A Game of Determinist Chess

“How can a loving God allow [fill in the blank]?”

There may be questions Christians are more likely to hear from unbelievers than the various permutations of the above, but I can’t think of one at the moment. The query may be a defiant attack on the character of God or the honest expression of perplexity by a genuine seeker. Either way, the answers that satisfy you or me rarely settle the matter for those who do not know Christ.

The Unseen Spiritual Realm

My understanding of the unseen spiritual realm that governs much of what happens on this planet has developed over the years into a complex mental vista I rarely feel compelled to defend or explain. In fact, it’s rather difficult to do so. It’s built on dozens, perhaps hundreds of Bible passages and verses, numerous conversations and hours of study and meditation, and it’s easier to describe by analogy than by quoting the text of scripture to somebody who doesn’t understand the most basic concepts behind it.

I picture God standing behind the archangel Michael at one side of a seventy-sided chessboard the size of an ocean. Michael is playing on God’s behalf, following only his orders. The other 69 players, who appear just as terrifying as Michael, are nominally working together, but often have their own agendas. All are under the influence of a shadowy “professional chess consultant” whose chief attribute is lying so frequently that no advice he gives can be fully trusted, but whose obvious shrewdness is such that, lacking any other recourse, the 69 constantly resort to consulting him even when his previous advice has not paid off.

Instead of 64 squares, the board has tens of billions, and instead of sixteen pieces starting from each side, each player has millions at any given time. The sum total of the board pieces includes all the human beings, angels and active agents of any kind on earth at any given point in time. If something can make a choice, it sits in a square. Michael’s pieces are white and shockingly few. The pieces of the other 69 players are black, except in the rare instance that a certain special combat interaction with a white piece causes a black piece belonging to an opponent to turn white and change sides. Once thus converted, it can never revert to its original color, though the death of the agent it represents may remove it from the board, as it always does eventually. And, of course, new black pieces appear on the board regularly.

Billions of Agencies in Play

Each chess piece receives direction from one of the seventy members of the divine council, but each piece is also capable of independent movement. It frequently surprises everyone except God when a black or white piece fails to respond to a direct order from the player it nominally belongs to, and does its own thing instead. There are no traditional “turns”. All the pieces are moving all the time, some of their own volition, some at the direction of the players, their interactions determining both the color of the pieces and whether they remain on the board or are removed from play. On rare occasions, and within clearly defined limits, the rules of the game permit a player to shake his own sector of the board, or perhaps an adjacent sector, taking out large numbers of pieces at the same time.

The most shocking move in the entire game so far was when God instructed Michael to sacrifice the White King. The players found the game did not end as they had expected. The King reappeared on the board three days later, right after which the number of black pieces changing to white began to proliferate mysteriously, much to the frustration of the 69 opponents. No other player to date has been able to pull off that move.

Though the black pieces outnumber the white pieces by orders of magnitude most of the time, God, being sovereign and all-wise, will inevitably win the game. But at any given moment, billions of separate agencies are always in play and nobody but God really understands what is going on.

The View from Board Level

You will say, “Well, your analogy breaks down in this way or that”, and you will be correct. All analogies do. For one, games are frivolous and fun. Life is anything but. But it’s as close as I can currently come to describing how I view the complex interactions that occur in our world, and the causes that lead to various effects, good and bad.

It should readily be evident that in such a scenario, any question beginning “Why did God allow?” is effectively meaningless. He may preside over the entire game, and he will surely win it in the end, but God has only personally directed a tiny fraction of the moves made, and overruling every move anyone finds objectionable would effectively end the contest. The chances are that any result you thought unsporting or a cheat was actually the product of a move made by a piece or player, not by God at all.

I would like to answer such questions, but most people do not find the explanation that the game requires volitional agency fully satisfying. Being the equivalent of chess pieces themselves, they are viewing the contest from the level of the board, unaware of its massive size, unaware of the existence of the 70 players, of the almost endless number of other pieces, and of the length and spiritual stakes of the game underway. The standard pat answer of “free will” almost invariably meets with irritation, as it probably should. Of course there is more to it than that, but who is equipped to fully explain it apart from God? Without a bird’s-eye view of the game, a good look at its rulebook, and the ability to watch a few dozen rounds, no individual piece can see much more than the other pieces around him.

An Even Less Satisfying Analogy

Still, any attempt I make to answer such a question from a frustrated fellow chess piece in this life will be immeasurably more satisfying than if I reconfigure my poor, impoverished analogy to try to describe the spiritual universe from the perspective of the Christian determinist.

Their version of the game has an equally large board with an equally impressive number of transactions occurring at any given time. The difference is that it has a single player: God. The seventy players and their shadowy consultant, whose machinations directed much of the game in my analogy, each occupy squares on the board right alongside the regular chess pieces. No piece has genuine agency, and all the moves in the game occur only as God sees fit.

When you ask a question about such a game that begins with “Why did God allow?”, the only possible answer is “Because.” Of course God did it. He does everything, and his ways are inexplicable. In his inscrutable rulebook, words do not mean what they mean in normal language, and nothing actually works the way it appears.

That massively simplifies the game, naturally, but one wonders why it is even being played. We may as well not bother asking the question.