Animal instinct in the natural living world does not possess…does not exhibit…timeless foresight.
The reality of life is experienced in-the-moment…for absolutely every living organism…including humans.
A leopard on the African savanna plains…resting comfortably in the noonday shade…hidden up underneath the canopy inside a large tree…cannot thoughtfully plan several hours ahead-in-time until the evening sunset at 8 o’clock…when the leopard knows through timeless foresight that its unsuspecting prey a gazelle will conveniently stop to graze directly below this tree…because a leopard does not possess timeless foresight.
Within the program of natural instinct…constrained and channeled into the narrow, forward march of time…the leopard hunts its prey in-the-moment.
Hypothetically, human beings possessing timeless foresight combined with the knowledge of good and evil…yet lacking a third component of absolute moral goodness…would potentially be perfectly successful criminals in being able to plan perfect robberies…except for the police who would also possess the timeless foresight to be able to anticipate the robbery and take perfect steps to prevent it…when the future moment in time came.
If humans possessed timeless foresight…of knowing in advance future outcomes…then gambling in casinos or at race tracks, entering into a lawsuit against another person, and reading a murder mystery book or a romance novel…would no longer have purpose and meaning…because the outcomes…the endings…would already be known ahead of time.
Lack of timeless foresight is one reason why we like reading murder mystery books, spy thrillers, and romance novels…because we do not know the outcomes…unless we cheat, turn the pages to the end of the book, and take a sneak-peek at the story ending…which I confess I have done sometimes…when the story is so suspenseful I cannot wait to see how it will end.
Motion pictures capture our attention for two hours in the movie theater because they condense the events of a larger story like The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars…down into a two-hour long feature film…reducing the story down to as short a time-period as we can achieve yet still tell the full story…a two-hour movie typically being as close to zero-duration timeless foresight as we can go.
We have to watch the entire movie from start-to-finish…for two hours…because we do not possess timeless foresight to be able to take-in the whole movie in a split-second flash of time.
The same thing occurs in reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace over a three-week period. The interest is generated…is artistically created by the book writer…based upon the absolute certainty of the absence of timeless foresight of the book reader…as long as the book is read from front to back without skipping ahead.
Two things here we know for sure…that human beings do not possess divine timeless foresight…and that we do not possess absolute moral goodness.
All three complimentary components…the knowledge of good and evil, timeless foresight, and absolute goodness…must be in-place and functioning simultaneously for free-will, thinking life-forms like human beings to have lives that operate at the highest optimum level of perfection.
The knowledge of good and evil…if only timeless foresight is added to the mix…without the third component of absolute goodness…creates a nightmarish reality of competing plural foresights good and evil…in an exponentially broadened cat-and-mouse scope of interacting outcomes…having a complexity well beyond the cause/effect stability experienced in our current one-dimensional time trajectory.
But absolute goodness without the independence of free-will choice inherent within the knowledge of good and evil…not having the capacity to freely choose between the broad arrays of moral concepts…would produce the equally undesirable reality of human beings that are mere robots…rather than free-will agents capable of the higher attributes like experiencing love, friendship, honor, integrity, courage, joy, and happiness.
The third possible option of having timeless foresight alone…without the knowledge of good and evil…and without absolute moral goodness…would be a bizarre reality that is unimaginable.
Yet curiously, human beings do clearly possess one of the legs of the three-legged stool…the knowledge of good and evil…without possessing either timeless foresight or absolute moral goodness.
From the standpoint of illuminating the real truth about God…this indisputable fact that humans have the knowledge of good and evil…eliminates the atheistic philosophy of naturalistic materialism from consideration as a plausible explanation for this reality…because of the unanswerable question of how and why a material causation alone could produce the incredible human possession of the knowledge of good and evil…without also including the minimum two additional required components of timeless foresight and absolute moral goodness…as complimentary to the knowledge of good and evil?
Of equal power as an exclusionary argument that eliminates naturalistic materialism from consideration as the sole fundamental cause behind the natural world…is the extremely fine-tuned moderation of time narrowly advancing in a one-dimensional direction forward…yet lacking the all-important timeless foresight of invaluable worth…a reality of thoughtfully planned moderation that has brilliant intelligent design written all over it.
The Cross in the Christian Life 