I watched a talk where Neil Degrasse Tyson uttered once again his statement that the universe is under no obligation to make sense to us, and someone else tossed in that it is under no obligation to be safe either.
My image of how God thinks is tied to the strange (to humans) ways that some human minds work, for example my younger brother who can look at a number up to seven digits long and just tell the prime factors – he doesn’t stop to calculate, he just “sees” them. Another example would be someone I know who always knows just where the balance point is on a log no matter how strange the shape – he definitely doesn’t stop to estimate volume and density and all, he just “sees” the balance point. Then there’s a kid who when handed a Rubik’s Cube that is scrambled will look at each side and then know the shortest sequence of moves to solve the cube – he doesn’t work through them mentally, he just “sees” the steps between the disordered pattern and the ordered one.
So my concept is that for all the mundane things we have to use math and measurements to figure out, God just “sees” them, so like my younger brother can look at a number and know its prime factors, God could – working in the other direction – think of the sort of universe He wanted and just “see” what the constants needed to be.
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Roger Zelazney wrote a series of science fiction books where a main premise is that a certain family had the ability to consider a situation and then choose which possibility was going to be realized – in the story’s terms they could adjust probabilities in order to get a desired outcome. And the probabilities didn’t have to be large, either; one of my favorite scenes is where one guy is traveling and wants his sword, so he stops at a hollow tree, reaches in, and there’s his sword because regardless of how vanishingly small the probability of his sword having somehow gotten into that tree, that was the possibility he ‘selected’ for.
I sometimes think of the first cell coming about in that way, that God chose a moment when the right elements were present and just tweaked the probabilities to select the possibility He wanted. Admittedly it’s not a great model since it pretty much conceives the universe as a sort of clockwork mechanism, but I find it useful in that it puts God’s action(s) in changing things in the universe on a more subtle level than Him adding energy or physically re-arranging things.
I agree with you that truth is not merely an opinion. The issue is that truth is an abstract concept that is not obvious and has no intrinsic power. The power of ‘truth’ is only in the passion of belief that it inspires. On a personal level, it can satisfy the troubled soul but on a larger scale, it produces much conflict. The issue of truth, driven by the passion of belief, is the source of all religious and political conflict. The only truth that always ‘wins’ is death. Mankind has created many opinions to deal with this reality.
I agree with that as well. But I think there are two kinds of truth which we can, do and must negotiate. There is that which can be vouchsafed by science or by direct observation. But then there is everything in our experience which one must negotiate without the benefit of certain knowledge. In such circumstances the “truth” is that which you actually rely on. As such it is the basis of faith. Some things, especially regarding the sacred, will always remain in this category. Though of course people can associate with others who rely on the same truth so conceived and thus form a community united by the shared belief in that which resists certainty.
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The concept of truth may be merely an abstraction, but truth itself is based in reality, and that reality is not an abstraction. ‘Truth’ to a Buddhist may calm her soul dispassionately (but not truly satisfy) and likewise may New Age woo for panentheists from the 1970s and 80s. I do not disagree about the power belief can entail, but isn’t there a difference between truth believed and truth (‘true truth’) in reality? Certainly to co-heirs in Jesus.
(Now of course I have to reprise my favorite anagram, the Latin that answers Pilate’ question ; - )…
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The Amber series, starting with “The Nine Princes of Amber”.
I don’t see God altering the probabilities – those are a big part of the laws of nature. But I do see God as selecting particular outcomes and the restraint of those probability distributions in the laws of nature explain why He cannot do so all the time or systematically (given His commitment to those laws of nature as necessary for the process of life). Miracles are by definition unusual and unexpected.
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Vanishingly small probabilities is a good description of how God orchestrates his providential interventions into the lives of his children, and that’s a fun fictional illustration of the former. A true to life illustration of God’s orchestration and vanishingly small probabilities is Maggie’s factual testimony about her five ‘lottery wins’ demonstrates it wonderfully (her ‘lottery wins’… in the order she bought the tickets and her single tickets being the only tickets bought at all, so to speak). Of course denialists will deny and not be convinced even if someone rose from the dead, per the parable of Dives and Lazarus.
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