We have seen several threads wound together into a cord, and these include love, and free will, and the potential for evil.  In other words, it is free will which makes both love and evil possible.  One could not love without the faculty of free will – it would not be love if it were automatic, determined.  However, since it is a choice to love, it is also a choice not to love – and this is the way that leads to evil.

Free will has remained at the periphery for most of this series, and even as it has come up, it has not been dealt with head-on.  We should consider it now, since we saw in the last post how it marks a divergence in the use of our analogy – that is, the author cannot really bestow free will, while God can.

I should also say, in brief, that I am simply taking it for granted that free will is real.  That argument – free will vs. determinism – has been alive for some time, and I have no ambition of settling it here.  It is settled, to my mind, for the obvious reason that no one takes determinism seriously; moreover, to take it seriously is a bit of a paradox.  After all, if you wanted to get serious about determinism, what would be your first step?  (Of course you would do that).

I also take for granted that an author, whatever her considerable talents may be, cannot really bestow free will.  She may indeed have a character acting in ways the reader may not expect, as though untamed; she may present the character with a dilemma, and no clear choice; the character may seem to be entirely original; yet ultimately, the author herself decides.

Now, the divergence is apparent.  Has our time been wasted, then?  Is the use of the author analogy invalid?

I don’t think so.  It is, again, like any other analogy – useful to a point.  The components do not all line up exactly, nor should we expect them to.  We are only looking for a guide, a device, even a working model through which we might understand things outside of our immediate experience.  You know, it’s just an analogy.

Furthermore, there is a kind of exception here, which fits within the analogy, though it departs a bit from our original parameters.  Consider some fantastic, true story in which you were the main character.  Now, place yourself in our hypothetical closed system – your mind, and nothing else – and tell the story.

As you do, you’ll describe some of the actions you took, some of the things you said – in other words, you’ll relate the free choices you made in the story.  The question is, does your perfect knowledge of those decisions, as you tell the story, in any way challenge your free will as you made the decisions, within the story?

The answer is, of course not.  Assuming you were free to make those decisions in the first place, it makes no sense at all to argue that your decisions have been “determined” as you tell the story.

But this is a little like a snake biting its own tail, so let’s de-couple the author from the character:  Imagine you are telling a story about a child.  These stories often feature the remarkable, charming, silly things that kids do and say, which adults do not do or say.  As the child was acting and speaking, he was making free decisions.

As you tell the story an hour later to your friend, the decisions may have the appearance of being “determined” since they are now fixed parts of the story.  But it would be nonsense to take this appearance and apply it to the original actions of the child, simply because the story now is fixed.

Very well so far.  It is clear that this all ties back to the apparent conflict between God’s omniscience (knowing all things that can be known) and our free will.  The challenge usually starts, “If God can know all of our decisions and how we will act, then we are not really free to choose.”

Obviously, knowledge of how a person did act (in the past) does not challenge his free will whatsoever.  So much for the past tense; the challenge, it would seem, is in the future tense.

We now have a platform – such as it is – from which to observe what it means for God to be all-loving.*  As mentioned above, here we are taking just one angle, and it can be no more than a guide.  The analogy is not the reality.

If souls – or centers of consciousness, if you like – require a medium to communicate (indeed, a medium through which they can be fully actualized), then God must set the stage.

Our author likewise creates a world in which to tell her story, and we imagine that she is creating for the sake of the characters themselves, and not for an audience.  Or, in a sense, the characters are also the audience.

Now the good of the characters is for each of them to realize their innate potential, that which the author has invested in them.  Though we don’t have time to fully articulate the point this is more than an semi-inspirational notion.  This is, rather, the notion that some part of their being lies in wait, requiring perhaps the right circumstances, or an act of the will, or even the impetus of the author herself, in order for that potency to be actualized.  “Be all you can be” is a nice slogan, but it imposes a limit of only those roles the Army can provide; it does not exalt the very being of a person beyond this world.  At best, in the sense we mean it, the Army could only be a stepping stone, however deep or shallow that might be.

To love the characters, then, is to desire and provide for their good – to aid in their self-actualization, to fulfill the purpose for which they were created.

