What is Identity?

"Bob isn't the man he used to be."
"You aren't the same person I fell in
love with."
"What happened to that little girl I used to hold on my knee?"

Every day, we become a different person than we were the previous day. We acknowledge this all the time in common discussion. We say things like the above quotes all the time. In doing so, we are simply acknowledging that people change, and sometimes, the things that "make them who they are" change too. We don't keep the same friends forever, we don't stay in the same relationships. And the reason is because we (and our friends) are no longer the same people we used to be.

As I pointed out in the last post, my perspective on The Problem of Evil requires the acceptance of two premises:

1) Existence is better than non-Existence
2) An individual is a collection of thoughts, feelings, experiences, and memories.

I've already addressed #1. But that seems to be self-evident to most people. What may not be as apparent is #2.

What I've stated in my article about The Problem of Evil is that my teenage self and my adult self are different people. And more important: the me which had a painful experience, and the me which did NOT have that painful experience are DIFFERENT PEOPLE.

The reason this matters is because we often ask God, "why do you make me suffer?" But if I'm right, this question is almost meaningless. I can ask God why he let me wreck my bike and bust out my teeth. But the me who's asking this question couldn't be anything other than what I am. The me who asks why this event happened only exists because this event happened.

This makes perfect sense if we accept the already commonly understood notion that a person is a collection of thoughts, feelings, experiences, and memories. Without the experiences that we've had, we wouldn't be the same people we are now.

But even though most people understand this, I've noticed that if you say that this is really true, people have a problem with it. Some common responses I've heard are:

"If you aren't the same person you were a few years ago, then how could the law hold you responsible for things you did in the past?"

"Which you gets to go to heaven?"

"If there are multiple versions of me in different universes, which one is the real me?"

I think all of these questions come from our discomfort with looking at how things really are. People have long been bothered by realizing that we are infinitesimal in comparison to the size of the universe. But there is really nothing bothersome in this; it's just different for some people. People have a similar reaction to realizing that we live in a practically infinite number of universes, wherein all possible histories are played out. It makes some people feel small and insignificant. But in reality, the impact of it is the opposite!

When you realize that God created every possible version of you, you realize not only how much he loves you, but how important it was to him that this particular you would exist. This particular moment of your life, right now, was so significant to him that he created a whole universe just to house it.

The issue of punishing people and so forth takes us to the issue of why do we judge or punish people in the first place? The answer is the same as the reason why we have friends - something we might call "Personality Inertia".

See, even though people change every single moment, the changes happen a little at a time. So even though the me you see tomorrow will be a different me than the one you see now, it's likely that most of my personality traits are the same.

By the same reasoning, if you tell me that you hate me, I will assume that you probably feel the same way 2 seconds later, even though I am dealing with a different "you". Across all the different versions of you, some things will tend to hold relatively consistent.

This is the reason we punish or lock up killers - we assume that even if the murder was committed 2 years ago, the murderer probably still has enough of the same personality traits to be likely to murder again. Even though the person who committed the murder, and the person who gets locked up, are different people, the person who gets locked up probably still has the dangerous personality traits that caused the murder in the first place.

Choosing to lock up murderers is not a moral decision so much as it a practical decision - society wants to free from the reasonable fear of being killed. The best way to do this is to lock up people who are likely to murder - and the best way to find those people is to look at the ones whose past versions committed murder.

Now, society is not always right about this. It can't be, because it can't read minds. There are probably many murderers who would never murder again. And so it would make sense to think that an all-knowing judge would let these people go free. After all, if they're not going to murder again, it wouldn't do any good to lock them up.

But society's courts have to base their rulings on what they DO know, not what they do not know.

And yet, it is obvious that sometimes this is wrong. Someone who murdered 50 years ago, and is just now found out and convicted, may have become a pacifist in the meantime, and be horrified at the thought of killing. Various "statutes of limitations" try to deal with this issue. But society has a hard time telling the difference between a genuine change, and a change done just to get out of a sentence.

But God would have no such limitation. God knows if a person who murdered 50 years ago is still inclined to murder or not. And God only judges based on what a person is really like inside, not what was in their past.

That is why God tells us to "repent", or literally, to change. If we change, we are no longer the people who gave themselves to murder, theft, or hate. And God no longer holds us as guilty.

