Metaphor 5 - The Novel as a Metaphor of Time in Eternity

Now, I have just gone over the idea of there being not only free will, but also resonsibility for it. And yet I have also proposed a metaphor of eternity which is that it is like all the moments in time happening at once. How are we to reconcile these two ideas? If time is of a piece with matter in being part of the creation, then all the moments in time, including the future, are already known outside of time. How then can there be such a thing as either free will or responsibility? Well C. S. Lewis gave me a very serviceable metaphor that helps a great deal. (Footnote 4)

It is this. Imagine that you are reading a novel instead of reading this. The characters in the novel are talking to each other and getting on with the lives the author of the novel gave them. In the novel, time is passing for these characters. Depending on what kind of novel it is, the time passing could be a single day, or a lifetime, or several lifetimes, but it is a kind of time passing.

Then you may come to a place in the novel were two characters are having a momentary discussion, and put the book down and do not resume reading it until a month so later. In your own time, a month has passed. But to the characters in the novel, only a moment has passed between the time one of them said something and the other replied.

But now also consider that besides time passing, the characters in the novel are making decisions that cause actions to take place that change the lives they lead in the novel. Now as far as the characters in the novel are concerned, they have complete free will. But yet the novel has already been written. Everything they’ve done is forever predetermined. In fact, in literature, there is something called an "authorial intrusion" in which the author of a story can interrupt the flow of the story by commenting, as the author, on things that are going to happen in the "future" of the story.

So in one sense, that is what I think the eternity that is outside of time is like. It’s like being the reader of a novel in which time is passing and the creatures in it are making decisions and causing consequences from their decisions, but it is all a recording of what has already occurred. To an eternal being, seeing the future is like re-reading the novel.

And you would then ask me, "But where’s the responsibility in all this? Aren’t all the decisions fake if they’ve already written down before hand?" And my answer would be: in the very best novelists, most of the characters have free will before the novelist ever sits down to write his or her novel.

Frederick Buechner, in The Book of Bebb, is on record as saying of his Leo Bebb novels "I had heard about single characters running away with the show but never the whole cast - and not just running away with it but refusing to let it end." And Stephen King has likened writing stories to archeology. He senses that he’s not so much making things up as digging up things that were already deep inside the human race to begin with. Fiction writers in general will tell you that it’s a gift when a character "shows up" and takes on a life of its own in their fictive universes.

Now if we stretch this last idea a little with the idea that the Creator is the best possible novelist there could ever be, we come up with the idea that we really do have free will, and responsibility for it, even if the Creator knows all the moments of our futures in a moment of His eternity. We have free will and make decisions that we can be held responsible for, but the Creator has decided where in time He will place us and how He will use our decisions in the story that He unfolds in our time.
------------------
(4) C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. Where I do not specifically mention what work of C.S. Lewis suggested something to me, the work is this one.