A Storm Formed

Overlooking the Tarpon Bayou, Rusty Bellies Waterfront Grill is the kind of place where butter buckets are as common as forks or knives, where daily specials are presented and ignored in favor of well-known dishes, and where a locally beloved peanut butter cake has been transformed into a locally beloved ice cream flavor, changed in form but retaining its essence. From my seat, I can see the water, where the Greeks who built this town once sent divers down to harvest the abundant sea sponges. The assembled crowd of jovial retirees bellow, shout, whoop, holler, and trumpet their jokes and stories, and the ensuing cacophony demands louder and louder voices until nothing is heard at all, but it's all been heard before.

At our table, Gay and Al and Mary and Jerry and I feast on shrimp and fish and conversation. The discussion takes on that particular tenor of octogenarians: doctor’s visits past, present, and future, cruise ship travelogues, war stories both literal and otherwise hard-won, measured pauses, and half-heard half-truths. Al's stories embody a charming paradox as they emerge at once perfectly rehearsed and entirely fresh. Like the crisp tzzzt of a just popped soda can, his quips erupt after being packaged and stored for the right moment. After meeting some married men on a cruise ship, he tells us, he responded enthusiastically: "My wife is Gay!"

Soon the conversation drifts toward the tropical storm that's dancing unsteadily as it finds its form and force over Caribbean waters. A news report on the television in the corner shows the possible trajectories for the soon-to-be-hurricane: hundreds of curving lines charting potential courses to disparate destinations stretching from Corpus Christi to Cape Canaveral, with landfall less than a week later. As the animation plays again and again, it begins to resemble catastrophic spaghetti, a collection of pasta-shaped possibilities for destruction somewhere. The entire experience feels at once like a celebration of scientific achievement and an exercise in intellectual humility: Our meteorological models are sophisticated enough to see a hurricane before there is one, but it takes time to grasp a storm's intentions.

Since the physical world is determinate, a perfect model would be able to account for every variable and offer perfect predictions. But as Borges notes in a very short story, a perfect model is just the thing itself:

"What a useful thing a pocket-map is!" I remarked.

"That's another thing we've learned from your Nation," said Mein Herr, "map-making. But we've carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?"

"About six inches to the mile."

"Only six inches!" exclaimed Mein Herr. "We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!"

"Have you used it much?" I enquired.

"It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr: "the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."

Jorge Luis Borges. "On Exactitude in Science."

So the storm, a map and model of itself, set sail toward a destination that was determined but unknown. As the days go by, our understanding increases until at last the hurricane reveals its plans, ripping off roofs and tearing down houses in that little town that was always going to get hit, we just didn't know it.

When the storm finally arrives, I'm sitting five hundred miles away at Cafe Du Monde, munching on beignets and covering my face with powdered sugar as Meg explains to me how Pokémon GO works. Nearby, a man busks and belts out country hits, framed by the three spires of a three-hundred-year-old cathedral. Here at the edge of the hurricane's reach, the temperature has dropped from sweltering summer to something akin to autumn, or whatever similar state New Orleans approaches for a few days each year.

Strolling through the French Market, we come across a collection of chess boards, which foretell the growing fascination I'll have with the game in the coming months. After a few lunchtime games with Meg, I begin to find satisfaction in regularly getting humbled by Sal's potent Sicilian and a cavalcade of internet strangers.

Studying a chess board is a bit different than studying a hurricane, for while the possibilities for a storm's destination decrease over time, the possibilities for a chess game increase with every move. After white's first move, there are only twenty possible configurations: sixteen different pawn moves and four moves with knights. After black's first move, that number increases to 400 possible board arrangements, which I'll spare the reader from enumerating here. By the end of two full turns, the number of possible configurations approaches 200,000, and just three turns leaves us with more than 100 million possibilities.

Indeed, after just a dozen moves or so, it's quite possible for a pair of novices to have laid out the chess board in a way that no two players have ever done before—and by the endgame among any two players it's almost a certainty that the landscape of the opposing pieces has taken on a form never before seen in history. Mathematicians with an enlightened understanding of exponents suppose that there are more possible chess games than atoms in the observable universe, a fact that leads me to lament how few chess games and facets of the observable universe I'm likely to enjoy in this brief life.

Because of the unique nature of each chess match, studying old games feels a bit like dissecting a long-lost past. Focusing too hard on the past is fruitless, for no matter how hard we prepare to change our mistakes with endless rumination, we're never going to have another chance to encounter the same pieces in the same positions, as it were. And preparing for the next chess game is a bit like rehearsing for a date in front of the mirror: Not knowing what the other person will say or do, the preparation leaves out quite a few salient variables. Partners and chess opponents are likely to surprise us at least some of the time.

Preparation for chess and life, then, share at least this similarity: We must reflect carefully in the present upon our past mistakes to identify the patterns and habits that led us astray in order to shape a more sound intuition for the future. Thus a good person is not merely probabilistic like a chess computer, but rather wise, having the sort of well-formed prudence that applies the right response in each new moment.

A wrinkle arises with human beings, though, who exist with even greater complexity than chess boards. For while a chess board's possibilities feel overwhelming, they are nonetheless finite. On the other hand, even a pair of people with free will seem to bend the otherwise compliant universe out of shape—and several billion souls are infinitely less predictable than several billion hurricanes.

This presents problems for Christians, who must reckon with competing notions of divine knowledge and human freedom: If we are truly free, how is God really all-knowing? Or if God is truly all-knowing, are we really free? To not consider such a conundrum is to give in the modern fallacy that faith is a sort of thoughtless acquiescence, when in fact faith depends on reason.

Certainly we cannot eradicate human freedom, because the resulting picture is incoherent and un-Christian. Without human freedom, there is no explanation for evil except that God wills it—"and everything God created is good" (1 Timothy 4:4). And indeed without freedom, we could not freely choose God's grace, making a liar of Jesus. Freedom, along with all of the good and evil it affords, is clearly essential to humanity—and indeed to salvation. God's plan is not merely a perfect weather forecast, since human beings are free to fail while hurricanes are bound by law to follow a set path.

So we must reconcile how God knows what we shall do although we have not yet chosen. There's some appeal in imagining that God is a sort of chess computer—calculating at each moment all possible permutations for the future of each person's life and creation as a whole. In this conception, God knows all possible outcomes in every possible moment. However, we must admit that this does not seem to satisfy our understanding of omniscient. To know what could be is very different than to know what will be—which is why the weatherman's imperfect knowledge leads us to set up a barbecue before a thunderstorm.

To understand how God can know our choices but not determine them, we must consider his nature. Indeed, God is quite different from a weatherman, a chess grandmaster, or a clockmaker, for he is at once here and above; he dictates while listening; he authored time but stands outside of it. This last point is key because it straddles that line of human understanding that makes belief rational but difficult. Indeed, the simple answer to this question is not satisfying because it requires us to accept that we can only know enough to know it's true but not enough to understand: God's knowledge is outside time; it's not like ours.

When we worry that our path has been predestined, we are really worried that our choices have no consequence. But this fear would presuppose that God is walking alongside us in history, when we know (or nearly know) that he does not. And he has told us that our choices do matter. We can shape the lives of family, friends, strangers, and lovers with a daily decision to fight back against the temptation toward evil and instead share the daily delights of the bread of life. Indeed, the greatest value of our choices extends beyond the reach of a chess board, the oceans, or the observable universe—to eternal life, where we will share in the full vision of what we now can only glimpse.

So we pray fervently and freely that our lives conform to the goodness and grace that God extends. For true freedom does not arise from unconstrained action, but rather from harmony with the ultimate good. Thy will be done.