The Road Ahead - Part 3 - Foresight

It is said, far too often might I add, that hindsight is 20/20. If we only examine the facts, the tangible outcomes to our actions and decisions, the cliché does bear some truth. However most retrospectives are colored by the emotions of the moment and fail to reveal the true value of the lessons learned along the way. That is where earnest insight, or introspection, becomes of vital importance.

What I am today is a representation of causality in motion. I am a result. If I choose not to take into account the emotional reflexes that cause me to interpret the various events that shaped me I can acknowledge that they are neither positive nor negative in nature, rather neutral. I can choose to perceive the causes, as well as their effects, however I will. I can value the lessons learned, even the very hard ones, and appreciate the knowledge and experience gained by having endured them.

Choosing to see the end in a positive light does not automatically justify the means used to reach it, however, it does lay the ground work for the road ahead.

Factoring together what I know of the past and the present, the unique relationships between the causes and effects, I can begin to calculate the outcomes of the actions I undertake today and chart my course toward a desired future.

This is what I call the Divine Mind.

God has been called omniscient, all-knowing, and all-seeing, but those adjectives fall drastically short when weighed against the cataclysmic fall of man. "Why would an all-knowing, all-loving God create man, knowing that he would fall?" Rhetorical questions like that have been posed for centuries, typically to attempt to disprove the existence of God, or to show Him to be a heartless, sadistic master. Strangely the rhetoric points more toward the truth than previously assumed.

The answer? An all-knowing, all-loving God would not do such a thing.

Would I choose to enroll my son in a school that I knew was going to be the target of a mass shooting, of which he would be one of the many mortally wounded victims? Of course not! But how could I possibly know such a horrible event might take place? All I have to go on to influence my decision of where I should enroll him is historical data concerning the community and an awareness of current trends. If this were the inaugural year for the school in question I would really not have enough information to make a valid prediction.

I don't conclude by that question that there is no God. Taking into consideration the scale and scope of existence that conclusion is simply asinine. I posit that He is not actually all-knowing. I know that I would have been burned at the stake for saying that only a few hundred years ago, and that even today I may find myself entirely ostracized from the mainstream, but I firmly believe that my statement does not detract in any way from His divinity. It does, however, help to clarify and define the nature in which He created man.

God does not know the future, rather all possible futures, every possible effect to every potential cause. Given an infinite store of historical data, an extra-dimensional vantage point over the present, and intimate knowledge of all laws governing all the various strata of the universe, He can easily predict any outcome that does not factor in the unpredictability of free will.

Pierre-Simon Laplace, a late 18th century French mathematician and astronomer, theorized on causal (or scientific) determinism:

"We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes."

Granted, such an intellect is the subject of much scientific debate, especially considering recent discussions proposing a limit on the computational power of the universe. However, for the sake of simplifying, and hopefully sometime soon, concluding this discourse, I will forgive certain unproven assumptions and allow for such an intellect, one whom we refer to as God, to exist.

The Divine Mind, the ability to apply insight to hindsight to improve foresight, is integral to the Divine Nature, the image of God in which we were created.