Any of my friends that have been willing to engage me on the concept of a contingent future and openness theology often find the idea persuasive enough to ponder its impacts on scripture. Eventually, they ask a question about the many prophetic statements found in scripture. Their questions fall along the lines of the following, “What about …”

• the prophecy of the civil war starting in North Carolina by Joseph Smith?
• Nephi’s vision of the Savior’s life 600 years before His life (1 Nephi 11)?
• Nephi’s vision of Columbus and the colonizing of America (1 Nephi 13)?
• Nephi’s vision of Joseph Smith (2 Nephi 3)?
• Nephi’s vision of the translation of the Book of Mormon and the Martin Harris story (2 Nephi 27)?

There are many more of these types of prophetic statements in our standard works. They are all potential evidence of a ‘fixed future omniscience’ because they are stating a fact about the future that has come to pass.

First, these stories are not as specific as we might imagine. Most are describing specific events in the future of God, but not specific events of any individual. For example, 1 Nephi 13 never mentions Christopher Columbus’ name. We tell that story with the benefit of history in our past.

Second, a key concept of openness theology is that God can know exact details and even all of the details of what is going to happen at points in the near future. The definition of ’near’ could be 100’s or 1000’s of years. What I don’t believe is that He has to know from all eternity that you or I would purchase a new car on a certain date or even that Judas would betray the Savior or that the Romans would crucify Christ.

Of important contrast to the lack of specificity of future events is the life of Christ. I believe His omnipotence and atoning sacrifice made his mission have many key elements that were known very early in the creation of God’s children. His acts in the future were so certain that they affect and affected all our history.

I think there are many potential explanations of future knowledge that don’t require a ‘fixed future omniscience.’ I am persuaded by the Instant Pot example and Arrival movie example as two ways to explain God’s revelations of the future to His prophets.

The Instant Pot example©

A known future based on agent-based choices: Most of science leverages the prediction of the expectation of many random events causing a more significant event. These precisions are so well known that they can be programmed in most instances to the exact moment. For example, the Instant Pot© uses the random movement of water molecules to create a carefully timed process. The diagram below shows one of their visualizations of this process.

In the visualization, you can see time on the x-axis and pressure on the y-axis. Vertical lines to show where they are heating (labeled) and not heating (blank) regions. Notice how the visualization makes no mention of the random movement of water molecules; it just says heating. I believe they don’t discuss it because using the word random in a controlled, engineered process scares humans - especially a process that can explode. Maybe they don’t address the randomness because it will confuse or because the consumer doesn’t need to understand that fact to know how to use their tool for cooking.

The image below shows a simulated example of how water molecules might look at a microscopic level (800 small particles with the random paths of the five yellow particles marked). It is random at the molecule level. However, we can explain the energy of the space in the picture below so adequately that we can create the Instant Pot© and the above graphic.

If heat is introduced into the system to move the liquid out of equilibrium, then we can describe the general pattern and movement of the mass of molecules.

• We can say what directions most of them are moving.
• We can describe their increase in speed.
• We can explain their effect on the more extensive system

However, we cannot start one particle in the system and foretell its exact path through the process. But, probability allows us to predict its most likely way. As explained in Wikipedia, ‘The many-body interactions that yield the Brownian pattern cannot be solved by a model accounting for every involved molecule. In consequence, only probabilistic models applied to molecular populations can be employed to describe it.’

We can see the plan of salvation or Zion as an emergent property that can be predicted with accuracy. “Emergence is an important term in a relational world. A property of something made of parts is emergent if it would not make sense when attributed to any of the parts. Rocks are hard, and water flows, but the atoms they’re made of are neither solid nor wet. An emergent property will often hold approximately, because it denotes an averaged or high-level description that leaves out much detail.”¹

Thus, God can provide visions of the future based on these emergent properties without imposing fixed choices on any of the individuals in Zion. God can heat His kingdom on earth and then describe the known results of the system without needing to see the individual’s agent-based choices.

Arrival movie example

Some future points can be determined and known in the current time: The story is focused on a linguist named Louise Banks and how she works with other scientists (notably almost everyone else in the movie is male) to decipher the language of an alien race that has arrived on earth. The fascinating aspect of the movie is that language could allow humans to understand how to interact with the future. It puts forth ideas about linear time and non-linear time. Much of the movie is based on a now-debunked Sapir-Whorf hypothesis about language and how it might affect our thinking. While I am fascinated with the idea of language’s impact on how we think, I don’t think anyone believes that learning some alien language or lost language of our fathers will give us some way out of the linearity of time. The film does provide a few key ideas around the NOW and one’s interaction with the future that might help us understand Nephi’s visions and other prophetic statements about the future.

