Time Immortal

1. I like voliscience as outlined.

But, even if one works with omniscience, one must remember that God (”the Judeo-Christian one”) is eternal, not everlasting. God is outside of our time standards. It is not that God knows what we do ‘before’ we do it. He knows it ‘as’ we do it, since all moments in time are present to Him in one mental act. To claim that He knows ‘before’ we do something is to extract His knowledge of all time to an arbitrary point in time.
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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.

…one also detects the whiff of soured Puritanism in our wide-spread faith in the doctrine of Strength Through Evil that is part and parcel of the Culture of Fear.

Strength Through Evil? When put like that, we don’t like to think we believe in such things. But looking not at our protestations but at our art, the notion that Bad is Powerful is everywhere. The myth created by that great son of Scotch Calvinist culture, Robert Louis Stevenson, is as potent today as ever: Jekyll is a weenie. Hyde is strong. Captain Kirk “needs” his evil side in order to avoid the same fate of terminal weeniness. From The Cowboys (where a wimpy stuttering kid finds inner strength through profanity, and boys become men through the brutal killing of a bad guy) to Million Dollar Baby (where the hero finds inner strength through murder) to Titanic (where a girl trapped in a colorless life finds inner strength through fornication), our culture loves and deeply believes the story of finding Strength Through Evil.

That’s no accident; it’s part of a Calvinist and post-Calvinist anthropology. That’s why one constant refrain in anti-Catholic apologetics is that the Immaculate Conception just can’t be true because, if it were, it would mean that Mary is not “fully human.” Why? Because you need sin and evil in order to be fully human, we are told. That, in the end, is what is implied by the wholly unbiblical and philosophically preposterous phrase “sinful nature.” What Calvinism and its postmodern descendants all tend to affirm is that sin is not what corrupts human nature, but what constitutes it. That’s because we have failed, as a culture, to make the distinction between what is normal and what is natural. Sin is normal. It is never natural. Indeed, it is what destroys nature.

…

The problem with this Faustian arrangement is simply this: Evil is not constitutive of the human person; evil is not healthy and natural and realistic and, most of all, evil is not strong. Evil saps strength, darkens reason, and corrupts our very ability to grasp reality. Evil does not, in fact, keep us safe, make us happy, or help us win the war on Radical Islam. It makes us weaker, confuses us, and leaves us more vulnerable than ever to our enemies. Indeed, mortal sin is radically contrary to the good of the human person and always results in disaster when we embrace it.

It’s funny that so much of Calvinist thinking — that is, a Christian religious philosophy that emerged in opposition to medieval Catholicism — now underpins secularist/atheist/materialist reasoning in so many ways. It’s everywhere in the atheist mind. Whether it’s Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (of which The Golden Compass, more properly called Northern Lights, is the first book) and its doctrine of the salvation of the universe through the sexual intimacy of its (unwed) teenaged protagonists, Amanda Marcotte’s weird obsession with proving that virginity is just a “myth” or artificial social construct, or Richard Dawkins‘ assertions that human beings overcome their base animal nature by giving in to the temptation to commit adultery (from which he draws the subsequent conclusion that society should no more stigmatize people who take multiple sexual partners, even after they are married, than it should stigmatize those who like two or three different kinds of wine), the idea that sin can in some way “save” us (from what we are saved is never clearly established) permeates secular thinking everywhere one finds it.

It’s sad that Protestantism has become such an enabler for modern atheism, and sadder still that so much of Protestant thinking — which was erroneous even at its promulgation centuries ago — has become so prevalent in our modern world. The most telling example for me, I think, was an argument I once had with a Southern Baptist kid who was attempting to explain how engaging in a little anonymous cyber-sex did not constitute cheating on his then-girlfriend.

But as Chesterton noted, fallacies do not suddenly become truths simply because they become fads. The only question, I suppose, is how messy the societal collapse triggered our willing embrace of every sinful tendency will be. Because that is the ultimate destination of decadence and of a society which abandons notions of self-restraint in pursuit of an uninterrupted experience of “what feels good at the time.”