Timeless Foresight Needs Explaining 1

            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.

            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.

            One problem here is that the police 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 the timeless foresight of knowing in advance future outcomes, then gambling in casinos or at race tracks, entering into a civil lawsuit against another person, and reading a murder mystery book or a romance novel would no longer have purpose and meaning. 

            This is because the outcomes, the endings, would already be known ahead of time in advance.

            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.

            But we can cheat, turn the pages to the end of the book, and take a sneak-peek at the story ending.  I confess I have done this sometimes, when the story is so full of suspense, 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. 

            This reduces the story down to as short a time-period as we can achieve yet still tell the full story.  A two-hour movie is typically as close to zero-duration timeless foresight as we can humanly produce.

            We have to watch the entire movie from start-to-finish for two hours because we do not possess the 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 six-week period (I am a slow reader).  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 multiple foresights good and evil in an exponentially broadened cat-and-mouse scope of interacting outcomes.  This would produce a complexity well beyond the cause/effect stability experienced in our current one-dimensional time trajectory.

            This would be a reality too complex to follow even in the classic television series The Twilight Zone.

            But absolute goodness without the independence of free-will choice inherent within the knowledge of good and evil, of not having the capacity to freely choose between the broad array of moral concepts, would produce the equally undesirable reality of human beings that are mere robots.

            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 biblical-quality faith, the fact that humans have the knowledge of good and evil eliminates the atheistic philosophy of naturalistic materialism from consideration as a plausible explanation for reality.

            Naturalistic materialism is eliminated from reality because of the dilemma 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 components of timeless foresight and absolute moral goodness as complimentary to the knowledge of good and evil.

            Having one the three legs of the stool without the other two, points to deliberate, intentional design.  It does not point to random and mindless happenstance of trial-and-error.

            Of equal power arguing for intelligent design, is the fine-tuned moderation of time narrowly advancing in a one-dimensional direction forward, yet lacking the all-important feature of the foresight to be able to see ahead into the future. 

            Timeless foresight is of invaluable worth.

            Its curious absence from the reality of human existence points towards thoughtfully planned, scaled-back moderation that has brilliant intelligent design written all over it. 

            Darwinism assumes by definition zero intelligent design utilizing foresight. 

            Traditional Darwinian evolution allows absolutely no architectural and engineering design through premeditated forethought, because to allow design into the mix also invites a super-intelligent Designer God into human scientific investigation, which is anathema to the materialistic worldview.

            Yet the one and only area in human experience where we do exercise extremely accurate, pinpoint timeless foresight is in the design and assembly of complex systems. 

            We exercise timeless foresight in manufactured products like hybrid cars, computer software applications, the construction of commercial buildings and residential houses, and in storyline scripts for movies, television, and fiction and non-fiction books, for examples.

            People are by nature prolific intelligent designers and can see ahead in time to visualize the final outcomes of human created things.

            How does this square with Darwin’s tree-of-life based upon common descent linked by an unbroken hypothetical chain of ancestors, when in-the-moment animal instinct shows no signs whatsoever of being able to go beyond the strict limitations of time? 

            Animal instinct shows no capacity to step-up into the cognitive, creative freedom of timeless foresight to envision future, inventive productions.

            Bee hives, beaver dams, and spider webs are produced by instinct and not by deliberative, free-thinking, flexibly creative contemplation.

            This reality between thought and instinct creates a huge gap between human beings and the rest of the natural living world, a gap that is unbridgeable by materialistic processes, by any stretch of the imagination.

            Human beings can design and manufacture an automobile, a physically tangible thing, that functionally operates for years and for hundreds of thousands of miles of driving, using the future-looking vision of timeless foresight and foreknowledge.

            But a young man and woman getting married at age 20 cannot see ten or twenty years ahead into the future, of either the husband or the wife or both entering into extra-marital affairs, sadly and tragically ending the marriage. 

            We cannot foresee our kids going off to college and falling-in with the wrong crowd, becoming addicted to alcohol or drugs.

            We cannot see into our future the contracting of a deadly disease that takes our life before reaching the age of 40 or 50.

            There is an old axiom that applies here: “If we don’t know where we are going then any road will take us there.”

            We know precisely where we want to go when we design an automobile, a new house, or a computer software application.  We know where we want to go when we start-out to write a murder mystery, biography, or technical book because we can visualize a rough outline in our mind’s-eye, in the creative area inside our heads.  

            But the capacity for timeless foresight for human beings stops at a certain point. 

            This is something that argues for the participation of an intelligent designer God and for the over-the-top brilliance of creative imagination in terms of intent and impact in the targeted, moderated, purpose-driven crafting of the dimension of time in service to mankind.

            Time as we currently know it creates the singularly unique context for the exploration and discovery of a fuller understanding of good and evil, which would not be possible if the other two legs of the three-legged stool were added of timeless foresight and absolute goodness.

            I do not think an answer to the question of why God cannot create human beings who possess divine timeless foresight and foreknowledge, and possess the divine attribute of absolute moral perfection, exists in this present world. 

            This might involve the impossibly unachievable goal of creating billions of junior-level divine gods, like the impossibility of creating square circles, or one-ended sticks, or married bachelors, or making two-plus-two equal five.

            But only premeditated intention, the thoughtful choice-making between multiple possible realities of intelligently guided moderation could produce something as well-defined and having a targeted function as precise as time.

            Trial-and-error, hit-and-miss, accidental dumb-luck, fall-into-place on its own, or some form of directional self-assembly could not plausibly be the explanation for the fine-tuned essence of time.

            Time is an intelligently designed thing, a created reality for a definite purpose.