sin which, as we saw in Tucson, can be lethal as well.

This is not a modern world view. We have exorcised sin conceptually from our vocabulary, our discourse and hence, our understanding of the human condition. "He has a demon, and is mad" is eye-rolled for the former part and medicated for the latter - psychiatry today exorcises pharmaceutically, not ritually. And yet for all its chemically-reliant wonder, no mental-health professional will ever be able to explain away that the human being is predisposed to cooperate with the iniquitous, a cooperation that not merely endures but increases until it forms the horizon of actual evil, evil that erupts so tragically.

The human condition is tragic

"Tragically" is a key word, for the ancients did not use it as we do, simply to mean "sadly." The Greek playwrights knew tragedy as the unfolding of human character, hence human events, not as they are predestined but as they are predisposed. Tragedy is not random or accidental. It is the result of human striving, whether for good or ill, not exactly inevitable but not altogether avoidable. Even the heroic can be tragic.

Always, the ancients knew that the tragic is woven inherently in the human condition because they understood what we have progressively dismissed: that "there is no one who does good, no not one," except now and then, here and again, but almost never as a habit. Virtue, said Aristotle, is excellence made habitual, which is exactly why virtue is so rare: the habits of man are rarely excellent and left to themselves, without rigorous moral training or an externality of constraint to the good, will always become corrupted.

What makes the human condition tragic in this sense is that evil is never temporary and triumphs are never permanent. Salve of compassion, care and grieving is being applied to Tucson, but some must be saved for the next venue. For certainly another there will be.

Update,Jan. 13: This is very similar to what President Obama said in his speech the evening of Jan. 12:

Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding. In the words of Job, "when I looked for light, then came darkness." Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.

For the truth is that none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped those shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man's mind.

That is very close to what it means to say, "He has a demon, and is mad." Bad things happen for which facile, "just so" stories offer no insight or understanding, especially if we agree with progressivism's mantra that, "people are basically good." This is a very modern world view, dating only about 130 years back. But it is empirically, provably false considering only the history of humanity of the last 100 years.

The president's quote from Job, "when I looked for light, then came darkness," is actually quite appropriate because the light of human reason and ability is simply too weak to overwhelm the darkness of the tragic of creation and the human condition. That is the primary, bitter lesson that Job must learn by the end of the book, as well as that human understanding is exceedingly partial, fragmentary, incomplete and usually misguided.

So how can the darkness be overcome? Again, Scripture gives us the answer: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."

Originally published at Right Network.