``Almost Surely''

I could be writing a file I/O module to support the ghetto Huffman encoder/decoder I wrote this evening, but I think I will save it for tomorrow instead, where I will then think about how to further enhance my understanding of flute/笛子 harmonics for devising a more systematic set of advanced techniques on the much lower flutes/笛子.

I still haven't played a video game. Strange huh?

Anyway, I want to talk a little bit about a thought I have regarding the resolution of the apparent contradiction of the sovereign nature of God against the free will that is apparently available in that of a human. This concept came to me as I was listening to the message as presented by the pastor at church earlier this evening.

When people think about God's will, two fallacies are committed. The first is that God's will is always about doing things that they (i.e. the person thinking about this) will see immediate benefits to whoever is thinking about God's will. This is often a central point of many refutations against those who ask things like ``if God is all-knowing, then why does He not help me now when I need it `the most' ''. Primarily, God's will isn't about furthering any single human's life in the sense that we understand---it is about furthering His overall plan for humanity to drop their sinful nature and then to glorify Him. Secondarily, it is often a problem of what I call ``temporal scale mismatch''---God is the definition of asymptotic time since He exists outside of time and space as we know it. So the time-horizon for the fulfilment of God's will is at least א‎₀, i.e. at least countably infinite (the units do not matter if we are talking about infinities, since a unit is just some finite scalar, which is nothing when compared to infinity), while our puny mortal time-horizon is limited to only about 100 years, if we are lucky. The Bible, the source of God's Word, does not hint on anything remotely relating to specific deadlines in terms of prophecies---all it often does is to set up a series of signs that one needs to observe before the main event. But note that even these set of signs only declare their order [sometimes], and not the duration that spans between the signs.

Given that, it is thus very unlikely for the prophecies made of God to happen in any specific person's life-time, which is alluded to with the metaphor of ``...like a thief in the night...'' (Revelation 16:15, 1 Thessalonians 5:2, and 2 Peter 3:10, to name a few).

That segues into the second fallacy: the assumption that God's will is deterministic. I think that a lot of the big arguments about the collision between God's sovereignity over how the universe operates (or more microcosmicly, how people operate) is the assumption that God's will is like a computer program, a formulaic antecedent→outcome ``machine''. With that fallacious assumption, people get understandably uncomfortable when they try to reason about free will, arguing that if God ``is real'' (conflating existence with determinism), then free will is not possible because God's all-knowing nature would render individual thought and decisions impossible.

I don't think that God's will is deterministic. I don't think that the Bible portrays God's will as being deterministic. Don't get me wrong, God has defined rules that are clearly of the form of antecedent→outcome, but the caveat is that very few such rules have a hard deadline. The rules that have some kind of ``hard'' deadline involve those of rituals in the Old Testament, but those are rather cyclical and are largely done/led by the priests of old. There are, however, very little indication of the time duration between antecedent and outcome, and is exemplified within the Bible itself (see the time duration between when King David committed a sin against God and when he was punished (2 Samuel 11:28, then 2 Samuel 12:18)---we only know the order of the events, but not necessarily specifically when).

God's will, based on my current understanding of the Bible, can be understood as the set of ``almost surely'' temporal events. This has several implications: it means that God's will does not contradict the prophecies by virtue of the fact that the prophecies are the temporal events that will occur ``almost surely'', but the actual path through the temporal event space by the universe is still subjected to the statistical effect of combining the multitude of individual free will. Put in another way, our free will can still allow us to make localised decisions that do not affect the overall thematic movement that is characterised as God's will.

Without going through all these mathematical concepts, that is basically what the pastor said at church today. There is no contradiction because God's view of the universe is unfathomably larger (in both space and time) as compared to us, that the free will that exists within us can still be exercised without necessarily screwing up God's will, i.e. in the end, God is still in control, no matter what we believe we can do.

So if a series of action now leads to, for the sake of argument, World War III, it is not because God has forsaken us, but that World War III (while detrimental to those involved in it) itself is a catalyst for yet another ``almost surely'' prophecy of God's will (communicated or otherwise).

I think perhaps part of the reason why the Bible is written in the way it is (and getting the misinterpretation that it probably does not deserve) comes from the limitation inherent in trying to record and communicate the big concept of God within the very primitive and limited media that is the written word in the Bible.

I wonder if things would have been different had Jesus's first coming, crucifixion, and resurrection appeared at an era where it was possible to capture and retransmit more than mere words, maybe as a podcast. Would that have made it less likely to be misinterpreted?

I suppose that there's no way to know. After all, God sent His Son at the time that He did because He had a reason to do so at the time and manner that He did. Perhaps it was time because the sending of His Son was how He could redeem all of humanity, both the Jews and the Gentiles, and sending His Son at any other time would not have as great an impact as compared to when He did it. But there is no way for any of us puny mortals to know about this.