-micah

(A Few) More Thoughts on The Problem of Evil

It's been a few days since I published my answer to The Problem of Evil, and I've gotten some interesting responses. I didn't realize when I set out to write it how much it would affect me. Thanks to Kevin, and his pointing out the significance of Isaiah and "God creating evil", I realized that not only does a proper solution to The Problem of Evil serve to show that God is not a logical contradiction, but it also points us towards a much much bigger view of God than that typically allowed by contemporary churches.

God is paradoxically the unambiguous source of good and evil, pain, suffering, and joy; and yet manages to be uncompromisingly all-loving and all-good.

The real Christian view of God has always been that God is not just omnipresent, but SO omnipresent, that EVERYTHING that happens is the work of God. The grass grows by his direct operation, the rain falls by his command. Of course, this points us towards a new understanding of what God is...but I'll deal with that later.

Since I laid out my solution to The Problem over three pages (I wanted it to be understood), let me sum it up right here:

1. God is Love
2. Love wants the loved one to not suffer
3. But Love wants the loved one to LIVE even more
4. God allows all beings to live, even beings that are hurt, or psychologically damaged, or just have had bad experiences. These beings may ask God, "why did you make me suffer?" And God's answer would be, "Because I loved you and wanted you to live."

This line of argument makes sense if we accept a few things:

1. Existence is better than non-existence.
2. An individual is a collection of thoughts, feelings, experiences, and memories.

Some have argued that #1 is not the case, that for some individuals, it would have been better to have never existed. But what does Love mean? Love means that we want the best for the one we love. It is nonsensical to think that Love could ever want the object of its love to not exist.

And it is nonsensical to think that ANY entity could wish itself not to come into existence. I would even argue that it is nonsensical for any entity which exists to wish to stop existing.

People who are suicidal (and I have been), seem to picture death as either some kind of heaven, or some kind of rest. But non-existence is not rest. It is not anything. One can't logically say "I would be happier if I didn't exist". Happiness is not a property of non-existent beings.

Neither can one logically say "I would be less depressed if I didn't exist". Degrees of anything don't apply to non-existent beings. Trying to compare existence to non-existence in this way is the philosophical equivalent of dividing by zero - it makes no sense.

Saying something is better off (when it doesn't even exist) is not even false - it just has no meaning.

In my own personal value system, the worst evil of all is non-existence. Even death is not as bad as non-existence, because the person who died DID exist.

Maybe I haven't made as strong a case for this as I would like. What do you think?

-micah

The Problem of Evil, part 3 - And God Saw The Multiverse, And It Was Good

If the multiverse, with the collection of all possible histories, really does exist, what does that mean for the Problem of Evil? Why does that solve it, or tell us anything about it?

At first glance, it may not help much. After all, if there are an infinite number of worlds with different histories than ours, we must assume that the amount of evil and suffering in creation is not just huge, but infinite. God created trillions of human beings only to suffer through short and horrific lives.

But the key thing about the multiverse is what it tells us about God's nature.

Why did God create anything? The traditional answer has been that he wanted something to love, or that his essence is creation. He had to display his All-Loving nature by creating finite beings to express his love through and towards.

I think this is correct. God has an innate desire to express his love through creation. And look at how abundantly he did this! He didn't just create another intelligent being to discourse with, he created a whole chain of creatures from bacteria to land animals to sea creatures, from birds to plants to the cosmos itself. He built a universe 20-billion light years across, and as far as we can tell, we're the only intelligent life-form in it. How wasteful! And yet, to God this is not waste. It's creation. It's creativity. It's love.

God's love is expressed in the existence of bacteria, which will never know him, just as it is in the existence of humans, who have the opportunity to be like him. God's love and majesty is expressed in 20 billion light-years worth of intricately shaped rock, dust, gases, stars and galaxies, just as it is in the crumbling of a small piece of sandstone.

And God's creative love, we have now discovered, is even more infinite than we thought. God didn't just create an enormous beautiful universe for us to inhabit; he did it trillions of times over, for different people and different creatures, with different structures and different patterns, holding different beautiful things we cannot fathom.

We should not recoil in horror at this image. We should stand back in awe at the creative work of God.

And this gives us a crucial insight into God. For the God we love and worship holds the suffering of his creation to be serious indeed. The rape of a poor woman, the torture of a Jew, even the unhappiness of a child, are serious things to our God.

