God-nerd: The Motion Picture - Part I
"Well, I'm back."
-Samwise Gamgee
That statement has a lot of poignancy to it. For one thing, it's the final line of one of the most beloved fantasy trilogies of all time. It conjures images of the familiar, the triumphant, the return of something beloved or significant, or important enough- like a Gand using a personal pronoun (yes, I am reading the X-wing series right now, how could you tell?)- that it deserves the announcement, that the subject is self-evident, that the return in question is so vital, so celebrated, that everyone within hearing range would WANT to be informed of it's momentous happening.
Well, I don't think the return of another 'regular' installment of the God-Nerd series elicits quite that much of a response. Nor in fact is this particular time in the author's life especially triumphant- rather dismal at many times, actually. But even in struggle and lack, the glory of God is plainly evident, and the one advantage that a wasteland of life, a long, frustrating passage between phases of one's existence can yield is... free time to write. So, for the moment, I am back.
Since it's been a while, I thought I'd tackle a slightly lighter subject this time around, to ease back into things... pre-destination vs. free will.
Oh, wait... that's not especially simple. Actually, theologians have been debating that for about as long as there have been theologians. Well, okay, perhaps that is a topic a bit beyond me. The question of our choosing Christ and yet being chosen by Him is one that I couldn't even begin to give an authoritative answer on- I try and make it a policy to avoid any statements of fact that may be contracted directly by Christ when I see Him. (Of course, I probably make a dozen of those a day without realizing- but I try to not CONSCIOUSLY do so.) Still, there is a largely related topic which I want to take a crack at, a kind of pre-destination type question that dips into the area of probabilities and quantum realities and temporal mechanics and Free Will and a great deal more. And it's actually a much simpler question than all that makes it sound like...
"I'm your density!"
-George Mcfly
Destiny. It's the stuff dreams are made of. Or at the very least, it's the stuff that Disney films are made of. The idea that there is an inevitable outcome, a fate, a set outcome to the series of events in motion that will irrevocably lead to a set conclusion. As the quote goes, "No matter where you go, there you are." It's from Buckaroo Bonzai, I think. Or maybe it was Buck Rogers. I don't remember- all I know is they used it for a dedication plaque on a Starfleet ship. Give me a break, all right? My sci-fi encyclopedia mind only extends so far! Whoever said it, it kind of falls along the same lines as the concept we're talking about- the concept that what is 'meant to be' will occur, and any actions you take will somehow lead you there. It's a popular concept. The Final Destination horror films are based on it, I understand (though I have not seen them myself.) They feature a series of groups who, in each film, cheat death, by somehow discovering that they are about to die in an accident or somesuch, and avoiding it. However, it is their 'destiny' to die- it was meant to be, and must be by some twisted laws of the universe... so events converge, unlikely, even impossible things happen to ensure that they do indeed die, one by one- because in the end, their destiny is to die at a certain time, and that WILL happen, one way... or another. It's destiny.
Likewise, there are many different time travel movies. I believe I have already posited on this blog why I believe time travel is impossible due to a number of factors these authors seldom consider. If I haven't... I should.In any event, writers deal differently with the idea of changing time. Some, like Back To The Future, show time as fluid, in the end concluding "The future isn't written yet- it's whatever you make it!" Man, I want that time train! I've always wanted a model of that thing, ever since I was a kid! Hey, if any of you out there have a way to get ahold of one of those things, I'll pay top... ummm, sorry, I digress. It was just a really cool train. Others, like the recent adaptation of The Time Machine (A terrible movie, but then... it's a thoroughly depressing piece of evolutionary propaganda and pessimism any way you look at it when studied with a clinical eye... at least that montage of traveling through the ages WAS awesome...) with Jeremy Irons and Orlando Jones and... the other guy (You know, the one who stars in the film? I can't be expected to know all of these details!)... take a different view. The main character builds a time machine to go back in time and prevent his fiancé from being shot by a mugger. He does so, only to start to take her home and see her run over by an out of control cab. It's implied (to me, though not to some) that he makes a number of other attempts- every time, she dies in a different random manner. Finally, the protagonist heads forward in time to find a time when people understand time (That sentence sounds suspiciously similar to a drunken Deanna Troi) so that he can get some answers about why he can't seem to change it. Finally, in the future, a highly-evolved Morlock leader explains it to him- he built his time machine to prevent the death of his loved one- if he prevents that from happening, then his former self, living happily with an un-killed wife, will have no impetus to build a time machine, and thus could never have traveled back to save her in the first place, which means that she would be killed and he would build a time machine too rescuer, but once he did, would have no reason to have built a time machine, and... this is called a Temporal Paradox. Which basically means an irresolvable problem in which doing one thing would cause the events that led to that thing never to have happened, creating an infinite loop of logic. It's the same as the old problem