Can the author, then, be all-loving?  We have said she created the characters for their own sakes, and the story is told for them.  She must simply desire – and provide for – the fulfillment of their purposes.

But this is trivially true, isn’t it?  Even in a bad story, the author wishes for the characters to fulfill their purpose – usually, entertaining an audience – and she tries to provide for it, even if she is not quite effective in achieving entertainment.

Maybe this isn’t perfect love, then – for if, despite the author’s best efforts, the characters fail to entertain, then they truly have not achieved their purpose, nor seen their potential actualized.  It may be truer than expected to say that the more an author really loves her characters for their own sake, the more they are likely to achieve the purpose she has for them.  But the waters get muddy here, and we have some ground to cover.

Our better author, then, who creates her characters for their own sake – can she be all-loving?

If I may skip to the point, this seems to pivot on the concept of a villain.

Of course the author will love the hero – at least this love is more readily obvious.  The villain embodies the problem of evil, which we have reflected on at some length, and so poses the chief obstacle here.

The villain, in fact, is almost a utility, a force and source of drama, and even to respect a villain enough to make him “three-dimensional” is uncommon.  He is, in a certain sense, already actualized, fulfilling his purpose from the start:  He is evil, because the hero needs something to conquer.

If that is true, this is a peculiar kind of love indeed; but can we say it is not love?  In what respect, since he is the author’s creation?  It is not his purpose to be “good,” according to the standard of the author’s will.

This is not far off from the problem of evil, and even the narrow way many of us – or even all of us, some of the time – conceive of the world.  Politics is finally useful:  To the liberal, conservatives are wrong, evil; and vice versa.  And they are largely irredeemable, we think, and thus only obstacles to be conquered.  Imposition of our (good, right) will upon them is the only suitable course of action.  Otherwise the world is doomed – the story will end the wrong way.

We, however, need not be restricted by this view.  And whatever we do, God is absolutely not so restricted.

Here, God shakes the earth, loosens the analogy from the reality, and it is done by the introduction of a simple and terrible faculty:  Free will.

The author, even the best author, can only hope to imitate free will, to give us the impression that a character really is choosing from among options, that he may do something unexpected according to our understanding, that he is in some sense untamed.  But God truly gives it, and from our minds and hearts spews all the good and evil that threaten the world in a suffocating tumult.  Chesterton has rightly said:  We are always at war, and sometimes peace breaks out.

The love of an author is thus limited, because she cannot bestow on her characters the ability to love her back, much less to love each other.

But God – with God, there are no villains.  Even he who appears to be a villain may change his mind.  The purpose of a soul is that exaltation of his being, and evil does not provide it.  Evil is a regression, a descent to a lower state of being.

God is pure actuality, and we retain some measure of potency within us.  Our betters on earth may help us on the path to self-actualization:  I testify that a good woman can do this for her husband (and he hopes he does likewise for her).  A good teacher, a holy man or woman – even a child can be the better of an adult in certain ways.

But to achieve full actualization – whatever that “looks” like – requires one who is fully actualized.  In other words, only God can love us so perfectly, so completely, so fruitfully.  Only that which draws us near to God can be thought of as an act of love, because there we find our true fulfillment.

*Indeed, it is not false modesty to say this is a shabby platform.  It is, even according to its builder.  I would like to build a better one, eventually, if my thoughts could be clear and constructive enough.  Still, with the reader’s charity, we can at least have a look at things.

In the last post, we saw how an author typically borrows the Universe she lives in to create her own world; well and good.  We also saw that this world is created in the first place to communicate something abstract, which could not be created without a fitting medium.  From there, we began to explore particular instances of this dynamic – namely, what is the significance of particular physical things?

I pointed to a gun, which is signifies the means to defend oneself, and/or to attack.  It might be said to convey the soul’s desire for self-preservation; or again, to impose upon the existence of another being.

Also mentioned was the idea of a talisman – let’s say a mailbox.  In our world, the mailbox has a mundane significance:  It is a channel for printed communication.  But our author might write a story granting the mailbox a magical significance:  Perhaps it tells fortunes, or dispenses memories which may be swallowed up and assimilated into the experience of the consumer.

