Welcome back.

Last time we saw that the KCA seems to give us a personal cause of the Universe, in addition to the other attributes we’ve looked at.  While we do not particularly mean something like “the God of the Bible,” that God might plausibly fit.  (Whatever “God of the Bible” means).*

How might the analogy of an author illuminate this concept of a personal cause?

It would seem, straightforwardly enough, that nothing but a person could tell a story. Show me a book written by a human person – Dante’s Inferno, let’s say. Now show me a book written by an amoeba, or a frog, or a tree – pick the phylum you like – or one written by the law of gravity, or the number 7 (whatever its capacity for sponsorship on Sesame Street might be).

Ah – but perhaps they have not been published! Well, I now add to their misery by submitting that they cannot even write!

There is something in this which I, at least, find fascinating. JRR Tolkien could have chosen NOT to write The Lord of the Rings. When he did start writing, a new world – one we ourselves can imagine inhabiting – came into existence.

Or let’s come back to our author, as I am not at all familiar with Tolkien’s writing process. She wants to tell an original story (not one in sequence or relation with any other story that has been told)

Let’s imagine her in front of a small audience. She is alone in front of them, and quiet at first. Then she speaks.

And that is like the Big Bang of that world. Suddenly everything comes rushing into existence, each thing falling into order. These are not mere syllables uttered at random (not mere noises), but deliberate, according to convention – that is to say, according to rules.

That world has its own matter (which is not like ours, only ephemeral by comparison) which is very real to the characters. Real to them, because they are made of that matter.

Anything she says is then not only possible, but accomplished. I have made the point before: She might create mountains out of nowhere, and have them tossed into the sea. She might send stars colliding into each other, or send her characters to another dimension from the one they started in. She might even let the characters be conscious of themselves, and have relations which produce still more after their own kind.

She is the God of that world, and there is no other.

But she – in that closed system – could have chosen not to tell a story. She could have chosen not to exercise her power and manifest her presence.

In a like way, we say that God could have chosen not to create. He is a free agent – he has free will – it was logically possible that He not create.

We thus find ourselves in existence, and so, He did create.  The story is underway.  The next reasonable question is like the one we might ask our author – “Why? Why tell the story of creation?”

It is not time to take up that question – as if I had the answer! – but we will consider another demonstration of the existence of God, and see what can be learned through the analogy of the author.

One might ask why I haven’t considered *many* gods as the collective cause of the Universe.  Don’t many authors sometimes write books?

I honestly can’t remember reading such a book, and I have to believe they’re typically bad literature.*  But for the sake of argument, why wouldn’t I consider multiple gods?

As a matter of fact, you’ll see I haven’t entirely ruled it out (see comments to Existence of God – 2).  In that case, though, I don’t mean that there are multiple gods at work in our Universe; I mean that God may have peers, of whom we have no real conception.

So – why not polytheism?  Because it does not seem to add anything to the plausibility of a God.  Ockham’s razor helps here – the simpler explanation is usually better.  Adding gods is mustard on the hot dog, if you will.

If you like – I won’t stop you – you can now read “God” as “the set of gods which collectively rule our Universe as if of one mind.”  But most of the time, the polytheistic objection does not originate from a sincere belief; it is only a red herring, and a false concept (as in, “We go one god further.”)  You can have mustard on your hot dog, if you like.

And those gods would be personal, and more obviously “relational” than the one God!  (Some relish on your hot dog?)

Anyway, it’s that one-ness of mind that’s important, which is demonstrated (I believe, and would try to argue) in the cohesion of the Universe.   If there are multiple gods, and they are of one mind, I don’t see how that would be practically different than one God, of one mind.  Moreover, I’m Christian – I believe in three persons, and one God.  Turns out God (the Father) does have peers, in a certain way.

*The smarmy skeptic will say, “The Bible was written by multiple authors!  Ha, bad literature!  You fool!”

First of all, smarmy skeptic, settle down.

