An Experiment in Scotch

Does God know par­tic­u­lars? Before you answer that, take a moment to con­sider the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of the answer, both pro and con. Like answer­ing the ques­tion “Did you ever get caught mas­tur­bat­ing in the closet?”, any answer you come up with is a net loss if you’re a Believer (or a closet mas­tur­ba­tor). If you answer yes, God does know par­tic­u­lars, the impli­ca­tions are stag­ger­ing to the con­cept of indi­vid­ual free­dom, choice and whether God is actu­ally very nice at all. If you answer no, you’re imply­ing that God isn’t omni­scient, that some things unfold with­out His knowl­edge and sud­denly you have to be OK with some sig­nif­i­cant changes to the gen­eral under­stand­ing of Him. What exactly is my point? I hope to con­vince you that while God may be inti­mately inter­ested in Tim Tebow as a human being, his inter­est in the out­come of par­tic­u­lar events that Tim Tebow is involved in, par­tic­u­larly foot­ball games, is non-existent if we are to believe God really is a lov­ing God who wants us all to suc­ceed and that if He is not, then we’ve got gen­er­ally big­ger prob­lems to deal with from a reli­gious stand­point. Specif­i­cally, any result­ing num­bers from any foot­ball games that loosely cor­re­spond to Tim Tebow’s favorite Bible verse are com­pletely coin­ci­den­tal and our notic­ing them tells us more about our own per­sonal biases than it does about God’s inter­est in foot­ball games.

This past Sun­day, the Den­ver Bron­cos, led by their quar­ter­back and excep­tion­ally open Chris­t­ian Tim Tebow, defeated the Pitts­burgh Steel­ers in a play­off game. The Bron­cos were large under­dogs in the game mean­ing no one, not even the very smart peo­ple in Las Vegas, gave them much chance to win the game at all. (As an aside, that part about the smart peo­ple in Vegas think­ing any­thing about who was going to win or not isn’t tech­ni­cally true but for the mat­ter at hand, we can let it pass.) All week lead­ing up to the game, the focus was on how bad Tim Tebow, and by exten­sion the Bron­cos, had played in the pre­vi­ous game. He had gone 6 for 22 and 60 yards with zero touch­downs and one inter­cep­tion. In a game that val­ues com­ple­tions and yards and touch­downs scored, this was not good. All the talk­ing heads assumed that the vaunted Steel­ers defense would dom­i­nate the game even though Ryan Clark, an inte­gral part of that defense, was not play­ing due to a life threat­en­ing blood dis­ease that had forced the removal of his gall blad­der and spleen after play­ing in Den­ver in 2007. The talk­ing heads also assumed that even though the Steel­ers quar­ter­back Ben Roeth­lis­berger had a bad ankle injury and their start­ing run­ning back was done for the sea­son with an ACL tear from the pre­vi­ous week’s game and their star­ing cen­ter was not play­ing due to an ankle injury, the Steel­ers offense would pro­duce enough points to beat the ane­mic Den­ver Bron­cos, maybe 13–3 or something.

Of course, this is not what hap­pened, oth­er­wise I’d have no real impe­tus for writ­ing this essay. The Bron­cos scored 29 points includ­ing 6 in the over­time cour­tesy of an 80 yard touch­down to win the game out­right and the mighty Steel­ers were sent pack­ing while the lowly Bron­cos, led by Tim Tebow, the evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian, moved on to the divi­sional round of the play­offs. In the game, Tebow threw for 316 yards. He aver­aged 31.6 yards per pass com­ple­tion. And finally, the game’s TV rat­ings was 31.6 Because we as humans tend to find pat­terns in every­thing, it was imme­di­ately noted that these were the num­bers for John 3:16, one of the most quoted and influ­en­tial pas­sages in Christianity.

This caused “tebow 316″ to blow up on Google and for a lot of what I’m assum­ing are nor­mally very intel­li­gent peo­ple to go slightly, or com­pletely, crazy. Peo­ple started say­ing things like “I still think it’s ironic that he threw for 316 yards” on Face­book, dis­play­ing for all the world that peo­ple still think Ala­nis Moris­sette was a poetic genius given the fun­da­men­tal mis­un­der­stand­ing of irony. Pas­tors on the web said things like “I don’t know if it is nec­es­sar­ily an act of God, but I don’t think any­thing hap­pens by acci­dent either”, fun­da­men­tally mis­un­der­stand­ing the idea of cau­sa­tion. Things that aren’t acci­dents imply inten­tion and with inten­tion comes rea­son. If it wasn’t an acci­dent, Some­one came up with a very elab­o­rate math­e­mat­i­cal plan. Lots and lots of nor­mal peo­ple hun­gry to find any con­crete exam­ple that God loves us grasped at the fact that num­bers 3, 1, and 6 showed up 3 times in var­i­ous forms dur­ing the game.

