Friday 14 September 2018

Agency is the main limitation and constraint on divine knowledge and power ('omni-science/ potence')

Regular readers will know that I regard the characterisation of 'an omni-God' - that is a God described in terms of abstract absolutes such as omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence - as a wrong, tendentious, harm-tending error of mainstream Christianity. God is not all-knowing, not all-powerful - and one major and vital limitation on God is agency, or Free Will.

God's knowledge and power is rooted in his being The Creator; and the crux of the problem for mainstream Christianity is that if God created Free Will, if he created the 'mechanism' of agency - and because creation is something on-going and continuous (not something done once in the past then left), then God would have knowledge of and power over Free would... But then agency would not be truly autonomous and free: merely just another expression of God's ongoing creation...

To me, the above mainstream Christian explanation is seriously incoherent; and given the importance of Free Will to Christianity, we need to try and do better... 

Since (as I assume) agency is real and will is indeed free; then these need to be regarded as Not having been created and sustained by God. But instead, agents with free will are pre-existent to God's creation - already-there when creation began - used-by God in doing creation, but not made-by God.

So; the nature of reality is that God's creation is the means by which he pursues his divine plan, a plan to have children and to raise them to become divine like himself (and this has now been fully accomplished by Jesus Christ - so all Men have a model and method) - working-around the constraint, a 'constraint' which is itself necessary for full divinity, of Man's agency.

Thus we have God's creation, inhabited by living, conscious agents with (various degrees of) Free Will - God controlling many aspects of the situation, but neither knowing nor controlling the 'inner workings' of agency.

In other words the real-self is divine, and opaque to God the creator. God must therefore pursue his goals 'indirectly'. However, this indirectness is a feature, not a bug, since it is only genuine free-agents who can fulfil God's plan.

(The alternative being a universe of unfree, wholly-controlled automata; fake/ simulated persons merely.) 

And insofar as reality consists of many agent beings of many kinds - including what we currently (mainstream) think of as minerals, vegetables, and animals; which are alive and conscious to different degrees and in different ways - the nature of reality consists of God setting up situations and responding to the consequences of agency, in a continually purposive but not-predetermined fashion.

It explains why Free Will is a necessary part of the plan; God had to work-around agency in order that the plan could be achieved; and without Free Will there could have been no plan for divinisation.

This description seems to me an exact fit for the nature of reality as I perceive and understand it; which is why I share it here.