Saturday 21 April 2001

Pic of the day: Purse holding. Lots and lots of purse holding.[1]
(Needless to say, this was taken after we came back home.)

SuperWoman, God and I

So today we went out shopping. Actually, I guess I should not implicate God too heavily in this shopping; he'll make his entrance later in the story.

"This was a disappointment" said my beloved friend, the SuperWoman. "They have almost nothing here." That said, she went to try on a few things, and was promptly stopped by a young employee explaining that she was carrying too many items to the try-out booth. My friend counted to seven items, which evidently was a lot less to her than to the young girl keeping guard. Heh. Almost nothing. We went to a couple more shops and spent exactly kr 2500,- burgers not included. (That is ca $275.) In all fairness, some of it was for Cutie, though the majority was still for my alliance partner.

This is however the last time we do this. It is kind of sad, but in the sweetest possible way. For the reason we won't do it anymore is that next time I see her, she will probably have passed her tests and be earning her own money. Not copious amounts at the start, but quite possibly as much as I. That doesn't take a whole lot, especially if you work a few nights and weekends.

***

After we came home, I saw the video from the sisters' visit to New York and Washington. There were a few landmarks but mostly the girls. I particularly enjoyed seeing my friend the Great Earth Mother, who I have not met on this short visit. She is very photogenic, and looked quite charming. She actually is, too. Shame that we never really became good friends. She is an interesting person. Not that SW isn't. Perhaps I'm just greedy, wanting two friends for the price of one. :)

Late at night, as the others had the good grace (and wisdom) to go to bed, SuperWoman and I stayed alone together for a few more hours, doing the thing that for both of us comes naturally when in the company of the opposite sex, and which we both enjoy, not least together. We discussed. And this, not suprisingly, is where God comes in. But let us take it a bit from one end. It is confusing enough as is.

***

I can't exactly remember why she brought up God's omnipotence, or lack thereof. Well, to some extent I remember. In May last year, there was a horrible murder in Kristiansand, the city where I work. Two small girls. The case is brought to the courts next week, if memory serves. There was a television program about it, or rather about the reaction of one of the parents of a murdered girl. Nor too surprisingly, SW wondered how God felt about the murderer. I suspected that his feelings may have been somewhat similar to the parents of that young man. (Just because you love someone doesn't mean you agree with what they do.)

SW argued, as is reasonable, that God must have known beforehand what would happen and that he might have avoided it. For instance, she proposed, God need not actually let us live in the world. Since he already knows who will be good, he could move these directly to Heaven (or Paradise) and skip the trouble of an earthly life. As a benefit, the evil people need not be created at all, and so would not need to go to Hell.

(It bears noticing that I personally consider Hell a place of destruction rather than torture, as implied several places in the Bible. My friend has only read the comic book version of the Bible, which may be a bit skimpy on some details.)

Here's what I say, which must sound like the rankest heresy to almost all my fellow believers: God is allmighty in that he can do whatever he wants; but he cannot do the logically impossible. He can not create black light or bright darkness, a square circle or cold heat. And, most important, he is not immune to paradox.

Once you create a universe, time is one of its dimensions. All of time exist. If you are not bound to the time axis like we are (us being chemical processes after all) you can see past and future as one continuous pattern. This does not mean you can tamper with it freely. Imagine that you see some horrible event in your own future. Armed with this knowledge, you will take steps to avoid it. (Don't drive to work that day.) But this means the event will not happen. And so you will not have seen it in your future. So you don't act to avoid it. So it happens after all. So you act anyway. You suddenly have an oscillating reality, where some sequence of events (and any ones thereafter) are at the same time real and not. This is not how reality works. If God tried the same thing, he would essentially meet the same problem: He would see something that wasn't there. Reality would be imaginary, or at best flickering into and out of existence at the speed of God's thought.

Basically, God can tamper with the timeline and tweak it; but if he removes the crucial events then the required future won't come to happen. If you first choose to have a material reality, you have to make it logically consistent. You can make improbable thing happen, but not illogical ones. (Square circles etc.) Skipping all the uncomfortable parts of reality is rigth up there with the stuff you just don't do. By skipping our past we would not be the persons we were meant to be. Well, you could create us with memories of a past we did not have. Kind of like virtual reality. But it doesn't sound very honest, and honesty is a required property of a worshippable God. (Of course, we would not know, but God would know after all...)

Some atheists rhethorically asks: "If God is allmighty, can he create a stone so heavy he can't lift it?" To this I have the answer: He already did, and then he let it drop on the head of people asking stupid questions. The stone is called free will. Now you explain how free will exist, or if it does not, why you keep using it. :)

Meanwhile, I use my free will to have a good time with my best friend. Watch this space.

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[1] Acid Reflux chapter 23, verse 1 and verse 7.