Dear Theophilus, 

We saw from the last several letters that our horizons have been greatly expanded and our view of creation has shown unexpected depth and complexity to it. In the light of this, let's look at some other aspects of our faith which are seen as problematical and see if we can gain new insights into them.

One of the problems that we come across is the relationship between the freedom of our acts and God's rule and His foreknowledge of the future. If God knows what the future holds, as we are taught, then what does this say about our choices? Doesn't this mean that we have no free will?

The conflict between free will and determinism, the teaching that we have no real free will but everything is decided, may be lessened by looking at the models we have developed for studying nature. What nature tells us is that when faced with these self-contradicting situations, we must learn to accept and hold onto both views. Neither free will nor determinism are absolute but simply describe our experiences of life in differing circumstances. This pair of concepts is contradictory and no-one would say both that free will and determinism are true at the same time. What this shows is that we do indeed have a pair of concepts which satisfy the complementarity principle as proposed by Neils Bohr.

Consider the example of two men playing a game of chess. Let us assume that one man exhaustively analyzes his opponent, taking into consideration all of the moves his opponent has made in all of the games he has ever played, taking into account all of the circumstances and so on. All this knowledge enables him to predict what his opponent is going to do in the very next step. He writes down his prediction and places it into a sealed envelope and awaits his opponent's move. The opponent, in fact, does carry out the predicted step. Analyzing this situation we see what we would call determinism in the prediction, but the one making the move still insists on the fact that he exercised his free will. And both are right. The fact that the predictor made the correct prediction does not mean that this forced his opponent to make a specific move or that he influenced him in any other way. Thus, we have an action and two different interpretations of what the significance of this action are. It is in this similar fashion that we read in scriptures that our future destiny is already known to God and yet, our decisions are crucial to our final fate. The difficulties arise in this matter because the methods that we use to talk about time are not correct and as a result, the whole matter looks paradoxical to us. But remember what the principle of complementarity says. We must keep both self-contradictory aspects of a description before us because both are equally valid. It is a credit to the Fathers of the Church that they did not succumb to the temptation to erase paradoxes but held onto them. Time has vindicated them and shown that they were correct in their decisions which now appear not archaic but very modern.

There is an interesting illustration of the respect given to our free will in the New Testament. You will notice that before miracles are carried out by Jesus, he enquires about the faith of the one making the request. It isn't that faith is being demanded or that the miracle is a reward given for the presence of faith. You see, faith is to be exercised freely and should not be coerced through the spectacular effects of a miracle.

So our free will is honored but at the same time, the unfolding pattern of history is already known by God and we are assured that everything will be well with us and with creation. Paradox? Yes, but a paradox because of our limited knowledge of time which seems to flow and yet is already all there.

We experience time sequentially, but there are indications that God is not limited to this type of experience of time. Just as we see space, all at once, so for Him time is seen all at once. And this is a very definite possibility in view of what modern physics says about the relativity of time and space. Scriptures underline the mystery of time by referring to the fullness of time when tremendous events will occur which are described through terms such as the Last Judgement and the final Resurrection.

The limitations in our experience of time come out in some parts of the Theory of Relativity. For example, if two events occur, according to us, simultaneously, then someone moving relative to us will not see the two events simultaneously. This shows that time is not absolute but is affected by other factors and we fall into serious error by assigning absoluteness to time.

We have considered free will and determinism above and now I'd like to turn our attention, briefly, to another problematical question, that of evil, and see, if in the light of the discussion we have had recently, whether we have gained any enlightenment which will shed some light on the vexing problem of the existence of evil in creation.

The problem of evil, as we will see shortly, is closely related to the question of freedom because freedom already presupposes choice, and if choice is to exist, then the opposite of what is good must also be a possibility.

In another sense, we can see evil as negation and this negation is important for us to grow and see more deeply. Perhaps an illustration will make it easier for you to see the point that I am trying to make. Let's suppose that you come to a foreign land and you are trying to make some headway in understanding some words of the language used by the natives. Your host points at a chair and says 'blah'. Now you are faced with two interpretations of this data. Either 'blah' means chair or it may mean a more general term, furniture for example. The only way you can resolve this question is by pointing at a bookcase and when your host shakes his head in negation, you realize that 'blah' is not a general term for furniture but specifically refers to a chair.

What this shows is that the positive and negative are necessary to give us a greater understanding, something which is reflected in the cataphatic (positive) aspect of theology being complemented by the apophatic (negative). If you lived in a world where no evil and no struggle existed, how could we then talk about love and self-sacrifice for the good of others. How could we talk about courage and steadfastness and faithfulness? All of these arise from the presence of what is not good, evil.

There is a mysterious statement in the book of Genesis which speaks about the fall occurring when man eats of the tree of good and evil. It seems that man has a unique role to play in creation and that is the role of a mediator, man being that part of creation who has experienced and continues to experience what is good and what is evil. Man has experiences, important experiences, which even the angels cannot comprehend and these experiences revolve around our struggle and suffering in life. And we bring memories of these experiences with us beyond the barrier of biological death to share with creation which has not gone through what we have. I'd like to just remind you that the Resurrected Christ appears with his wounded body to the apostle. Maybe that is one of the major roles that we are called on to fulfil; maybe that is a specifically human vocation and our mediating contribution to all of creation to bring this knowledge of suffering with us. I think, as with other fundamental characteristics of creation, evil also has a complementary property and we, as humans, modelling ourselves on the supreme example of Christ, see that evil is bad but see through this to a further and richer good.

Any time that I talk about evil, I shudder because it is very easy from a position of comfort, to speak volumes in a dispassionate manner. It is when we are in the grasp of evil, when we are in the throes of pain that all this talk becomes like straw with little weight. Be that as it may, it is still necessary for us to talk about evil when we are not in a position of experiencing it, because at this point our judgement is not clouded and we can speak a little bit more objectively. It is not when we are in a panic that we think most clearly; it is when we are calm that we judge and evaluate most clearly, especially with a topic which is so emotionally laden as suffering and pain and evil.

We have talked about science and the contributions of science to our understanding of the world. Previously, we were very much in the position of someone watching a magic show. We are led, by our common sense and observation, to accept certain things. We look and we see the woman being sawn in two and we are called on to believe this. Analogously, we look at a sky scraper and see all that concrete and weight and are impressed by this. But, when we dig deeper, when we see more accurately, our vision changes. That woman is not sawn in two; that building with all its cement and steel is mainly a vacuum. What modern science has done is removed the blinkers from our common sense acceptance of things. Time is not absolute; space is curved; complementarity rules. What this science has done is revolutionized our very basic rules of logic. Our logic screams at us that it is impossible for the same object to be present at two different points. And yet, when we apply modern views to time, we see that this objection falls away and opens the door to a complex and profound reality. We were skimming through our scientific approximations and getting by with this. But, when we look at the very foundations of matter and creation, we see a very different picture. This picture is no longer hostile to the teachings of our faith but, astoundingly, it resonates with what our Church has taught so many hundreds of years ago. At the very least, what this does is caution us not to close our minds to teachings such as the Trinity and the Incarnation because they are not contrary to what we are starting to realize about creation at its very foundational levels.

Yours,

Bar-Abbas