God as portfolio manager

Abstract

Theologians and laymen forever ponder and speculate about God's motivations, His demands on mankind, His decision-making process, and sometimes of course, His very existence. I shall not discuss the latter question; rather I shall assume that He exists. Instead, I plan to explore the question-how does God decide who shall be rewarded and who shall be punished? But first, I must explain that whenever I shall refer to God's or evaluation I will not really mean and evaluation. Being omniscient, God never analyzes or evaluates-He knows all at all times. Therefore, the discussion will not present a model of analysis that God uses, but a model of analysis that may simulate how God knows. Firstly, we must establish that God has a cardinal unit of having negative, zero and positive values. It must be a cardinal unit of moralityallowing us to state, for example, that action A is assigned ten morals, while action B is assigned 11 morals. Cardinality enables us to state that action B has ten per cent more moral content than does action A. Many people will surely object to such a nonrelativistic moral code. They may contend that God has different standards of behavior for different societies, so that a given practice, such as cannibalism, may rate negative ten morals in the western world and rate zero morals in the jungles of New Guinea. The model I am hubristically constructing can accommodate the relativistic point of view through the introduction of morality tables. Each of these tables assigns a unique moral value to a given action, depending on the society in which the action is executed. God, of course, does not refer to such tablesfor He is omniscient. However, the concept is useful in helping us understand how He might judge us mortals. I assert that God seeks a minimum rate of return on each of his investments (human beings). Of course, there is just as much logical basis for the contrary assertion-that God has no such rate of return expectation for each of us. I, however, choose to believe in the latter more purposeful cosmic structure. At this juncture a serious philosophical dilemma cannot be ignored, for it may be asserted that God can guarantee any moral rate of return that He desires; in fact, that if He wanted to guard against moral imperfection in mankind, He would have created perfectly moral humans. His omnipotence and omniscience make man's attempts to meet His moral expectations a travesty, a charade.