Time Immortal

Ever since I stumbled across game theory, I’ve been musing on its applications in Theology. Vox Day, being a game designer, has gone one further.

It occurs to me that when kicking around the concept of God as game designer, we’re still missing a few words required to properly consider the concept. The problem with the concept of omniscience is that it’s a weirdly binary notion, wherein the only options are a superficially illogical all-knowing and a definitively non-Biblical naught-knowing of nonexistence. But how would one describe the knowledge of the Game Designer God, who can know or not know any given thing depending solely on His will?

The concept of voliscience describes a Creator who knows whatever He wants, whenever He wants, to the extent that the concept of time is even relevant to such a being. Not only does this concept not limit God, but it has the additional benefit of being far more Biblically accurate than the traditional concept of an omniscient God. In fact, if one thinks about the matter for more than five seconds, one quickly realizes that the concept of voliscience is far less limiting than the use of the concept of omniscience has historically proven to be. One might also consider the concept of volipotence to be of some benefit in better conceiving a rationally sound and Scripturally precise nature of the Biblical God, but it’s probably less necessary since the key stumbling point for most Christians and atheists alike here is not related directly to omnipotence per se, but rather their inability to distinguish between the capacity of omnipotence and the action of omniderigence.

The fact that there is no possible logical conflict between voliscience and volipotence only adds to the rational appeal of the concept in my opinion, although I regard the nominal theodictic conflict between omnipotence and omniscience to reflect thinking so shallow as to border on stupidity anyhow. In an information society, one has to be fairly obtuse to fail to realize that because knowledge is power, absolute knowledge IS absolute power. There is no conflict because the two are one and the same.

I’m just talking off the cuff here, but I think that volipotence and voliscience (terms Day has coined, but the definitions are not hard to infer) are concepts that most Christian apologists internally use anyhow when dealing with the challenge of theodicy. The typical atheist lame-duck argument (evil exists; we can conclude that either God is evil because He could stop it and doesn’t, or that God is not all-powerful and cannot stop it, or else that God doesn’t actually exist at all) has any number of flaws with it, but I admit I’ve never thought about it in terms of the rather binary nature of omniscience/omnipotence.

And yet, without knowing a term for it, I’ve used voliscience/volipotence as the framework for my main rebuttals to the above, and also in my rebuttal to the classic (if silly) question of whether God could create an object so massive as to be immovable by God. I think what a goodly number of atheists forget, and what no small number of Christians likewise forget, is that God is possessed of a will, a divine will the finds its analog in our human will. Will is a powerful and funny thing, and too many people on both sides of the religious divide seem to forget that having an ability and exercising that ability through force of will are two separate and almost mutually exclusive things. One may not wish to exercise any particular ability, but that doesn’t mean that one is incapable of said ability’s exercise.