Review of Jonathan W. Tooker's Time Travel Interpretation of the Bible

I recently read Jonathan W. Tooker's 2001 book The Time Travel Interpretation of the Bible, which is available as a free pdf at the link. I do not in the end find it at all convincing, but it certainly was a stimulating thought experiment.

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God as the time traveler with the last word

Tooker begins with the assumption that at some time in the future time-travel technology will be developed, at which point a variety of people with a variety of motives will go back into the past to attempt to rewrite history, with changes undoing and overwriting other changes again and again indefinitely. Therefore,

The real course of immutable history which we all share, then, must be the limit of an infinite number of changes. The history that we all share is the final word once all the time travel work has been done. Since there will always have been a finite number of human generations following the construction of the first time machine, and since the men of each generation will work only a finite number of shifts [as time travelers] during their lives, humans will never be able to write the last of an infinite number of changes. If the last word cannot be had by any mortal, then it must be had by some supernatural entity. . . . Here, we seat God on the throne of his eternal glory at timelike infinity [in Minkowski space], the end of time, a place that no mortal can ever reach.

It is not spelled out why no time-traveling mortal can ever reach timelike infinity, especially since time travel is generally conceptualized as "teleporting" from one time to another without any need to pass through the interval (finite or infinite) between them. Anyway, it is assumed that no one can. But them, confusingly, Tooker goes on to posit that the God of Abraham is actually a flesh-and-blood man from the future, possibly even the inventor of the first time machine. How then did he reach timelike infinity, which ex hypothesi no man can do? Tooker attempts to deal with this by invoking his version of the Trinity:

In the preceding sections, we have made the point to put God in the seat at timelike infinity but now we will seat the Holy Spirit there to assign God as a human man. Jesus is God as a younger man before he completes the mission of the Messiah. God is Jesus as an older man after the harvest has come and he has affected the final defeat of Satan . . . .

Note that this does not mean that the man born as Jesus grew up to be God. Rather, God is assumed to be born in the post-Einsteinian future (since he must have access to a time machine), and Jesus is one of this future man's relatively early ("as a younger man") ventures back into the past. Jesus as such is assumed not to have been born at all (as hinted at in some of the Gospels; like me, Tooker gives priority to the Fourth Gospel, but does so because it says nothing about the birth of Jesus).

Among all the changes enacted by all the [time-traveling] agents, after all the generations of mankind have come and gone, whose intention for what history ought to have been will dominate at infinity? We propose that the intentions of the man God are those which survive until the end. For this reason, the Holy Spirit is called by God's name. When all was said and done, it was his intention which survived to infinity. As the winner of the time travel war, God is the greatest and winningest warrior of all time. This is the nature of the trinity: God as a younger man fighting for victory, God himself having attained absolute dominion, and God's intention: three parts of a whole.

As best I can make out, this means that God is not enthroned at timelike infinity, and that the "Holy Spirit" that is said to be enthroned there is only a figure of speech -- not an explanation of why God has the last word in the editing of the past, but a metaphorical way of expressing the fact that he does have the last word.

Why, then, does God have the last word? This is a rather important question since, in Tooker's model, having the last word is what makes God God. The answer seems to be simply that God is good, that evil inherently leads to destruction, and that therefore only God's intention leads to eternal life.

If there comes a day when the last human dies, then life will not have been eternal. . . . Beyond that day, there would never again be someone using a time machine. Some human would have had the last word about what history was. There would be no future generations through which God's intention might propagate all the way to infinity. To the contrary, if extinction never comes, then the limit at infinity which we have associated with the Spirit of God is generated . . . . The Sovereign Lord is separated from false gods [i.e., rival human time travelers] because the timeline passing through God's ultimate victory in his Messianic mission is the only timeline that does not lead to extinction. . . . The road that leads to death is broad but the road that leads to life is narrow. All futures apart from God are doomed.

No real metaphysical reason is given for this. God is just some guy, and his way just happens to be the only way to "eternal life" -- meaning, apparently, the temporally infinite continuation of the human species and time-travel technology, not personal immortality. (Personal immortality apparently consists in being taken out of the time stream altogether, into the "elsewhere" regions of Minkowski space.) I don't know why we would assume there would be exactly one way to attain this; many ways or no way seems more likely. Actually, I'm not  clear on how "a day when the last human dies" could even be an issue in a world with time travel, since pre-extinction human could travel into the post-extinction future and restart the species. Nor do I know why we need to assume that our species does in fact survive indefinitely, approaching a limit at timelike infinity, rather than some human having the last word. None of this is clear to me, and I don't think the problem is entirely my own.

Anyway, this is the model you have to entertain in order to proceed with the rest of Tooker's thesis.

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The water/earth/heaven metaphor, and miracles

Tooker proposes that in the Bible, "water" is often used as a metaphor for the past; "earth," for the present; and "heaven," for the future -- with God being the "Most High" because he (or, rather his intentions, reified as the Holy Spirit) is located in the "highest heaven," which is timelike infinity. When Satan is cast down from heaven to earth, for instance, this is taken to mean that his time-travel privileges are revoked and he is confined to his own "present." (Satan, too, is a time-traveling mortal man, as we shall see below.)

Tooker is generally reluctant to countenance any sort of "magic" or miracles beyond those that involve manipulating time through a technology to be developed in the future. Events such as the Flood of Noah and the parting of the Red Sea are reconceptualized on the assumption that "water" and "dry land" are references to the time stream. Since it is obviously impossible for the whole earth to be submerged under physical water, the Flood is understood to be God undoing his creation by going back in time and altering the past that led to it, and the ark is some sort of temporal "bubble" (whatever that would be) which is unaffected by this. It is within this framework that Tooker understands God's promise after the Flood:

I will not again . . . smite any more every thing living, as I have done. While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease (Gen. 8:21-22).

As Tooker points out, a flood of water has nothing to do with the progression of summer and winter, day and night -- but meddling with the fabric of spacetime does. God is promising never again to play fast and loose with the timeline to the extent that he did in this metaphorical "flood."

Smaller scale temporal editing is still permitted, though, and the passage through the Red Sea on "dry ground" (another temporal bubble) is understood in this way. God's "jamming" the Egyptians' chariot wheels (as many translations give Ex. 14:25) is also understood to be a temporal effect.

Although no water metaphor is used, the extension of Hezekiah's life (Isa. 38) is understood as a small-scale manipulation of time. Time is rewound a bit, which is why the shadow on the sundial goes back 10 degrees, so that Hezekiah can be placed on a timeline in which he lives 15 years longer than he would otherwise have done. Apparently a minor adjustment like this is not considered to be a violation of the promise to Noah since it is not enough to disrupt the cycle of day and night or the seasons.

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Israel as Satan

I have noted before some of the similarities between the biblical figure Jacob, a.k.a. Israel, and the serpent of Eden. Jacob means "he seizes the heel," a name he was given because "he took his brother by the heel in the womb" (Hos. 12:3). To the serpent, God says, "Thou shalt bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15). The serpent deceives Adam, and Jacob deceives Edom (basically the same name in Hebrew). Jacob is even described as being physically serpent-like -- a smooth-skinned man in contrast to his hairy brother -- and the account of his life in Genesis is just one deception after another. Even the name God gives him, Israel, means "he contends with God."

Why, then is Israel God's chosen? Tooker makes the rather shocking proposal that Israel is literally Satan. Satan, like God, is a time-traveling human being, and the specific human being he is, is Jacob the son of Isaac. But Israel and his descendants are nevertheless "chosen" for special protection because they are the ancestors of the man God himself, and he cannot therefore destroy them without destroying both himself and the one true timeline that leads humanity all the way to timelike infinity. Although a large part of the Bible consists of diatribes against the wicked Israelites, God is forced to continue protecting and helping them. This is the meaning of the parable of the wheat and the tares (Matt. 13): the tares (Israelites) cannot be destroyed yet without destroying the wheat (future Messiah, who becomes "God") with them. Once the Messiah has been born, though, the long-awaited time for burning up the tares will have arrived. Yes, I realize that this is, like, super anti-Semitic.

According to Tooker, Israel is explicitly identified as Satan in the Bible, but you'll only pick up on it if you compare two different verses. We are told that "Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel" (2 Chron 21:1). But we are also told, "And again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them to say, Go, number Israel and Judah" (2 Sam. 24:1). Tooker maintains that the "he" in 2 Samuel cannot refer to the Lord, since 2 Chronicles says Satan moved David to number Israel, and that therefore the only possible antecedent is "Israel." Tooker's reading is, "And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel [the person, Jacob], and he [Israel/Jacob] moved David against them [Israel, the nation]."  Compare that with Chronicles, and you find that Israel must Satan, because that's who moved David to number the people. I think it's a ridiculous reading, which relies on the same noun being the antecedent of both "he" and "them," but that's all he's got.