Because he is All-Loving, there is only one thing that he could hate worse than the suffering of his children: their non-existence.

...

When I was 15 years old, I was in a bike accident, and busted out my front tooth. I ended up with 15 stitches INSIDE my mouth, and some pretty impressive scarring on the outside. Because of that accident, I went through months and months adjusting to the replacement that had been made for me. I got used to eating again. Then, in examining my mouth, the doctors discovered that I had four extra teeth growing under my normal bottom teeth, a pretty rare situation in humans. That was only one of a host of different odd situations that happened in this process.

It's certainly conceivable that this experience affected my confidence and personality as I finished high school and went on to college. It would be hard to assess whether this effect was positive or negative, but it definitely had an effect.

Due to having this experience, a host of other experiences resulted, including specific conversations I had with people that are very memorable to me. The chain of events leading from that one event grew and grew, including the one where I am writing about it now.

If that one event had never happened, some parts of my life would have turned out very different. I would have different memories, a somewhat different personality, and a slightly different set of pyschological tools to work with.

I would be a different person.

Not as different as, say, two random strangers walking down the street. But different enough. More different than the difference between my teenage self and my adult self. If I could meet this alternate self, we would have different memories and experiences to discuss; some shared thoughts, but also some different thoughts. We would recognize that we were indeed different people. We would even look slightly different.

But according to physics, this other self DOES exist.

Make no mistake - busting out my front tooth was suffering. Relatively minor suffering, but suffering nevertheless. The God who numbers our very hairs knows about this suffering. He empathizes with it. He felt it when it happened.

And he could have stopped it from happening.

But consider our two Micahs - one who got a busted tooth, one who didn't. Which does God love more? Which does God value having?

Doesn't God value both of us the same? Doesn't God love the version of me who got his face busted just as much as he loves the version of me who didn't?

So which one would he create?

...

If God was choosing to create the universe, and he could choose to create one in which I never had that experience, or one in which I did have that experience, which would he choose? I think we can now see the answer to that. God would look at the results of these two possible universes, and see people he loves just as intensely as he ever loved anything. And instead of choosing only one of these people to exist, he would express his infinite love by creating BOTH.

Truth be told, God had the option of creating a universe where no evil existed. In fact, he DID create that universe. That universe does not hold you and me, however. It probably does not even hold anyone like you or me. It is a world without suffering, but also a world without us. Without sin and evil, the genealogies that led to us never happened. God hates the sin and evil that have existed in our history, but he would hate our non-existence more.

And so God also created other universes, universes which contain you and me, and every version of you and me that is possible. God's love for his creation is so intense, he could not stand to let any possible creature miss its chance for existence.

When God began to create, he got to choose which universes (which histories) he would actualize. And from his perspective, the only choice was which of us got to exist. Which of his children would live? The good and unbroken, undamaged ones? Or the broken, suffering, victimized ones? The ones who never had a moment's worry? Or the ones who underwent unfathomable suffering?

If God had chosen just one universe out of the many, we would have a legitimate question: why this one? Why actualize all this suffering?

But the fact that God chose ALL reveals to us his overall nature: unfathomable love expressed in the infinite act of creation, the act of creating brokenness as well as wholeness, health as well as sickness, evil as well as good.

Because God is love.


Part 1, 2, 3

The Problem of Evil, part 2 - The Multiverse vs Gnosticism

In the previous post, I've tried to establish that the given answers to the Problem of Evil are not only incorrect, but they almost always lead us towards dangerous philosophies that directly oppose the bible and Christianity.

To complete the picture, I want to address two more things - one is another proposed answer, the other is another brick to pile on our list of "problems" with God.

One last tactic taken in attempting to answer the Problem of Evil is to downplay evil itself. If we say that physical suffering is not really that bad, then we can absolve God of guilt. We can say that suffering produces character (and this is true), therefore it is good to have suffering. But this flies in the face of a biblical value system. Can we really say that rape leaves the victims better off? Can we really say that all the people who died from the tsunami are building character? Can we really claim that the Jews are better off for the holocaust?

These are the mind-numbing things we end up implying if we try to downplay the significance of evil. They devalue the physical existence, in order to claim that only the spiritual matters (more traces of gnosticism). And they end up robbing us of a humane value system.