To the point:  The Bible is more a compilation than a single work, and it is certainly not a book for which all of the authors got together.  It was written and compiled over time, and even among Christians there is some disagreement about who is really part of that “project” and who is not.  Nevertheless, I like to carry on the conversation without too much smarminess, if possible.

So much for omnipresence.

The third omni- attribute I referred to was omniscience.  I probably led you to believe we’d look into that next.

Turns out, you don’t know everything.  Or maybe you saw this coming?

Omniscience probably could be drawn out of the KCA, but I think we may be stretching the thing uncomfortably.  Eventually it will get some treatment.

For now, one last look at the KCA:  It would seem to give us a mind which created and transcends the Universe, true enough.  There is one more thing – I noted it seemed to be a later addition to William Lane Craig’s thought.

And, for me, it begins to touch the heart.  Until now, these things – creation, power, and presence – while they do have the ability to comfort and inspire and awe, might belong to a deistic God,* one who creates and stands back.  Authors will sometimes tell stories just to see what happens, just to engage the mind.  Some write text books, which isn’t really storytelling so much as it is instruction.  Well and good.

Here, we seem to have a personal cause of the Universe.

Why say that?

Well, I noted that if the laws of physics are really to credit for the creation of our Universe – if, because they are abstract, they can transcend the Universe, and if, by some ability unsuspected until lately, they could create a Universe out of nothing – we would have a few questions about this.  Relevant here:  Why did the laws of physics create a Universe when they did, and not sooner?  Why did they create a Universe at all?

After all, the laws of physics are abstract objects.  Even if they are forces (and no longer abstract), this does not explain why a thing should happen at one time, when it conceivably could have happened at any other time.  Nor does it explain why it should have happened at all.  This represents an impersonal cause of the Universe.

While abstract objects do not have the capacity to choose anything, a person does.  Free agents are the only beings who can start a causal chain of events.  “God” has answers for the questions we posed.

“Why did God create a Universe when he did?”  – Because he willed it.  And if the issue of “timing” is relevant, then we can see that God would likely have reasons for that timing, whether we are aware of them or not.  (Does “timing” remain a coherent question in view of eternity?).

“Why did God create a Universe at all?”  – Because he willed it.  And again, we can see that he would likely have reasons.  Religion begins to postulate what those reasons might be.

A person can make something happen at one time, and not another.  A person can make a thing happen at all (or not).  And is there anything else that does make such decisions?

The last few posts have been a bit lengthy.  Let’s cut out early.  When we come back, we’ll see what the analogy of an author can show us.

*A deistic God, you might object, can still make a decision to create the Universe, could still be a “person” in the sense described here.  Right you are, but then the usual (or at least, layman’s) view of the thing has shifted.  For the deistic God is usually seen as “impersonal,” and the deist’s objection, or hesitation, is against a “personal” God.

The God of deism would fit the description gleaned from the KCA – all-powerful, omnipresent, creator of all, and even “personal.”  That is, everyone who admits a deistic God believes that God is capable of making decisions – the decision to create the Universe, for instance.  And yet the deist wants to be careful to distinguish himself from the theist.  What is that distinction?

It would seem to result from “immanence.”  And a careful reader might think I’ve conflated “transcendence” with “immanence” in recent posts.  But that is a perfectly theistic thing to do (and indeed I have, hopefully in a defensible way).

Sticking with the present point:  We seem to be shifting our meaning when we first say “a person” and then say “personal.”  Perhaps a person can be a very impersonal being – what can that mean?

It would mean, at least, that such a person is indifferent, aloof – reminiscent of the God of deism.  Such a person participates as far as is necessary – as far as she is interested – and then retreats.  Such a person is not “personal,” in the sense of being “personable,” and is not interested in relationships with other persons.

So, the deistic God would be “a person” but not “personal,” while the theistic God would be both – a person and personal.  The theistic God has the capacity for making decisions (a person) and has a desire to be in relationship with other persons (personal).

Taking this back to our present discussion:  We have only gotten as far as talking about a deistic God, one who is a person.  We don’t know if this God is also personal (in the layman’s sense), also desiring relationships with other persons.