Surprisingly, despite saying he prioritizes the Gospel of John, and despite his belief that "children of Israel" is literally synonymous with "children of Satan," Tooker does not mention the episode in John 8 where Jesus calls the Jews children of the devil while at the same time conceding that they are also children of Abraham. Those who do not interpret the whole thing metaphorically tend to arrive at some version of the Fake Jew Thesis -- that the "Jews" of Jesus' time were not really Israelites at all but Edomite conversos or some such. Tooker's interpretation would be that they were children of the devil precisely because they were Israelites -- and that Jesus himself was just as much a (genealogical if not spiritual) child of the devil as they were. Both Jesus and the Pharisees were descendants both of the righteous Abraham and of Satan himself, though they varied as to which of these ancestors they took after.

All Jews are children of Satan. Jesus was a Jew. Jesus is God. It's not often that you find one person asserting all three of those things! It's hard to reconcile with the wheat and tares model -- where once the Living God has been born, all the "tares" (Israelites) will be destroyed -- all the other tares, I should say -- because it seems that in Tooker's understanding God himself is not really wheat (the product of a different seed) but rather one of the tares, one that happened to turn out good, atavistically taking after Abraham more than Jacob. If the fruit of the family tree of Israel is God himself, on what grounds can we call it a bad tree that must at some later date be hewn down and cast into the fire? "Either make the tree good, and his fruit good; or else make the tree corrupt, and his fruit corrupt: for the tree is known by his fruit" (Matt. 12:33).

Coming back to the man Jacob himself, how did someone born in the Bronze Age, long before time travel technology, end up becoming the time-traveling devil? Tooker suggests that the incident of Jacob's Ladder refers to a chance encounter with time travelers and their technology (angels are generally seen as time-traveling agents from the future), and that Jacob thus got access to this technology and decided to use it to rewrite history so that he, not God, would be the last man standing at timelike infinity (not understanding that this was impossible because, well, reasons). Satan is supposed to have made many attempts to kill God or God's ancestors (the "false gods," Satan-affiliated time travelers, demanded child sacrifice because they wanted to eliminate certain bloodlines), and the crucifixion of Jesus is one such attempt that succeeded -- at least until it was undone by more time-travel shenanigans, resulting in the Resurrection.

The command to sacrifice Isaac is presented as a similar attempt by God himself, to erase the devil from history by having his father killed. When God realizes (remember he is just a man from the future, not omniscient) that he would be grandfather-paradoxing himself, he sends another agent back to the past to stop Abraham from going through with it. 

Jacob's wresting match with God is interpreted as another aborted attempt to stop Jacob from becoming Satan. The "wrestling" is assumed not to have been literal grappling but a "time fight," a struggle for mastery over the timeline. In the end, God perceives that despite everything, allowing Jacob to proceed is preferable to the alternative, and he lets him win.

Ultimately, though, God and his agent Michael win the "war in heaven" (that is, in the future), and Satan is cast down to "earth" (that is, to his own time in the Bronze Age, no more to wander through the spacetime manifold for the ruin of souls).

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Oh, and you need to keep the Law of Moses

We have seen that in Tooker's model, God is just some dude from the future and is not Good in any transcendent sense. (He rejects "God is love" as a "dehumanizing proverb," preferring Moses' definition: "The Lord is a man of war; the Lord is his name.") God's way is the right way for essentially Darwinian reasons -- because, as it happens, it is the only way that takes the inclusive fitness of the human species all the way to timelike infinity. And Satan is not an imp on your shoulder egging you on to succumb to vice; he's a dude from the past trying to kill the dude from the future. Whether you yourself are sinful or virtuous, whether you inwardly align yourself with God or the devil, doesn't ultimately seem to make much difference in this war, the outcome of which has already been determined by the ineluctable fate that decrees that straight is the way that leadeth to life.

With that as the metaphysical background, it is odd to find that Tooker's book ends with a little diatribe against "Paulism," and particularly against Paul's teaching that the Law of Moses has been superseded. Pork remains absolutely forbidden, Tooker insists, and circumcision absolutely required -- for what exactly? Because, as the butterfly effect would have it, some critical mass of humans must do those things or else the species is doomed to extinction? But we know that future history has already been written -- and rewritten for the final time -- and that the species does not go extinct. As for personal immortality and the afterlife, Tooker barely mentions it, contenting himself with a passing reference to the possibility of "going to heaven" by being shunted off the timeline into the Minkowskian "elsewhere," and leaving us to guess whether or not going there has anything to do with not eating pork.

The whole "Paul is bad because we have to keep the Law of Moses" thing almost seems like a separate theological hobby-horse, left over from before the Time Travel Interpretation had been formulated, and included here as a sort of palimpsestic holdover.

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Assessment

Tooker's thesis is undeniably fun to entertain. It's fascinating to revisit all the familiar Bible stories from this entirely different perspective and see how everything might be reinterpreted in its light. In the end, though, it fails in some very important ways. Here, aside from the specific problems detailed above, are its main flaws.

First, though perhaps not foremost, it bases everything on "time travel" without coming up with any rigorous theory of the same. The idea of time travel cannot even be coherently formulated as a hypothesis in the four-dimensional world of Einstein and Minkowski, and naive attempts to do so -- the H. G. Wells style thinking that if time is just another dimension, we should in theory be able to travel in it -- are ill-conceived. To travel from Point A to Point B means to be at Point A at one point in time and at Point B at some later point in time. For example, if I was in Chicago Heights at 2:00 and Buffalo Grove at 3:00, I traveled from Chicago Heights to Buffalo Grove. "Time travel" would mean that Points A and B are not places but times, though -- leading either to tautology ("I was at 2:00 at 2:00 and at 3:00 at 3:00") or to contradiction ("I was at 2:00 at 2:00 and at 12:00 at 3:00"). I don't see any way to think at all clearly about the possibilities of "time travel" except from an explicitly Dunnean standpoint, where dimensions of meta-time are recognized. Wells unconsciously smuggles in Dunnean assumptions.

More importantly, the whole model is too "cosmic," and not personal enough, to really serve as a religion. God and Satan had a time war, and God won -- which is good, because it means the human race will survive to timelike infinity. This has all in some ill-defined sense "already" been done, and that's why all those things in the Bible happened. Fine. Now what? How does this relate to me as an individual and how I should live and what gives my life meaning? If God's ultimate victory is what really matters, then nothing I do really matters, since nothing I can do can affect that. (If it did, God would just go back in time and undo what I had done.) As for my own personal destiny, Tooker barely touches on it, except to mention in passing that it would be technically possible to "go to heaven" in the "elsewhere" regions of Minkowski space. Will God come back and manipulate spacetime to do that for me if he wins in the end? Is that why it matters? "I don't know, just remember to get circumcised and lay off the pork."

Overall, Tooker's "theology" reads like some history lesson (about things in some sense "already done") about how the good guys defeated the bad guys and made the world safe for democracy or something. Yes, very inspiring, three cheers for the flag and all that -- but if that's your answer to the Bible, are you really sure you've understood the question?

The logic of Gnosticism and where it leads

Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God; and this is that spirit of Antichrist.

-- 1 John 4:2-3

That's a somewhat surprising litmus test, isn't it? The belief that separates those who are of God from those who are of Antichrist is not that Jesus is God, but that Jesus is a Man -- a real, physical Man, "come in the flesh." Today, with the exception of a few atheist cranks (a bit cranky even by atheist standards), just about everyone accepts that there was a real flesh-and-blood man named Jesus. The author of the epistle wasn't thinking of atheist cranks, though; his test was designed to exclude the Gnostics.

I think of the Gnostics as kindred spirits, not because I believe many Gnostic ideas but because of their method: Start with an assumption you feel confident about and unflinchingly work out its ramifications. I've tried to do that in such posts as "The Supergod delusion," "From the Resurrection to Kolob," and "On the origin of agents by means of -- agency." In the case of the Gnostics, the starting assumption is simple: Spirit is good, and matter is bad.

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It's not an obviously ridiculous position, and one can find apparent support for it even in such mainstream Christian texts as Paul's Epistle to the Galatians.

This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.

But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law.

Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.

And they that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts (Gal. 5:16-24).

Taken at face value, this says that there is an irreconcilable conflict between the body and the spirit; that everything that comes from the body is bad, and everything that comes from the spirit is good; and that the Christian way is to "crucify the flesh" -- that is, to reject the body as utterly and mercilessly as the Roman occupiers rejected a condemned criminal.

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Let's go Gnostic and carry this evaluation to its logical conclusion.

Paul's specific allusion is of course to the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ, held up here as a symbol of the utter rejection of the body. But after the Crucifixion came the Resurrection: Jesus took back the body he had supposedly rejected, bound himself to it permanently, and ascended into Heaven with it! What is to be made of that?

Well, the Gnostic conclusion is that Jesus obviously wasn't really resurrected, not physically. The true Jesus is a being of pure spirit. He did appear to some of his disciples in human form -- just as God appeared to Abraham as three men and to Moses as a burning bush -- but this was a concession to their limited understanding and should not be interpreted as proof of his true nature. God is not really a burning bush, and the risen Jesus is not really a man with flesh and bones. And don't some of the anecdotes in the canonical gospels back this up? The risen Jesus could apparently appear and disappear at will; his features were mutable; he sometimes looked like himself and sometimes like a stranger; and in the end, he rose up into the sky and vanished, later to appear to Saul as a disembodied voice and a light. Isn't it obvious that we're not dealing with a physical man here, but with a spiritual entity that can appear as a man when he so wishes?

