LAST EDITED ON 02-22-10 AT 08:19 AM (EST)

Speak of the devil - I used to teach Paradise Lost. There's a great deal of discussion about free will. In Milton's poem, the concept of free will has nothing to do really with humans being free to do what they want.

The issue is, will Man love, worship, and obey God of Man's free will? God being all-powerful, he can make Man obey. He could find Satan. He could prevent the temptation and fall. He could appear and scare the crap out of Eve as she's raising that apple to her lips. But he doesn't. All he does is tell them the rules in advance, and show them the gifts that are theirs if they obey.

What is more, because God sees everything that is predestined, he KNOWS they will Fall. There is no question that Eve and Adam will resist breaking the prohibition and will seek to gain higher knowledge than they have been allotted, and that God will have to drive them out of Eden, and so forth.

Ultimately, free will turns out to be nothing other than making decisions and acting without foreknowledge but in a universe where there is a power that knows what is predestined. Free will does not change how it all evolves, or how it ends, because the results of free will are predictable - by an omniscient being.

God wants Man to obey, love and worship him willingly, without coercion, because coerced obedience is not satisfying, but at the same time people who read the story can't help but get irritated with the God character because he doesn't stop the Fall. He sends a warning messenger, but the messenger doesn't stop anything either. Rather he explains the danger and warns of the consequences.

You might say that God involves Man in a very long con. God has a plan. After Man has suffered for many generations, God's Son will go down and redeem everyone, and that will make up for everything, but not quite, will it, because a) there will have been suffering, plague, pestilence, famine, war, etc., and b) God's Son has to make a tremendous sacrifice.

So this raises some difficult questions that could relate to LOST. If you can see things going down a bad road, why not change it? God created human beings, so why did he create them so weak that they would stray and fall? Is God sadistic? Cruel? Supposedly not. The process of failure, repentance, and redemption ultimately makes for a richer existence, creation, than simply creating a perfect world that is perfect because none of God's creations are able to rebel or disobey.

Something to think about.

Some more concepts. In the Greek world of Gods, there was Fate, but not Destiny. Man was just a toy of the gods. Fate was inescapable. That was Greek tragedy. You could be good and still suffer a bad Fate. But then came the concept of Providence, the concept that a higher Power guides you to a destiny.

In a world of Fate, your ship crashes on a desert island. That's your Fate. The End, as Desmond would say. But in-between getting smacked around by Fate, you make choices and decisions and pursue your desires.

In a world of Providence and destiny, you crash on that island for a reason, and the hand of Providence silently guides you to make the right decisions, if you pray for guidance, and then you fulfill your purpose. You may have to make sacrifices. You have to put aside your desires in deference to the higher purpose. But what is Providence? Is it a force working to save you or a force pushing you in a direction for some "higher good"?

The man of Faith believes in Providence. Is that the part Jacob plays? Is it a long con?

One reason I'm bringing up this idea of Providence, is that the idea really took hold around the 2nd and 3rd centuries in Egypt, in the mystery religions, the cults of Isis. And the early Christians were in Egypt as well, Coptics, Gnostics, and other sects, and there was a lot of cross-fertilization. Just something I've been thinking about since they started with the Egyptian symbolism. The Coptic Cross, or Egyptian cross, is a derivative of the ankh, the symbol that was in Charlie's guitar case. Not that I think Damon and Carlton are really into the ancient mysteries.