Brad Ideas - Can you be merely "influenced" by God? - Comments

I would like it to be this way

brad — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 08:23:41 -0800

But the problem is so much of the plot hinged on that damn song, the song that contained in it a series of jump coordinates. Problem is we are told throughout the series how fickle jump coordinates are. Get them wrong and end up very far away. And they depend both on where you are and where you are going, they are not just a coordinate for a target.

So the numbers Starbuck punches in from the song only work if the ship is in exactly the place it is when she punches them in. Not something Gog can predict if Gog is granting humans true free will — being unpredictable even to Gog.

This is the worst one, but the others are also bad. The opera house vision seems hard to accept if the humans did not need to follow a specific path. Had the vision been of some grand and general thing, it would have been fine, but in fact it was of something trivial — the arrangement of people in a room when certain people enter carrying a certain child they have been chasing.

So while I would love a Gog that is not all-knowing, that’s not what we were given here.

Of Mice and Gog

Schmoker — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 07:18:46 -0800

I don't want to get into a point by point defense of BSG's use of Gog (spoiler: I just reread this, and I kind of did). It was a great show that stumbled towards the end, and my problems with it came out all throughout the fourth season (which was wildly uneven, and even flat out bad sometimes), but I actually liked much of the ending, for the most part, and have a viewpoint that accepts Gog without denying free will. My view may be hogwash, but here it is for better or for worse. And don't anyone bitch about pronouns please. If I use "He" when I mean Gog, so be it. I don't really look at Gog, or God, as having gender, should He or She even exist, thank you very much. I just use a pronoun for simplicity's sake.

Think of a buggy computer program, and there you have Man. Yes, Gog can see the myriad possibilities that make up the future, but that does not mean he knows which path the future will take, because he introduced into the equation this pain in ass program he called Man. Gog designed Man, and if he wanted to design us so that we could confound him from time to time, what is so hard to believe about that? This is Gog we are talking about. Gog can do whatever the hell he wants. The idea that a Supreme Being HAS to know what every response to every action will be denies the fact that the being is supreme. Gog could make Man any way Gog sees fit, so that means that Gog could set up Man so that Gog could be surprised every once in a while.

After all, sometimes it has got to be boring being Gog, don't you think?

So, Gog knows us inside and out, and he obviously has the upper hand in pushing us in any direction He pleases, but that supposes that he even wants to push in exactly one direction. Perhaps Gog doesn't mind aiding man from time to time, but in the end let's say that Gog wants Man to stand or fall on his own, because that was why Gog gave Man the ability to confound Gog in the first place. Gog wanted to see what this new type of being he nurtured from the much and the ooze could accomplish.

So, how do you do that? Well, mostly you would think that you would stay out of the way, letting Man rise and fall on our own merits. But let's say that billions of years later Man has gotten himself into such a pickle that all of the great work that Gog did---a trillion years worth, perhaps---is about to be flushed down the galactic toilet when Man renders himself extinct. Maybe making Man in the first place was a real bitch, even for Gog, and Gog doesn't want to see all that work go to waste. Who the hell knows? This is Gog, so how could we know?

Maybe Gog just made a bet with a different God--say, the God of Lost, who we will call Gol--that Man would make it long term, and so Gog is cheating a little bit to make certain He beats Gol (who we will say is a She) out of the fifty billion galaxies they have riding on the bet.

So, for whatever reason, Gog decides Man is worth saving but only if Man is willing to meet Gog halfway. We can assume that Gog knows all the myriad outcomes of his various possible interventions, so he can easily set up markers and guides to help us along our way. But because Man is at least somewhat unpredictable to Gog (because Gog gave Man that power), maybe Gog sets up millions and millions of these markers, knowing that only a handful will be used depending on the path that Man ends up choosing to take. But since He's Gog, that is not a problem. Gog can set up an infinite amount of markers and guides should He choose to do so. He can use people, places, things, memories, dreams, visions, planets, stars, star clusters, galaxies, whatever-the-frak-he-pleases.