But what of the empty tomb? What happened to the body if Jesus didn't come back to reanimate it? Easy: The body disappeared because it had never been real to begin with. If Jesus' post-resurrection body was only an appearance, not a physical reality, what is to stop us from saying the same about his original body? And the Gnostics did say it, or at least some of them did. Hence John's reference to those that "confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh." Come in the flesh? What doctrine could be more blasphemous than that to those who have equated the flesh with adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, and so on? Jesus was never really a man; he merely appeared in human form.

(When I was a Mormon missionary back in the late 1990s, I met someone who maintained something similar about Moses. He had told me he didn't believe God had messengers, and I said, "What about Moses? Wouldn't you say Moses was a messenger of God?" His reply has stuck with me all these years, more for its strangeness than anything else: "I used to believe that, but the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that Moses was never really a man at all but a projection of God himself.")

Once the assumption has been made that both the Incarnation and the Resurrection were illusions, all sorts of facts rearrange themselves in support of what has been assumed. Didn't Jesus appear suddenly at the age of 30, saying that he had come down from heaven and denying that his mother and brothers were really his mother and brothers? Isn't his youth a blank and his infancy a handful of mutually contradictory legends? Didn't he have a way of suddenly appearing in places, with no one knowing when or how he got there? Didn't he once go 40 days without food or water? Didn't he walk on water for God's sake? Obviously a spirit appearing in human form, not an actual man.

Together with the Incarnation and the Resurrection falls the Passion. While what has become mainstream Christian tradition places great emphasis on the enormous suffering of Christ -- the sweat of blood, the scourge, the crown of thorns, the spikes driven into living flesh -- Gnostic texts treat the whole thing as a joke. The body was not real, the suffering was not real, and -- we are told in one of the Gnostic gospels -- while his enemies were gloating and his disciples mourning, the true Jesus, an impassible spirit, surveyed the scene of "his" Crucifixion from high above and laughed.

As Elaine Pagels has pointed out, one consequence of this view was that the Gnostics never embraced or glorified martyrdom the way their Catholic cousins did. The Catholic Christ willingly submitted to torture, indignity, and death because "to this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth" (John 18:37). The Gnostic Christ, in stark contrast, successfully tricked those who wanted to torture and kill him. Each sect emulated the Christ they knew. This was one of the causes of conflict between the two groups -- the Gnostics saw the Catholics as troublemakers, and the Catholics saw the Gnostics as cowards -- and, if the blood of the martyrs truly is the seed of the church, it may have been one of the reasons for Catholicism's eventual ascendancy over its onetime rival.

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The ultimate consequence of Gnosticism, though, has to do with the Creation. If matter is evil, what is to be made of the God of Genesis, who created the earth and all that is on it, and saw that it was all very good? Did they dare to go there? They did. This Creator, they reasoned was obviously not the true God but a mere demiurge, and they gave him the name Samael -- interpreted by them as "the blind god," and more traditionally a name used in Judaism for the "chief of all the satans." Basically, the Creator was the devil, the "prince of this world" mentioned in the New Testament.

The Creator's antagonist, then -- the serpent of Eden, bringer of forbidden knowledge -- must have been a good guy, and was sometimes identified with Christ himself (who said "be wise as serpents" and "the truth shall make you free").

So this is where the original Gnostic assumption, that matter is evil, leads us: to borrow a distinction introduced by Waite in Devil Worship in France, if not to "Satanism" (the worship of evil as evil), certainly to "Luciferianism" (the belief that being most call the Devil is actually good).

That mainstream Christians and Gnostics, with their nearly opposite worldviews, could both make a plausible claim to be followers of Jesus Christ and to derive their doctrine from him is nothing short of astonishing, and it highlights the vital importance of metaphysical assumptions.

The Sempiternal Count recites ALL the digits of pi!

It begins . . .

1. Introduction

For a kids' show, Sesame Street occasionally delved into some pretty deep subject matter. I'm sure you remember the 1983 episode where Big Bird visits the ancient Egyptian afterlife and defies Osiris to secure justice for the damned soul of a 4,000-year-old Egyptian prince.

Damned Prince Sahu, his demon visitant, and the great god Osiris are far from being the only ancient eldritch characters to appear on the show, though. It's a little known fact that the "Count" character is based on a mysterious but very real immortal entity known as the Sempiternal Count. This strange being, as his title denotes, exists within the time-stream like us mortals -- he is not atemporally "eternal" as some suppose God to be eternal -- and yet he has always existed and always will. (Hence his portrayal as a deathless "vampire.") And just as you've seen on Sesame Street, he really does spend the bulk of his time shouting out numbers and laughing.

The Count recently agreed to take some time out of his busy schedule to discuss this unusual pastime of his. Below is a transcript of our interview, lightly edited for clarity and to remove most of the ha-ha-ha-ing.

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2. Transcript

SC: Two! Six! Four! One! Ha ha ha . . .

WJT: If I may interrupt, my -- uh, is it "Lord Courtesy"? Forgive me for being a bit unclear on how to address a Count in English. I understand that you -- that Your Lordship -- enjoys a rank corresponding to that of an Earl, isn't that right?

SC: One! One false assumption! Ha ha ha . . . . As you would have realized had you thought about it, one can hardly claim noble birth who never experienced any sort of birth at all. I've always existed, which is why they call me Sempiternal. And do you know why they call me the Count?

WJT: Don't tell me it's really because you love to count things! I'd always assumed that that was --

SC: A gross oversimplification to make an ancient eldritch entity more comprehensible to the Sesame Street audience? Just so. There are only so many things around, you understand, and one has so much time to fill! No, I've hit upon a truly inexhaustible hobby, one that will keep me busy forever, and which is never boring because it is never repetitive. Surely you must have noticed that the numbers you caught me chuckling over when you came in were not in the sequence one normally uses for counting?

WJT: I was going to ask you about that.

SC: Digits of pi! I started back in the year 1742, and I've recited nearly nine billion of them so far.

WJT: Nine billion and counting! Just how many digits of pi do you intend to recite?

SC: All of them. After all, I have all the time in the world.

WJT: All of them? But pi has an infinite number of digits. If you recite them one by one, advancing one finite step at a time, you'll never reach an infinite number, even if you keep at it forever. You'll never reach the end.

SC: Two! Two false assumptions! Ha ha ha . . . . Suppose you told me you were going to recite all the months of the year, and I told you it was impossible because no matter how well you did it, you would never reach "Febtober." What would you say to that?

WJT: I suppose I would say that, since "Febtober" is not one of the months of the year, reciting all of them without ever reaching it is not only possible but to be expected.

SC: Now consider your implication that it is impossible for me to recite all the digits of pi because, no matter how many digits I recite, I will never reach the last one. But there is no "last digit" in pi any more than there is a "Febtober" in the year, so my failure to reach it is no failure at all and is in no way inconsistent with my reciting each and every one of the digits that are in pi.

WJT: Okay, maybe I worded that poorly. What I mean is that you can never recite all the digits of pi, because there are an infinite number of them, and you go through them one by one. No matter how many times you add one (or any other finite quantity), you can never reach infinity.

SC: But I don't have to reach infinity. There is no "infinitieth digit" of pi any more than there is a "last digit." I only have to recite the digits that are in pi. I don't have to reach "Febtober."

WJT: Poor wording again. I don't literally mean an "infinitieth digit." I just mean that because there are infinitely many digits, you can't recite them all.

SC: Because, although I have unlimited time, I have to recite them one by one?

WJT: Right. No process of adding up finite quantities can ever reach --

SC: Reach what? And remember that you can't say "infinity" or "the end." If I recite one digit after another a thousand times, I reach the thousandth digit. If I do it a quintillion times, I reach the quintillionth digit. Which of the digits of pi can I not reach by this process?

WJT: Well, for every digit of pi, it is true that it has a finite ordinality and thus can be reached by the iterative process of reciting consecutive digits. So you can reach each of the digits of pi -- but you can still never reach all of them.

SC: But what do you mean by that distinction? Do you mean that there may be two digits of pi such that reaching one of them by my method is inconsistent with reaching the other -- so that, while reaching either is possible, reaching both is not?

WJT: No.

SC: Or are you imagining some particular digit called "all the digits of pi" -- a close cousin to "the last digit," "the infinitieth digit," and the month of Febtober -- and saying that I cannot reach it?

WJT: No, not that, either.

SC: Let me help you. What you are saying is that, although I will recite each and every digit of pi -- that is, for every digit of pi it is true that I will eventually recite it -- I will never have recited them all. There will never come a time when I can say that my project is complete and that I have recited all the digits of pi.

WJT: Yes, that's just what I've been trying to say.

SC: Well then our disagreement is merely verbal. I never said that I will have recited all the digits of pi; I only said that I will. If that seems slightly paradoxical, such is the nature of sempiternity.

WJT: Okay, I guess we can agree that --

SC: But --

WJT: Yes?

