The Risky Isness of Creation

There are two kinds of meaninglessness: disorder at one end, excessive order at the other; or, randomness and determinism, respectively. 

Now, we know this isn't a random universe. To the contrary, it is a shockingly ordered place, but to what end? The anthropic principle -- at least the strong version -- says it is ordered to us, of all people: the principle maintains that

There exists one possible Universe 'designed' with the goal of generating and sustaining observers.... It implies that the purpose of the universe is to give rise to intelligent life, with the laws of nature and their fundamental physical constants set to ensure that life emerges and evolves.

So, intelligent persons are the cause, not the effect, of the universe. If this is the case, then we ourselves are nothing less than the final cause of existence. 

That's a big responsibility. 

True. I'm not sure I want that kind of burden.

Besides, even supposing we are the telos of the universe, this nevertheless seals us in an absurcular tautology. It may be a bigger circle, but a circle nonetheless. It reminds me of something Schuon says -- that

Once man makes of himself a measure, while refusing to be measured in turn, or once he makes definitions while refusing to be defined by what transcends him and gives him all his meaning, all human reference points disappear; cut off from the Divine, the human collapses.

Back to the strong anthropic principle, supposing man is the final cause of the universe, then we have two questions: what exactly is man, and what is his final cause? What's he supposed to be doing here?

For Schuon, The very word "man" implies "God," the very word "relative" implies "Absolute."

Now, man is intelligence, but not just any kind of intelligence, rather, an intelligence that transcends the material world and can thereby know truth. It is an open intelligence, open to intelligible being. But it is also vertically open, or open to the transcendent source of intelligence itself. Hence the latter must be the (divine) Telos of the (human) telos, so to speak.

Or in other words, 

To say that man is the measure of all things is meaningless unless one starts from the idea that God is the measure of man, or that the absolute is the measure of the relative, or again, that the universal Intellect is the measure of individual existence; nothing is fully human that is not determined by the Divine, and therefore centered on it (Schuon).

Only in this way do we exit the tautology referenced above. We can indeed be King of the Universe, but where does this leave us if we aren't subject to a higher authority? For again, human intelligence is not just horizontally but vertically open: 

The animal cannot leave his state, whereas man can; strictly speaking, only he who is fully man can leave the closed system of the individuality, through participation in the one and universal Selfhood.

So, it seems that the final cause of the universe is something like an intelligent being open to the Absolute. "Other creatures," writes Schuon, 

participate in life, but man synthesizes them: he carries all life within himself and thus becomes the spokesman for all life, the vertical axis where life opens onto the spirit and where it becomes spirit. In all terrestrial creatures the cold inertia of matter becomes heat, but in man alone does heat become light.

I'll buy that. But what does it have to do with our subject, which is to say, open theism? Well, we've just laid out the principles of an "open anthropology," in that man is essentially open to both world and God. But is God open to us? 

Again, the traditional view says no -- that if God were literally open to us, this would imply change, and change is something that God by definition cannot do, for he is eternal changelessness itself.

This may sound a bit cold when put that way, but it's what they say. However, no religious believer behaves as if this were true. It reminds me of how no determinist behaves as if determinism were true, just as no Darwinian conducts his life on the basis of Darwinism. Are they hypocrites? Or on to something?

Likewise, is the religious predeterminist who engages in petitionary prayer a hypocrite? Or is he too on to something? 

Let's say I'm faced with a binary life choice, and I don't know which path to choose. I pray to God, hoping to help me discern which choice to make. But from God's perspective, the choice has already been made from all eternity, and there's no deviating from it. Again, there is no contingency in God, so the best we can do is resign ourselves to eternal necessity.

As mentioned yesterday, I don't find this appealing. Let's take a concrete example: Jane doesn't know whether to marry Tom or Dick, so she prays to God for guidance. But in the future she is already married to Tom or Dick, and there's nothing that can change this fact one way or the other, because it has already been determined.

God -- they say -- doesn't know contingent things, because this would make God contingent upon the things he knows. From God's timeless perspective, the future is every bit as determined as the past: it has already happened.

Paradoxes abound here, the bad kind. For example, why try to discern a spiritual vocation, when it has already been determined? This makes no sense to me. Let's start over.  

There is no risk in creating a machine-like universe in which every outcome is foreknown. But one of the themes of open theism is that God actually takes a huge risk -- a leap of faith? -- in creating genuinely free creatures. Does he?

Does God make decisions that depend for their outcomes on the responses of free creatures in which the decisions themselves are not informed by knowledge of the outcomes?

If he does, then creating and governing a world is for God a risky business (Hasker). 

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Perhaps this is why 

There is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who do not need to repent.

After all, why rejoice if you knew it all along?