4b) Continued
ii. Some Thoughts on God's Perspective
I suggested that God is the Thinker and everything else is His thought. By that I meant that literally everything in our universe is in the mind of God. He can do anything as easily as thinking about it and only He knows the end from the beginning. Only He knows what He will think of next while all others are only guessing. Bear with me a moment on this, while I explore an obvious question:
Almost immediately an intelligent person will ask the question, "How can I have free will if God is the Thinker and I am merely a thought of His?" The answer is that God thinks it up that way for a good reason, so just trust Him. What does this mean? I suggest that God can keep us alive by thinking of us, but He chooses to not pull our strings even though He could. Why is that? Because, if He wanted robots, He would have made more grass. In my model, God wants us to have free will so we can experience His creations and share those experiences with Him as we would with our human parents.
What all this leads to is an understanding that God is in a different universe than we are, just as the Thinker and His thoughts are separated. I have said that God has additional dimensions, which enable Him to be eternal and all alone in His universe (ie there is nothing outside of God). So, we can never know everything about God. All we can work with is that 3D projection that He puts in this universe. We need revelation directly from God to fill in certain holes. Hence, for those who are interested in getting closer to the truth, He has provided this unique resource, the Bible. Very strange isn't it, that in this Bible God says quite often, "I will tell you what will happen next, so that when it does, you will know that I am God". I have to believe that anything, which accurately predicts the future enough times to be statistically incredible without ever making a mistake, must be from the Thinker Himself. I see that the Bible fits this criteria, so I look to it as a source of God's revelation to us. When He tells us something in that Bible, I expect it to be true, even if I can't completely understand it. But I still need to be sure I'm interpreting it right.
It helps me to understand the true meaning of what I read in the Bible if I use the model of God as the Thinker and everything else as His thoughts. Consider what it was like for God before He thought of anything other than Himself. He had to be all-alone in that universe unto Himself at some point. Being all alone, I say He sought companionship in some form. He has no outside, so any companionship He provides must be thought up in His mind. Any of us can do that, so surely God can do it too. This then explains His expressing interest in us as His "children". He creates situations around us for us to experience. He asks us to make our own choices and to "tell Him” about our feelings. Yes, He could create robots without free will, but being free to choose, we have far more variety in the experiences we can share. I see this relationship of sharing as our key to everlasting life with God. If we cannot choose to share what we experience in this short human life, then why would we want to share with God for ever after?
Overlay what you read in the Bible with this perspective and suddenly it starts to make more sense, both in general and in the specific.
July 26, 2001
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