SC: But suppose I told you that, as it happens, I have recited all the digits of pi. This task that can never be finished -- I have finished it. That's what I was doing for all those numberless eons before 1742.

WJT: But we've just agreed that that's impossible!

SC: Three! Three false assumptions! Ha ha ha . . . . We've only agreed that it is impossible, not that it always has been.

WJT: No, it is, was, and always will be impossible. No one -- past, present, or future -- can ever have recited all the digits of pi because there is no end to them.

SC: There is no end to them, quite right. But there is a beginning, isn't there? The first digit is three, the second is four, and so on.

WJT: But we're talking about finishing, not beginning. I don't see the relevance of --

SC: I recited them backwards.

WJT: You mean you started with the --

SC: No, that's just my point: I never started. I had always been reciting digits of pi in reverse order. At 10:17 a.m. on April 14, 1742, I recited the first digit of pi. Just before that, I had recited the second; before that, the third; and so on all the way back. I had always been doing it, for mahakalpas without number, until one day I finally finished.

WJT: But how could you have finished a finite time ago, if you began infinitely long ago and advanced step by finite step?

SC: I didn't begin infinitely long ago because I didn't begin at all. I have recited an infinite number of digits of pi, but each and every one of them was recited at a particular time only finitely antecedent to 10:17 a.m. on April 14, 1742. We have already discussed all this. Just reverse past and future and apply the same logic.

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3. Commentary

3.1. Bidirectional sempiternity

A typical definition of sempiternity, as a technical term in philosophy, is "existence within time but infinitely into the future, as opposed to eternity, understood as existence outside time." That is to say, sempiternity is like a geometric ray, or like the ordered set of all natural numbers -- or like the decimal expression of pi. It has a single endpoint and extends infinitely in one direction only. The Count, on the other hand, is what we might call bidirectionally sempiternal, like a geometric line, the ordered set of all integers, or the decimal expression of pi preceded by its mirror image.

I think many more people are willing to countenance future-only sempiternity than the bidirectional variety. This ultimately comes down to a very fundamental assumption about time -- namely, that the past actually exists but the future does not. A sempiternal future, these people would say, is boundless but not actually infinite. No matter how long one goes on living, one will always have lived for a finite number of years. The future is only potentially infinite, in the sense that that finite number will go on increasing indefinitely. Past sempiternity, on the other hand, is taken as meaning that an infinite amount of time has already elapsed, making it an actual infinity.

There is really no arguing with primary metaphysical assumptions, so I can only state that I do not share this one. Either only the present is actual ("presentism," as defended by Edward Feser here vis-a-vis Kalām), or the whole timeline is actual ("eternalism," which is what I believe due to the relativity of simultaneity and the fact of precognition). And either way, as I have tried to argue in recent posts, there is no question of an infinite amount of time elapsing because no point on the timeline is infinitely distant from any other.

3.2. A project which is neither completable nor hopeless

One of the things that used to bother me as a Christian youth was the idea that one day everything would be finished, every goal accomplished, and then -- an eternity of stasis and boredom? I used to think of John Lennon's infamous line, "Imagine there's no heaven . . . above us, only the sky," and reinterpret it -- thinking of "heaven" as a state of eternal rest after all has been accomplished, and Lennon as proposing that there is no such final state, only infinite potential. In Mormonism, this conception of heaven as an eternal sabbath -- when one has become "a pillar in the temple . . . to go no more out" (Rev. 3:12) -- coexists uneasily with the concept of "eternal progression." I was very much a proponent of the latter, finding the former unbearable.

But what's the alternative? Working forever to reach a goal that can never be attained? This is another sort of hell, that of Sisyphus. Still, suppose Sisyphus finally succeeded in getting his boulder into a permanently stable position at the top of the hill. Then what?

This sort of thing really used to bother me a lot, which I suppose made it emotionally easier for me to transition to atheism, since eternal extinction seemed no more futile or meaningless than any of the alternatives. Why want eternal life if it meant either chasing unreachable goals forever, or else reaching all possible goals and damning oneself to an eternity of boredom? All is vanity and vexation of spirit. As They Might Be Giants put it,

Now it's over, I'm dead, and I haven't done anything that I want --

Or I'm still alive, and there's nothing I want to do

Though the Sempiternal Count's specific pastime of reciting digits of pi would be mind-numbingly boring for us humans, it does provide a model for a tolerable eternity. Each goal is reachable, so one's efforts are not in vain; and yet there will never be a time when all the goals have already been reached.

3.3. Something new can happen, even after a sempiternity

In "What if there was no beginning?" I wrote,

If something has never ever happened through all the countless kalpas of our existence, shouldn't it be pretty obvious by now that it's never going to happen? Thus the thesis that we have always existed would seem to lead to despair.

But the example of the Sempiternal Count shows that this reasoning is not valid. The Count had always been reciting pi backwards without ever finishing -- until one day he did finish, and moved on to the next thing. So the thesis that we have always existed is not after all incompatible with the doctrine that "it doth not yet appear what we shall be" (1 Jn. 3:2).

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Note: I've been working on this post for a week or so. It's by pure coincidence that I finally finished it on Pi Day.

What if there was no beginning?

If you could hie to Kolob in the twinkling of an eye

And then continue onward with that same speed to fly,

Do you think that you could ever, through all eternity,

Find out the generation where Gods began to be?

Or see the grand beginning, where space did not extend?

Or view the last creation, where Gods and matter end?

Methinks the Spirit whispers, "No man has found 'pure space,'

Nor seen the outside curtains, where nothing has a place."

-- W. W. Phelps

When did that thinking thing begin to be? If it did never begin to be, then have you always been a thinking thing from eternity; the absurdity whereof I need not confute, till I meet with one who is so void of understanding as to own it.

-- John Locke

In comments to my recent post "Why does God exist?" Bruce Charlton and Francis Berger have both expressed the opinion that beings of some sort have always existed -- not atemporally like Allah, but temporally, with their existence extending back over an infinite expanse of time. Bruce Charlton wrote:

I find it very strange that (apparently) some people find it inconceivable that there should be infinite 'time' in the past leading up to now. I find the opposite impossible to imagine - i.e. that there was ever a beginning before which there was nothing.

I think I have always been like this, since I was a child. Even when I accepted the recent (and constantly changing) scientific theories about the Big Bang as a certain truth, at the back of my mind I always wondered what happened before it - and assumed some kind of eternally expanding and contracting and re-exploding cyclical universe.

The infinite temporal existence of beings -- including God, man, and even the physical elements -- is also the Mormon position, expressed by Joseph Smith in the King Follett Sermon (part 1 part 2), and was my own position until fairly recently. I therefore thought I ought to devote a post to reasons for not believing it. Before doing so, let me state again my meta position that theologies are akin to map projections -- in order to get some things right, you have to omit or distort others; and which projection is "best" depends on what you most care about getting right.

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1. Infinite elapsed time

As discussed in my earlier post, the Kalām Cosmological Argument assumes that there can be only two kinds of beings: (1) beings that began to exist a finite amount of time ago; and (2) beings that are atemporal, or "exist outside of time." Everything we know, including the physical universe itself, belongs to the first category; it is therefore necessary to explain their existence by positing a being of the second type, and this is Allah.

The reason given for rejecting a third category -- beings that are temporal but never began to exist -- is that for those beings an infinite amount of time must already have elapsed. They must already be "infinity years old." However, it is impossible for anything to ever be "infinity years old," because time elapses finite step by finite step, and infinity can never be reached by adding up finite quantities.

With the caveat that it is notoriously difficult to think clearly about infinity, I think this argument is in error. It conflates "never began" with "began an infinitely long time ago." Consider by way of analogy the number line of integers. It is infinite, but it would be sloppy thinking to say it extends "from negative infinity, through zero, to positive infinity." There is no such number as "infinity" (negative or positive) on the number line. Of all the infinitely many integers on the line, not a single one of them is infinitely distant from zero.

The present moment corresponds to zero, the past to the negative integers, and the future to the positive ones. If I say that my existence (in one form or another) is infinite in both directions, in precisely the same way that the number line is infinite, does that make me "infinity years old"? No. The Kalām Argument assumes that an infinite amount of time must have elapsed from "the beginning" to the present -- missing the point that there was no beginning. A billion years ago, I existed; and a billion years have elapsed since then. A quadrillion years ago, I existed; and a quadrillion years have elapsed since then. The "infinity" lies in the fact that the statement will be true for absolutely any number I choose, no matter how astronomically large it may be; but every number, without exception, will be a finite distance from the present, and only a finite time will have elapsed since then. Just as you can get from any point on the infinite number line to any other by adding or subtracting a finite quantity, so any distance on the infinite timeline can be traversed without an infinite amount of time elapsing.

So I reject this argument against infinite temporal existence.

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2. Unrealized potential

Central to Christianity is the idea that we have the potential to become like God, but that at present we are obviously very, very far from having realized that potential.

