In the last installment, I wrote at length about sin as a choice of what world view one accommodates.\u00a0 I also mentioned the idea of original sin, and sins of “weakness.”<\/p>\n
I’ll start with “original sin.”\u00a0 Consider the possibility that moral laws are as inflexible and implacable as physical laws.\u00a0 People have no problem with the fact that physical laws don’t “care” about one’s attitude, culpability, or whatever.\u00a0 One might believe that a person who does something reckless and is harmed “deserved” it in some way (the famous dictum of “F**k around and find out”).\u00a0 So, if someone drinks too much and falls from a roof while engaging in drunken horseplay, there’s not a lot of sympathy.\u00a0 Gravity is gravity.\u00a0 \u00a0In terms of moral law, we feel similarly.\u00a0 You shouldn’t be getting drunk and doing stupid stuff on the roof.\u00a0 We may feel *some* sympathy, but it is what it is.<\/p>\n
However, it’s different when breaking a moral law isn’t one’s “fault.”\u00a0 If a man is repairing a roof and is hit by a falling limb from a tree, we will feel more sympathy.\u00a0 However,\u00a0 there is no (or at least rarely) the claim that the law of gravity should have been suspended.\u00a0 \u00a0Physical laws are physical laws.\u00a0 We may not like them, but they are what they are, and we sometimes suffer the consequences of them through no fault of our own.\u00a0 \u00a0In contrast, if someone breaks a moral law but is either ignorant or well-intentioned, we somehow feel that the moral law should not apply.\u00a0 \u00a0Physical laws are not mitigated because of good intent, but moral ones should be.<\/p>\n
This is most obvious in the story of Uzzah in 2 Samuel chapter 6.\u00a0 When the Ark of the Covenant was made, God told Israel that anybody who touched it would die.\u00a0 \u00a0David was moving the Ark, and two of his subjects, Uzzah and Ahio, were driving the cart that held it.\u00a0 The cart tilted a little and Uzzah reached up to steady the Ark.\u00a0 When he did, God killed him:<\/p>\n
They set the ark of God on a new cart and brought it from the house of Abinadab, which was on the hill. Uzzah and Ahio, sons of Abinadab, were guiding the new cart 4 with the ark of God on it,[c] and Ahio was walking in front of it. David and all Israel were celebrating with all their might before the Lord, with castanets, harps, lyres, timbrels, sistrums and cymbals.<\/em><\/p>\n When they came to the threshing floor of Nakon, Uzzah reached out and took hold of the ark of God, because the oxen stumbled. The Lord\u2019s anger burned against Uzzah because of his irreverent act; therefore God struck him down, and he died there beside the ark of God.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0Then David was angry because the Lord\u2019s wrath had broken out against Uzzah, and to this day that place is called Perez Uzzah.<\/em><\/p>\n Most of us feel a bit like David felt — that God should have given Uzzah a mulligan.\u00a0 After all, Uzzah was trying to do a “good” thing by preserving the Ark.\u00a0 \u00a0A lot of people have tried to provide motivational excuses for punishing Uzzah, for instance claiming that Uzzah didn’t have sufficient faith to believe that God was competent to make sure the Ark would be fine.<\/p>\n But I don’t think that’s the case.\u00a0 I think that God’s laws are like gravity.\u00a0 The laws just are.\u00a0 It doesn’t matter *why* you fall unprotected from a height, you are going to get hurt when you land.\u00a0 It doesn’t matter *why* you break a moral law, you are going to suffer a consequence.\u00a0 \u00a0There are things you can do to mitigate the damage.\u00a0 You can wear a parachute or fall onto a mattress.\u00a0 That doesn’t change gravity itself, however.\u00a0 Similary, there are things you can do to mitigate the consequences of a moral law, but it doesn’t change the rule itself.<\/p>\n A lot of people, for instance, have a hard time with the very idea that God the Father would “demand” that His Son come down to Earth, be tortured and executed, and break the bonds of Hell.\u00a0 They think that God should just say “Oh no, just forget it, it’s all cool,” and move on.\u00a0 \u00a0I think He could do it, since I think God can do anything.\u00a0 But I think that in doing so, He would necessarily also destroy reality itself.\u00a0 It would be the same as saying “OK, let’s just do away with gravity.\u00a0 It’s just a bummer.”\u00a0 Gravity has some very\u00a0 negative consequences.\u00a0 But you can’t have our universe without it.\u00a0 Repentence from sin and forgiveness of sin by God mitigates future consequences to some degree (since repentance means that you stop doing harm and can start healing), and, more importantly, decreases the separation and loss of communion with God.\u00a0 Thus, for instance, David’s repentance of his sin with Bathsheba and his murder of Uriah, did not stop the tragedy of the death of Bathsheba’s child but did result in God providing Solomon.<\/p>\n The point is that these rules are impersonal and impassable.\u00a0 And, in my personal cosmology, they are more impassable and impersonal than physical laws. In contrast to moral law, I think that God can, and did, change physical laws.\u00a0 \u00a0My working hypothesis of the Garden of Eden, the fall, and original sin (since this is written for Christians, I’m assuming you know all about these) is one in which major events resulted in a recoding of the\u00a0 basic laws of existence.\u00a0 \u00a0When Adam and Eve sinned and God cast Adam and Eve out off the Garden, the fundamental laws of nature were rewritten to result in the fallen world.\u00a0 Of course I don’t know if it’s true, and it’s completely unfalsifiable.\u00a0 But, as an intellectual conceit, I find it appealing.<\/span><\/p>\n Some folk have seriously suggested that the reality we live in is consistent with, or indistinguishable from, a simulation.\u00a0 There is certainly nothing to disprove it, and there are anomalies that are consistent with it.