My theory is not that God is constantly micromanaging the laws of physics, but that, first of all, he selected, out of all the laws of physics that are possibilities in any possible universe, that one set of laws that most ideally fit the plan he had for this world, and then he didn’t have to do anything extra to create the laws and create the infrastructure to make the laws work; the desired laws were the actual laws merely by virtue of being the only potential left when all other possibilities were eliminated. Why are the laws laws? Why are they consistent across the universe? Scientists describe the laws emerging from fields or from superstrings, but those things (if they exist) exist at a level far below the entire concepts of matter and energy and space and even time perhaps. What actually exists at that level? Could it actually be defined by the will of God, and not just more physical, material realities, like turtles all the way down?
Actually, I have studied Hebrew. Yes, God speaks creation into existence. But what does that actually mean? Did he utter sound waves from his mouth? Jesus is described as the Word, but he is not a five-letter word or any spoken word. A word, from God’s perspective, means the expression of God’s will in any way that makes his will perceivable, explicit, knowable, and known. Jesus is God’s will and God himself embodied in the flesh. He is the Word because he is the means by which God makes himself known, revealing everything that God is and everything he desires and everything he shares with us. So, in the beginning, God spoke; he made his will singular and real, and I’m just suggesting he did it by subtraction of all the possibilities that did not match his purposes and plans, rather than by addition of something invented ad hoc.
When Adam and Eve ate from the tree, God said they would become like God, knowing good and evil. If being like God means knowing both good and evil, then God knows both good and evil. How could that dichotomy be a bad thing? Adam and Eve already knew good, didn’t they? They were created perfect, in complete alignment with the will of God. What changed? Some have suggested that what they gained at the tree was an experiential knowledge of evil to go along with their previous knowledge of only good things, but that would hardly make them like God. I believe the word “knowledge” in this case expresses more than just knowing, but an authoritative determination of good and evil. What they gained was nothing but the attitude of self-appointed judges, deciding what is good and what is evil based on their own opinions. (Eve looked at the tree and decided that in her own judgment it was good for food and desirable for gaining wisdom, so she ate). Eating the fruit didn’t magically change them and give them something new as if it was a vitamin or poison within the fruit; the act of eating was itself the self-appointed determination of good and evil. They became like God, making judgments that some things are good and some are evil; but they did not make those judgments from the same divine storehouse of infinite, perfect wisdom and understanding that God has, and that is why man is perishing.
My theory could also have something to say to the conundrum of sin entering a world in which God's will is sovereign. If God is sovereign, is he responsible for sin? Why did he create the tree if he knew Adam and Eve would eat the fruit and bring evil into God's perfect world and ruin everything? Why does God allow evil and suffering to exist and bad things to happen to good people? Perhaps all these things stem from pockets where God allowed some dominoes to remain standing and in play, where we, if we were God, think we wouldn't have. But then God is not the cause of that evil; he simply did not rule it out. And he didn't rule it out because a) he desired to give us the freedom to serve him as children, not as robots or slaves (and giving children freedom sometimes means letting them make mistakes and sometimes suffer the consequences of their mistakes), and b) because it did not, in fact, ruin everything, but set the world on a course which, in the end, will be all the more to God's glory and praise for having saved us by grace.
Chaos theory reveals that we can never nail down the universe to one fated future, pre-ordained by all that came before. That’s simply a bigger example of what I was describing at the quantum level. It leaves huge swaths of the future course of creation within the realm of multiple potentialities, and God can choose from those possible courses the one that best serves his purposes, and in this way he is intervening in history, but without the need for a single miraculous contravention of the laws of nature. And he declares the end from the beginning, he makes all these choices from his position outside of time, which actually makes it so much easier. Why? Because if he was intervening in history from within history, every time he might use a miracle to change the course of my life, he would have to rethink and replan the whole future course of my life and of all subsequent history to account for everything that’s going to change. But if he works outside of time, then, in a logical sense, all of his interventions throughout all of history are planned out simultaneously (so to speak), and if he does it by subtraction of potentialities that don’t match his will rather than addition of something new, then all subsequent history does not need to be rewritten; it just gets chosen from a reduced set of potentialities.
