The Scourge of The Dark Side...Tolkien and Modernism

[skip spence]

Originally Posted by Gwathagor

Consider the characters on their own level, and you will see that WITHIN THEIR STORY, they have what you would call free will.

No, if everything is preordained, the characters may belive they make choices and that they are free, but they can't be. To make an actual choice there must be different options available and with a future already decided there can be only one option: that what the characters do. They can do nothing else.

Or can they? Please explain to me how they can. How can the book character Sauruman repent, and do what he was sent to do?

[Gwathagor]

It's a matter of which perspective you take: divine or human.

[McCaber]

Originally Posted by skip spence

If an omnipotent God knows all that is to come, the choices of his characters, like you and me, are also set in stone and there can be no randomness. We can not be held accountable for our choices since God then must be the author of our story, not ourselves. He created us to do just what we do, and we have no free will in the matter.

That assumes that God experiences time in the same way we do. We see the timestream as a flow moving in one direction, but God could see it as an outside observer, like us looking at a drawn timeline; or he could experience all time as Now.

I love tough theological questions.

[skip spence]

Originally Posted by McCaber

That assumes that God experiences time in the same way we do. We see the timestream as a flow moving in one direction, but God could see it as an outside observer, like us looking at a drawn timeline; or he could experience all time as Now.

I don't think it matters whether God sees time as a drawn line or if he experiences all time as now. The key point is whether there is randomness, or if all things can be predicted and understood if you only knew every single factor influencing the event. If the latter is true, and there is a grand equation for all of existance into which an allmighty being can insert all the - for us - unknown numbers, and predict all that is to come until the end of time, I can see how this deity could see into the future without messing with the free will. But then again, he would know everything his children would do at the very moment he created them too, and they would not be free in any actual sense.

Or is it perhaps chaos that governs the universe? Think of the butterfly effect. Every event, although seemingly uninportant, has the potential to change the world. Had fex. Hitler succeeded as a painter the world might have been a very different place. Will a mouse in a maze always choose the same path, given the exact same conditions? If the answer is no, the future must be uncertain, and no amount of omnipotence could get around that.

I love tough theological questions.

I certainly don't know the answers to these questions but they are intriging nonetheless.

[Gwathagor]

You are still confusing the divine and human perspectives, skip. What looks like free will to us looks like something else to God. Two sides of the same coin.

[Ibrîniðilpathânezel]

There is also a scientific theory that postulates time as a construct of the human mind, a means by which we relate to the universe around us to give it some kind of order we can understand, but which doesn't actually exist. (I shall have to ask my husband to dig up the material he gave me on this, as I've lost track of it.) If this theory is true, then the concepts of some being outside this human imposed system "knowing" what "will happen in the future" becomes a moot point from the human perspective, since we know the world as we perceive it, and not necessarily as it really is. Some of its functions may well be beyond our grasp, because of the limitations we have as we exist in this flesh, but once outside the restrictions and perceptions of a finite body, that perception might be considerably different, and aspects of the infinite in its reality easier to comprehend. It may well be possible for an omniscient Eru, outside the limits of Time, to coexist with free will, but perceiving how this could be so within the construct of Time may not be possible.

Did that make any kind of sense? This is what I get for going online too soon after waking up....

[skip spence]

Originally Posted by Ibrîniðilpathânezel

Did that make any kind of sense? This is what I get for going online too soon after waking up....

No, I get what you're saying.

It may well be possible for an omniscient Eru, outside the limits of Time, to coexist with free will, but perceiving how this could be so within the construct of Time may not be possible.

That may very well be true, but I'm not willing to accept it as a solution without proof or real comprehension. If we do, "God works in mysterious ways" might well be the universal explanation to anything we don't understand (although he/she/it/xxx certainly does). But as I said before, and you suggested, seeing things from a limitless God's perspective is impossible for finite beings like ourselves. To continue my earlier analogy, it would be as fruitless as an ant trying to see things from a man's perspective, while burying it's fangs deep into his bare pinky toe.

But what is time? I for one take it for granted and can't imagine it in any other way than we perceive it. But I remember from my physics-classes that time isn't as fixed as one is tempted to believe (fex. it passes more slowly for an object travelling at speeds approaching the speed of light). But I'm out of my depth here. If there are any students or scientists with knowledge of advanced physics around, I'd appreciate their input.

Edit: I did a quick search and found this discussion which pretty much mirrors my earlier thoughts, although with much more knowhow obviously (haven't read much of it myself yet though): http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=245197

Here's a teaser:

Q: "Are not these very words, written by myself, nothing more than a consequence of the initial conditions?"

A: "I don't think we yet really know the answer to that question. In the classical/newtonian era before qm theory was developed; most phycists would probaby hedge for a Deterministic universe. Now with qm it's a very contentious issue."

[Kin-strife]

[QUOTE=Ibrîniðilpathânezel;563090]There is also a scientific theory that postulates time as a construct of the human mind, a means by which we relate to the universe around us to give it some kind of order we can understand, but which doesn't actually exist.[QUOTE]

This sounds kinda like Kant's theory that time and space aren't necessarily properties of the outside world but rather the only means we have of perceiving it. We perceive everything as being extended in space and time. Is this because everything is or because its the only way we can make sense of it? If you think of the outside world as being a computer code and we are a type of computer programmed to interpret that code in a certain way. If we interpret the code in such away that it causes a lovely graphic of The One Ring spinning on our screen, how much is this a property of the code itself and how much our own hardwiring (I confess I don't know much about computers). Kant, (who lived in the 18th Century so certainly didn't know jack about computers), believed that time and space existed in our minds prior to our experience of the world, and that it shaped our experience of the world, and that therefore we don't experience the world as it really is in itself. Also he believed that worldly phenomena that is unable to be interpreted spatially or temporally we don't experience at all.

I know this is a tough concept to get your head around but I've always found the idea facinating. If this were the case then God or Eru (I don't believe in either by the way) would not suffer such limitations and perceive everything as a whole. We have no way of knowing what this would be like as we can't even imagine anything without spatial or temporal extension. But where does this leave free will?

I would not imagine that Eru's concept of time would be like a long tapestry that He could see all at once, tracing the initial event A right through to the inevitable end consequence Z. Thus leaving human history as nothing more than an extremely complicated document of cause and effect, so that from the first human action He could predict every human action that would follow. Rather perhaps free will would be like a moment of spontanoues imporvisation in a paint-by-numbers picture, a surprise ingredient in a cake. He wouldn't know the end result before adding it but immediately after he would see its every effect. But then "before" and "after" are temporal concepts which may undermine my argument.

The above is a bit of a mess but I'll have a think about it and try to clarify my meaning.