Now, what about love?

Love, I would like to assert, is desiring and, where possible, providing for the good of another.  And what is “good?”

Good, I might say, is that which is directed toward the fulfillment of a thing – what might also be called the actualization of a thing’s potential.  And now, we are bound either to an endless cycle of abstractions – which would ultimately mean nothing – or we find a terminus, a ground of good.  Good itself, if you like.

Let us take the author as the terminus, as we did in a previous post.  The author creates a main character, charming and impetuous, short and slim.  What is the good of that character?  How would the author (or any other character) love this main character?

We would have to know, somehow, what the character was created for.

Now, setting aside our hypothetical author for a moment, who we said created for a unique purpose, let us look briefly at a common author.  A character is often created for any number of reasons, including a kind of self-projection, or thought experiment for the author, or even for the purpose of targeting a certain audience.  The unifying – perhaps the highest – reason is that the character was created for the good of the story, to entertain, to captivate, move, inspire.

In this way, most characters are reduced to utilities.  No reader much minds them, except as they might reflect real people, or as far as they provoke and inspire.  They are a medium for delivering a feeling, a thought, a conviction.

Consider now our hypothetical author and her unusual purpose:  She creates her characters for their own sake.  She calls them into being, from nothing into a kind of existence (again, within her story).  Perhaps she shapes them a certain way, invests them with traits and talents, burdens them with troubled pasts.

Now, what is the good of such characters?  How might they be fulfilled?  What is the potential that may be actualized?

We might, in this context, phrase it another way:  What is the highest existence these characters can attain?

The upper limit:  They cannot ever have the same ontological status as the author.  That is, they can never have being in the same way the author has being – the author possesses it more fundamentally.  If the author ceased to exist, so would they; moreover, the author might continue to exist, but cease to think of them.  Then, too, they would die.

This is the unbridgeable gap between the Creator and the created.

Very well.  Respecting this limit, what is the highest existence these characters can attain?

I think we must say that they can have as high an existence as the author can possibly devise.  Consider that:  If you created a character this very moment, what is the highest existence you can imagine for them?

Would it be to make them royalty in their lands?  To give them the ability to fly?  To give them endless worlds to explore?  To make them a being of pure light?  To annihilate them in an experience of Nirvana?  (And what, exactly, would Nirvana be?)

If we consider the author as all-powerful, we might see how the author could be forever inventive in this way, or at least inventive for a long time.  Of course, this mere inventiveness – this endless string of novelty, or (merely) exalted sense of being is not quite the same as the Beatific Vision.  The difference is critical, and shows us how even our hypothetical author does not really show us the breadth and depth of God.

But it is enough to say, by way of analogy, that if the author creates the characters for their own sake, she fulfills them by an exaltation of their being, and not by a measure of their usefulness for some other purpose.

With the cautionary words of the last post in place, we proceed to creation – all things seen and unseen – and the analogy from a story.

Now, the thing we must keep in mind is that when God creates the Universe, he does it out of an overflow of love, and not for his own need or want.  Rather, if it can be imagined, he creates for the good of that Creation, for the sake of those sentient beings who will inhabit it (and for other things besides – is it not better for a tree to exist, rather than not to exist?).

This differs from the typical purpose of storytelling:  A story is told for an audience.  So, here, we must imagine that our author is telling her story for the sake of her characters, and if it were not for their sake, she would not tell it.

And that, at least, is a cursory look at what it means to be all-loving.

Returning to the point, we have an author who wills to create characters and give them life.  Now, just how could she do this?

It will help to draw a distinction, in this world she is creating, between the abstract realm and the physical realm.  That is, she can begin to create a character who is charming and impetuous without having to decide whether the character is tall or short, fat or slim.  Then the question is, how will we know this character is charming and impetuous?

Can a person be charming without speaking?  Without having a body?  Even if a person can be charming without speaking and without having a body (as some would describe God), can a person be those things without a medium through which to convey them?

That is, we experience God’s charm through some coincidence, or by the impression of natural beauty, or else by a sense of peace at an unexpected time.  If you existed only as a mind, without a Universe, how would you convey charm?

