If there will be a sea battle tomorrow, then that fact is true today and has always been true. Our future is thus inevitable. What freedom is left to us?
On the other hand, if statements about the future are neither true nor false today, then how can God have perfect foreknowledge of the future?
Jean Buridan presented a logical proof of the existence of God:
The two statements can be reconciled only if God exists.
But see Cloudy, Kangaroo Court, and Powerless.
Concerned that the men of 1768 no longer read the Bible, Edward Harwood decided to translate the New Testament into modern language. The result has been called “turgid,” “absurd,” “ridiculous,” and “one of the most discussed and insulted” Bibles of the 18th century. Samples of his work:
Before: “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”
After: “Since therefore you are now in a state of lukewarmness, a disagreeable medium between the two extremes, I will in no long time eject you from my heart with fastidious contempt.”
Before: “Give us this day our daily bread.”
After: “As thou hast hitherto most mercifully supplied our wants, deny us not the necessaries and conveniences of life, while thou art pleased to continue us in it.”
Before: “We shall not all die, but we shall all be changed.”
After: “We shall not all pay the common debt of nature, but we shall by a soft transition be changed from mortality to immortality.”
And here’s the Lord’s Prayer:
O thou great governor and parent of universal nature (God) who manifestest thy glory to the blessed inhabitants of heaven–may all thy rational creatures in all the parts of thy boundless dominion be happy in the knowledge of thy existence and providence, and celebrate thy perfections in a manner most worthy of thy nature and perfective of their own! May the glory of thy moral development be advanced and the great laws of it be more generally obeyed. May the inhabitants of this world pay as cheerful a submission and as constant an obedience to Thy will, as the happy spirits do in the regions of immortality.
Harwood said his translation “left the most exacting velleity without ground for quiritation.”
Early editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica accepted Noah’s ark as real, to the point of discussing how the animals were arranged and fed:
Bishop Wilkins computes all the carnivorous animals equivalent, as to the bulk of their bodies, and their food, to 27 wolves; and all the rest to 280 beeves. For the former, he allows 1825 sheep; and for the latter, 109,500 cubits of hay; all which will be easily contained in the two first stories, and a deal of room to spare.
That’s from the 1797 edition. By 1860, realizing that an ark couldn’t possibly accommodate all the world’s species, Britannica suggested that the flood had covered only the parts of the earth inhabited by men. By 1911 it was describing the whole story as myth — and in 1960 it remarked on the “many ingenious and curious theories” that had once been advanced to support the story.
Alexander William Kinglake suggested that all churches should bear the inscription IMPORTANT IF TRUE.
John Dalton was a tornado of English science, exploring atomic theory, meteorology, perception, and the physics of gases with equal avidity.
But he was a Quaker, and when in 1834 he was invited to be presented to William IV, the question arose whether he could properly appear in the scarlet robes of an Oxford doctor of laws, as the color was forbidden to him.
Dalton solved this neatly: He pointed out that he was color-blind. “You call it scarlet,” he said. “To me its color is that of nature — the color of green leaves.”
Robert Peary’s attempts to reach the North Pole raised a curious question for Jewish scholars: How should Jewish law, which normally assumes a 24-hour day, be interpreted in the land of the midnight sun?
Writing in New Era in 1905, J.D. Eisenstein asked, “Which is the seventh day, or Sabbath? and when is Yom Kippur to be observed around the North Pole, where the day and night are of about six months’ duration?”
If one reckoned by daylight, “As to Yom Kippur, it would be obviously impossible to prolong the fast till the closing prayer of Neilah. Besides, one would have to wait for the following Yom Kippur, 354 to 384 years, figuring a year for a day, according to the Jewish calendar.”
According to Eisenstein, one rabbi advised that observing Jews should not settle in high latitudes at all, to avoid the question. The problem has not been entirely settled even today — indeed, it’s been compounded, as Jewish astronauts can now orbit the earth and may one day colonize other worlds.
A young gentleman happened to sit at church in a pew adjoining one in which sat a young lady for whom he conceived a sudden and violent passion, and was desirous of entering into a courtship on the spot; but the place not favoring a formal declaration, the exigency of the case suggested the following plan: he politely handed his fair neighbor a Bible opened, with a pin stuck in the following text:
‘And now I beseech thee, lady, not as though I wrote a new commandment unto thee, but that which we had from the beginning, that we love one another.’
She returned it, pointing to the verse in Ruth:
‘Then she fell on her face, and bowed herself to the ground, and said unto him, Why have I found grace in thine eyes, seeing I am a stranger?’
He returned the book, pointing to the following:
‘Having many things to write unto you, I would not with paper and ink: but I trust to come unto you, and speak face to face, that our joy may be full.’
A marriage soon after resulted from this Biblical interview.
— Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, February 1867
Buzz Aldrin celebrated communion on the moon. From his 2009 book Magnificent Desolation:
So, during those first hours on the moon, before the planned eating and rest periods, I reached into my personal preference kit and pulled out the communion elements along with a three-by-five card on which I had written the words of Jesus: ‘I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit; for you can do nothing without me.’ I poured a thimbleful of wine from a sealed plastic container into a small chalice, and waited for the wine to settle down as it swirled in the one-sixth Earth gravity of the moon. My comments to the world were inclusive: ‘I would like to request a few moments of silence … and to invite each person listening in, wherever and whomever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her own way.’ I silently read the Bible passage as I partook of the wafer and the wine, and offered a private prayer for the task at hand and the opportunity I had been given.
“Perhaps, if I had it to do over again, I would not choose to celebrate communion,” he wrote. “Although it was a deeply meaningful experience for me, it was a Christian sacrament, and we had come to the moon in the name of all mankind — be they Christians, Jews, Muslims, animists, agnostics, or atheists. But at the time I could think of no better way to acknowledge the enormity of the Apollo 11 experience that by giving thanks to God.”
In his Notebooks, Samuel Butler tells a story of Herbert Clarke’s 10-year-old son:
His mother had put him to bed and, as he was supposed to have a cold, he was to say his prayers in bed. He said them, yawned and said, ‘The real question is whether there is a God or no,’ on which he instantly fell into a sweet and profound sleep which forbade all further discussion.
Elsewhere Butler wrote, “What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, ‘I bet that my Redeemer liveth.'”