But, I will continue to use the word “personal” as the adjective form of “person,” and speak of a “relational” God at another time.  (Colloquialisms be damned!)

We have considered what presence might be (“the state of bringing one’s consciousness to bear” or something like that), and how, when we slow down time within a story, it is clear that an author is necessarily omnipresent in her story.  How might this translate to God, and his omnipresence in our Universe?

This might be messy.  I hoped by having the analogy of an author that it might clear things up; I also wish I had more time to precisely reference some other thinkers.  Moreover, this is only how we might think about God’s omnipresence – it is surely not a complete description of reality.

If we consider that the entire Universe, everything seen and unseen, is simply the result of God telling a story – “God said, ‘Let there be light…'” – it is not hard to see how God must, necessarily, be present everywhere in that Universe.  If every part of it depends on his “words” (some thinkers would say every part actually does depend on God sustaining it in his mind – if he stopped thinking about you, for instance, you would simply disappear), and if by “words” we imply that God’s consciousness is attending to the thing(s) he is speaking about – well, it’s actually kind of easy to see how that works.

All of creation is God’s story.

So we see, in a cursory way, how this is possible; in other words, the riddle of omnipresence is not impossible to resolve. A human author is omnipresent in her story – ergo – There’s nothing incoherent in the idea of a mind being omnipresent in the Universe.

What about the details?  We saw how our author might slow down time in her story, or speed it up, relative to her “real” time.  How is it that any consciousness could do such a thing in our Universe?  Does God speed up and slow down time?  Is there a “real” time for God, which stands apart from our perceived time?

H0-K.  I should know better, and the pain is self-inflicted, but these questions would take far too long to answer here.  I did promise to look at it, though, and so I will give a rough (and probably imprecise) account of how the thing might work.  Time doesn’t have to work in the following way, but we only want to see how it might be feasible for God.

In Where the Conflict Really Lies, Alvin Plantinga considers quantum mechanics (QM) and whether the reality of QM does in any way cast doubt on God’s existence.  He concludes it would not; moreover, it may offer an elegant view of how God sustains the Universe.

Now, Plantinga is dealing with the “problem” of miracles; the objection being that for God to act in the Universe in an extraordinary way would force him to break his own “laws.”  Plantinga notes, as I would in light of the author analogy, that there isn’t any clear reason why God couldn’t or shouldn’t act in such ways (other than, perhaps, that it offends the sensibility of some people – miracles can be awfully inconvenient. I don’t see why God should care about that…but let this pass, as Plantinga might say).

Indeed, as I have come to appreciate with Plantinga, he lets the objection stand, for the sake of argument – then what?

Here is what applies to us:  He notes that QM features “collapse” theories, which I might describe as a kind of pulsating of the most fundamental particles and energies in the Universe. The heart pulsates – it pushes, then stops. Pushes, then stops at an average (healthy) rate of 72 beats per minute.

We may already be far afield of what the collapse theories intend, but let’s just expand it a little further:  Think of the frames in a motion picture.  When you watch a film, what appears to be continuous and fluid motion is actually a rapid succession of frames, around 30/second.

The fundamental particles and energies of the Universe – to follow the analogies – run at 10 million “beats” or “frames” per second.

In a film, the frames are all held together on the film strip – so one follows the other automatically, in a predetermined order.

Reality, Plantinga explains, does not appear to be like that.  We don’t have a naturalistic mechanism to explain why each “frame” of reality (some 10 million per second) follows the one before it, and precedes the one after it.

There is nothing in or about frame 11 which leads to frame 12.  One could imagine that, in a truly chaotic Universe, you could be standing one moment in your bedroom, and next moment, float a little too close to Proxima Centauri.  And the moment after that you might be reconstituted with six heads in completely white space, with no apparent ground or horizon. It would be zanier than the zaniest cartoon, and more painful too.

But those things don’t happen.  Plantinga suggests – it’s not required, but it’s a possibility – that when one “frame” ends, and might be completely altered in the next frame,* it is God who maintains the consistency between the two frames.  God keeps your head on, and your feet planted, and the earth moving exactly as we have come to expect it to move.  God is like the living film strip, keeping the frames together.  (This particular analogy becomes clunky fast).