That an author chooses a medium analogous to our own is not important (and more than analogous – in imitation of our own), so much as that it is also a medium.  She can’t tell the story without some analogue to our physical realm.  The characters need a “place” in which to dwell, with “matter” they can manipulate for their (abstract) purposes, and “time” in which to carry out their (abstract) plans and desires.

Moreover, they need a realm within which they can relate to each other.  These relationships are often the chief focus of drama (apart from “man v. nature” stories) and the means by which they find and communicate (abstract) meaning.

There is no relationship, therefore, between you and your significant other, apart from the physical world.  But the purpose of your relationship – love, hopefully – is abstract, transcending the physical means you have chosen to convey it.

(I pause now as I am positively inundated with possible lines of thought.  It is like standing on the South Pole and deciding to move north – you can choose from countless angles which way you want to go).

The physical realm – this very moment – gives me a means by which I can communicate with you, and perhaps all activity in the physical world is communication of one kind or another.  Habits and drives pose an interesting challenge here, but this is not the direction we want…

And so our author, at any rate, creates a world for her characters.  Typically, this world will imitate our own, but it often attempts a departure of one kind or another – whether in geography, cumulative history and culture, or some other significant way.  As I said before, the only important thing is that it IS a medium, or else her characters could not relate.

Imagine it this way – she creates a character who is impetuous and charming, and another who is shy and harsh.  Now, without creating a world – remember, no bodies, so no speech, no vision, nothing physical – how shall they interact?

One might even ask at what point they will achieve personhood – surely the quality of being charming is not equivalent to personhood.  What must be added?  (Yet another question for another day)

Perhaps, with so many directions to take, there was something hidden in our point of departure – that is, the earlier thought, that “There is no relationship, therefore, between you and your significant other, apart from the physical world.  But the purpose of your relationship – love, hopefully – is abstract, transcending the physical means you have chosen to convey it.”

The author, in choosing to imitate the real world, takes many things for granted, and this is just one way we can see how any human author is inferior to God.  Nevertheless, the author takes on – or challenges – the (abstract) significance of things in the physical world.  For the author, those physical things in the story really do mean something (abstract).  In more mundane stories, a gun means essentially the same thing it means in our world; but a talisman is something our world finds mundane, while the story finds it magical.

In the next post we’ll develop this a bit further, and attempt to bring together the abstract and the physical.

Before wrestling with what it means for God to be all-loving, we might find some benefit by shifting the emphasis.

Namely, we’ve focused primarily on God, appropriately so, in consideration of the analogy of an author.  We have seen, for example, how the human author shows herself to be all-powerful in the context of the story; so, by analogy and at least to that extent, we may say that God is all-powerful in reality, and there is nothing impossible or incoherent about such a notion.

But what about the story?  What about creation itself?

The first word I would offer is a word of caution:  The analogy should not be applied too stringently.  It is more of a guide, a way, an open door.  It is not a complete map, much less the journey itself.

So, for example, I think it would be fun to ponder the notion of “elementary particles” within any given story, and what, if any, significance there might be here.  Indeed, I do think there could be some.

However, it is important to see two things:  Whereas the analogy is metaphysical, elementary particles are proposed as simply physical realities.  The analogy will not teach us physics – we cannot observe the world of “War and Peace” and discover something about the force of gravity.  (At least not anything which Tolstoy had not already discovered himself, from…observing the real world).

The second is also a basic distinction:  God is the greater mystery, the more fundamentally real subject of our discussion.  The author is not an exact analogue to God – even if we can confirm a truth about the author, it might not necessarily show us something about God.  Rather, God is the One we are groping for, as if in the dark and cavernous space of the entire Universe, and we are hardly able to leap off our own pale blue dot.  The analogy may give us an idea of what we are looking for, perhaps how the search should proceed, perhaps even correct our course from time to time – but it is not the same as contact with the living God.

There is, rather, something wild and lonely and exhilarating about that journey, and it is never enough merely to consider the map in comfort.

So with that arduous caution in place, we’ll take up creation in the next post.