Starbuck the Angel-in-Training? Who is to say there weren't a hundred million potential Starbucks out there? Or a billion? Who is to say that Roslyn was the only candidate to be the dying leader? Perhaps there were many of those as well? This is Gog we are talking about. Just because the idea of how to do all of this baffles us, what does that matter? I'm just trying to set up a plausible reality where there is a Gog that can influence but still allow for free will while doing so.

Ok, don't worry, I'm getting somewhere.

So, yeah, Head Six could say exactly what Gog knows will cause Baltar to act exactly how Gog wants him to act, and there goes free will right out the air lock. But who says that is what Head Six did? Perhaps Gog had HS saying exactly what Gog knew would cause Baltar to merely walk the razor between the right action that saves humanity and the wrong one that dooms us? If Gog knows exactly what to say in order to get us to do exactly what he wants, thus negating free will, then obviously Gog knows exactly what to say to force us to make our own decision, thus ensuring free will shines through. Sure, Gog is lending a hand, but who is to say that hand was one that we had to accept? Gog may have been giving us that hand we needed while still allowing us to reject it if we choose to.

In other words, if Gog can force us to do what Gog wants, then Gog can obviously allow us to choose for ourselves if that is what Gog wants.

BSG never conclusively said that Gog made everything happen; it only conclusively said that Gog was involved and helping. Some people chose to believe that any divine intervention negates man's existence. Others believe that without diving intervention man is nothing. I tend to walk the middle, thinking that a little diving intervention is not necessarily a bad thing, and that little bit of it can go a long way and isn't necessarily cheating (unless you have a bet with Gol going on, in which case She is going to be mighty pissed if She finds out).

The song? The opera house? These weren't the most well thought out over-story points by the writers, but let's not blame Gog for the failures of Ronald D. Moore. And who is to say that these were not all things that Gog set up because he knew that IF we accepted his help, then we would eventually reach the moments where they would come in handy? And maybe there were many other songs and visions at the ready just in case one of the other (millions? billions?) of possible angels-in-training/leaders ended up surviving to the end. Who knows how many other people had lives and back stories that fit perfectly into any number of Gog scenarios but didn't survive the Fall or were never needed? Gog could have loaded the deck (again, where was Gol, and how come she wasn't watching that deck more closely??) long before the first person on Kobol discovered fire.

Anyway, just because Gog was whispering in Baltar's ear doesn't mean that what Gog was whispering was designed to force it all to Gog's preordained conclusion. It was Gog opening the door, while still leaving to us the decision as to whether or not we walk on through. Obviously, if we proved ourselves worthy along the way, Gog may decide to step up His involvement, deciding that being so close to the end merited a little extra help (thus Baltar gets his "proof" right at the end), but I still don't see how that negates free will.

Look, it's all retconning. I know that. And personally, I'm not that invested in it all, because BSG let me down that last year by not being as compelling and entertaining as the show I had loved up to that point. The show just wasn't that good all season long, but it didn't let me down because of the Gog business, and I think it is because I can wrap my head around the idea that Gog's desires and our free will can coexist if Gog decides to let them coexist. Gog may have been ready to cut bait at any time, letting humaninty go down the tubes of extinction and starting over from scratch, but that's a lot of work to let slip away without at least trying to help out a little bit wherever and whenever Gog felt it was appropriate.

Basically, there are a lot of reasons why BSG disappointed me in the final year, but that "God did it" wasn't one of them, because I do not believe Gog did do it, or at least not all of it. The existence of a God does not have to mean that Man is a puppet on a string. A puppet maybe, but I think the strings were probably cut long ago. Gog, or God (or even Gol--she who is most beautiful of all), can choose to get involved directly, indirectly, or anything in between. And it is not beyond the realm of possibility to believe that Gog also created a creature whose actions Gog could predict but not know for certain. Sort of like Man trying to predict where electrons will end up during a double slit experiment. We can chart the probability, but we can't know for certain.

Omniscience is a silly concept even for a God. But even if we accept that idea of God, that doesn't mean that every God in every piece of fiction has to be completely omniscient. And it also doesn't mean that there cannot be graded levels of knowledge that appear to be omniscience but are not. Sure, knowing something that MIGHT happen a million years in the future sure seems omniscient if it comes to pass, but we don't know that Gog hadn't planned for any number of other outcomes other than the one that played out on BSG. And just because this particular Gog could see what was probably coming down the road thousands or millions of years in the future also doesn't mean that Gog had covered every base forever and ever into infinity.

