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09 March 2025
In MSL, there is one most pivotal decision in all of reality, which is whether God will be good, or whether he will harden himself against being good. If God hardens himself against being good, then good itself ceases to be valid and everything ceases to be valid enough to exist. To be good requires that you be willing to give up everything for the good, including your very existence. And for Legitimacy, the Law, who is personal, to itself be valid, if possible it must bear the burdens of those it is the law over.
The Finite person of Legitimacy is the one who makes that decision, because he can be tempted, and because he can die, like we can. He can be in the position where death looks like the end of existence. If he can be willing to die, he can be willing to give everything he has to what is good. An important question: has he done this already? If so, then we don't have to worry about him coming and failing the test. If not, then maybe we would worry.
Biblical Christianity avoids this potential worry by asserting that it knows that Jesus (who would be the Finite person if both MSL and the Bible are true) already came and died. But for MSLians who don't trust the Bible enough to think that Jesus already came and died, what then?
One thing to say is that maybe life is liveable without knowing the answer. I don't think that means "completely ignore the fact that maybe the Finite person hasn't died yet and thus everything could cease to exist"; to have no sense, at any time, of the tension that reality is under, Legitimacy not having fully been validated. But it is something that we don't have much ability to do things about. So maybe it's best not to let it overwhelm us. Secular people believe that this life is the only one, so death is the end, potentially a depressing thought. Yet they go about their lives almost as though they aren't going to die. It could be similar for MSLians thinking about the possibility that all existence could cease.
That's a baseline, in case it's impossible to reduce uncertainty anymore.
It sort of makes sense that God wouldn't tell us about the terrible decision, of Legitimacy facing the choice of the cross, until after it was too late for us to mess it up. (Or, too late for evil beings to mess it up.) In a sense, the Finite person may be the only one who could mess it up, because it's his decision, but I'm not sure about that 100%. Maybe like us he needs to be tempted and anti-tempted to develop to the point of ethical maturity, such that he can make the right decision. So maybe God would keep the plan hidden until after the Finite person's death, and since we know about the plan, we can assume the death already happened.
Another thought is that the usual Christian idea that Jesus had to die on earth, in history, is both true and overstated. In other words, the way that I see Jesus is by using my imaginal and noetic senses to see him in the spiritual world. You can see him there too, right now, just by thinking of him. There he is, being tempted at Gethsemane, and yet simultaneously from the rememberer's perspective, but earlier in his life, walking to Bethany or casting out a demon. This story exists independent of human history, and could easily have existed even before the first human sin. (The resonances between this spiritual world and human history that exist being caused by God conforming human history to fit the image of this spiritual world.)
In that case, anyone can verify that the Finite Person has already died, simply by seeing that Jesus fits the bill of "Finite Person" and this Jesus can be seen clearly by simply observing the imaginal and noetic worlds pointed to by the Bible.
But I don't quite think a non-Biblical MSLian would be satisfied by that idea. At the very least, some doubt would be left.
Another thought is that it would be more responsible of God to have the Finite person live a finite life, overcoming the temptation to not die, before creation. (If the Finite person fails, then we all cease to exist, so maybe then nothing matters. Yet, we struggle and sacrifice for the future, and it could be seen as unfair to us to not secure that.) Then, maybe the Finite Person would be tested in an experience machine, sufficient to have really borne the burdens of finite life, having chosen to give up everything for the good. Having passed the test, then God would have the confidence to create us. What the finite person's life would look like might even vary based on culture. Jesus may be what the Finite Person looks like to Christians, or to Earthlings. (If there are extraterrestrial intelligences, the image they access in the imaginal, noetic, spiritual world may be of the "face" of the Finite Person conforming to their biology and history. Perhaps the Finite Person successively lives finite lives, so that he has lived the life of Jesus, and of a certain mythic and real being seen in the culture of the orbiters of a distant star. But in every culture, there would be some things the same about the story, of sinlessness, bearing burdens, and giving up everything for what is good, if nothing else.)
I feel like the solution of, Finite Person lives a finite life or lives that as far as he can tell is as real as our finite lives, though it is in an experience machine, and lives this before any of us are created, is possible, and probably what it would make sense for God to do. Would it even be responsible for God to create us without knowing himself? It seems doubtful. In a way, God does not fully become himself, Legitimacy does not fully become itself, until the Finite Person is tested. Could God allow himself to create if his goodness was only provisional? Maybe not. Maybe he would have to figure himself out before going on.
Would it then make sense for this narrative to have preceded the creation of anything? It seems like some sort of being would have to exist in order to pioneer evil and temptation so that it could be imagined in the experience machine, and to tempt the Finite Person.
From the perspective of MSL, it's conceivable that God could not anticipate evil until it arose, produced by beings who freely chose to be evil. Maybe there was only one such being at first. In that moment of seeing evil (perhaps most radically a kind of anti-ethical tendency?), God could extrapolate a lot more of human history (or of the history of other finite personal beings). (Perhaps if God is unable to think of evil that hasn't been innovated by a non-divine being, he tests the initial evil being in an experience machine of its own, where it is able to innovate all possible categories of sin, perhaps thinking that its simulated world is real, and thus that its evil is having full effect.) Perhaps at this moment, God negotiated with this first evil being to will all subsequent temptation. And then God and this one evil being (this singular Satan?) put Jesus through his life, death, and resurrection (and the Finite Person through whatever other lives he led).
This last idea (of the Finite person being tempted and dying before the creation of almost all other beings, and this being something God would put into action in order to be responsible and/or to really become himself) seems fairly satisfying to me as an explanation, and so I will say it's my first preference for explaining whether the Finite person has died yet.