The Oracle

Ok, so The Matrix Reloaded isn't specifically music (although there is a lot of cool music in it), but the movie is on my iPod, so talking about it counts in this blog.

There's an interesting scene where Neo is talking to the Oracle in the park. They bring up an interesting spiritual concept. The Oracle offers Neo a piece of candy, and the following ensues:

Oracle: "Candy?"
Neo: "Do you already know if I'm going to take it?"
Oracle: "Wouldn't be much of an Oracle if I didn't."
Neo: "But if you already know, how can I make a choice?"
Oracle: "Because you didn't come here to make the choice. You've already made it. You're here to try to understand why you made it.... I thought you'd have figured that out by now."

This same discussion can be heard when people talk about God. If God already knows what's going to happen, then how is it we have free will and choice? Isn't everything already pre-destined?

The problem with this discussion is that people argue it from a human standpoint, totally mis-understanding God. I'm not saying I totally understand God, but I think I kind of get this weird space-time continuum thing.

You see, God is not constrained by space and time, like we are. He is outside of space, time and the laws of physics. One way it was explained to me that helped me to understand it is, imagine that history is drawn on a timeline, from the beginning to the end on a whiteboard. Sorta like this image, imagine the line in the middle represents all of history, from beginning to end: Now, imagine that instead of the borders that you see around that line, there are no borders, and the surface the line is drawn on goes for eternity in all directions. Since you are not bound by the line or the surface it is on, you are able to look at that entire line at once. You can even look only at specific sections of that line if you want. If this was a 3-dimentional example, you could even rotate the line and look at it from other angles and see the back side.

That, in simple terms, is how God is compared to what we call space and time. He is outside of it, therefore He can see all of it at once. He knows what's going to happen. His foreknowledge of events does not eliminate the fact that we still make choices. He simply is able to see the whole thing at the same time.