Future events don’t add up but are known

The future events that Louise did come to know had impossibilities without additional information. For example, the near-final scene had the Chinese general find her at a party in her future to share with her knowledge that she could remember from the future to change her current Now. It appears that he could not see the future. Without invocation on her future part, he visits her and gives her very private information. It is almost like she can see and interact with future events until sections of the future have resolved into a path that is certain or known. As you watch the clip, you will see her surprise in the future as the knowledge comes to her.

While not explicitly stated, there must have been other attempts in the future until the future arrived at the story shown in the clip. If the general cannot see the future, then his actions would make no sense without an original provocation from her. It is the future that changes her NOW, which then becomes fixed and entangled. It is as if she can interact with the future possibilities until a future happens that changes her Now and then that future contingent moment is fixed.²

Future events aren’t settled until action in the NOW

A similar pattern is shown in her understanding of her family and its interaction with her daughter’s future but youthful death. It appears that all the future moments are shown as possibilities happening. Then she understands how to handle herself in the future and makes decisions about her future actions, which brings critical points on the future path into alignment, which then affects her NOW. She is struggling to find out why her husband is missing from her life throughout the movie. It appears to me that once she settles on an action that she will take in the future that it affects the choices of others in the future but that the effects of her works are then known in the NOW.

It also shows that certain events in the future are known if current decisions in the NOW are made. The movie also seems to imply that the knowledge of the future is encased in one individual’s lifespan. She is told earlier in the film by the Aliens that the humans will save them in the very distant (to humans) future because of the visit. However, she does not see any of that future as it is out of her space of influence. The final scene is impactful as it mixes her future love of her child and husband with her first embrace and love of her husband.

Conclusion

In the ‘The whimsical Christian’ by Dorothy Sayers, she eloquently combines the ideas of the above two concepts. She says;

Let us then picture the totality of things as a web spread out in as many dimensions of time and space as we may find it easy and convenient to imagine. We shall observe in it certain fixed points; these are the nodes of necessity, through which the lines must pass in order to make the pattern. The nodes are determined by the artist, but the lines are self-determined and may take any direction they choose, subject to two limitations: (1) However they bend and turn - even if they start off in opposite direction - they are bound eventually to go through the fixed points. (2) Every moment they make modifies and is modified by the movements of the neighboring lines. The will of the maker readily submits to all these modifications, since the necessity laid upon the lines to come to the nodes means that all the possible modifications can only in the end produce a conditioned necessity of their own - just as, in a game of croquet, the path of every ball, however wildly it may diverge under the impact of a bad shot, or the disturbing shot of the adversary, is governed by the absolute external necessity imposed on both sides alike of going through the right hoops in the right order. … The lines that seemed to run away are brought home by the master hand, the chain of primary causation always adapting itself, link by link, to the chain of secondary causation, as the concave curve follows the curve of the convex and is identical with it.

Let us take another example: the tale that, if it is not true history, is at any rate the greatest of all myths. Most races have cherished the prophecy that, in some manner or other, the divine should become human and share human experience. Given that all men are mortal, it becomes necessary that the human experience should include the experience of bodily death. Birth and death are thus, presumably, the essential nodes of the pattern. But time, place, circumstances, and in particular the manner of the death are determined by the course of human history; for though all men must die, comparatively few die violent deaths, and fewer still by judicial murder. …

At the rim of the pattern, then, the lines of potentiality lie wide apart and may take almost any course toward the node. But as they close in, the area of available choice becomes narrower and narrower. The decision of man in general becomes the decision of an empire, of a nation, of a court of law, and eventually the decision of particular persons—all moving to one end, under pressure of the history of decisions in the past. But the element of personal choice remains to the last moment: “the Son of Man goeth indeed as it is written of Him, but woe unto that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed.” Some measure of indeterminism, though limited at length to Pilate’s simple choice between yes and no. (Dorothy Sayers, The Whimsical Christian, pg 253-255)

The future is full of infinite possibilities for God and us. However, He can know and explain those fixed points or nodes in scripture according to His knowledge of what I will call ‘intelligence physics.’ He can diagram for us the path that His kingdom must follow according to His will, but we draw the lines of our own lives into that path. His infinite knowledge of the principles of Heaven and of our collective history allows him to bend the future to His will. Our contingent acts can be unknown precisely to Him while He leverages the laws of ‘intelligence physics’ much like statistics leverages the concepts of randomness to handle those unknowns while predicting the events of the system.

• openness
• time
• principles
• agency
• diagram