How long will it take us to realize our divine potential? A billion years? But we have already existed for a billion billion billion years (or whatever other arbitrarily large number you choose) without realizing that potential. If something has never ever happened through all the countless kalpas of our existence, shouldn't it be pretty obvious by now that it's never going to happen? Thus the thesis that we have always existed would seem to lead to despair.

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3. Meaninglessness

If we have always existed, and our existence is not "necessary," then it seems to follow that we exist for absolutely no reason. Our existence has no inherent meaning or purpose but is just a brute fact, no less an "accident" then if we had originated when lightning randomly struck the primordial ooze.

I'm actually okay with this -- I spent a decade of hard atheism getting used to the idea -- but most Christians are obviously not. It is extremely common to hear that atheism makes life meaningless because it means you're an accident and exist for no inherent purpose. No, atheism makes life meaningless because it means you die, not because it means you were born. Meaning and purpose in life come only from our choices, not from the circumstances of our coming into existence.

Still, though, there's something deeply unsatisfying in the idea that existence is irreducibly "random," that we all just happen to exist for no reason at all.

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4. Agency is necessary anyway

The "no beginning" scenario would be most appealing to a determinist, who maintains that the state of the universe at any given point in time is determined by its state at the point immediately previous. An infinite past with no beginning would seem to be required by this "all dominoes and no fingers" theory.

If we accept agency, though, then some causal chains at least do not extend back infinitely into the past but terminate in a free choice, an uncaused cause -- and our metaphysics must accommodate that. Since we have this experience of things having a real beginning, and no experience of things having existed forever, it seems reasonable to assume, unless there is some strong reason to assume otherwise, that all things had a beginning, and that that beginning was a free act.

Why does God exist?

Why does anything exist? Because God created it. Right, then -- why does God exist? This is considered a childish question, because it's one of the first things children think to ask about God -- if he created everything, who created him? -- but I don't consider that a point against it. Do we need to know why God exists? No. "I know that he loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things" (1 Ne. 11:17). But how we answer the question does have important metaphysical ramifications.

While "proofs of God" properly address the question of how we can know God exists, rather than why he does in fact exist, a few of them also suggest answers to that latter question.

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One of these is the Ontological Argument of Anselm, which runs as follows.

1. Let us give the name "God" to the greatest being we can conceive of.
2. A being which exists is greater than a being which does not exist.
3. If God did not exist, then we would be able to conceive of a being greater than this non-existent God -- namely, a God who did exist.
4. Therefore, "God does not exist" is logically self-contradictory and necessarily false. So God exists. 

By Anselm's reasoning, asking why God exists would be like asking why circles are round. Circles are round because that's what the word circle means. If it weren't round, it wouldn't be a circle. "Some circles are not round" is self-contradictory and therefore necessarily false.

Of course, this is no proof that there actually are any circles. It only means that if there are any circles, all those circles are necessarily round. That necessity is conditional, not absolute.

In the Ontological Argument, though, the predicate in question is not roundness but existence itself, and the necessity is therefore presented as absolute. It isn't, though. Circles are by definition round; therefore, if there is a circle, that circle is necessarily round. God by definition exists; therefore, if there is a God, that God necessarily exists. Since "there is x" and "x exists" are two ways of saying the same thing, this is an uninteresting tautology which applies to everything, not only to God.

The illusion of absolute necessity is created by conflating "thinking of a being as existing" with "thinking of a being which in fact exists." The same sleight of hand can be used to prove that absolutely anything exists. If you think of the Loch Ness monster, you necessarily think of it as living in Loch Ness; therefore, the monster you are thinking of actually lives in Loch Ness. (Of course I believe in the Loch Ness monster; after all, it lives in Loch Ness by definition!) Or think of the scariest werewolf imaginable. Now what's scarier, a werewolf that's just imaginary or one that actually exists? Or, better yet, one that not only exists but is standing behind you right now! Every predicate presupposes existence, and sophistry can "prove" that any P exists by deriving from "P does not exist" the contradiction "P is not P."

If Anselm's argument fails, and it does, can we still maintain (as classical theology generally does) that God "exists necessarily," in contrast to other beings, whose existence is merely contingent? I don't see how. The necessity in question can only be logical necessity, since physical necessity would not apply to the being who created the physical universe itself -- and, well, how can the existence of anything be logically necessary?

I suppose people who reject Anselm's argument (as everyone should) but still insist that God exists necessarily, must think that his existence is logically necessary in some way that we don't yet understand, just as the necessary truth of, say, Euler's identity (e^iπ + 1 = 0) is not at all obvious to the layman. Perhaps some future theological Euler will succeed where Anselm failed and demonstrate the logical necessity of God's existence? Can we say with certainty that "God exists" is not true-by-logical-necessity? 

Well, yes. Yes, we can say that. All necessity is conditional and relational. An equation, such as Euler's expression of a necessary relationship among five constants, is the sort of thing that can be logically necessary; and a flat existential statement, such as "There are butterflies in Madagascar" or "God exists" is the sort of thing that can't. I can say with complete confidence that no purely logical argument (with no existential or empirical premises at all) can ever prove the existence of God -- or of anything else for that matter.

So I consider this type of explanation for God's existence -- that he exists because it is impossible that he should not exist -- to be a dead hypothesis. It wouldn't voom if you put four million volts through it. What else is there, then?

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The other relevant "proof of God" is what is called the Kalām Cosmological Argument, Kalām being the Muslim counterpart to Scholasticism.

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause for its coming into being.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause for its coming into being.

If the cause-of-the-universe also had a beginning, then the same logic would apply to it. Therefore we must finally trace all causes back to something that did not have a beginning, and this is Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.

This argument is what brought me back around to belief in God after nearly a decade of hard atheism -- but it did so indirectly. In fact, I thought of it not as a conclusive argument but as the Kalām Paradox, and it was the attempt to unravel the paradox that led me to belief first in agency and then in God. Let me retrace some of that thought.

Where Kalām parts ways with Anselm is in the assumption, implicit in the first premise, that God can just exist for no particular reason. Only changes -- comings-into-being -- require causes, and if God has always existed, there is no need to pretend he "exists necessarily" or to give any other reason for his existence. He just does exist, as a brute fact, and that's all there is to say.

But isn't the whole idea of a "Creator" based on the assumption that things don't just exist for no reason at all? Why can't we just say that the universe has always existed, for no particular reason, and leave it at that? That's where the second premise comes in: The universe began to exist. This is asserted not because of any empirical evidence for the Big Bang theory or anything like that, but because the universe is temporal, and time elapses finite interval by finite interval. No process of adding up finite quantities can ever reach an infinity, so it is impossible that an infinite amount of time has already elapsed. Therefore, only a finite amount of time has elapsed, and the universe had a beginning. This makes a lot of potentially debatable assumptions about the nature of time, but let's just accept it for now.

So the universe began to exist, which means it had a cause, God. And in order for this to explain anything, we must assume that God himself has always existed. But didn't we just argue that nothing can "have always existed," since it is impossible for an infinite amount of time to have already elapsed? Isn't that the whole basis of the first premise of the Kalām Argument? Why doesn't the same logic apply to God?

Well, the only way to make God a valid exception is to posit that he is not only everlasting but atemporal. Time does not elapse for God, and there is thus no need for an infinite amount of it to have already elapsed. God exists outside the time stream like, like -- well, no actual atemporal entities come to mind, but I guess he's supposed to be timeless in the way mathematical abstractions and such are, whatever that could possibly mean. Anyway, let's grant it. (For the record, I myself do not believe in atemporal entities, though I do believe in higher dimensions of temporality.)

Now here's the part that turns the Kalām Argument into the Kalām Paradox. God is supposed to be a sufficient cause for the existence of the universe, and God has always existed. How then to account for the fact (assumed in the second premise) that the universe has not always existed? How can a strictly timeless cause have a temporal effect? It can't, obviously.

How, according to the argument, do we escape this paradox? By assuming that God is personal and has free will. The existence of the universe must have been caused not by the existence of God but by a free act of God. As I wrote in my 2012 post "The Kalam Argument,"

I was very impressed with this part when I first read it, since it’s the first real argument I’ve found for the paradoxical idea of free will — of causation without determinism. If the rest of the kalam argument holds, then, yes, it would seem to follow that the universe must be the result of free will.

Thinking about it more deeply, though, I soon came to two conclusions: (1) It's impossible as it stands. If we take seriously the thesis that God is atemporal, then it is true in the very strictest of senses that he cannot change and therefore cannot act. Action just-is an inextricably temporal thing. A God who has already created the universe is different from a God who has not created the universe yet, and that distinction cannot exist without some sort of time. (2) All the explanatory work is done by the (inherently temporal) act, and none of it by the supposed timeless God behind the act. The correct conclusion is not that everything ultimately owes its existence to some incomprehensible timeless Allah, but that everything ultimately owes its existence to an act, or acts, of free will. Goethe's Faust wasn't just playing word games with his translation of John 1:1 but had it exactly right when, after considering and rejecting word, mind, and force, he finally arrived at this:

Mir hilft der Geist! Auf einmal seh' ich Rat

Und schreibe getrost: Im Anfang war die Tat!

The Spirit helps me. Boldly I proceed --

And write: "In the beginning was the deed."

