The following are a few personal and provocative thoughts that you might find useful and/or unsettling. Extremists will find them threatening.
•Life is messy. Thank God! (This one’s an onion)
•Playfulness is a joyful embrace of uncertainty.
•Perfection sucks! It is boring. It is seemingly invulnerable. It is inferior to incompleteness. (Thanks to Kurt Gödel who, in the 1930s, proved mathematically that no interesting (non-trivial) system can be complete; even infinite systems of any degree of infinity. It has always amazed me that this proof hasn’t had more of an impact on philosophy and religion. )
• A desire for perfection is ultimately a desire for invulnerability and non-existence.
• We can experience a moment in one of three primary ways: joy, pain or boredom. Boredom is the least desirable. When joy is out of reach, we often choose self-inflicted pain to relieve our boredom.
• A God who launched, enervates and attracts uncertain evolution is far more awesome than a controlling, micro-managing, deterministic creator described by fundamentalists and other extremists.
• We have two choices: to live and thrive with uncertainty and vulnerabilities or to huddle in a corner, forever waiting to be certain before acting. Our lives express our choice; the big-bang and uncertain evolution may express God’s.
• Failure is an essential part of a life well lived.
• Extremists so fear the cold reality of an uncertain present that they retreat into idealized pasts, snuggle up to lifeless concepts of perfection and wrap themselves in moldy blankets of absolutes; vainly attempting to make themselves invulnerable. (NB: extremists are not limited to religions, there are political, business, racial, economic extremists, etc.)
• Extremists use their beliefs to make themselves invulnerable and others vulnerable; those with healthy faiths witness their beliefs and thereby choose make themselves more vulnerable. Christ, Mother Theresa, Rosa Parks, and Ghandi are examples of healthy believers.
Finally, an engineering perspective:
• In order to control one or more variables in a closed system (i.e. reduce their uncertainties), we must allow others to fluctuate more wildly. —The relentless increase in total entropy (randomness, uncertainty) in closed systems cannot be stopped, it can only be redistributed; that annoying 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Restated in the style of Abraham Lincoln:
• We can control some things— to a limited degree— some of the time, but we can’t control everything at any time or anything all the time.
Interesting – found you on econlog.
Point of interested: in considering God as transcendent (above time as well), creation at the point of the Big-Bang IS equivalent to recreation/guiding at all points after: since he sees to the end from the beginning, he essentially “chose” the end and all intermediate steps.
Kind of like knowing and seeing where to hit a break on a pool table to get all the balls in on the first shot.
Also; Maimonides discusses the concept of a miracle as a natural occurance rare only for it’s placement, extent, and timing. The astrological possiblity (infinitesmally small) of the Splitting of the Sea actually occurring isn’t a contradiction of God, it’s a validation of it being setup from the start to work out correctly when needed.
Isaac: Thanks for the comments. We probably see uncertainty in different ways. I see it as intrinsic to being non-trivial and real; which means that there is no way to know the future with certainty, even for a being (or creator) with an infinite capacity to know. Of course, I’m not certain of that and have no wish to convert anyone else to my viewpoint. I am happy with these thoughts at this stage of my life, and run them up the flagpole from time to time to stimulate discussion. (By the way: had four years of Catholic theology in high school and studied Thomas Aquinas’s “Summa Theologica” on my own while studying engineering in college. For more than 20 years of my early adulthood I was comforted by my belief that a transcendent, infinite God knew everything; that God was the ultimate engineer. Now I suspect that things are actually far more awesome than that.)
Hope you’ll visit again.