posed in theoretics- what if you went back in time and killed your grandfather? Then, you would never have been born, so you couldn't have traveled back to kill him, which means he would still be alive, and have you, the Extremely Ungrateful Homicidal Grandchild(tm), who would travel back and kill him, but then of course you would never have existed, so you couldn't travel back, which means he would be alive to have an EUHG(tm), who would travel back in time to kill him, but... it just isn't possible! "And that, dear children, is called a Paradox, which is frowned upon in modern society..." It's one excellent reason not to mess with time travel. (That, along with, say, the butterfly effect, the idea that even seeing you walking down the street where there was no one before in 1632 might cause someone to think a different thought than if they'd been walking down the sidewalk alone- for example, to notice your wristwatch and wonder what this strange piece of jewelry is, whereas if you hadn't been there, he'd just have been counting cobblestones in the road, and now that he is wondering about your watch instead of looking at the ground, it will cause him not to notice the nice shoes of a passerby a few minutes later that he otherwise would have commented on, which would cause the passerby with the nice shoes not to be thinking what a nice day it was to live in such a friendly town, which would cause them to say a different thing to someone else five minutes later than he would have if he'd been thinking on community pride, which would cause that someone to get angry at the nice-shoed man's self-centeredness, which would give him a chip on his shoulder which he wouldn't have had if the nice-shoed man had been thinking on community pride and said something nicer to his neighbor, which would cause the shoulder-chipper to not buy flowers for his wife as he had originally been considering, which would lead to he and his wife not getting in the amorous mood his botanical gift of spontaneity would have engendered, which would cause them not to engage in marital activities which would produce a child that night, which would mean that child would never exist nor have children, and thus there is no bloodline that eventually would have produced Louis Pasteur, and milk would never have gotten sterilized, and Einstein would have died as a child from an illness from spoiled milk, and with the plague and the lack of an atomic bomb, defeating the Japanese in World War II, would have been so costly in lives on both sides that the West would never adequately recover, and 9/11 becomes the date of a massive Taliban invasion of the U.S. who is not a leading world power because of their weakened state, and before you know it, POOF! You've just caused the downfall of civilization as we know it and Osama Bin Laden is in the conquered Oval Office planning the invasion of Canada all because some guy in 1632 happened to notice your wristwatch and was distracted and neglected to compliment someone's shoes! You jerk!)
Ah, time travel is fun... I could talk about paradoxes all day. But now I have VERY seriously digressed- that entire conversation is so completely irrelevant to our main point! Which is the concept of paradoxes. There are many different theories about them, how they would work- some films suggest that, since it is an infinite loop that cannot be resolved, it would cause the universe to simply end. After all, if you tell a robot "Everything I say is a lie... now listen to me very carefully... I am lying." It will have smoke pour out of it's ears and shut down, because you have given it a problem you know it cannot solve, because it is impossible to solve- it presents two completely contradictory reports that cannot be reconciled. (How do we know the robot will do this? Why, from Star Trek of course! Poor Norman ...) Well, likewise, if two completely contradictory things happen, the universe might well cease to exist, like our robot, since there is no way to resolve the conflict. However, other films, like the Time Machine (you remember, the one I was telling you about before I got distracted by the Butterfly Effect?) suggest a different idea- they view Time almost like a living, thinking entity- it repairs itself, protects itself, knits itself back together. In essence, Time itself was somehow causing the death of our hero's loved one to happen no matter what so that he would always have had motivation to build the time machine and not create a temporal paradox. Her death became destiny, an inescapable fate which would always happen no matter what the events leading up to it, so that the timeline would remain undisturbed. (After being granted this understanding by the Morlock leader, our hero shows his thanks by punching him in the face, wrestling with him, and causing his body to decay, shred and shrivel, and die, all in a matter of seconds. Some gratitude... and some hero! Stupid movie...)
Of course, leaving aside the mechanics of how 'destiny' could work- magic, perhaps?- simply causing random objects and people and events to happen for no good reason to get what it wants- last I checked, an anvil couldn't simply materialize in the sky to fall on your head and kill you because you were supposed to die; someone would instead have to put it there- that is the idea of destiny. A horror movie and a sci-fi movie, both leading the characters to a place that is inescapable, and when they somehow 'cheat' by escaping, it causes the inescapable to happen by other means- the cause is not important, simply the fact that what was 'supposed' to happen always does happen in the end, and always will. Death is used in those two circumstances because it is seen as the most inescapable and obvious of 'destinies,' but the concept turns up in many forms- someone is destined to be in a certain place at a certain time, or make a certain decision, or do a certain thing- they simply have no choice, it is foretold. This then, is the idea we're working with.