Look--I really don't think BSG's failures all boil down to the fact that God was involved (except to those people who cannot emotionally accept even the possibility of a God existing at all---Atheism is new Fundamentalism, people), but that the show itself just wasn't very good in the final season. I don't get involved with shows for mythology and over-story, but, rather, for characters and entertainment. BSG was wildly entertaining for three years, then not so much once it had to start attending to the mythology that the (occasionally) psychotic fans demanded be attended to. Just like Lost, BSG stopped being a show about a group of characters and their story (and stories), but instead became about putting all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together, which is almost always a dramatically inert exercise.

Sure, it could have been better. Much better. Sure, it suffered a lot, and they cut some corners, and some things turned out to be dead ends. But the idea that you can write an essay "proving" that God couldn't have done it, or that if God did do it then God had to do it this one certain way, which then negates all free will and character, is just silly. You don't know God anymore than I do. You have a concept based on the idea that an all powerful, all knowing God couldn't intervene without forcing everyone to do exactly what It wanted, but that just doesn't make any sense. An all powerful, all knowing God could do anything he or she wanted. They could force, or they could nudge, or they could abstain. Or they could do all three, depending on what God's mood was on that particular day, or whether or not God was out of coffee and in a cranky mood.

I don't believe, but I don't disbelieve. As Heinlein said, we'll all find out soon enough, so what's the rush to come to a decision? Denying without proof is no less ridiculous than believing without proof. And trashing a television show because you believe you know exactly how a God's actions would or would not affect man is no less ridiculous than either of those other alternatives.

It wasn't entertaining, fair enough. It wasn't entertaining to me for much of the final season, either (although a good part of the finale was very moving and far better than the handful of episodes that preceded it), but don't pretend that one story point about Gog was the only reason you are not happy with the show, because that just sounds childish and petulant.

And only Gods are allowed to be petulant children.

The knowledge per se isn't the problematic thing.

Chris M. — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 01:50:51 -0700

Consider the logic like this: for any being to have omniscient knowledge of the future, the future must be knowable. If future events are knowable, that means they are predetermined. And if future events are predetermined, then how can I possibly have any choice about what my future actions will be?

Thus it's not omniscience per se that precludes free will... it's the very possibility of omniscience, at least as something that transcends time. (And this is why the "God who chooses not to know" concept isn't an effective loophole, BTW.)

I'm acknowledging that in

Kamil — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 21:42:26 -0700

I'm acknowledging that in leaving my two cents, I obviously want to seem smart and curious. And my following response, though dismissive, is honestly asked. God is generally acknowledged to be omniscient and omnipotent. I would think that if God was just one of those things, it would be pretty easy to be the other. Thus the question: "If god whispers to you something that it omnisciently knows will make you turn right, are you an instrument or merely being influenced?”

really reduces to "Can a being that can do anything do the impossible ie two mutually exclusive things simultaneously like influencing and directing?"

Can someone who knows everything solve a paradox? Well if he knows everything, he should have the answer to any problem...but a paradox is a problem without a logical solution...but in knowing everything he would know how to circumvent causal relationships...but...

It's fun for a while, but it's been done before. How much time can we devote to (pardon the paradox) know the unknowable?

Thanks a lot!

Anonymous — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 15:05:18 -0700

Brad, thanks very much for the great reading and commentary on BSG over the past few years. It's been challenging, thought provoking and a lot of fun! I count myself as one who was also very dissappointed with the conclusion; but I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Cheers!

Grace

Anonymous — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 16:34:51 -0700

There is a comment in many religions that we are "saved by grace". Technically, ego gets in the way between the self and reality. There is little the broken clock can do to fix itself but by letting go, dropping all ego driven preconceptions and clinging, ones "Buddha nature" might emerge. This is being "saved by grace". God is not necessarily required and this principle can be tested in everyday situations so should keep atheists and scientists happy as well. I see no reason why this can't operate in the reverse direction with free will and omniscience.

