RE: [asa] The Fall (humanity source of suffering)

Related to time:

I was contemplating some fiction writing, and learned that in a plot,
you can make whatever thesis you want. For example, your story (thesis)
could be:

1. Being a drunkard leads to a happy and fulfilling life.
2. Being a drunkard destroys your life, those around you, and
eventually the whole world.

You choose the characters, their surrounding, etc. You are God, for
that story. Once you write the book, it is done and published. There
were so many different possible outcomes, but so what, you chose one.

The same with life. Anything could happen (holocaust, no holocaust,
etc.). The point is, something happened, and everything else happened
based on it. Likely if some of these big events happened differently,
none of us would be here. I think in one sex act alone, there are
something like 300 million sperm racing for the egg. Do history all
over again, and a different sperm would win, meaning a different person
would be born and different outcomes based on their personality. But if
history were re-done, your ancestors would probably even have sex with
different people at different times (choosing different partners because
of different events where they meet).

Bottom line- so many things could have happened, but only one thing did
happen. It is all so specific, in hindsight. We could have taken so
many different roads and paths, but looking back, we took a specific
one, which could never be re-traced if we start over again from a point
in the past.

...Bernie

________________________________

From: David Opderbeck [mailto:dopderbeck@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2008 10:56 AM
To: j burg
Cc: Dehler, Bernie; asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Re: [asa] The Fall (humanity source of suffering)

How about if, instead of "undoing" the past, the new heavens and the new
earth are a sort of parallel universe or different "brane" in which
those events never happened? And how about if the present universe we
inhabit is a sort of parellel universe or different brane than the one
first inhabited by "Adam?" What if the "flood" was a collision of
branes and the "heavens rolling up like a scroll" at the return of
Christ is another collision of branes? Well, old Bill Ockham can have a
field day with his razor, anyway. (BTW, I hereby claim copyright so
that I can publish my planned Christian science fiction series, "Prolept
Ahead").

On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 12:55 PM, j burg <hossradbourne@gmail.com>
wrote:

On 6/19/08, Dehler, Bernie <bernie.dehler@intel.com> wrote:
> Un-doing the holocaust would also undo all the relationships after
that-
> who married who and which people were born. Everything is connected
in
> a intricate web.

Of course. That's an elementary sci-fi concept. But God IS omnipotent,
isn't He?

It now appears that time travel (into the past) is theoretically
possible. Questions of "shooting one's grandfather" and causality in
general are receiving serious consideration in the physics literature.

Human imagination is capable of pastward time travel. How much greater
must be God's imagination. And capability.

j

jb

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-- 
David W. Opderbeck
Associate Professor of Law
Seton Hall University Law School
Gibbons Institute of Law, Science & Technology 
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