Why You Should Trust in God Even After Adversity

In this article I won’t ask you to believe in God. That is fundamental to the whole argument but either you do or you don’t. Now if you do, you can conceive partially in your mind the awesome Computing Power of something infinitely infinite. Something so far beyond our comprehension that it just beggars belief ve. There is an unbridgeable chasm between finitude and infinity, which allows God to do anything he wants in a finite reality.

So this article asks you to comprehend the rational, intellectual aspect of the Godhead. Now given this infinity of comprehension, you must know and take to heart that God foresees everything even including actions taken by a free-will agent like a human.

Imagine Jack Doe on a soccer field with a ball, placed directly in the field’s centre. Which way will Jack Doe kick? For simplicity’s sake, I will assume he can only kick the ball on the floor. Now according to finite mathematics ( a redundant term since mathematics concerns itself with definitions and limitations) Jack has 360 possibilities of kicking this ball, because of the degrees of a circle. Even if we account for the mismatch between reality and perfect geometry, allowing for a deviation of 1/4 degrees, we would only have 1440 possibilities of kicking the ball. A simple Casio calculator or just a relatively arithmetical student such as myself could calculate this in a few seconds.

We are still left in the problem of potentiality and actuality, which has no solution in normal mathematics. While I may know all the various ways in which the ball may be kicked, I can never say this and this will happen at any given time Jack decides to kick.

Now let us turn up the dial and imagine ourselves as God. God is not only above space and time, allowing him to calculate ad infinitum within a split second( actually less, no time at all) but also omniscient. He knows every single thing about Jack from his birth to his death: he knows what he ate, how he plays soccer, how the entire universe around him is acting on him at the same time and vice versa. Therefore God can predict everything, even free-will.

This brings us to another point of free-will: free will is not random but deterministic although there are so many variables that it is mind boggling.

What can we compare this to? To a man who loves spaghetti, and is offered the choice between spaghetti and steak. He has free-will but he will always choose the spaghetti because of his preference for it. Unless he decides one day he is sick of spaghetti, but which God already foresaw.

With Gods infinite processing power and the rationally determinable actions of free-will agents, we can finally state an axiom. The good as well as the evil comes from God although he uses different actors as his instruments.

If a man kills someone, God has allowed that man to do so because he wants two things to happen. First he wants the murderer to experience what it is like to murder and the consequences (or not) to his actions. Second he wants the murdered man to be dead. Now we can’t understand exactly why, but the outcome is definitive and tells us that God is doing something here. This is true for every single microscopic detail of the universe, that whether we know it or not there is a telos to every thing, or as the Jewish sages and others before them put it, only the Lord knows which way a leaf will blow.

We must come to the understanding that God allows evil experiences for a multiplicity of reasons which often look very very bad for the person experiencing them, and which might not make sense in the course of one lifetime as opposed to the perspective of eternity.

And only if we trust in His infinite wisdom, yes trust since we cannot rationally comprehend His wisdom, can we accept that bad experiences happen for good reasons.

And if you can learn to overcome your own personal tragedy, since we all have it, you will have learnt one of the many lessons God is trying to teach you.