On the other hand, the bible seems to have no qualms about placing the blame for all events squarely on God's shoulders (thanks to Kevin for pointing this out):

"I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things." Isaiah 45:7

It's as if God was saying, "don't even think of blaming someone else!" God wants us to know that no other force is interfering with his plans. If a disaster happens, we can look to no one other than God. So much for our "Satan-is-to-blame" theory.

If Christianity is going to continue to exist, it needs a coherent argument against both atheism, and gnosticism. The indications are good that in the absence of such an argument, the world will head towards one of these options or the other. This argument needs to deal with the Problem of Evil head-on: without degrading our own moral responsibility and sensitivity, and without diminishing God in any way.

Historical Christianity has always struggled with its inherent tendency to devolve towards gnosticism, and as the Problem of Evil becomes more acute in people's minds, this tendency will continue. Without an answer, gnosticism or atheism will win out.

But I believe there IS an answer to be found, and that this answer is unique. I believe that there never will be another answer that will ever work. Further, I believe that this answer solves almost all of the ancillary questions to the Problem of Evil: Why does God hide? Does God answer prayers? Why does God sometimes do miracles, and sometimes does not? How do we reconcile God's omniscience with Free Will?

But to discover this answer, we need to understand a theory in modern physics.

I suspect that many people will not like this. After all, should we really come to a better understanding of God through something as crass as science? I think this attitude is an example of our tendency towards gnostic thought. God has told us that creation is "very good", but we sometimes want to believe that God is so separate and apart from a "dirty" creation, that nothing we humans can discover would be of any use in understanding God.

But the bible has always told us otherwise. Not only is God present everywhere, but the ways of understanding him are present everywhere as well. And when asking questions about the nature of our existence and this creation, it only makes sense to take into account the insights of science. Especially when those insights FINALLY give us an answer to the most difficult theological problem of all time.

All attempts to answer the Problem of Evil postulate a theory about the universe. The Gnostic answer is that the universe is composed of two co-equal forces fighting it out, one ruling the spirit world and one ruling the physical world. Other answers give us other theories of reality.

But physics has revealed what I believe to be the truth about the nature of reality. Let me explain this truth, then discuss WHY it solves our questions.

The truth is that our universe is really a multiverse, a collection of an infinite number of different histories. In the multiverse, all possibilities have and DO happen.

Every time a decision is made, every time there are different alternatives that could happen, all of them actually DO happen. We only see one of these history-paths because of the way in which our perceptions are limited. But God sees all.

This fact has been very well-established by quantum physics, and despite the philosophical hesitations many have in accepting it, it is nevertheless true.

Schrodinger famously proposed an experiment called "Schrodinger's Cat" to demonstrate how ludicrous quantum phyics was. In this experiment, scientists place a cat in a box, then place a small bit of cyanide poison in the box with the cat. The cyanide will only be released if a radiation detector goes off. This radiation detector is set to trigger if a particle emits a certain amount of radiation. The scientists then shoot a particle into the radiation detector which has a 50/50 chance of emitting radiation. A couple of minutes later, the scientists open the box to discover if the particle emitted the radiation, triggered the detector, released the cyanide and killed the cat. According to our suppositions, the cat should have a 50/50 chance of being alive.

But according to quantum physics, the cat is both alive AND dead! This result led many people to be uncomfortable with quantum physics, to try to disprove it, or to try to interpret it away.

You may have heard of the "Copenhagen Interpretation" of quantum physics, which suggests that when the scientists open the box, they get to decide whether the cat is alive or dead. They don't realize it, but by looking at the cat, they are deciding. The Copenhagen Interpretation attempts to explain away what quantum physics actually says by attaching some magical power to humans, which allows them to control the universe with their minds. This is the reason you'll see so many new age mystics talking about quantum physics. They're actually talking about the Copenhagen Interpretation, which allows them to teach a lot of crazy things.

But if we take quantum physics for what it says (and it is the most well-tested theory in all of science), then we live amongst a multitude of histories. Every decision we make, every time we flip a coin, every time there are options in our world, every time the universe could take one path or the other...it actually takes both.

And that is a good thing, because it means we really DO have Free Will (but we'll save that for another time), that God really does know all of history, and that we can finally understand why evil exists.

...to be continued...

Part 1, 2, 3