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Agency has to be accepted as a primitive metaphysical concept, and as the ultimate origin of absolutely everything. Anselm tries to make logical necessity more fundamental than agency. The Kalām Argument tries to make the "randomness" of brute fact more fundamental. But I maintain that absolutely nothing is more fundamental. God exists for no other reason than that he chose to exist: Im Anfang war die Tat, und die Tat war bei Gott, und Gott war die Tat.

In principle, that one original creative act could be the ultimate cause of everything else. However, there is no reason to postulate only one such act and good reason to assume the opposite. We ourselves have free will, which means that our own ultimate origin might be like that of God.

Joseph Smith, the Prophet, wrote,

Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be.

All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence.

Behold, here is the agency of man (D&C 93:29-31).

The orthodox interpretation of this is that just as God has always existed, so man -- or the uncreated intelligence at the core of man -- has always existed. I would interpret it differently now. "In the beginning" does not after all imply a beginningless eternity. God was in the beginning. The beginning was an act, and God was in that act, and God was that act. Man, too, was in his own beginning. Man, too, is an agent, and acted himself into existence. Otherwise there is no existence.

"No coincidences" implies a single-author creation

For every house is builded by some man; but he that built all things is God.

-- Hebrews 3:4

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players

-- Shakespeare, As You Like It

According to the Epistle to the Hebrews, every house is built by a human builder or builders, and every house is also built by God. Everything that exists and everything that happens, even when it seems to be (and is, at one level) the work of human actors or blind natural forces, is also something for which we can and should thank God. In my 2018 post "Shining Buddha problems" (written before I was a Christian), I make various attempts at understanding this idea, arriving in the end at what I call the "literary approach."

In trying to come up with some way of conceptualizing such an idea, I keep coming back to the metaphor of a book, which is why I’ve dubbed this the "literary approach." Everything that happens in a work of narrative fiction can be explained on two different levels. Assuming the story makes sense, every event therein will have a cause within the world of the story and can be fully explained on that level without reference to the author -- but from a "higher" point of view, that of the larger world within which the story-world is contained, every detail of the story is without exception the work of the author.

I go on to discuss how this metaphor can be used to conceptualize the idea of a "meaningful coincidence" -- or the coincidence which at another level is no coincidence at all. 

Take, for example, the storm on the heath in the third act of King Lear -- a perfect example of a meaningful coincidence. Viewed from within the story, the raging storm is a natural meteorological event caused by the mechanical unfolding of the mindless laws of physics, and the fact that it coincides so nicely with Lear’s psychological rage, and with the impending descent of Britain into political chaos, is just that: a coincidence. There is no within-story causal connection between the storm and what it mirrors -- and if there were -- if, say, Shakespeare had portrayed the gods specially arranging the storm for the purpose of providing a meteorological counterpoint to Lear’s psychological state -- that would be aesthetically objectionable . . . . But from a point of view that transcends the story itself, we can see that Shakespeare clearly arranged the coincidence on purpose and that we are therefore justified in considering it meaningful.

Even in King Lear, though, it seems that there are real coincidences -- truly meaningless coincidences, intended neither by the characters nor by the author. When Kent says, "the poor distressed Lear's i' the town; who sometime, in his better tune, remembers," only a person with a particularly strange way of thinking would notice the name Israel spelled backwards and connect it with Judges 2, where Israel is "greatly distressed" because, while they do sometimes in their better tune remember the Lord and serve him, they keep backsliding into idolatry. Surely no such message was intended either by Kent or by the Bard -- nor, if I may presume so to speculate, by God himself -- and yet there it is. There are so very many possible connections one could notice, it seems impossible that they could all be intended, all meaningful, all not-really-coincidental.

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In a comment on my post "No escape from coincidence," Bruce Charlton also proposes a literary analogy, even choosing the same author as an illustration.

Since this world is being-created by God, it is coherent at a spiritual level. Some of this coherence is important for salvation or theosis, which is the purpose of creation. These are the synchronicities.

But some of the coherence is an unintended by-product of the sheer fact of coherence of creation.

An analogy might be a good Shakespeare play - which has that coherence to it which is a product of deliberate authorial intention (coming via the author's mind); but there are other coherences (or 'symbolisms') which may be discovered by the scholar - and which are unintended products of the fact that this is a play, written by one Man, and was written so that it held-together.

If we look, there are many cross-correlated aspects of a play that are secondary to the nature of the thing, the fact of its coherence as a work of art.

I don't think this quite gets us to "no coincidences." There are just so many different things that could be connected, and so many different ways of connecting them, that it just seems inevitable that connections should arise "by chance," without reflecting either intention or "the sheer fact of coherence." Of course, this is a bit of a metaphysical assumption, and it's not as if there's any control group to compare things to. I mean, the world created by God is all we know, so we can't exactly look at an incoherent world that wasn't created and see if it differs from the real world in terms of the presence or absence of coincidences.

Using the literary analogy, though, let us look at what I would consider to be a truly meaningless coincidence in a coherent literary work by a single author. Our earlier "Lear's i' the town" example will not serve, because it is a coincidence between something in the text and something outside of it. If the text represents the created world, though, all coincidences must be within the text, without reference to anything outside it. (Obviously, any apparent coincidences we can observe in this world will be between various features of this created world, not between the world and something outside of it.) No Shakespearean example comes to mind, so let's take one from the Book of Mormon instead. 

Remember, to be carnally-minded is death, and to be spiritually-minded is life eternal. . . . I know that the words of truth are hard against all uncleanness; but the righteous fear them not, for they love the truth and are not shaken (2 Nephi 9:39-40).

It is an old Sunday-school standby among Mormons that "spiritually-minded is life eternal" (a slight modification of a phrase from Romans 8:6) forms the acronym SMILE -- and this is juxtaposed in the text with the implication that the words of truth would make the unclean frown but the righteous smile. (A biblical equivalent would be Matthew 7:7, where the first letters of the three clauses spell out ASK.) The word smile is also found in the BoM, so this counts as a proper within-"world" coincidence.

Now I am reasonably certain that this is not an intentionally created feature of the text. Obviously the Nephite authors writing in Egyptian could not have had English acronyms in mind, and while Joseph Smith could in principle have chosen this particular wording for its acronym potential, I see no evidence of that in the text. (Wouldn't he have paired it with something like "the flesh-regarding ones will never see life"?)

Here's another sentence, taken from a BBC article (qv), that coincidentally includes a series of words that form the acronym SMILE: "Although they had a tough time, none of our volunteers had to put up with the wide range of lethal microbes that killed so many in London's East End in the mid-Victorian period."

I would say that this differs from the 2 Nephi SMILE in that the coincidence does not seem in any way appropriate, intelligible, or meaningful. No one would say, "What a coincidence!" if you pointed it out. It doesn't even really count as a coincidence -- by which I mean it's not what people have in mind when they say "There are no coincidences."

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Anthony Hopkins has a name that resembles ant-honey and thus suggests hymenopterid insects, and the poster for the movie he is most famous for, The Silence of the Lambs, also features an insect, though one of a different order. Note also how Mark Antony (source of the English name Anthony) fell in love with a woman whose name resembles Coleoptera, another non-hymenopterid order of insects, and was co-triumvir with Lepidus -- Lepidoptera, of course, being the very order of insects to appear on the movie poster for Silence of the Lambs! What are the odds? The movie is about someone called Buffalo Bill who skins people. Buffalo is by far the biggest city in New York that ends with the letter O, and Anthony Hopkins's first name ends with ONY. Buffalo is called the Nickel City. and both Nickel and Hob (whence Hopkins) were formerly used as names for goblins. Hob, is a diminutive in which the initial letter of the original name (Robert) changes, and one of the few other English diminutives with this property is Bill, so Hob suggests both Buffalo and Bill. After the Hob element comes kins, which is just an anagram of skin -- so "Buffalo Bill skins" is right there in his name. We might also note that only two of the characters in this movie bear the title "doctor," and that both of them are played by actors named Philip Anthony H. who go by Anthony rather than Philip: Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins, and Philip Anthony Mair Heald. Sir and Mair are also equivalent because of the similar meanings of the Latin roots (senior, "the elder," and maior, "the greater") from which they derive. I could go on and on like this, and I've never even seen the damn movie! I picked Hopkins at random and just started writing.

These are junk coincidences, pseudo-coincidences, the kind of thing you'd find in "King-Kill/33" or Finnegans Wake (Downard and Joyce, sad James and happy James). Is anyone really prepared to maintain that they are all meaningful, all not-really-coincidences, all put there by God on purpose?

Anything as complex as the universe -- or even just as complex as Finnegans Wake -- is inevitably going to include billions and billions of coincidences above and beyond those intended by its creator -- yes, even by an omnipotent and omniscient Creator. It's statistically inevitable.

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But this literary analogy has led us astray. Who noticed that "Lear's i' the town" contains the name Israel spelled backwards? I did -- I, one of the readers of King Lear. But if all the world is a stage -- if the "literary work" we are considering is the universe itself -- then we are not readers or spectators but characters -- all the men and women merely players.

