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God's answer

A rhetorical question today: Do you also wonder (sometimes) if we are truly able to make our own life (successes and failures) or whether it has been pre-determined by God?

The age-old debate of predeterminism:
God must know everything - or else He is not omniscient.
If God knows everything, then my decision is already made.
Is life worth living if my success or failure is not as a result of my labour and initiative and creativity?

The answer lies in what the image to the right represents. It is an image of Pollock's paintings ("Convergence: Number 10, 1952" at The Albright-Knox Gallery). It is a fractal image. Just Google 'fractal pattern') and you will see tens of thousands examples.
Fractal image is an image of chaos. It illustrates one of the tenets chaos theory very clearly: At the level of the whole it appears chaotic; random swirls and lines. Look closer and you will see fine repeating patterns.

And Life is like that: For the individual in his or her own 'sworl' (swirl+ world = sworl, do you like it?) life appears to be pretty random. Shit happens. Sometimes it looks like thing go according to a plan, but then suddenly luck, fate or destiny seems to interfere and it is off on another tangent.

More people probably believe luck writes your success rather than choice. But the answer lies in the 'sworl' - there is pattern. The pattern is set by a very simple set of rules (see the 'Game of Life' reference in an earlier blog) - and life plays out in that pattern. When you are bouncing around in your sworl - making decisions that take you left, right, forward, sideways or wherever, that is all as a result of those decisions. God does not take that decision for you. But where your life bounces to as a result of that decision has been pre-determined.

On a micro level you have complete freedom to make the decisions and get suffer the consequences (good or bad). But ultimately the pattern of Life is written in the universal law of God.

The new-age gurus are very fond of claiming they have discovered 'the answer' and know the 'laws' which can be reduced to a 7-step program of course, or in teh case of The Secret, only 1 - but generally I am quite doubtful. But whether the answer is discovered or not is not material. Because chaos theory also dictates that 'everything is connected' and that the system is sensitive to initial conditions, it will be humanly impossible - EVER - to manage the system entirely in your favour. Shit still happens, because somewhere in your sworl, someone makes a decision that is their butterfly flapping its wings, but turns out to be the tornado in your backyard. To wit: the drunk who skipped the red traffic light...

And so life swirls on-and-on in patterns that people just can never fully understand.
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