So we speed it up – the frames flicker by, now resembling the fluid motion of reality – you see yourself running down the street in a stop-animation sort of way – then more fluidly, until it is concurrent with reality.

Yes – right now, the idea goes, you are flickering in and out of existence^ 10,000,000 times a second. And you remain you, you move and think in a continuous fashion, not interrupted by an interlude into white space, because something non-physical maintains the continuity. And this might be God.

And so, God is omnipresent like the author, in that whatever exists has its grounding in his consciousness. Can God compress and expand time, so that each ten millionth of a second (in our time) may endure for a greater or shorter period in his time?  Could it be that as each collapse happens, there is an “eternity” of time during which God may, at his leisure, prepare the next frame of reality?

I think, yes (in order), he probably could and he might very well do such a thing. But I’m not sure he even requires that power to accomplish his work. If his intelligence is also infinite – if, for him, the most complex equations we know are mere ephemera – I doubt whether he needs time to restrain itself for him. I suspect he can keep up just fine.

*Not only might the very next frame be non-cogent, it might simply fail to exist.  Reality might “collapse,” and not recover from the collapse.

^I interpret the “collapse” to be a coming into and out of existence, as my limited understanding of QM leads me to believe.  I could certainly be wrong, and am probably simplifying the idea to the point of being wrong.  But all I want is an illustration – the thing appears feasible for God.  Moreover, Plantinga notes that the science may change – what if QM changes significantly, or is completely overthrown? – but this need not trouble the believer.  We are not dependent on how God fits into a given scheme; we have other means for belief, according to Plantinga.

This helps us understand, at least as a start, how the author is present in her story. She brings her consciousness (complete with talents and passions, ideas and shortcomings) to bear on the story, and therefore is present in it. Can we extend her presence throughout the story? Is she indeed omnipresent?

It would seem that she is, and we won’t stop there; it would seem she is necessarily omnipresent in her story.

What does this mean? Let’s assume that she wrote a book with 32 chapters, and didn’t skip any numbers. We can start by saying – as she tells the story, perhaps – that she is present in the context of the story, during Chapter 11. After all, her consciousness is directed toward the telling of the story, and the story does not tell itself. Nothing happens unless she speaks.  If Chapter 11 was told, she was necessarily present as it was told.

Now, could she possibly skip Chapter 25 – just not tell it – and nevertheless have it exist? Of course she couldn’t, not in the context of her story. And so if Chapter 25 does not exist, she would not have been present for it. (We can’t, therefore, demand that she should be present to something which does not exist).

Conversely, if she does not speak Chapter 25 into existence, then it simply does not exist. Our imagined Chapter 25 depends entirely on the author for its existence, if it is to exist at all. (We, existing on the same plane of reality as the author, realize she has “skipped” Chapter 25. But in the context of her story, there simply is nothing there that was skipped).

Or, let’s consider the claim more closely. It seems to me that the challenge to omnipresence is not in location, but in time. That is, how can any consciousness – God’s or otherwise – not only be everywhere at once (easy to imagine, even for ourselves, if time stands still) – but everywhere at once, at every moment?

That is, I can imagine myself – if time could actually stand still – moving about and inhabiting every possible location in space. Then, when I’ve visited them all, we move forward one moment, and I make another circuit through and among all those same points. This, at least, is what we might imagine for the author.

Indeed, let’s slow down, so that later we can “speed it up.”

JRR Tolkien, for example, is omnipresent in Middle Earth. That is, he is present at every location where The Lord of the Rings is taking place, and wherever he is absent, that place simply does not exist. (If there is a location in Frodo Baggins’ mind – the Shire, for example – which Frodo might think about even if he can’t visit it, then it is Tolkien who permits and facilitates that thinking – so that the Shire exists inasmuch as Tolkien permits it to exist, and Frodo can no more imagine it existing than Tolkien permits).