As we conclude our reflections on the moral argument for God’s existence, I want to pursue the analogy of the author and see what else might be understood about moral grounding, and the moral argument.  In the last post, I reflected on God as “that which is good, if anything is.”  From here, we saw how morality may be seen as a sense of our relationship to God, of our closeness to Him and our momentum toward or away from Him at any given moment.

In this post, I want to explore the difficulties in positing both atheism and objective morality.  We have done this in brief, of course, when considering what else could step in for author – in the context of our analogy – and be the ground of moral ontology.  Here we will look at this problem in some detail.

Let us assume, then, that the story is underway – but so far as anyone can tell, either within the story or outside of it, there does not appear to be an author.*

If there is no author, where shall we begin to determine what is good?  Following the pattern of the previous post, let us consider what there was “in the beginning” – for again, surely whatever existed solely and necessarily must be good, if anything is good.

What first comes to mind is what naturally came to mind to atheists up until the early to mid-20th century:  The Universe is eternal.  It is a brute reality, exists without explanation; even beyond the dawn of the Big Bang Theory, Carl Sagan saw fit to say that “the Cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be.”

Of course, it became clear that this is not true of our Universe – it had a beginning, before which there was nothing.  (Recall that, even in the case of a multiverse, the same rule applies – it must be expanding, and any Universe with an average expansion greater than zero must have a beginning in the finite past).

And it seems true enough of any given story, as well.  It is not clear that we can imagine a beginningless story, no more than we can now start one.**

So we are speaking of a story that has a definite beginning, as all stories have, though we are inclined to deny an author.  But let’s allow a more modest wording – let us say the existence of the author is at least unclear, if not improbable.  In any event, as we consider the ground of morality, we exclude the possibility that the pre-existing author is that ground.

Very well, what is left?

We may have something like Plato’s forms, mentioned in the footnotes last time.  That is, “the Good” just exists, and we find that people act according to it, or else are otherwise animated by it.  Likewise, perhaps, for “Justice.”

The first difficulty encountered is that, even if these forms are permitted, they still do not rule out the need of an author to tell the story.  Sure, an author may have her themes, which in some sense exist independently from her (or do they?), but they themselves do not write the story.  Yet, we have granted that a story is being told, and we have agreed to let go the idea of an author.

But this is the problem, isn’t it?  Isn’t an author (some intelligence, at any rate) required to conceptualize a theme?  By merely asserting the existence of a theme (or form) we don’t seem to get around the need for these forms to come from somewhere.  It is not, even at face-value, any better than asserting an author.  In any event, an explanation of the existence of a theme (or form) would be necessary.

Now, assuming both that there is no author and that these themes exist (we are far afield from any plausible cause for believing such a thing, but let’s chase it down one leg further), it becomes unimaginable to believe that a spontaneously arising story with spontaneously arising characters should also follow along with a theme, much less that anyone should find the confluence to be a valuable thing.  After all, this incomprehensible fluke would still be a fluke – why be troubled over whatever is “Good” or “Just”?  They have no greater explanation for their existence than I have!^

We have previously seen how moral ontology could not arise from evolution, so it requires no more than a passing glance – even if the characters in a spontaneously arising story did begin to develop ideas about what is “good” and “evil,” these things obviously correspond to no transcendent ground.  Moreover, they must assume – without justification – that the survival of the characters (and/or their species) is an objective good, rather than a subjective one.  It is hard to see how that would be the case in this particular story.

This concludes our reflection on the moral argument in particular, but the concepts here will provide a useful basis for understanding God as “all-loving.”  It also marks one of the first significant weaknesses of the author analogy, though the analogy is nevertheless useful in seeing the greatness of God.

*While some thinkers grasp that atheism entails a kind of paradox like this, that is, something defying our understanding of everything else in and about the Universe, it has seemed to me that most casual atheists do not.  They take the Universe for granted, and shift the burden of proof – “Now let the theist prove that God exists.”

**The burden of proof is shifted back.

^I take the perspective of both a hypothetical reader (yes, reading an authorless story) and an uncommonly self-aware character.  From either of these perspectives, can there be anything valuable about the confluence of two spontaneous phenomenon?  One might wonder at it, but would it make any sense to heed it, or to read into it, or to think it applies to one’s own life in any way?