Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise
For those of us who that don’t recognize that line, it comes from a traditional Christian hymn. In this entry, we are going to tackle an issue which is a very big deal for non-believers and not a big enough issue for believers. The issue is that of immutability. A lot of ink has been spilled over the concept that God is unchanging. There are references made to a God who seemingly changes His mind. This then begs the logical question: How can a God who is unchanging change His mind?
Implicit in this question and the answer are a number of other claims that Christians make about God that fit this same description. If you recall my entry about the basics of Christianity, there were three other words I used along with immutable, namely:
-Omnipresent, that is to say, all present.
-Omnipotent, that is to say, all powerful, and
-Omniscient, that is to say, all knowing.
If you’ve been reading those things carefully, you’ll notice that seems to put God in a place of complete and total everythingness, if I can use such a made-up word. That’s not an accident. Christian doctrine does not hedge on these points. However, that does create a certain number of logical problems for us, namely:
If God is those things (omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent and immutable) isn’t there somehow an issue with the God revealed in the Bible, and even if there isn’t how do we explain that in meaningful human terms?
Before I bring those questions to you, I want to ask a related, but unweighted (at least, from a religious standpoint) question: What is infinity? How would you know it if you saw it? Isn’t it just a word to describe something we can’t describe?
We say all kinds of things about infinity in mathematics and science, things like, “As you approach infinity, the value for x increases,” or so on. But in real, definable, measureable terms, what does that mean? In the case of infinity, saying those things only indicates movement in a direction that presumably goes on forever. But notice, we never talk about the status of infinity, because it is something no one can know.
I want to transfer some of that issue to the matter currently at hand. If you’ll notice, all four of the words I’ve used to describe God bear a resemblance to `infinity’ in one very important aspect that should not be overlooked-they are words to describe something we have no way of understanding. All of our terms for presence betray our terrible limitedness in terms of how much space we occupy. Can we really understand omnipresence, and what that looks like? All of terms for knowing betray our lack of total knowing. We have no way of describing knowing everything in a meaningful way. All powerful? Most of us can’t even decide what we want for dinner, or what clothes to wear, yet alone making our own life decisions or designing complicated systems of life or thought. (Mad props to the scientist and philosophers who do those things, but they are the exception, not the rule.)
The same is true of immutability. The only methods we have of keeping track of anything is by a comparison of how things change. Even time, in the most basic sense, is only a measure of change. We talk about time as though it were a solid object, but in reality, the scale we’ve created is somewhat arbitrary, and only measures the movement of a clock hand that changes by set gradations, or if you want to go to the most basic sense, the movement of the sun, and the changing of the seasons. The only way we know time has passed is by the amount of change we can measure in our surroundings. Furthermore, we are all hopelessly locked into time. We are slaves to it. We serve it. Clocks guide our temporal existence. If you wanted proof, all you need do is put a person in a room without windows or natural light, and without a clock. After a few short days, their patterns are all screwed up, and they eventually go insane. We are slaves to time.
(continued, next entry)