As someone who exists outside the world of King Lear, I can notice coincidental patterns in it that were never intended by the author -- truly coincidental patterns which must inevitably exist as a matter of statistical necessity. If a character in the play is made to notice a "coincidence" within the world of that play, though -- well that noticing was deliberately written into the script by the author, and we can therefore be absolutely certain that it is not really a coincidence at all but an intentionally designed and potentially meaningful feature of the text. If this universe was truly created by a divine Author, and all that happens in it was scripted by him -- if we poor players are not in any sense co-creators but simply follow a preordained script as we strut and fret our hour upon the stage -- then there would still be coincidences in the universe, but we characters could never notice any of them. "There are no coincidences," while technically false, would still be practically true for us. Noticing something and wondering if it was "just a coincidence," we could confidently reason, "No, nothing we notice is ever a coincidence, for we are characters in a play. Everything we notice, we notice by the grace of the author, and that means that it is not a coincidence but an intentional and meaningful feature of the play."

This is what I mean by the title of this post: "No coincidences" implies a single-author creation. It implies that everything in this universe, including everything we ourselves do and say and think, is fated, "scripted" by God. It means we have no free will but only a simulation thereof -- just as Hamlet seems to deliberate and vacillate and finally make a decision, but in fact every detail of everything he says and does is really decided by Shakespeare.

But we do have free will, and this means that coincidences -- true coincidences -- are inevitable. If I write a novel in which Bob and Alice meet by chance in a coffee shop, the meeting does not really happen by chance at all, because "Bob's decision" and "Alice's decision" are in fact made by me, the author, and I deliberately made them to coincide. In a world with real free will, though, Bob can freely choose to go to the coffee shop at a particular time, Alice can independently make a similar decision -- and these two decisions, being the work of two different free agents, would be causally unconnected in deepest possible sense and as true a coincidence as it is possible to imagine.

I think this is perhaps the metaphysical foundation of my delight in coincidences, my insistence that they are coincidences, and my resistance to the idea that "there are no coincidences." A coincidence as such may be meaningless, but in a deeper sense it is an indicator that we live in a world that has coincidences -- an open-ended world, co-created by many truly independent free agents. It is a reminder that free will is real, and as such its very meaninglessness reveals the meaningfulness of our existence.

Who or what is the ultimate spiritual authority? (a Mormon perspective)

And there ran a young man, and told Moses, and said, "Eldad and Medad do prophesy in the camp."

And Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of Moses, one of his young men, answered and said, "My lord Moses, forbid them."

And Moses said unto him, "Enviest thou for my sake? would God that all the Lord's people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit upon them!"

-- Numbers 11:27-29

"Your Highness says her Voices have revealed to you, by her mouth, a secret known only to yourself and God. How can you know that her Voices are not of Satan, and she his mouthpiece? -- for does not Satan know the secrets of men and use this knowledge for the destruction of their souls? It is a dangerous business, and your Highness will do well not to proceed in it without probing the matter to the bottom."

That was enough. It shriveled up the King's little soul like a raisin.

-- Mark Twain, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

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This is going to be long and meandering. I considered condensing it to a few pithy epigrams but in the end decided it would be better to "show my work."

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Who or what is the ultimate spiritual authority? God, of course.

Okay, so what has God told us? Which ideas are truly from God, or in harmony with God, and which are not?

The Protestant answer is that the Bible is the inerrant word of God and can be treated as the ultimate authority. (This is how it is now at any rate; things must have been different in days of old, before Bibles were invented.) Different possible interpretations of the same biblical text are to be judged by, uh, how biblical they are -- how closely in harmony with what the rest of the Bible says. There's a certain circularity here, and in practice additional standards of judgment are needed. As the young Joseph Smith observed, people have "understood the same passages of scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible."

Catholics point out that sola scritura -- the Bible alone as the standard of truth -- is self-defeating, since the Bible itself does not tell us which texts are "part of the Bible" and which are not -- and even if some Bible passage did tell us that, what good would it be unless we already had other grounds for believing that passage at least to be authoritative? Nor does the Bible provide hermeneutic principles for reading and interpreting itself -- and even if it did, how could we understand them unless we already understood them? Whatever it is that tells us that, then -- whatever defines "the Bible" and tells us what it means -- is the real ultimate authority. For Catholics, this higher authority is the tradition of the Church as interpreted by the Pope.

But of course Catholicism is not the only tradition, the Pope is not the only religious leader, and my earlier quotation from Joseph Smith was a partial one. What he actually said was that "the teachers of religion of the different sects understood the same passages of scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence." The Catholics want questions of canonicity and hermeneutics to be settled by tradition and priestly authority -- but first we must judge among the various rival traditions ("sects") and rival authorities ("teachers of religion"). And if the only way to do that is "by an appeal to the Bible," well, then we're right back where we started.

It may seem strange to say that Joseph Smith in any way "solved" this problem. After all, what did he do but found yet another sect, propose yet another alternative scriptural canon (the Protestant Bible, plus the Book of Mormon and a few other texts) and set himself up as yet another alternative "Pope"? What clarity could come from that?

The clarity comes not from following Joseph Smith as one follows a Pope, but from following his example. Smith relates how, faced with a welter of competing versions of Protestantism, "At length I came to the conclusion that I must either remain in darkness and confusion, or else I must do as James directs, that is, ask of God. . . . So, in accordance with this, my determination to ask of God, I retired to the woods to make the attempt."

There followed the famous First Vision, in which he saw and spoke with entities he understood to be God the Father and Jesus Christ, and other heavenly visitations would follow -- John the Baptist; the apostles Peter, James, and John; and, most notably, the otherwise unknown "Angel Moroni," who set in motion the chain of events leading to the publication of the Book of Mormon.

Is that the answer then? Pray to God, and he'll send you angels, or even make a personal visit, and then you'll know?

Well, no. Even if we assume that God is willing to make such experiences available to everyone -- leaving aside the observed fact that people like Moses and Joseph Smith are very much exceptions to the rule -- apparitions and visions are no more self-validating and self-interpreting than anything else. Everyone knows that the devil may appear as an angel of light -- even if the Bible didn't say so (which it does), it would be a logical possibility -- which is enough to disqualify angelic, or even seemingly divine, visitants as ultimate spiritual authorities. They, too, must be judged and discerned.

Joseph Smith's First Vision is a case in point, as it appears it was the devil that first answered his prayer.

I kneeled down and began to offer up the desires of my heart to God. I had scarcely done so, when immediately I was seized upon by some power which entirely overcame me, and had such an astonishing influence over me as to bind my tongue so that I could not speak. Thick darkness gathered around me, and it seemed to me for a time as if I were doomed to sudden destruction.

But, exerting all my powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the power of this enemy which had seized upon me, and at the very moment when I was ready to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction—not to an imaginary ruin, but to the power of some actual being from the unseen world, who had such marvelous power as I had never before felt in any being—just at this moment of great alarm, I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me.

It no sooner appeared than I found myself delivered from the enemy which held me bound. When the light rested upon me I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name and said, pointing to the other—This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!

Joseph Smith's interpretation of this is that he was met first with a demonic assault, because "the adversary was aware . . . that I was destined to prove a disturber and an annoyer of his kingdom," but that as he persisted in prayer the true God appeared and delivered him from the devil. But of course another possibility that comes readily to mind is that the whole thing could have been a demonic good-cop/bad-cop routine -- that the devil appeared first in his own character and then, finding that he was resisted, returned in disguise as God himself. This possibility becomes even more apparent once the Personage has delivered his message

My object in going to inquire of the Lord was to know which of all the [Christian] sects was right, that I might know which to join. No sooner, therefore, did I get possession of myself, so as to be able to speak, than I asked the Personages who stood above me in the light, which of all the sects was right (for at this time it had never entered into my heart that all were wrong)—and which I should join.

I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight;

Keep in mind that these "personages" never actually identified themselves as God and Jesus; one simply called the other his "beloved son" and let Smith infer the rest. And what was the personage's message? That all Christian creeds were an abomination in his sight.

One's reaction to this reported vision reflects one's implicit hierarchy of spiritual authorities. For Smith himself, if Jesus appeared in answer to his prayer, then whatever he said must be true, even if it was something shocking, like that all Christian creeds were an abomination. (After all, didn't Isaiah also have the Lord call the religion of his time an abomination, even though it was the "true" religion given by Moses?) For others, any messenger who called Christianity an abomination must be demonic, even if he appeared in the form of Christ himself. (After all, isn't the Bible full of warnings about false Christs, and about apparent angels from heaven delivering a "different gospel"?)

Most of Smith's contemporaries were in this latter camp. When the young Smith (still a teenager) shared his vision with a Methodist minister, "I was greatly surprised at his behavior; he treated my communication not only lightly, but with great contempt, saying it was all of the devil."

At first, Smith seems not to have fully grasped what the Methodist minister and others were claiming. His reaction was, "I had actually seen a light, and in the midst of that light I saw two Personages, and they did in reality speak to me; and though I was hated and persecuted for saying that I had seen a vision, yet it was true; . . . I was led to say in my heart: Why persecute me for telling the truth?" But the mere fact of his having had a vision was really not the point. Some, of course, would claim that the vision had never happened and that Smith had made it up -- but the Methodist minister wasn't saying there had been no vision; he was saying it was all of the devil.