We might say that, when the Fellowship is broken up, and Frodo and Samwise travel separately from the rest, that Tolkien might seem to have a hard time following them simultaneously. But he doesn’t; it need not stress the limits of his consciousness any more than telling a single storyline. And why not?

Because time itself, in Middle Earth, is subject to him (to his will, we might say). He may write Book One and then take a year off, in our time; this will not affect Frodo on his journey. When Tolkien picks up his pen again, not a moment will have elapsed in Frodo’s time (unless Tolkien wishes it to be so – but it need not be so).

Let’s try to lay this out clearly: An author may take 10 years to tell a story which lasts 10 minutes. In the context of her story, that author does not need to delay her characters or their sense of time one bit. Her characters will have no idea, none at all, that it took the author 10 years (in her time) to tell their story; for them, only 10 minutes have passed, and that is all. They are only 10 minutes older.

The converse could be done, as well – an author might, in 10 minutes, tell a story which endures for 10 years. That is, her characters will experience 10 of their own years passing during the course of the story, while the author has scribbled down the whole tale in a mere 10 minutes of her own time.

And back to that original challenge of being in multiple locations at once:  Tolkien could tell us about simultaneous events because he had control over time.  He could tell us about one event, then tell us about another, and simply explain that they were happening simultaneously; and exactly because he willed it, it would be so.  When those characters all meet in the same space and time, they will relate their stories and realize (and not suspect any disruption in the space-time continuum of their world) that their stories were occurring simultaneously.

This shows us how the author can bend and manipulate space and time in her story, and at least one way in which they seem to be related.  The author has existential control over all things in her story; nothing exists without her permitting it.  Moreover, she has control of all “space” in her story, in part, because of her control of time.*  In the next post, we will begin to “speed up” this analogy of space and time, and see how God might do likewise in our Universe.

*The interesting thing about our restrictions on time is that we typically expect time to pass in a story just like it does in our world.  That is, we borrow the mechanics of “our” time, and translate them to any story we read (unless we are otherwise instructed).

But we are seldom, if ever, instructed to completely abandon our sense of time.  An author may have her characters traveling through time, or traveling at warp speeds (which is the same thing), and yet the duration of their travel is supposed to have elapsed just as we expect time to elapse on our world.

I suspect there is too much work to be done in constructing a completely new sense of time, to facilitate the adoption of that new time by the readers, and then to make the whole gimmick useful and satisfying enough that the readers will have appreciated the expense of their efforts.  And so we borrow time, which makes my work with this analogy easy:  The author could create a whole new sense of time, but they typically use ours.  In that way, we can see how the author transcends that time (in the context of her story) and how she might compress and expand it, relative to our time, in order to serve her purposes.

We have said what omnipresence is not; let’s see if we can hone in on what it positively is.

What do we mean, for example, when the person we are speaking to is staring off in the distance and we say, “You look like you’re 1,000 miles away.”  (Or, “Earth to Suzy!” – but this is more obviously out of fashion).

Or again, think of the phenomenon of video conferencing. One party may be in New York, the other in San Francisco (or Tokyo, or Berlin). Yet we see and hear them – are they present? How would you explain your answer?

If so – take it back one step. Imagine you are only able to talk on the phone. Is the other party present to you?

Now both of those require communication, so let’s bring it back yet another step. Say you have an infant, and the child is now fast asleep. You walk in to enjoy the moment (and to make sure the baby is still breathing). Are you present to the child, who is unaware of your physical presence, and is not communicating with you?

So “to be present” seems to include (but not require) communication; it seems to include (but not require) physical proximity, or a representation of one’s self in physical proximity to the other; it seems to include (and perhaps require?) awareness of the other, even a kind of active observation. Perhaps other things besides.

You may even be thinking back to the last post, and saying to yourself: Well, I can be in multiple places at once. I might be in Peoria, and in a video conference with people in Johannesburg, Calcutta, and Detroit.

Perhaps you can; the wider the net, the easier to make my point.

Because we see that, while you can project a representation of yourself all across the world (think of television stars appearing on millions of television screens at once), this is a kind of loophole. Such images do not represent our full presence, our true consciousness. That, almost by definition, is a yes or no question – Are you fully present here? – and if it is “yes” in one place, it is “no” in every other place.