"Understanding" and "solving" are merely perspectives. There is nothing to understand or solve. This is counter-intuitive to the ego which finds letting go of preconceptions and clinging very difficult. It wants to understand or more properly impose understanding, or solve or more properly bend the world to its liking. However, once one grasps this and stops being such an egotistical putz things get a little easier. Again, this is why Buddhism among other religions comment that the short cut is the long path. The reasoning is poetic but quite sound.

Not to be resolved here

brad — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 12:01:21 -0700

This debate won’t get resolved here. As for the “how come?” — the basic answer is that that people ask how, if god already knows that you will turn left at the end of the street, can you choose to turn right? Or is your future predetermined? Some see this as a conflict with their concept of free will, and some don’t. However, that’s not the subject of this article, which is “If god whispers to you something that it omnisciently knows will make you turn right, are you an instrument or merely being influenced?”

Ineffable

Anonymous — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 08:07:23 -0700

I find it remarkable that the thinkers behind the Tao grasped so many things. They understood that the substance of reality ran through everything, and that words were mere symbols wrapped around this unknowable reality. Plato had some insight into this as did more recent philosophers.

Some might consider any statement on these issues to be arrogant. Whether it's a priest or a scientist making proclomations based on less than certain understanding is a little hasty and almost always wrong. At best it's no more than a guess in the hope you get lucky.

One thing is sure: nobody knows anything. ;-)

Free will isn't determined by knowledge!

TJ — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 02:23:19 -0700

"Many religions struggle with the concept of a god that is so omniscient, it knows the future. This sometimes is described as being eternal, existing outside of time. The problem is the conflict between this, and free will. I find the two to be contradictory"

How come? Imagine a camera that, at any moment can go to any point in time (past or future point alike, doesn't matter) and go back to it's owner. Whatever happened or will happen is no secret to camera owner. However - where's his influence in the actions taken?

Knowledge doesn't influence anything (not in that way, at least). I know 2 times 2 gives 4, but in no way I determine what the outcome on that calculator will be. That's determined by something else entirely.

You are definitely right in

One-Note Pony — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 07:25:59 -0700

You are definitely right in that Yahweh was a less omniscient god; in the OT Yahweh is often like Greek gods in that he seems to need to have humans do his will, and goes around doing things like, well, wrestling with people, physically. But I disagree that my postulated god is not the Christians' god. Even many fundamentalist Christians effectively acknowledge that he is *not* omnipotent in their belief that he is limited by his own nature...that, for example, he cannot lie.

As for "demand[ing] it in order to not have slaves", that's exactly the point. God already has angels to do his will and sing his praises - humans must be meant for something else, and so there must be a possibility of failure.

This in no way takes away from your points that it's an awful lot of divine intervention for very little purpose, or that divine intervention is device indicating total narrative (and cognitive, IMHO) surrender. All I'm saying is that given a (literary or dramatic) god who can be omniscient and omnipotent and who actually cares about his creations, it is not impossible to imagine why he'd choose to move humans around the chessboard rather than either leave them to their own devices entirely (we've seen where that goes in the BSG universe) or simply bamf the world into his preferred configuration. The idea, I imagine, is that this way humans and Cylons would learn their lesson, though other narrative flaws in the story (as you have pointed out) actually demonstrate that this is not so.

Proof by Demonstration

Anonymous — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 03:28:13 -0700

Um, Brad. You need to look again at the Christian God, and check to see if you understand what wilfull blindness is.

Unless this is your way of proving the point to yourself...

Wilful blindness

brad — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:04:33 -0700

You could write the divine this way, though of course it is not the Christian’s god. It might actually be Yaweh, who seemed less omniscient, and was always asking questions and testing people.

However, my point is about an intervening god, who is talking to people. To make your approach work, the god would have to turn off his powers and then try to talk to people to influence them, risking failure in making them do his will. I suppose you could write a god that likes that risk, or demands it in order to not have slaves. But gods that need people to do their bidding always seemed strange to me.