Now, before we dive into an exam­i­na­tion of whether God really does love Tim Tebow enough (and by exten­sions hates the Pitts­burgh Steel­ers) to influ­ence the out­come of a human foot­ball game, let’s look back at the orig­i­nal ques­tion, does God know par­tic­u­lars? This is a thorny ques­tion inte­gral to dis­cus­sions in reli­gion and phi­los­o­phy for hun­dreds of years, not only in Chris­tian­ity but also in the Ara­bic and Judaic worlds as well. At a high level, the issue is that if God is omni­scient and thus, knows par­tic­u­lar details of the world, say that some­one is going to be raped and killed at some point in the future, how can we rec­on­cile that with our idea of God as a lov­ing and for­giv­ing God? On the other hand, if God does not know par­tic­u­lars and thus is not implic­itly impli­cated in the evil in the world, how can we rec­on­cile that with the idea that God is omni­scient? Logi­cians and schol­ars infi­nitely smarter than I am have dis­cussed this idea for gen­er­a­tions. Some schol­ars do some fancy hand-waving and imply that God’s knowl­edge is fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent from human knowl­edge and that because of this, it is essen­tially not ours to rea­son why, etc., etc., etc. This is good for the inter­nal con­sis­tency of said schol­ars belief frame­work but not help­ful for those of us writ­ing two thou­sand word essay at 4 in the morning.

When I look at the ques­tion and try to answer it (with­out any real review of the his­tory or schol­arly works per­tain­ing, I’m not writ­ing this essay for pub­li­ca­tion), here’s what I come up with. God has knowl­edge of par­tic­u­lars in a prob­a­bilis­tic way, Einstein’s belief that God doesn’t throw dice notwith­stand­ing. I think that God has a frame­work for how things might turn out but that there are hun­dreds of thou­sands of events every day that God isn’t that inter­ested in from a global stand­point and that how­ever those things work out are largely left to chance, human inter­ac­tion and pos­si­bly some influ­ence of chaos the­ory. If we are to believe the text of the Bible, God already gave us the way to get into heaven in the very quote now being used to con­vince us He exists through the actions of a 22 year old NFL quar­ter­back. I find it excep­tion­ally hard to believe that God feels the need to influ­ence an NFL game just to give those of us with a blog and too much time on our hands a new sign that He does in fact exist. If God truly does know exact par­tic­u­lars of every sin­gle human action in some divine knowl­edge, the impli­ca­tions for His good­ness are stag­ger­ing, at least to my lim­ited human mind. You can hand wave and say He has a rea­son for every­thing but that rea­son in many cases seems to then be at the very least tinged with mal­ice if you con­sider events that are bad for the humans involved. It’s nice to be able to say “God has a rea­son for every­thing” and go on about your daily busi­ness but that’s intel­lec­tu­ally lazy as far as I can tell. Maybe it’s not our posi­tion to know the work­ings of God’s mind but if He laid out all details long ago for all peo­ple, I find it impos­si­ble to ever see Him as any­thing more than a merry prankster at best and pos­si­bly actively malev­o­lent at worst.

Instead, I think God has a gen­eral frame­work for how things are going to work out and beyond that, He doesn’t much care or know of any par­tic­u­lars in advance. He may inter­vene on the part of truly good or truly evil peo­ple (see Brett Favre’s fall from grace in par­tic­u­lar) but as a gen­eral rule, I think He lets us go about our daily busi­ness using our best judg­ment as to the actions we should take and their out­comes. He may have a gen­eral plan for our lives but I’m not even con­vinced that He knows exactly how they’ll play out, because again, the idea that He kicks things off know­ing par­tic­u­lar peo­ple will be tor­tured and mur­dered is directly in oppo­si­tion to any idea that He gives one damn about what hap­pens to us. Think­ing God doesn’t know every­thing is slightly (slightly? Deeply is more like it) hereti­cal but far bet­ter to think maybe God isn’t omni­scient than that He’s actively evil.