So, presence might be seen as a function of consciousness – whatever your consciousness attends to, there you are present.

I have one grizzly challenge to this idea, which may only serve as a distinction.  Let’s say you are stationed at a military base in a foreign country.  You are on the phone with your spouse, and so “present” to your spouse.  Your consciousness attends to that person, and not, say, to the grumbling person behind you waiting to use the phone.

Suddenly there is an airstrike, and you are killed.  How can we maintain that you were present somewhere else, yet vulnerable to death here, at the base?

It would seem that your body is the “host” of your consciousness.  Your consciousness might attend to anything at all – a person across the ocean, a person across time (if you are reading the biography of Alexander the Great, for instance) – but it depends, in the ordinary sense, on your body for its function.  The body is an “accident” of your consciousness, in the philosophical sense, and so is vulnerable to physical “accidents” of time and space.  (Your body is, itself, the “base” of operations for your consciousness).

The distinction here shows us how the author is free to be omnipresent; and it becomes all the more clear, I think, how this can be possible for God.

If God can be compared with an author, how shall we think of God’s omnipresence?

This may be one of the more difficult “omni-” attributes that we have to think about.  We’ve thought a bit about omnipotence, and we have omniscience waiting in the wings; these two are already “invisible” traits.

That is, if I say to you, “Superman is stronger than any human being,” you don’t have any trouble with that.  His strength is not necessarily apparent, but lies in wait, and we only see it when he’s doing something.  Then, we compare what he can do with what the strongest human beings can do, and we see that he is stronger than they are.

Or take the root of omniscience, intelligence*.  Let’s say I invite you into a room full of Stephen Hawking look-a-likes.  They are chatting amicably, and amid the computerized chatter I ask you to pick out the real Hawking, who is one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists in the world.  You can’t easily tell which one is he – his intelligence lies in wait.  But a good way to find out might be to ask them all to give a quick exposition on whether black holes lead to new universes (they don’t, according to Hawking).

Now ask either Superman or Hawking – where are you?  The answer will be a single location in three dimensional space.  You can only be in one place at one time.

Presence as an attribute, in other words, does not lie in wait (unless you’re a ninja).  It is the obvious thing about you, that you are somewhere, and only there.  It can be an alibi or a damning piece of evidence – but it can’t be both at the same time.

How then is God omnipresent?

We are often – I am often, even until the present moment – tempted to imagine a vast ghost of a being, invisible to us, perhaps like a really thin gas.  This ghost permeates the Universe, though we have trouble with this, and not just because it’s eerie.

For a start, can this ghost see?  Where are its eyes?  Is it entirely composed of “spiritual” eyes?  Or, are its eyes focused on us, and the long train of its flowing being extends from here out into space?

Or would we insist that God is not in space – therefore not omnipresent – because we don’t have any direct empirical evidence of him?  The opposite is a bit jarring to think about:  Some exterior physical presence existing in such a way that you are always and constantly aware of it.  (I imagine the body of a nondescript white male in 19th century clothes multiplying himself along the streets of, say, London).  This would make us all speak and act as though we were paranoid, no?

If the being has to be imagined “in” space, that is, as part of physical space, then maybe we have the wrong idea.

Rather, I suggest that the author is omnipresent within the context of her story, and we might take our cue from her.

Now, the author is something completely apart from her story and even our human authors are not made of up of the same “matter”  as the content of their stories.  So there is an implicit – shall we say necessary? – separation between the author and her story.

In this sense – as we saw with God – the author does not maintain a “physical” presence in her story.  I am grateful not to have to misconstrue her in such ways (I’m a married man, after all).  Isn’t she, nevertheless, present in her story?  If so, in what way?

*Here I use “intelligence” to mean something like “an ability to know.”  Of course it can also connote “an ability to learn” or something suggesting that the objective of learning has not been achieved, but could be.  This distinction will enjoy (or suffer) more treatment in future posts.