This is a delicate argument

Anonymous — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:47:00 -0700

This is a delicate argument but there is some merit in "willfull blindness". One has to tease away gently at the nature of good versus evil, insight and balance, and so forth but there is some theological foundation for this in Christianity and other religions like Islam and Bhuddhism. The idea that knowing "God" is to know madness, and that the damned are forever cast from Gods eye have some salience here.

In part this is why I mentioned Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations'. The "invisible hand" is as much a part of stone cold no God required economics as it is religion. If myths of God and self-delusions are cast aside there's an underlying mechanism that "directs" and "influences" the "outcomes" we experience. On this the most celebtrated scholar and humble peasant are one. Nobody knows more than anyone else.

* For the purpose of discussion "God", god, or God are interchangeable. One may talk about a totally mechanical reality or conciously driven one. To all intents and purposes they're the same.

I've seen people leap on

Anonymous — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:37:04 -0700

I've seen people leap on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle as proof of "free will" but I've never been convinced of that. Also, like Einsten, I'm not persuaded that Quantum Physics is 'it'. Just because we can't penetrate hidden layers doesn't mean that one should derive a truth from that. Guessing would be more reliable.

Anglo-Saxon law and its derivitives make a big deal of responsibility. While one could argue the universe only came into existence five minutes ago or it was negligent potty training that did it that doesn't wash with courts of law. These defences have been tried but law informed in part by science has dismissed them.

Personally, I wouldn't want to lean too much one way or the other. Religion, science, and law are merely ideas. They have a certain direct and indirect usefullness but beyond that become absurd. Indeed, people can misunderstand religion, science, and law as things unto themselves or mess it up before we get very deep into it.

If one could peek into time there's probably a caveman sitting somewhere wishing he'd never started this God troll thing around the campfire. But people do say stupid things and bang on the most about things they know nothing about so, I suppose, the outcome was inevitable. Better luck next time around, eh?

A Way Out?

One-Note Pony — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:09:57 -0700

If you are going to have an interventionist god with omniscience or knowledge of the future, there can be no influencing or manipulation. The people manipulated by the god become instruments, not beings of free will. This is one of the reasons that having such a god as a character eliminates meaning from the actions of other characters.

I agree with this, but there is an "out" for somebody writing fiction with omniscient characters. I actually had to come up with something like this for a piece of fiction that I was trying to troubleshoot for the author, and which involved the unquestioned (in-universe) existence of the Judeo-Christian God. The out (or cheat) was this: an omniscient God recognizes that its omniscience destroys free will; so an *omnipotent* one can, if it cares to, choose to simply not know - to willfully blind itself. Maybe it wants human to have free will; maybe He just wants to be surprised; maybe the former is a means to the latter.

One could argue that an omniscient being not using its omniscience is not...well, omniscient. This point is strictly true, but not very sporting - or, in other words, an audience willing to read a story that presupposes God will probably give the author enough leeway to accept an explanation like this. BSG, unfortunately, proffered no explanation at all, and (as Brad points out elsewhere) does not unequivocally ESTABLISH the existence of God...er, Gog...in the world, so that when His Heavy Hand descends on every damn plot thread resolution in the finale, it is rightly regarded as cheating.

Can you be merely "influenced" by God?

brad — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 20:48:54 -0700

Discussion of yesterday’s mega-review of the ending of Battlestar Galactica included much focus on my negative view of the rule of a god as an intervening character in fiction. Many readers feel that the God of Galactica (Gog) did not so much control events as influence them. This suggests the following sidebar on religion:

Many religions struggle with the concept of a god that is so omniscient, it knows the future. This sometimes is described as being eternal, existing outside of time. The problem is the conflict between this, and free will. I find the two to be contradictory, especially when it comes to the concept found in many Christian sects that free will is most important with respect to your choice about whether to believe in god or not, or whether to be good or evil. The religions say you were created by god, who knew what choices you would make before creating you, but you are also punished for those choices. Even though, if asked, “can I choose another future than the one god knows I will choose, making him wrong?” they will say no.

However, the religious often do not see the same contradiction. We will not resolve this conflict here. I want to address the more direct question of a god who talks to people, and intervenes directly in the mortal world, as Gog does.

Gog appears in the minds of Baltar and many other characters. Gog also directly affects physical events, doing things like returning Starbuck in a new Viper.