This really IS the short form. I swear ....
I haven't the time this morning for my usual deposit of horsepucky, so it's well enough to limit myself to a couple of specific points which will, hopefully, be understood in terms of their vitality to the topic:
- I think people are examining the question from too personal a perspective. That is not to say that the posts are without insight, intelligence, or progressive thought, but I submit as part of my constant litany, Huxley's "Martian eye": being depressed about the number of people on the face of the Earth who were left to collect the excrement of animals, Huxley realized that seen through a "Martian eye"--that is, a perspective removed from the system examined--the situation was not nearly so depressing. It may be depressing to think of the millions of people to whom the passing of an unconstipated elephant is a godsend, but if we look at humanity from without, it's rather a cheery thought that we've figured out something to do with all this shite.
- Part of this not only involves a removal from the space of the system examined, but also a removal from the time of the system examined. Anyone more familiar with quantum mechanics and mathematics than I should have a better idea of what I'm talking about, but part of abstract mathematics examines probability waveforms and other somewhat surreal concepts. The point being is that we gain from this some perspective on
potential.
- Thus we naturally look to the future as something which has not occurred. What becomes today when tomorrow arrives? Is today any less real come tomorrow? When that future becomes the present, we see which potential outcome of the system examined is real. Despite the
potential outcomes, the
actual result could be no other way.
- We may feel that we have free will, and a side consideration is the possibility that there exist too many factors affecting the determinist nature of the Universe for the human brain to calculate. However, in terms of free will, when we look at what has
just occurred, can it be said to be possible that it occurred any other way? Things occur the way they do because that is the way they are. If another potential outcome was more persuasive according to the actual rules of the Universe, then that potential would have been the actual. "God does not play dice," says the sage. Another replies that it's a little like playing poker in a pitch-black room with cards with blank faces, an indeterminate number of players, and a dealer that smiles
all the time. But evolution has led to humanity (or deer, or bears, or
E. coli, ad nauseam) simply because, when all else is done, it is the only way things could go. If there had been another, better way, that way would be reality and not some theoretic would-be, could-be, should-have-been. From this perspective, the notion of free will not so much crumbles under the weight of protest, but evaporates having become largely, if not entirely, irrelevant.
To be more specific to the topic post (well, hopefully), God cannot be excused from any result occurring within a free-will Universe, because at that point our version of free will is not entirely free. Were it free, our choices would not be constrained by this filter we call "reality". (Why should I not flap my arms and fly? Teleport to Proxima Centauri? Dance with Andromeda?) It should be mentioned that a danger of "Tiassa's Universe", as such, is that everything generally leads to a form of nihilism, and free will in a designed Universe is no exception. (I have no handy tips to cope with that condition, other than, "Deal with it," and how useful is that?)
One might say that we are made in God's image because, according to the Universe, humanity could not have evolved any other way. Certes, with a different climatological history, or electrochemical foundation, humanity could have evolved differently. But those conditions did not occur, and are not real. We have ten fingers and toes, two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, and a brain that compels our mouths to be useless in order to make other compromises with nature. Without the intellectual level found in humans at least, the world is reduced to a certain degree of savagery. Truly, we accomplish our own savagery, but I say that Life (capitalization intentional) is a learning process. Do we learn from history? Should we learn from history? But that history occurred because it could not occur any other way. From there, to be more expedient, I might invoke the question of the quantification of a thought impulse: what are the natural (or physical) properties of thought? Voltage? Amperage? How closely can we observe the changes in blackbody output during different states of mind? In the end, all consciousness and thought (barring the existence of the soul) is nothing more than electrical phenomena. A star goes through phases according to its mass and density. This is in response to nature. At what level are the energy relations of human thought subject to natural law? All that we do, we do because we do. It's not a riddle. It's just irresponsible rhetoric.
There is no other possible reality than the one we have. All that occurs within this reality, from the biggest bang since the Big Bang down to children starved in a basement in New Jersey, all the way down to "Does this dress make me look fat?" comes about because it
must. Not necessarily by the will of any being, but by the facts of circumstance. That I write these words is necessary. That police shoot someone for smoking pot or perhaps--in the case of Amadou Diallo, Mario Paz, Patrick (?) Dorismond, Esquivel Hernandez, and many others--for
not smoking pot, is somehow necessary. Don't ask me why; if I knew, I would be God. But just because I can't figure out how to ascertain the whole of the question
why does not mean I should not endeavor to discover that.
A friend who happens to be a psychologist asked me the other day about happiness. I told him that I would be happy if, even for just a second, I could understand what it is to be a human being. Even if it's the last thing I do.
I'll most likely never accomplish it. But I do know that I see farther if I step out of time just a little bit, and see things as necessities of the Universe, and not the fancies of ego--be it God's or ours.
(So much for the short form. And for coming back to the topic question. Something about the fancies of ego ....
)
I'll stop now ....
thanx,
Tiassa