(Not going to lie, it took me three tries to type out that subject.  You might really be in for it this time).

In our last post, I compared God to a common author, and applied the analogy to the classic riddle, “Can God make a rock so big He can’t lift it?”  This, of course, is a challenge to the coherence of a property like “omnipotence” (being all-powerful).

William Lane Craig gives us more to think about, however, than omnipotence alone.  If the KCA is successful, it also gives us a God who transcends space, time, matter, and energy.  Furthermore, God is the “First Cause” of the Universe, the one who brought it into being.

How does this comport with our analogy?  “Nicely,” it would seem.

Who or what else, for example, can be said to bring a story into existence except its author?  The story does not write itself…

We quickly run into a kind of obstacle, perhaps only a matter of scope.  In our world, it is obvious that any given author is not THE first cause, but has a prior cause (the author’s parents, for a start).  So, for the purposes of our analogy, we are speaking of the author and her story as a kind of closed system.  In the closed system, the author simply exists.  Then, she begins a story, and she is indisputably the first and only cause of that story.

So the author speaks (or writes), and with mere words, a new world comes to exist.

And she may write of men and women, for example, animals of all kinds, trees and rivers and mountains.  Her story may follow the passage of a few moments, or days, years, even eons.  It may take place within a single building, or span continents, planets, galaxies – even other dimensions.  The driving forces of her story may be merely physical (the classic “man vs. nature” kind of story), or else she may tell of great movements in human civilization, or hitherto impossible technologies, and have in motion all manner of interests and objects.

That is, she speaks into existence the kinds of matter, time, space, and energy she wishes.  (And she might create other realms as well).

Does she not, then, transcend all of this?

To borrow some biblical ideas – are not 1,000 days like a single day for her, and a single day like 1,000?  Can’t Chapter 1 take place over the course of a single minute, and Chapter 2 the course of a century?

Hasn’t she called the sun into existence and commanded it to shine?  Whatever animals exist – hasn’t she also called them all up?  And the characters – hasn’t she fashioned them herself and, we might say, in her own image?  (Can an author ever create a character she cannot, in some part, relate to?  A good psychologist might have something say about this).

Is it any actual effort at all for her to be present at all places of her story at once?  (She does not even need to multi-task – after all, the story goes nowhere without her, and by necessity must wait until she attends to it).

This is enough to set the mind reeling, and perhaps your mind is doing better than mine in seeing the potential usefulness of the analogy.  But come humor me and my tortoise’s pace.   You may have noticed, for example, that I give a few examples of omnipotence, which we have already introduced as an attribute of God, and here at the end I switched to the attribute of omnipresence (being present everywhere).

The KCA does give us the impetus to think of God as transcending – rising above or going beyond the limits of, says Webster –  the Universe.  This would seem to get us started on omnipresence; we’ll consider it at greater length in the next post.

This is a brief addendum to the last post, which I hope was easy enough to follow for anyone still reading the series. I’m sure I don’t always make it easy, and I’m hoping by the exercise of writing these things out that I will become better at articulating them.

Moreover, the subject of infinity is challenging enough, and I find myself in a peculiar position of understanding somewhat more than I used to, and yet not very much at all. There are things like “infinite set theory” that are beyond the scope of anything I have studied, though I hope to approach such things in the future.

But what can be said now about infinity as it relates to God and the large stone?

In the last post, I am essentially describing a “potential infinity,” a series of ever larger numbers that can be supposed to go on forever. One never reaches the number “infinity,” because it is impossible to count to infinity, but the fact that the series can go on forever is what makes it “potentially” infinite. For all we know, there is no end to the series, just as, for all we know, there is no end to the future.

To ask whether, in the end, God was either unable to make the rock or unable to lift it is like asking whether the last number you count before infinity is even or odd.  There’s no answer to the question – we might say the question is the “wrong” question.

In this way, I offer that the theist has escaped the riddle. But, then, what about an actual infinity? Couldn’t the skeptic say, “Well, God, create a rock that is actually infinite in size – then, can you lift that rock?”

