I saw this guy on a talk show recently.  Quote:

"Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is a master of game theory, which is a fancy label for a simple idea: People compete, and they always do what they think is in their own best interest. Bueno de Mesquita uses game theory and its insights into human behavior to predict and even engineer political, financial, and personal events. His forecasts, which have been employed by everyone from the CIA to major business firms, have an amazing 90 percent accuracy rate, and in this dazzling and revelatory book he shares his startling methods and lets you play along in a range of high-stakes negotiations and conflicts."

Took me back to the early days of the open theism debate. If humans, with severely limited knowledge of the present and limited analytical skills and processing abilities, are able to predict the future with 90 percent accuracy, what does this say about Bruce Ware’s claim that the God of open theism would face the future with "wringing hands"?

Post Edited (Tom) : 9/30/2009 12:26:38 PM (GMT-5)

Interesting.

I see a deep, poetic, interwoven logic in the "Creation Game" posited by the open and/or process metaphysic:

1. Randomness and freedom in the world creates the space or separation from God that is necessary in order to avoid a determinism that would be tantamount to pantheism.

2. It is this randomness/chaos necessary to avoid pantheism, combined with order/patterns in a cosmic dance, which also results in natural beauty.

3. This cosmic dance of randomness/chaos and order/patterns that makes the world interesting and beautiful is the same recipe out of which emerges intelligence and higher orders of freedom, resulting in relational possibilities.

4. The intelligence and relational possibilities that emerge from chaos and order is necessary in order for the natural beauty of creation (that results from the same combination of chaos and order) to be appreciated and expressed back to God.

5. The separation resulting from freedom that is necessary to avoid pantheism also results in epistemic distance which is a necessary condition for faith.

6. The freedom built into creation that is necessary to avoid pantheism and which results in aesthetic beauty and ultimately creatures capable of loving relationality, entails the inevitability (or at least a very high risk) of evil and pain.

7. Such evil and pain, when combined with epistemic distance, are the soil in which the seeds of our teleological/eschatological selves, watered with gracious revelation and Spirit empowerment, can sprout the deepest levels of faith and trust.

8. The deep kind of faith and trust that can only sprout from such evil and pain adds more value and beauty to the world than all the natural wonders of the world combined.