Occasionally two events coincide and end up
cross-pollinating (or, if you prefer, cross-contaminating) each other in my
brain. Since this leads to subjects for posts other than me moaning about my
medical misadventures, I don’t really mind.
In this instance, those two things are a book and a board
game, but not in that order.
The board game is one we played last Monday, instead of our
regular roleplay session, and which I’d never played before. It’s Scotland
Yard, a game in which one person plays a criminal on the run in London, and
the rest of you play detectives trying to track them down and capture them.
Occasionally throughout the game, the criminal’s whereabouts are made known. From
that point onwards the detectives only have vague clues as to where the
criminal might be and in which direction they’re moving until they’re revealed
again several turns later. They win by working together to close in on where
they think the criminal is, trap them and capture them. If they fail to do this
in a set number of turns, the criminal wins.
The book is one I received for Christmas; Proofs of God
by Matthew Levering, which is a run-down of the arguments of various luminary
theologians and philosophers throughout history.
I’ve only just started reading it. I’m still on the
introduction, and I’ll admit that it’s rather denser than the usual popular
theologies I normally read. It’s one of those books in which the footnotes take
up more of the page than the actual text. Still, it looks like it’s going to be
very interesting.
As I’ve said, I’m only on the introduction so far, but Dr.
Levering is discussing the definition of
‘proof’, and whether or not it is indeed possible to demonstrate the existence
of God using reason alone. Reading this, it made me wonder how God views our
fumbling attempts to prove His existence, and whether He finds it amusing. In His
place I certainly would.
This led me onto thinking about our game of Scotland Yard.
My wife ended up playing the criminal (which she did exceedingly well), and I
remembered her look of amusement as the three of us who were playing the
detectives squinted at the board, saying things like ‘Right, so she was here
two turns ago, so she must have gone here, and then here or here. But going
there wouldn’t make sense, so she must be here.’
Then, a turn later her location would be revealed, and it
would turn out that she’d slipped through our supposedly impenetrable logic and
was actually on almost the opposite side of the board, miles away from our
pieces.
Scotland Yard starts not only with the existence of the
criminal known, but the initial location too. Most theologians would argue that
the existence of God is similarly known; it’s just the details that are
unclear. Of course, a great many people would dispute even the existence of
God, something which would make Scotland Yard a much more difficult and more
philosophical game than the designers obviously intended.
Possibly a theological version could be made, in which the
criminal is replaced by The Truth of God, and the public transport tickets the
detectives (aka theologians) have to use as clues are replaced by various
theological and philosophical schools. However the game would have to be based
on the premise that God wishes to hide His nature from humankind, rather than
it merely being incomprehensible to mortal minds.
Instead, we’re informed that God wishes to be known to all people.
‘Why then,’ we’re sometimes asked, ‘doesn’t He just reveal Himself and make
everything clear, instead of providing only occasional revelations and leaving
us to grope around as best we can with feeble theologies and philosophies and
barely-educated guesses?’
A good question. To some extent, I guess it’s about free
will. After all, if everyone knew that God definitely existed, and if we knew
the exact arrangements for the afterlife, the universe and everything, it would
rather skew people’s behaviour. Psychological experiments only really work if
the experimentee doesn’t realise it’s happening. I’m not suggesting that
existence is any kind of experiment on God’s part, but presumably he’d prefer
our reactions to be honest rather than forced.
Obviously, for many of us our behaviour is already strongly
influenced by what we think God wants, but the element of uncertainty, of
Faith, keeps us guessing, keeps us searching, keeps us refining what we believe
God is and what we believe God wants. I think that when that search stops and a
faith ossifies, something extremely important is lost, and cultural constructs
from ages and societies long gone exert an undue amount of influence. Not, I
hasten to add, that they can be automatically rejected simply because of their
age or cultural provenance; I’m no chronological snob. However, they mustn’t be
automatically accepted either, simply because they are now ‘tradition’.
We don’t know the answers, but perhaps it is the search and
the attempt that is important, rather than the answer itself. God wishes all to
come to Him, not to inflict himself on all people. As Christians, it is our
journey that defines us, not just our destination.
And for the record, my wife won the game. We never did
manage to track her down.
