Perfection

Over the weekend Brad, the Unrepentant Individual, wrote and article, Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick Two”. He went on a philosophical binge, reminiscent of “proofing” a mathematical situation in geometry or physics. I was never all that good in geometry; I passed and appreciate the disciplines gained through logic. Here is the “equation”, for lack of a better name, that Brad has placed “out there” as he attempts to reconcile God, the Plan of Salvation, and the quest to understand it all:

“ 1. God is omniscient.
2. Being omniscient, God knows the past, the present, the future, and everything in between.
3. Since an omniscient being cannot be wrong, God’s knowledge of the past, present and future cannot be changed.
4. Therefore, human free will is not truly free, because human choices were foreseen by God.
5. God, as a supreme being, created the world in which we live.
6. Since God is omniscient, God created this world with the foreknowledge that evil beings would exist, and who they would be.
7. From 3, 4 & 6, therefore evil people have not freely chosen evil.
8. A perfectly good being would not sentence his own non-free creations to eternal damnation.
9. God is perfectly good.
10. Therefore, God does not send his creations to hell.”

I threw in my “2 cent” version of a comment and then went back to something I wrote in a journal some time back. I do not claim to have the solution to the holes in Brad’s equation other than to disassemble some of the “hard edges” created by the use of words.
The fact is that language has been and always will be a stumbling block when attempting to communicate thoughts. Rather than try to “prove” out a formula, one that cannot be proven, I would prefer to offer “possibilities” that expand understanding. Here is what I wrote in my journal. The section had to do with Perfection:

“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in Heaven”; from the Gospel according to Matthew. We are His children and therefore we are heirs to all that He has, to include becoming perfect. It does not say that we will do it before we die; but it is a commandment and therefore expected. We will achieve according to our willingness to become like Him.


Perfect; at least one of a couple of words that would include; time, infinity and eternity, that we use quite often and yet have a limited understanding of their actual meaning. Some mathematicians have explored time as a dimension, making an educated guess, postulating theories as to the properties of that which we call time. It is a proven fact that time is relative. We take for granted that intervals of time, hours minutes and seconds are all constant forms of measure. This has been proven not to be true. While we may measure time in this manner and be relatively certain that everyone else on Earth has been or is being measured with the same time; it does not take into consideration that time slows down as speed increases. An astronaut traveling at orbital speed around the Earth measures time in hours, minutes and seconds; however there will be a measurable difference between the calibrated spans of time. The astronaut will be younger than everyone else because his time is not going by as quickly. Science fiction writers have had numerous opportunities to examine the possibilities of time as a flexible unit; rather than a finite property.

Time Travel ( this was inserted as a tangent while going over my own thoughts )

I have been a big fan of time travel movies and books for a very long time. I have enjoyed lots of movies, The Time Machine, Time After Time, Altered States and many others. I left out, Kate and Leopold, some of the “Outer Limits” short Sci-fi romps. I like one in particular where a woman decides to “fix” things. Our hero’s friend is murdered, the suspect is found guilty and sentenced to die. The hero uses a time machine to go back and execute the suspect before he commits that crime for which he has already been condemned to die. Justice is served, maybe out of order; however, in this way the victim didn’t have to die and only the bad guy is killed. The only one who is really affected is the “hero” who now has to live with the knowledge of both the pre and the post crime events. Tom Cruise was in a similar twist on the same general idea recently, Minority Report, where the police have a Pre-Crime Unit to take suspects out before they actually commit the crime. I also can appreciate the effort in the movie, Twelve Monkeys, with Bruce Willis as a time tripping hero/victim. This afternoon I was watching one of those kinds of movies, Peggy Sue Got Married. The movie is not a “two thumbs up movie”; all the same, it had something that was interesting. Without going over the entire movie, Peggy Sue faints and when she wakes up, instead of being in 1985 at her high school reunion she is back in 1960. The scene that caught my attention was in the library where she asks the school nerd about time travel. His answer was, “time is like a big burrito” as he went on to explain how the edges may touch in places; no, we didn’t go out for dinner at Taco Bell after the movie.

Time travel may be possible forward or backward. I had the idea that we experience time in moments. Most of these are seemingly unending chains of moments and we might draw a conclusion that time is measured by a never ending chain of moments. What if time is only the sum of moments, not necessarily the sum of an unbroken chain of moments. There could be chains of normal mode moments that we understand as natural and there could also be small chains mixed within those longer chains where we were not sure about reality. If this is so then we could actually go forward or backwards and pop into a section of moments that were not entirely enmeshed with each other. We could have a brief experience that we would know to be out of sequence with all those other moments and be cognizant of it; as a vision or as a dream, a vague memory loss that we snap out of and wonder where those moments were spent.

It would make the visions of prophets easier to accept as factual accounts. The moments spent in one chain would, out of necessity, remove him from the natural chain of moments. He would feel as if he had been in a dream, transported to observe or even participate in another reality. His own time chain, though broken and put back together would still add up to one mortal lifetime. He could experience a slice of time from various other time periods and not be removed from the human condition of ageing.

And you thought…never mind what you thought. This is what I am about and it’s not as crazy as all that.

(you may now return to the rest of my meanderings on Perfection)

Perfection has given the human comprehension of a God like attribute similar finite parameters. We have assigned the word perfect to mean something which it is not, nor could it ever be, finite. Somehow, since God is perfect, we have taken that to mean all knowing; which is a state that cannot yet, or ever be. This is not blasphemy; but an acceptance of the laws of logic. To know all things may not be possible; that is, to experience all. I will explain. We believe in the concept of eternal progression and there can be no end to progression, not in our current human form or in our perfected bodies which will take us through the eternities. To be constantly improving from one moment to the next, even though the concept of “next” is a time based finite principle, we are left with only that which we can comprehend at this time to explain the difference from one state of perfection to another.

I may have experienced a phenomenon, such as a sunset. It could be said that I have a perfect knowledge of how sunsets occur, or even that I have a perfect knowledge of that particular sunset; which would be stretching, as I would not have seen it from the vantage point of others who had experienced the same sunset or how it affected them emotionally as it may have triggered other memories. To fully experience any phenomenon would require the art of communication, a means of debriefing each other to relate not only what was taken in through the senses; but to also share what feelings were aroused, what emotions were triggered because of that moment. I have a picture hanging on my wall that Lucy and I took of Acapulco Bay at sunset. That requires quite a bit of other information to distinguish it from the one we saw while shopping here in Houston last week; however, when I think about those two events they can easily be distinguished. To complete the experience, it must be shared with everyone else and therein lays the issue of knowing at one level and then covering all the other levels of knowledge which can only be gained from someone else and their perception as input. If this were not so then why bother? “Whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto in this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection. And if a person gains more knowledge and intelligence in this life through his diligence and obedience than another, he will have so much the advantage in the world to come.” Doctrine and Covenants section 130 verses 18 and 19.

We have said that God is perfect and by so doing have expected that there is nothing left for God to experience. I feel we would be limiting God’s desire to debrief each and every one of us on the experiences provided for us as his children. It will take eternity, another of those words we cannot quite grasp, to understand and take in those limitless words; time, perfection and, yes, eternity.