Science Helps Us Understand "Free-will"

First, we have to pin down the concept of free will. Because God LOVES His creation, most especially human beings, He gave all human beings FREE WILL. He didn’t want us to be His “toys”, because toys are mere objects. Instead, He created us to be children in His Family. He wants to interact with us and have a dynamic relationship with us. The way He did this was to bestow upon us individual sovereignty – or free will. We can choose. We can, through our decisions and actions, alter the timeline. In fact, every decision and action we take does just that. As we travel through linear time, we are constantly shaping and directing how the timeline unfolds.

Now a little recreational physics. I have always LOVED physics. In Steven Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”, one of the concepts that Hawking explained was the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. In a nutshell, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that we can never know the exact position AND velocity of any particle, because in order to observe a particle, you have to bounce a photon off of it – which then alters its position and velocity. Now, you might think that is no big deal, but it is a HUGE deal. You’re just going to have to take my word for this for the moment, but what this means is that when a particle travels from point A to point B, it traverses EVERY POSSIBLE PATH SIMULTANEOUSLY. I’m not kidding. This is experimentally proven.

What does this have to do with God and free will? God in His omniscience knows and sees not only the Real Timeline, which is the result of all of our individual decisions, but he also knows and sees all of the “Heisenberg Timelines” which are constantly and infinitely shooting and branching off from the Real Timeline. In other words, the Heisenberg Timelines are the timelines that WOULD have happened IF we had made a different choice. When we say that God is INFINITE and ALL-KNOWING, we really don’t comprehend the real scope of what we are saying. Infinite means infinite – not limited in any way. Hence, the infinite number of Heisenberg Timelines fit very easily into that set.

What God does is constantly reset His Perfect Will after every decision every person makes. He always has a clearly defined Will, which is always for the perfect good, given the timeline up to that point. Let’s say that right now in this moment His will is for Lou to do action Y, which is in accord with His Perfect Will, but I instead choose to do action Z. After I choose and execute action Z, He adjusts His Perfect Will to a new set given action Z. If action Z was a sin, His new Perfect Will now includes that I confess and repent of that sin, but the timeline continues given the reality of Action Z, which I freely chose. If I choose action Y, no adjustment is made on His part, because I have acted in accordance with His Perfect Will, and the timeline likewise continues. I cannot emphasize enough the infinite love, patience and condescension we are talking about here. There just aren’t words.

So what we see is that God is in an unending Heisenberg dance of love manifested in freedom with all of us. His Will is always for perfect good, but in His love for us, He allows us to act freely, and then in His Mercy, He resets the Heisenberg timeline according to our choices. He allows us to, in a sense, cooperate with Him in authoring reality. This is why wonderful things tend to come out of bad situations. Think of all of the husbands and wives who have met and fallen in love . . . because of a war. How many times have you heard a person recall a terrible childhood, or a terrible accident, and then say, “. . . .but I wouldn’t change a thing.” Now you know why. Does God ever enter into the timeline and “nudge” events? Oh, yes. Many times these “nudges” are barely perceptible and exist almost entirely within the conscious or sub-conscious mind. But He does also on occasion physically enter into spacetime to nudge the timeline, and those instances are called “miracles”.

And yes, He is managing to do all this while driving billions and billions of fusion reactions per second in those many stars around us. What a God!!