tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11422779.post-1128522517093420562005-10-05T10:23:00.000-04:002005-10-05T10:28:37.190-04:00As we went from discussing gratitude to how prayer may or may not work, some of you touched on the subject of a divine plan – the idea that even the details of what happens here on earth and in the universe is the acting out of a preconceived scheme of things established ahead of time by God. This view is commonly held among many groups of Christians, and I believe Muslims and Jews as well. The concept of a preconceived plan also frequently enters into other religious belief systems in one form or another. Here, from what I’ve seen, it often involves “destiny” – for example, in ideas of karma, reincarnation, and past lives.<br /><br />Those who speak of the existence of a plan always rely heavily on some hidden or unseen aspect of it. That’s the part that explains how situations and events in this world that appear chance, chaotic, or dynamic when we just look at them, are really aspects of a well constructed – well, “intelligent design,” I suppose.<br /><br />I assume that in the West, divine plan thinking represents a particular understanding of scripture; one that has apparently become well established in many organized religions. Personally, there’s a lot I don’t understand about the idea of a plan. Here are a few things that come to mind:<br /><br /><strong>Filling in the Blanks</strong><br /><br />Free will: If we can act on free will, this sounds like a major area in which God didn’t plan out details in a preconceived manner. So is the idea that God planned for “free will” as a general sort of item or box in his overall scheme of things, but then left the specific contents of that box blank, so to speak? Because if God planned each of our freely made decisions in advance, it’s hard to understand how they’d be free. Wouldn’t we be the dreaded “zombies” that it’s usually said we would have to be without free choice? I do kind of wonder about that too. I mean, since we all have free will (or, don’t – but either way, it’s the same for all of us), then isn’t it hard to know if we’d really act like zombies without it? Then again, maybe we’re acting like zombies now, and don’t have any non-zombie humans around for comparison purposes…<br /><br />Anyway: If God’s plan provides for free will in general but leaves the particulars up to us, are there additional “general” components to the plan? For example, did God plan out in advance exactly which way every leaf would land on the ground every autumn – or do the trees, the sun, and the wind work that out? Did God plan out which twigs every bird would select every spring for their nests, or has he allowed that blank to be filled in by the birds?<br /><br />The more “blanks” there are, the more reality looks to me like an actual and ongoing act of creation and not something that was mapped out and preconceived ahead of time. Anyone familiar with creativity knows that the dynamic processes involved are very different from what it’s like to use the mind with a cleverness and intelligence that decides beforehand what the finished product will look like. If God’s a planner, for me that’s quite a different statement from saying that God is a genuine Creator.<br /><br /><strong>Knowing A Lot</strong><br /><br />Yet certainly there are advantages to believing in a plan and believing that you know a lot about its unseen details. You can explain anything. The hidden part of the plan serves as a balance sheet, an unseen ledger so that any contradictions, inconsistencies, injustices, or other forms of untidiness that we observe in reality as we know it now, are only apparent.<br /><br />And no one can ever prove you wrong. You can’t “go there” with someone who questions your idea of the plan to “look” and see if it’s really true. No one can check up on the accuracy of your assertions.<br /><br />To give a simplistic and silly example, and yet one that operates on plan-principles, I could tell you I know about the Land of Live. (Live is evil spelled backwards…) Any time something evil happens in the world as we know it now, something very lively and twice as nice happens there.<br /><br />Still, we should never do things here on purpose that are evil. For if we choose evil just to make that burst of positive energy happen in the Land of Live, to make it twice as nice for us when we finally get there, well, I hate to tell you, but that’s the one time it doesn’t work. A neutralizing energy field from that kind of thinking always crosses over into the Land of Live, so that nothing happens any different there than would have happened otherwise.<br /><br /><strong>Things Unseen</strong><br /><br />I believe in the reality of things unseen myself. In fact, I tend to believe reality is mostly unknown by us in its full sweep, compass, and power.<br /><br />When people around the world offer their different explanations concerning how much they know about things unseen, and in so much detail – well, frankly, the more they say they know, and the more details they give, the less convincing it sounds to me.<br /><br />Anyone know how the idea of a divine plan got started?<br /><br /><em>Pls. note: the "Changes" link has been updated to the topic of Gratitude...</em>Paulnoreply@blogger.com