In the post on Hilbert’s Hotel, I give a well-known argument against actual infinities. The argument stands on the basis that an actual infinity leads to logically absurd conclusions. Rather than accept those conclusions, we instead reject that an actual infinity could exist.

So, our author (and God) might reject outright the challenge to build an actually infinite rock. The existence of such a rock would lead to logical absurdities which are not useful to the telling of a story.

They might, of course, be useful to the telling of a particular kind of story – science fiction, for a start – and that’s an interesting subject to explore. Again, we are not saying that an actually infinitely sized rock is logically impossible, or that the conclusions are logically contradictory. Rather, we are saying that the conclusions are absurd, not seeming to have any relation to the world we find ourselves in.

If it is possible to create a rock of actually infinite size (residing, as it surely must, in a Universe of actually infinite size), then the answer whether it can be lifted is probably only known to an all-knowing creator (he says with sheepish grin). I do suspect that such a Universe is only a possible one, and not necessarily one God has or would actually create; at least, it seems not to be possible in this Universe, and just as well, since the story of that Universe is probably far less useful to God’s purposes.

In any event, even with this caveat, it would seem that a consideration of actual infinities renders the riddle absurd, and therefore it does not fare better here than it does with potential infinities.  Even if we have to retreat to the notion that God only do one thing or the other, this simply means there is one less thing that any one can do, and God can still do all things that can be done.

Last time, I introduced the analogy of God being related to his creation like an author is related to her story. Since we have dealt primarily with the attribute of God being all-powerful, I raised one of the classic challenges to God’s omnipotence, and proposed that we address it with our analogy.

The challenge is this: Can God make a stone so heavy that he cannot lift it? As we saw, if God cannot make a stone that large, then there is something he cannot do, and therefore he is not omnipotent. Likewise, if he can make the stone, but can’t lift it, there again is something he cannot do, and therefore he is not omnipotent.

How does the theist escape this?

I think I have one vague way leading to one clear way.

Let us first suppose an author, whose abilities within the context of her story will (hopefully) help us see the way out. She is, for all intents and purposes, presumed to be all-powerful in the context of her story.

So let’s ask the question a different way: Can an author create a rock, within the context of her story, which is too big for her to lift?

The vague answer is this: The question makes no sense. We see, clearly, that she can create and destroy galaxies, entire Universes, with mere words. Can she not create a rock any size she likes? What does it matter if she can “lift” it? Can’t she always lift it, no matter how big she has created it? Are we to suppose, in the context of her story, that she will ever strain against the weight of any rock, or that she will ever strain against the effort of building a still larger rock?

And this leads to our clearer answer, which harkens back to the posts on infinity.

Let’s say she sets out to create that rock (in the context of her story), a rock so big that she cannot lift it. She builds a rather large rock – a boulder, let’s say. She then describes herself picking it up and lifting it. She’ll need a bigger rock.

So she builds a rock the size of a mountain. Again, she can lift it without effort.

She builds a rock the size of a continent. She lifts it.

She builds a rock the size of a planet. She lifts it.

She goes on, building them to the size of a solar system, a galaxy, a supercluster of galaxies, increasing the order of magnitude of this rock by hundreds and thousands at a time. At no point does she ever strain to create the rock, and at no point does she ever strain to lift it.

Soon, compared with the original rock, she is building rocks beyond description, except by numbers. She builds a rock that is 1 x 10^100, then the 1,000^th power, then the 10,000^th power, then 1 x 10^10^123, which is actually beyond human comprehension of any kind except that we know how to read numbers. Still, there is no difficultly either in creating it, or lifting it.

In effect, I would venture, the answer to the question is – well, she is infinitely powerful in the context of her story. There is no finite end to this challenge. I see no point at which she could no longer create bigger rocks, nor any point when she could not lift the rock she has created. The question pertains to infinity, and so the answer is neither “yes” nor “no.” It is better to say, perhaps, that it is not applicable.

Or, if it is not enough to equate “infinitely powerful” to “all-powerful,” I don’t know what anyone can be looking for when they say “all-powerful.”