"You have a touch of destiny about you..."
-Tia Dalma
In the Star Wars novel series The Swarm War (great buildup, lousy finale) one of the characters demonstrates a new ability in the Force- they are able to touch an object and travel to the past or future of the object, actually appearing in the past to observe where a crashed ship has been, or darting into the future when someone else comes looking for the crashed ship and leaving a message for them, all while standing and touching the crashed ship in question. He does so, leaves, and a few days later, his parents (Han Solo and Princess Leia from the films) come looking for him. When they arrive at the crashes ship, he appears before them to communicate his message which he had done by traveling through time several days before.
I for one found this concept to be an awesome new force power- Luke Skywalker found it profoundly disturbing. As master Yoda had taught him, "Always in motion is the future." Like the model of Back To The Future, it suggests that whatever you do in the present causes the future to become a certain way- what you do now affects what happens then. The future is a blank canvas to be painted on by whatever actions are taken today. From Luke's perspective, however, when this wayward Jedi traveled into the future and left a message for his parents, he 'fixed their destinies' to that place and time. No matter what they chose or where they went or how they acted, they were now destined to be on that planet at that time. Since he traveled there and saw them and talked to them, and thus it was bound to happen, a part of that blank canvas of the future came with a pre-stamped watermark... no longer would whatever Han and Leia chose direct everything in their future- because whatever they did, they would SOMEHOW end up on that planet at that time to receive that message. They were bound to it as a fate they could not change. Their future became fixed, inescapable, for a brief point in time.
This is an interesting question for us to ask, because we have had roughly the same experience. It's called the book of Revelation... or is it Revelations? I'm pretty sure it's Revelation, without the S. Hang on, I'd better go check... yep, Revelation, singular. In Revelation, we are given a view of the future- of what will happen! Ever think about how weird that is? I mean, our Bible actually tells the future? That's really pretty wild! Yes, it's possible to get too carried away with enthusiasm over the idea (See "The Omega Code"), but it's still really rather amazing! But wait... if the Bible says what is actually GOING to happen, no matter what, does that mean that our destinies, like Han and Leia's have been fixed? That nothing we do matters? That we're not in control of our own actions or futures?
For that matter, have there been any of you that haven't wondered "Well, if the Bible says Satan is going to do this and that, and lose here and there, and the Anti-Christ is going to die then, and Gog and Magog are going to rise up and be crushed there, and Satan will end up here... why doesn't Satan just read the book, get God's game plan, and not do that? Why not do something else?" I mean, for heaven's sake, we have the Left Behind series... doesn't that mean that absolutely no one ought to be clueless about the Rapture when it happens and not a single person on Earth should fall for the anti-Christ because everyone ought to be able to say "Hey, I read about this in that best-selling series of books... people were idiots for falling for this stuff in those books, but since I've read about it, I'm not going to fall for it!"? Does that mean that everyone, from those who will worship the Beast to Satan himself has had their destinies 'fixed' in place so that they can't use this information to do anything differently than it says they will?
(If you want my take on it, Satan's already read the book, and he knows he's going to lose- but since his mission is as it always was, mess things up for God's creations, who have God's favor instead of Satan himself- not to mention that, being weaker than God, striking at us is the only way that Satan can strike at Him- he's just determined to do as much damage as he can and take as many of us with him as he can- and of course, he keeps on, not admitting the truth, because propaganda is half the battle, and the longer he can demoralize those who oppose him by making them think he can still win, the more he can take with him- which is why he will keep fighting the same way, even just the way that Revelations says, even though he knows what will happen to him- because that way also happens to be the way he can do the most collateral damage, which, knowing he's defeated, is all he has left. But then... I'm hardly an expert on Satan, so take that with a grain of salt!)
"And one more thing- you can't mess with anybody's Free Will"
"May I ask why?"
"Yes you can! That's the beauty of it!"
-God and Bruce
We've covered A LOT of ground here, and that was all just the set-up, so let's stop and take a breather here, shall we? Don't take off on me, now... I've fallen for that "I'm just going to the bathroom" when you're really escaping out the back room and heading for the hills trick before, too many times. (I always hate that in movies- they never actually DO go to the bathroom, so for the next five scenes as they're escaping, and heading out wherever, I just get stuck thinking "But don't they still have to go?" Okay, weird digression... bet you didn't really care to know that.) But, if you need to head out, clear your mind, digest everything for a while, go ahead. All I ask is that when you're ready, you come back and read the rest- you've slogged through all the setup, and now things are about to get interesting!