\u00a0 This speculation has been the subject of lurid discussion in a number of popular press articles, such as Scientific American<\/a>, NBC,<\/a> Forbes<\/a>, and others<\/a>.\u00a0 \u00a0From an apologetics point of view, I always find it amusing that there are people who consider the idea of the existence of God stupid, but who nod and accept the possibility that we are living in a simulation — without considering that such a simulation would almost certainly demand a God whose instantiated thought we are experiencing.\u00a0 I’ll also point out that this simulation idea is nothing new, having been discussed as the “Butterfly dream” of Zhuangzi in the 4th century BC (in terms of living in a dream),\u00a0 Anaxarchus in ancient Greece, as well as Descartes and Nietzche.<\/p>\n A variation of this idea is proposed by Max Tegmark that the universe is actually a mathematical construct<\/a>.\u00a0 \u00a0I am more sympathetic with Tegmark’s hypothesis.\u00a0 It goes to a deeper issue of whether mathematics is “discovered” or “created.”\u00a0 This has become a big deal in Progressivism, which claims that mathematics is arbitrary and represents “colonized” thinking and “white supremacy.”\u00a0 If a culture decided that 2+2=5, then it would.\u00a0 For those of us who believe that mathematics represents a description of reality, and is thus “discovered” and immutable, the idea that it is culturally determined is silly.<\/p>\n An important implication of either of these ideas, though, is that a minor change in the “programming” or the rules of mathematics could result in a radically different reality.\u00a0 If either of these physical or mathematical laws are imposed, then they could be changed.\u00a0 Changing those laws would result in changes in natural laws and in reality itself.\u00a0 In addition, such changes may not be easily discovered, since they may be made to back-propagate in perceived time and in the physical record.<\/p>\n One possible interpretation of Genesis, for instance, is that it is not just a chronicle of people, but also describes multiple resets in reality itself, when the laws of nature were revised — as would be allowed in the simulation or mathematical reality hypotheses.\u00a0 Thus, the creation saga in Genesis 1 reflects an instantiation of a set of physical laws, and the “days” would both be literal “days” of that version of reality while different than the 24 hour days of the finished reality.\u00a0 Similarly, the fall of nature after Eden, the changes following the Great Flood, etc. could reflect these kinds of resets.\u00a0 \u00a0People really did live for hundreds of years and giants did walk on the earth, but it was a different reality with different natural laws.\u00a0 It would also be an explanation of another singularity mentioned in the Bible — the death and resurrection of the Christ.\u00a0 The period of darkness, the odd events, etc. could represent that “Great Reset.”\u00a0 Instead of Matrix version three,<\/a> we are living in Earth version six or seven or whatever.<\/p>\n Who knows.\u00a0 I don’t, certainly.\u00a0 But conceptually, it fits well into this worldview idea, and with original sin.\u00a0 \u00a0If one posits that Eden was an instantiation of the Kingdom of God, then Adam and Eve were living in a world that was in tune with God, and the very rules of existence were different.\u00a0 \u00a0The eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was exactly that -a discovery that there were possibilities of other realities and other laws — ones that even humans might modify.\u00a0 In this analogy, eating of the Tree of Knowledge was not becoming the software engineer that created the program, but instead, becoming aware of previously hidden features of the program.\u00a0 \u00a0 When God said “And the Lord God said, \u201cThe man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0If reality is an instantiation of this kind of construct, then the trees of Knowledge and of Life may be visualized as glorified widgets for user privilege escalation<\/a>. In addition to Eden,\u00a0 consider Genesis 11 and the Tower of Babel:\u00a0 \u00a0But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, \u201cIf as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.”<\/em><\/p>\n In this conceit, expulsion from Eden was expulsion into a world that was no longer an instantiation of the Kingdom of God, and which had different physical and moral laws.<\/p>\n Of course this is speculative, and I am more comfortable thinking of this as an example analogous reasoning.\u00a0 I’m not trying to convince you that this is what reality is.\u00a0 I’m trying to convince you that it is rational to view reality as perhaps something analogous to this — perhaps even in a way we biologically cannot really understand.\u00a0 \u00a0But this approach becomes can explain why the concept of\u00a0 “original sin” is not just the introduction of entropy, as some have suggested, but that we are living in a constructed reality that by its very natural laws does not adhere to the instantiated Kingdom –\u00a0 through ancestral choice.<\/p>\n One result of living in a world where the physical laws are incompatible with the Kingdom of God is that eventually we will be put in a situation where there are no morally acceptable actions.\u00a0 We all constantly are presented with moral “Sophie’s choices<\/a>“, where all options are bad ones.\u00a0 It is thus impossible to be “sinless” in the world, because we are put in situations where there is no sinless option. Not living the Christian life to the best of your ability is a sin and, moreover, making an error even if you are doing your best is a sin. Moral relativists posit that when one is given two bad choices, then the least bad choice is the ‘good” one.\u00a0 But if moral laws are immutable, then that is not the case.\u00a0 The lesser of two evils is still evil.\u00a0 We do not choose between good and evil, but between evils.<\/p>\n