by Thomas Abshier | May 13, 2025 | Uncategorized
Meeting #5, 5/12/25, Divine Constraints, Human Freedom, and Meaning
Divine Constraints and Human Freedom: The Paradox of Creation
Introduction
In the twilight of human understanding, where philosophy and theology meet, lies a profound question: Why would an all-powerful God choose to impose limitations on His actions? This apparent paradox formed the center of a remarkable discussion among Thomas, Charlie, Lucie, and Isak as they explored the tensions between divine omnipotence and the imperfect world we inhabit. Their conversation wove together questions of cosmic purpose, divine intention, and the very meaning of existence itself.
The Garden Paradox: Perfection and Curiosity
“Why do you think that humans were attracted to disobeying God, even though their world was perfect?” Lucie’s question cuts to the heart of creation’s most enduring mystery. If Eden represented perfection, what could possibly have motivated humanity to reach for something beyond it?
The answer may lie in the nature of consciousness itself. As Thomas suggested, “We’re curious. I think we always want something better than what we have… I think we want something better than perfect perfection.” This seemingly contradictory desire—to improve upon perfection—reveals something fundamental about the human spirit that may reflect divine intention rather than human failure.
Charlie offered a compelling analogy: “Cayenne studies animals a lot… She says that dogs never grow up. We provide them with everything… Only wolves grow up completely because they are fully in the challenging world.” In this view, the Garden represents not the ultimate destination but the protected nursery from which humanity needed to emerge. Perfect security, it seems, prevents the growth necessary for full development.
The serpent’s promise that “you will become more like gods” contained a truth that transcended its deceptive context. As Lucie observed, “When the serpent said, ‘you will become more like gods’—that wasn’t a lie.” The fall, paradoxically, may have been essential for humanity to develop the wisdom and moral maturity required to truly love God from a position of understanding rather than naivety.
Divine Self-Limitation and Meaningful Creation
Perhaps the most challenging aspect of this theological exploration is the suggestion that God deliberately constrains His own power. Thomas proposed that “God has imposed limits on Himself. He doesn’t do everything he can. He could make this a perfect world, and he clearly has not.”
This self-limitation creates what might be called “the divine paradox”: God could eliminate suffering, yet chooses not to—not from indifference, but because without limitation, life loses meaning. As Thomas elaborated, “If you can take a mulligan all the time, it isn’t real. It’s not a real game… Everything is without significance if you don’t have to pay for it. If there isn’t a cost, life is cheap.”
The group explored the possibility that God Himself underwent a development process, testing multiple “iterations” of creation before arriving at our current reality. Isak drew a parallel to the biblical flood: “When I think of the story of Noah’s Ark, it’s similar to God preserving little things and keeping them safe, and then once again starting over.” This suggests divine patience and wisdom developed through cosmic experience rather than existing as static attributes.
The Boredom Problem: Eternal Life and Meaning
“The boredom would kill me,” Charlie confessed while contemplating an eternal Garden of Eden. I would be so bored I would want to partake of the forbidden fruit and die someday.” This startling admission reveals a tension at the heart of human desire: we simultaneously long for perfect peace and meaningful challenge.
This paradox extends to our conception of eternity itself. Isak framed the question powerfully: “If all there is at the end, in heaven, in eternal life… is that we are refined so much that we become just like a part of God… it seems like that lacks the individuality that makes life fun and worth living.”
The resolution may lie in distinguishing between different types of imperfection. As Thomas observed, “The only thing we’re sacrificing is sin. We’re not sacrificing sunrises, sunsets, childbirth, difficulty, overcoming imperfections in life, and solving problems, joy, and sorrow.” The key question becomes: “Can you imagine a world worth living in that didn’t have disease, death, and sin? Would it be interesting enough?”
The Necessity of Difference and Choice
A world without meaningful distinction would be a world without meaning itself. As Thomas explained, “The entire creation is based on difference. If we didn’t have a difference between here and there, this and that, we would have no basis for choice.”
