Cause and Effect

I really started thinking about the concept of God my first year at Wheaton, around 1996. It was a philosophy course that really started me thinking about it (I failed the course but that's another story). The concept is hard to get your head around until you start thinking about it differently, outside the box, then everything clicks into place. Unfortunately, to reach that step you either have to do some complicated mental gymnastics or bypass it entirely. I had to do it the hard way, which caused something of a mental meltdown that I wouldn't wish on anyone.

Most people don't think about God very much, which is probably the best way to go if you want to stay healthy. Even those who claim to pray "without ceasing" like the Bible says don't really take the time to think about it. I have a problem, though: I think too much. Ever since I was a kid I wanted to know how things work. The universe is just another machine, another problem, another puzzle to be solved.

Any physicist will tell you that the universe we live in is a mechanistic one. Everything that happens, happens for a reason, effect follows cause, nothing is random, etc, etc. (I'm not going to get into the "spooky" things that happen at subatomic scales. Maybe I'll blog about it later. Moving on.) Where most people go wrong lies in the reversing of cause and effect which is only possible when you predict the future.

You and I are constantly making predictions about the future. We don't realize it because most of the time it happens automatically. Suppose you're a baseball player, an outfielder, and the opposing team's hitter hits a long fly ball to center field. A good outfielder will analyze the ball's trajectory and run to the exact spot he needs to be to catch the ball without even realizing he's made a prediction about the future. Let's do an interview with our imaginary outfielder:
Me: What caused you to run to Center Field?
OF: That was where the ball was going to be.
Me: So the ball's future position caused you to change your own?
OF: Exactly.
Of course, the whole story is a bit more complicated. It involves photons bouncing off objects and striking the retina which produces a series of electronic signals which are processed by the human brain which, based on experience, makes a prediction of where the ball is going to be. If the outfielder was less experienced, his predictions might be wrong. In any case, because of our intelligent brains, you and I are able to add a third stop on our cause-and-effect run around the bases: a goal.

So the sequence now runs: Cause-Effect-Goal. We, as intelligent beings who can predict the future, are capable of setting a goal and adjusting cause and effect in order to meet the goal. The outfielder can adjust his stride to run faster and in different directions. So even though Goal comes last in the sequence it actually gets evaluated first in the mind.

We humans are biased. We tend give human attributes to things around us because that's how we think. Even inanimate objects are not immune. If my car is unable to start one morning when it's too cold, I say "it doesn't want to start," as if it were a person or animal capable of having a goal. So here's the real question: does the universe have a goal, or are we humans assuming it has one because that's how we think?