Later on, though, Smith kept coming back to this question of how to distinguish a genuine heavenly messenger from a demonic impostor. In his prologue to Genesis, Smith has Satan appear to Moses, saying "I am the Only Begotten; worship me!" In a pivotal scene in the Mormon temple drama, Adam prays to God and is answered by Satan ("I am the god of this world," he explains), the implication being that this could happen to anybody. At various points, Smith taught that false angels could be recognized by their hair color or by asking them to shake hands. (This latter test was later canonized as D&C 129!) In the temple drama previously mentioned, the "handshake" idea is taken further, with true heavenly messengers proving their identity to Adam by means of -- a Masonic grip and due-guard! (Mormonism uses different terminology.) All of these specific tests seem laughable to an outsider, but the point is that Smith recognized the need for some kind of test and did not naïvely assume that all "angels" are good.

Even if we grant the possibility that all of Smith's tests are grounded in fact -- that, as it happens, only fallen angels have red hair, only good angels have read Duncan's Ritual of Freemasonry, and all angels good and bad are bound by the "three grand keys" of handshakery -- the only reason for believing any of that is Smith's own authority, which in turn depends on the genuinely heavenly nature of his own visitants. We can accept these methods of judging angels only after we have already judged the "Angel Moroni" and the "personages" of the First Vision.

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In Mormonism as it has developed, Smith's teachings about hair color and handshakes are little more than historical curiosities. The ultimate touchstone of truth that has been adopted is the one given in the Book of Mormon:

And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost. And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things (Moroni 10:4-5).

Of course "by the power of the Holy Ghost" is a little vague, and so Mormons tend to zero in on what is called the "burning in the bosom." In Luke, two disciples who belatedly realize that the person they have been talking to was the risen Christ say, "Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures?" (Luke 24:32). This is reinforced by D&C 9:8-9 -- which, while it was originally about the process of "translating" the Book of Mormon by inspiration, has been interpreted more generally as an explanation of how God answers our questions.

But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right.

But if it be not right you shall have no such feelings, but you shall have a stupor of thought that shall cause you to forget the thing which is wrong; therefore, you cannot write that which is sacred save it be given you from me.

I first experienced this distinctive "burning" on July 22, 1996 and can confirm that it is a real phenomenon and is utterly distinctive, unlike either an emotion or a physical sensation. I first felt it after asking in prayer whether Jesus Christ was the Savior of the world, whether Joseph Smith was a true prophet, and whether Gordon B. Hinckley (then leader of the CJCLDS) was a true prophet. The burning started after I asked about Jesus and continued through all the questions, subsiding some time later.

For a long time after that, my "testimony" was based on the unique nature of that "burning." When I felt it thereafter -- as I did from time to time -- it was always in the context of Mormonism, and therefore I saw it as a consistent and reliable indicator of truth. Boyd K. Packer had compared a testimony to "tasting salt" -- an experience which, while it cannot be communicated in words, is utterly distinctive and reliable.

But in fact nothing in the mere experience of saltiness entails the presence of sodium chloride. That a salty taste tends to indicate the presence of that substance is an empirically based inference, not a direct experience, and it seems perfectly plausible that it might be a highly imperfect indicator -- that other chemicals might also "taste salty," and that some things that in fact contain a great deal of salt might not "taste salty" at all.

Similarly, once the "burning in the bosom" has been experienced, it can be recognized as a distinctive and indescribable sensation (akin in that way to the taste of salt), but it does not interpret itself any more than any other experience does, and it cannot be assumed a priori to be some kind of litmus test of spiritual truth.

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Synchronistical interlude:

I have been writing this post slowly over a period of many days. Just after writing the above paragraphs, in which I discuss the "burning in the bosom" and question it as a guarantee of truth, I happened to read two things. One was in The Edge of Evil: The Rise of Satanism in North America, a 1989 "Satanic panic" book by Jerry Johnston. On p. 139, Johnston briefly discusses a 1988 magazine article by Lee Coit called "Inner Listening (Guidance) Made Simple," a New Age, non-Christian explanation of how to tune in to one's "inner guide" (which Johnston implies may be demonic in nature).

The article goes on to answer a subtitled question: "How Do We Tell When It Is Working?" Coit begins to answer with method number one: "We will have a warm glow." I flip to other pages in the magazine.

Shortly after reading that, I read a post by William Wildblood called "Valentin Tomberg on the Difference Between Buddhism and Christianity." in which he quotes the following passage from that author. The italics are Wildblood's and indicate parts which he finds "particularly pertinent."

This is why the mystics of eastern Christianity do nor tire of warning beginners of the danger that they call "seductive illumination" (prelestnoye prosveshtcheniye in Russian) and insist upon the nakedness of spiritual experience, i.e. on experience of the spiritual world stripped of all form, all colour, all sound and all intellectuality. The intuition alone of divine love with its effect on moral consciousness is —they teach —the sole experience to which one should aspire.

What you will read below -- further thoughts on the inadequacy of the "warm glow" and the necessity of "intuition alone" -- was already planned before I had read the two passages quoted above.

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My over-reliance on the "burning in the bosom" was one of the underlying causes of my apostasy from Mormonism, which began in late 2001. Earlier that year, I had felt the burning while reading the James Joyce novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and then again while reading Einstein's Dream by Alan Lightman. Since these books were obviously not "true" -- both are works of fiction, and Portrait in particular has an intensely anti-religious message -- that meant that the burning was no longer consistent in its manifestations and was not a reliable indicator of anything. A few months later, when I encountered some particularly compelling secular evidence against Mormon claims, I no longer had the reliability of the burning to fall back on, and my faith quickly evaporated. At first I thought I might become a Protestant or Catholic, or even convert to Judaism, but it soon became clear that all my religious beliefs, including those that were not specifically Mormon, were grounded in the no-longer-trustworthy burning, and so I quickly became an atheist. The foolish man built his house upon the sand.

It is curious to note that, although my faith collapsed with the collapse of the burning in the bosom, it had not originally been built on that foundation. Before my prayer of July 22, 1996, I was already confident that Mormonism was true. I was praying not for my own enlightenment, but so that I would have something to tell others. I was 17 and had just returned to the world of secular "education" after a seven-year break, and was anticipating challenges to my faith. "How do you know?" people would ask me, and I would reply (because it's what Mormons are supposed to say), "I prayed and asked God, and he revealed it to me." Only he hadn't, not yet. So I was praying so that I would be able to say that. If I had been wiser, I would have noticed that my faith was obviously not based on an answered prayer, that I was seeking a rationalization for what I already believed; and I would have asked myself what my faith was really based on and perhaps discovered something important. But 17-year-olds are not noted for their wisdom.

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After many years of atheism, I have returned to Christianity and even to a kind of "Mormonism." (I recognize Joseph Smith as a true prophet but am not affiliated with any church.) This time around I find that I have zero interest in "epistemology" -- in trying to justify my beliefs to those who do not share them or to explain "how I know." The burning in the bosom has played no role at all in my return to faith; nowadays, I find D&C 8 more helpful than D&C 9.

Yea, behold, I will tell you in your mind and in your heart, by the Holy Ghost, which shall come upon you and which shall dwell in your heart. Now, behold, this is the spirit of revelation; behold, this is the spirit by which Moses brought the children of Israel through the Red Sea on dry ground (D&C 8:2-3).

As I explained it in an email to a family member,

The conversion has been the result of a simple decision to "listen to my heart" -- to admit that I know what I know and believe what I believe, and to dispense with the need, once so keenly felt, to make my "official" beliefs "respectable" to anyone but myself and God.

Listen to your mind and your heart, and to the Holy Ghost that dwells therein. Trust your own intuition and judgment. That's the bottom line. Everything else is secondary, because any authority you choose to defer to is just that: an authority you choose to defer to, based on your personal judgment, and is thus "downstream" from that judgment.

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I do realize that if I someone had given the above advice to me a decade or so back, when I was an atheist, I would have found it uselessly vague -- and I probably would have felt that I was trusting my own judgment above all, and that that was precisely what had led me to reject all religious authorities and become an atheist. Here are two specific messages I would give to my past self if it were possible:

1. Every time you say to yourself, "Of course I don't really believe X, but --" and then proceed to think and behave just as someone who did believe X would think and behave, you need to stop and consider the possibility that you are not being honest with yourself about your actual beliefs.

2. If you maintain that X is false but that it is nevertheless necessary to act as if it were true (see Hume's position on causation, for example) -- that means that the philosophy that led you to the conclusion that X is false is dysfunctional and needs to be reexamined from its underlying metaphysical assumptions on up.

For me, the deciding issue turned out to be human agency ("free will"). Once I faced the fact that I did believe in it, that I had to believe in it, and that I therefore needed to jettison all the metaphysical assumptions that had led me to the conclusion that it was impossible, I did not remain an atheist for long.