This necessity for contrast extends to our moral understanding. When Charlie observed that in Genesis, “each day of creation, He said, ‘This is good,'” he realized a profound truth: “In order for there to be a decision that something is good, there has to be the possibility that it’s bad.” Without the possibility of evil, the concept of goodness itself loses meaning.
Yet this raises troubling questions about divine intention. Lucie directly asked, “Do you think that God actually wanted us to eat the fruit?” Her question probes whether temptation itself was part of the divine plan rather than an unfortunate accident. The discussion suggested that while God may not have desired disobedience itself, He may have recognized its necessity for humanity’s spiritual development.
The Universe as Divine Workshop
Isak proposed a fascinating model of creation: “What if God did this experiment in this universe and then didn’t like it… continually making everything and then wiping it out and getting to a point. So this wouldn’t be the first time… This would be maybe Earth 7000 or something.”
This concept of multiple creation attempts raises profound questions about divine nature. As Isak pondered, “Are we watching God having an adolescent phase and choosing evil, or living as part of everything, including evil, and having different lifetimes and then scrapping them, but learning from them?”
Thomas suggested that Christ’s incarnation represented a solution to this divine dilemma: “The father, by creating the son, separated himself out and said, ‘I am not going to be part of creating anything evil. You are in charge of creating this thing… You’re the one that gets to reconcile the world to me.'” This theological framework provides a way to understand how God might engage with an imperfect creation while maintaining His perfect nature.
Conclusion: Toward a World Worth Creating
The discussion ultimately points toward a profound synthesis: a creation requiring both freedom and constraint to achieve its purpose. The apparent imperfections of our world may be necessary features rather than flaws in the divine plan.
“I think the only way I can put it,” Thomas reflected, “is to say that God has his plan, and it’s something that’s larger than the particular specifics of any one person.” This larger purpose appears to involve the development of souls capable of choosing good from a position of mature understanding rather than naive innocence.
The ultimate question becomes not why God allows imperfection, but whether we could imagine a meaningful existence without it. As Isak articulated the challenge: “Would that world be a docile, sanitized world that is void of intrigue? Maybe, maybe not.”
Perhaps the most profound insight emerged in Thomas’s final reflection: “The concept we’re talking about is wanting sin and imperfection in our lives to make existence interesting. But what if humanity eventually puts on the mind of Christ, and people overcome disease and death by choosing not to sin? Can you imagine a world that’s worth living in that didn’t have disease, death, and sin? Would it be interesting enough?”
This question beckons us toward a deeper understanding of divine intention—one that recognizes the possibility that God’s self-limitation may be the greatest expression of divine wisdom. By creating a universe where actions have consequences, where choices matter, and where growth requires struggle, God may have fashioned the only kind of reality where beings created in His image could truly develop the capacity to love, create, and choose goodness from a position of wisdom rather than innocence.
In this view, the Garden of Eden was never meant to be humanity’s permanent home, but rather the protected beginning of a journey toward a far richer destination—one that would preserve the wonder of existence while transcending its current limitations.
by Thomas Abshier | Apr 25, 2025 | Physics/Christianity/Life, Uncategorized
The fact of the existence of the physical universe is the ultimate mystery. We take it for granted, we don’t think about it, it’s like air, it’s simply there, and we live inside of it every day.
When we do ask the hard questions, like, “What did the universe come from?” We can’t answer it, so we often listen to the experts, who are the physicists who have become philosophers. And, since they are experts, we may believe their theories about the origin of the universe and life. After all, they are the experts. They think about this stuff all day, and they went through really hard and specialized schools, they are super smart, and they have equations that prove everything, and people got Nobel prizes for their discoveries and theories.
Some physicists rationalize the existence of the universe as being the result of a quantum fluctuation in the pre-creation space. That is, they believe the whole creation may have come into existence spontaneously. They use the Casimir effect (and other experiments) as evidence that virtual electrons and virtual positrons spring out of the empty space. (Note: this “empty space” is actually filled with a “quantum foam,” from which virtual electrons and positrons spring for a moment before quickly they recombine and disappear.
