God Does Not Play Dice (Or if He does, He is no Mere Gambler).

God Does Not Play Dice (Or if He does, He is no Mere Gambler).

It is a fallacy to refer to God as though He were a law-maker prone to human error. The Paradox of the Law-giver out not to upset the intellectual, however restless, even at the very start.

The paradox reads: A law-giver has no a priori value according to which to ascertain the virtue of his law. Only once he has made a decision does that law become just (and virtuous), after the fact. [a posteriori.]

This means that a human law-giver is all ways arbitrary. The human in this example tries to be God, effectively, in the way that many have misconstrued God. Now, the fact that this is a paradox [and I use “fact” liberally and loosely] ought not to bother one. As Kierkegaard pointed out, God is a paradox. But even regarding the brilliance of Kierkegaard’s phenomenology, this may appear like a vacant appeal to Authority.

This paradox is prejudiced in favour of Atheism from the start. Only if there is no Divine Grace to hold the law-giver’s hand is his action arbitrary. Were God present to administer laws, the decisions of the person of Pure Faith would no longer be arbitrary, even if in meeting a challenge the human is still prone to botch it as in any well-designed video game.

So remains the question: Is God arbitrary? Is He comparable to the human law-giver? The paradox never raised contention, at least on the surface, with God’s existence, but rather with his nature as administrator. Yet one need go no further than our own human administration systems to see that, despite apparent disappointments (exaggerated poetically in the eyes of a cynic) owing to human error, as in the case of the human law-giver that botches a Divine Project, on the whole a system can be much more effective and efficient, to a mystifying and miraculous degree that is never fully comprehended by any one of its parts [like Kafka’s Law], than an individual operating in isolation.

So is God arbitrary? If God is a system that encompasses all of existence, its Order is PROBABLY of a higher degree of both efficiency and mystery than just the experience of a human being operating in His absence. So how is the one, a system of relative chaos from the perspective of contemporary physics, to judge fairly the nature of a Divine Order [again, from the perspective of Physics, everything is in Harmony, and one might infer that this harmony is no mere Baroque Cadence] by COMPARISON WITH ITS SELF?

In truth, all arbitrariness is the absence of comparison. We make decisions THINKING them to be arbitrary but IGNORING the possibility (and probability, given dreams and other evidence of a transcendent Unconscious) that our actions are guided by more intelligent motives. Is Revelation not the comprehension of these motives, and Grace not the surrender to them (which is not a pitiable surrender but a bearing of grave responsibility)?

When an action is arbitrary, we judge it to be so because of our own masculinist prejudices. Why should something Random and Chaotic by reduced to an inferior position? Given a more integrated view, does this not resolve the problem of Evil? Perhaps all talk of God’s Goodness is merely consolation for us who worry so much about man-made laws of Bad and Good. Perhaps GREAT and AWESOME are over-used in secular conversation.

There is another prejudice immanent in this inquiry. It is that if Man following God is not arbitrary, God at least, as the Ground and the Ultimate Bureacrat, is. Yet what does it means to be arbitrary? When we judge our selves to be arbitrary in our actions, we feel that we fail to meet the “a priori necessity” of providing justification and warrant for our action. Yet all such things, in a world that is fundamentally NOT hierarchical, are merely comparisons to other things that we have done in the past or, if we are more sophisticated thinkers, objects of concern within our present(s). So we are arbitrary to the degree that we appear to be disconnected. [As Heidegger pointed out, Appearance (or Semblance) is Reality, inextricably, in different forms, to speak in scientific language. No false dichotomies, please.] But a Supreme Unity by this definition could never be Disconnected. As Schoenpenhauer put it, what appears at first to be a paradox is seen later to have been incontrovertible: A truism. The root of our problem at the beginning was that we construed of God as the Ground of Being upon which everything was founded, but we did not comprehend Him as including all that was “founded upon it”. In fact, no notion of a “foundation” (which is “arbitrary”) should any longer be necessary.

Dm.A.A.