All this brings us back to our lit­tle foot­ball game (I know you were won­der­ing if it would. Or maybe you’re asleep by now any­way, like I should be at 5 AM). The peo­ple like the afore­men­tioned pas­tor who believes every­thing hap­pens for a rea­son also has to believe the fol­low­ing things:

1. God gave Ryan Clark a dev­as­tat­ing blood dis­ease AT BIRTH that caused him to lose his spleen and gall blad­der after a 2007 game in Den­ver JUST so he would be pre­vented from play­ing in this game in 2012 neg­a­tively affect­ing the defense of the Pitts­burgh Steel­ers and allow­ing Den­ver to win. Almost no one with any foot­ball knowl­edge would assume that the out­come would be exactly the same if Pitts­burgh had been able to play their start­ing free safety.
2. God inten­tion­ally hurt Brett Keisel, the Steel­ers’ start­ing right defen­sive tackle, dur­ing the game to affect the out­come. Keisel went out in the first half with an injury that undoubt­edly affected the game plan and effec­tive­ness of the Steel­ers defense.
3. God inten­tion­ally hurt Mau­r­kice Pouncey months ago, pre­vent­ing him from play­ing in this game. Pouncey was the start­ing cen­ter for the Steel­ers and with­out him, Doug Legursky filled in. He had sev­eral ter­ri­ble snaps includ­ing one before half that moved Pitts­burgh out of field goal range.
4. God inten­tion­ally hurt Ben Roeth­lis­berger who was extremely hob­bled with an ankle injury, dras­ti­cally lim­it­ing the Steel­ers game plan. This one might actu­ally be true since Roeth­lis­berger might have some aton­ing yet to do for his vio­lent inci­dents with women not so long ago. If you said God knew the par­tic­u­lars of this one, I might agree with you.

In all, the num­ber of things that had to align per­fectly for the var­i­ous 316s to hap­pen and have sig­nif­i­cance are astound­ing. Now, you might say that Tebow is some sort of super Chris­t­ian or a prophet for the times and thus has been picked out in advance to fur­ther the mes­sage of God. Or you might say that God can do any­thing and thus He had Tebow throw for 316 yards includ­ing one 80 yard play at the begin­ning of over­time that math­e­mat­i­cally manip­u­lated Tebow’s aver­age such that it too was 31.6 (real­ize that if the Bron­cos had won with an 80 run, Tebow’s pass­ing aver­age would not have been 31.6. Of course, I don’t think this would have affected the cra­zies that much) AND had exactly the right num­ber of peo­ple tune in to guar­an­tee a TV rat­ing of 31.6. If you argued these things, I’m not going to argue with you because those are not par­tic­u­larly arguable points. How­ever, I would assume that you attribute almost every­thing to God and thus, we’re not going to have a lot in com­mon to talk about any­way, in the grand scheme of things.

Suf­fice it to say, I find Tebow slightly hyp­o­crit­i­cal (some­times the author’s bias comes out in the begin­ning, some times at the end) in that he openly prays for his own suc­cess on the foot­ball field which nec­es­sar­ily implies the fail­ure of oth­ers at his expense which seems to me a not par­tic­u­larly Chris­t­ian thing to do. Let’s be hon­est, Tebow plays a par­tic­u­larly vicious and vio­lent game, one that often entails grue­some injuries and long term bod­ily effects on the com­bat­ants and to assume that God has a root­ing inter­est in your team because you pray harder is a level of trib­al­ism that exceeds all pos­si­ble gen­er­ous expla­na­tions for your faith. Of course, I have no idea what Tebow is pray­ing for on the side­lines but since he is often seen kneel­ing before com­ing into play, I can only assume he’s ask­ing for pro­tec­tion from peo­ple like Brett Keisel who actively want to hit him as hard as they pos­si­bly can, this after vol­un­tar­ily choos­ing to play a game where peo­ple on the other side of the ball want to hit you as hard as they can. This is tan­ta­mount to the Cru­sades and we all know how that worked out for the heathens.

In the end, Tebow is a polar­iz­ing and engag­ing crea­ture. It doesn’t seem likely to me that he’s a mes­sen­ger from God, only that he’s a par­tic­u­larly open and flam­boy­ant Chris­t­ian who has engaged two fan bases, the Bron­cos and crazy peo­ple on the inter­net look­ing for signs that God really does exist. I don’t begrudge him either of those. I just don’t think God is going to be quite as inter­ested in his suc­cess this week­end on the road against New England.