In other words, this creation scenario depends upon empty space (from which virtual positrons and electrons spring and recombine) as being the incident from which all the particles constituting the entire universe of particles sprang in a moment by a massive quantum fluctuation.
This spontaneous quantum fluctuation (that didn’t recombine) creation theory depends upon the theories and evidence of quantum mechanics. While such a cosmic split in the void of space cannot be ruled out, it still begs the question of what/who created the pre-creation void? What natural process generated it? And what natural process created that? In other words, what is the original cause of the creation original space come from which the space came that generated the quantum fluctuation from which the universe sprang? Obviously, the best and brightest physicists of our time have no answers to this question.
Such problems are called an infinite regress. Physicists, atheists, and philosophers criticize theists who say that “God created the creation” because that raises the question of where God came from. But obviously, the physicists who believe in quantum fluctuations creating the universe have presented a solution that offers a solution no deeper than the theist’s faith that the creation was generated by God. Neither solution resolves the fundamental mystery by proposing an original cause, a first cause that generated the mass, energy, space, and time we see in the physical universe.
In other words, both conventional physicists and theists rely on faith that their theory is correct. And being realistic and intellectually honest, neither theory gives a logically satisfying answer to the question about the final/ultimate/original origin of the creation/universe.
The physicist seeks to identify ever more elemental physical processes that may explain a more complex/higher level phenomenon. Staying inside the self-constrained boundaries of physics, no cause other than physical processes can even be considered as the cause of phenomena. In other words, God cannot be considered the cause of the creation, because only non-God solutions are considered. Thus, the physics community has committed itself to the exploration of only physical phenomena, and only physical causes and effects. Thus, the physicist in effect has declared, “I have faith in physical processes” as the cause and origin of the universe.
But, such a position, cannot declare that there is no God, because there has been no search, no study to test whether there is or is not a God. Instead, all physics community can say, is, that they have looked for smaller and smaller, more elemental physical causes (masses and forces) and inside of that domain of research and theoretical consideration, they have not found evidence of God.
Of course, if you don’t look for God, and specifically restrict the consideration of God as a causative factor in the existence of the creation, then it would not be likely that a physicist would conclude that God was the cause. The physics community is looking in a different arena, and what they do is amazing, skilled, intelligent, logical, and imaginative. But, all their work proves is that they have been able to explain every physical phenomenon in the fields of Newtonian mechanics, quantum mechanics, field theory, particle physics, and relativity using ever-smaller phenomena. Such discovery and elaboration of the details of the physical world does not prove, or disprove, the origin of the universe as purely physical or God-created.
In the case of the typical physicist, many hold to the religion of secular humanism and Scientism. As such, many seek to justify all knowledge past the current level of explanation by identified physical causes as in the realm of “someday science will fill in the gap and identify the details of the currently unseen/unidentified physical phenomena that produced xyz particle or force.
It may be true that all forces may be someday be unified as originating from a single primal force. And, it may also be true that all particles may someday be known to have decayed from a single primal mass. But, even in that scenario, the man who believes that the physical universe is all there is, will not be able to take his knowledge any farther and say, “This is the source, this is the beginning, there is no God.”
Rather, the man of faith in God, and the man of faith in the physical universe-alone will both still be men of faith, each clinging to his own religion.
Thus, the question of origin cannot be resolved by finding the unified mass and field theory. Rather, each man must decide in his own heart whether he hears a still small voice speaking that convinces him of the existence of God.
The man who believes only in the existence of the physical universe as the source of all creation and life will also explain the mystery of life by another process of faith, that the theory of evolution was adequate to explain the entirety of the ascent of life from primordial slime to man. Such a doctrine seeks to entirely replace the working of the hand of God with the blind hand of chance and time, and survival of the fittest as the motive force that shaped the minds, hearts, and bodies of all animate creatures. Each man must choose in who and what he believes.
