Human beings naturally imagine heavenly superiority by enlarging the qualities they admire in themselves. If intelligence is valuable, heavenly beings must possess infinitely more intelligence. If knowledge gives power, heavenly beings must possess enormous stores of knowledge. If science allows humanity to manipulate nature, divine knowledge must be something like perfect science.
But perhaps this entire picture begins from the wrong end.
Scripture certainly does not require us to believe that heavenly beings have no intellect. They recognize, speak, choose, remember, obey, oppose, and act. Some intellectual capacity is clearly compatible with what they are.
What is much harder to find is evidence that intellect is particularly important to them.
They do not appear as great scientists. They do not teach the hidden physics of creation. They do not impress humanity by revealing equations thousands of years before their discovery. Even Jesus does not fill His teaching with advanced scientific knowledge. Neither do revelations attributed to Him or coming through the religious traditions that followed, including the Qur'an.
Perhaps Jesus deliberately limits Himself to the knowledge of the people among whom He appears. Revealing modern science in first-century Galilee could have violently disrupted the ordinary intellectual development of humanity. That possibility remains.
But another possibility can stand beside it.
Perhaps heavenly beings simply do not value scientific knowledge nearly as much as humans do because they do not depend upon intellect in the way humans do.
Intellect Is the Power of the Trapped
Human intellect is magnificent, but its magnificence exists within confinement.
We enter a reality whose rules we did not choose. Matter behaves in certain ways. Bodies have limitations. Time moves in one direction. Distances must be crossed. Causes precede effects. Death appears irreversible. A destroyed object cannot simply declare itself restored.
So we learn the rules.
That is the domain of intellect.
Intellect asks what exists, discovers how it works, constructs models, finds regularities, and eventually manipulates those regularities for human purposes. Science and technology are extraordinary achievements because human beings have become increasingly capable of operating within the prison of the given.
But intellect never escapes the basic question:
Given these rules, what can I do?
Even an unimaginably advanced intellect remains dependent upon the "given."
A superintelligence might understand structures no human mind could comprehend. It might calculate billions of possibilities, discover new physical laws, design extraordinary machines, and predict consequences with astonishing accuracy.
Yet it would still need laws.
It would still need premises.
It would still need causality.
It would still need some stable structure from which conclusions could follow.
An intellect can become incomprehensibly greater than ours without becoming one inch more divine.
It merely becomes better at navigating the maze.
Force Does Not Need to Be Intelligent
Satan represents something very different.
Within Logosian thinking, Satan need not be intellectually impressive at all. His cognition may be comparatively rudimentary. He need not possess a celestial databank containing the secrets of physics, biology, mathematics, and engineering.
He does not need them.
Satan is fearsome because his principal strength is not intellect.
It is force.
Suppose humanity eventually creates an astonishing civilization administered by extraordinarily sophisticated artificial intelligence. Its machines can solve problems humans cannot understand. Its institutions have centuries of accumulated knowledge behind them. Its weapons, communications, medicine, and engineering represent the summit of intellectual achievement.
Satan does not need to outthink any of it.
He needs pride.
He needs fear.
He needs grievance.
He needs humiliation.
He needs envy.
He needs accusation.
He needs one person to refuse forgiveness and another to retaliate.
Then the magnificent intellectual machine can begin destroying itself.
Satan does not have to invent the weapon. Humans will invent it.
He does not have to understand the weapon. Humans will understand it.
He merely needs enough force applied to primitive impulses for the intelligent creature to point its own weapon in the required direction.
That is why intellect provides surprisingly little protection against him.
The brilliant person can hate.
The scientist can envy.
The philosopher can become consumed by humiliation.
The technologically advanced nation can seek revenge.
An artificial superintelligence could conceivably organize an extraordinary system and still remain powerless before such force.
Satan does not necessarily defeat intellect by possessing greater intellect.
Force simply crashes through it.
But Force Is Not the Greatest Power
There is, however, something against which even overwhelming force becomes almost ridiculous.
Imagination.
Here the word must be separated completely from its ordinary meaning. Divine imagination is not cleverness. It is not creativity added to intelligence. It is not an especially ingenious way of solving difficult problems.
It is something much more radical.
Intellect solves the problem within its premises.
Force overwhelms the problem.
Imagination refuses to grant the premises authority over reality.
Suppose there is a locked room.
Intellect studies the lock. It searches for a key. It designs a tool. A sufficiently advanced intellect might understand every atom in the door and calculate the perfect method of opening it.
Force smashes through the door.
Imagination draws another door on the wall and walks through it.
The last possibility is absurd.
And that is exactly the point.
Perhaps the locked room is more than an analogy.
After the resurrection, John's Gospel twice draws attention to closed doors. On the evening of the resurrection, the disciples are gathered behind locked doors when Jesus comes and stands among them. Eight days later, the doors are again shut, and Jesus again comes and stands among them.
The Gospel does not describe Jesus finding a key.
It does not describe Him breaking the door.
It does not even provide another mechanism.
The obstacle is stated, and then Jesus is there.
Intellect immediately asks how He crossed the locked door. But perhaps that question already grants too much authority to the door. It assumes that the alternatives recognized by ordinary reality must also be the only alternatives available to Jesus.
Unlock it.
Break it.
Pass somehow through it.
But why must those exhaust the possibilities?
Perhaps human beings keep asking how God overcomes obstacles because they assume that God agrees with them that these things are obstacles.
The disciples' world says:
The door is locked; therefore entry requires overcoming the lock.
The resurrection world may simply answer:
Why?
Bugs Bunny and the Absurdity of Heaven
A ridiculous cartoon character may unexpectedly provide a better illustration than an impressive philosopher.
Bugs Bunny is effectively indestructible.
He does not survive because he is the strongest creature in his world. He does not survive because he has developed superior technology. Nor does he normally appear to possess some vast scientific intellect capable of calculating his escape from every danger.
He survives because reality around him refuses to remain serious.
Someone brings overwhelming force against him, and the entire premise changes.
A wall becomes a doorway.
A fatal situation becomes a joke.
An object appears because it is needed.
The environment changes allegiance.
The rules that made the enemy powerful cease to matter.
The analogy is deliberately absurd because absurdity is precisely what intellect experiences when imagination refuses its rules.
The intellectual observer protests:
That cannot happen.
That is inconsistent.
That violates the premises.
There is no mechanism.
Where did the door come from?
How could he survive that?
But Bugs Bunny does not provide a scientific paper explaining the mechanism.
He is already somewhere else.
Of course, a cartoon character possesses no divine power. The cartoon works because an animator controls its reality. Yet this makes the analogy more interesting rather than less. Bugs Bunny appears powerful because the reality surrounding him is not sovereign over him.
The rules are negotiable.
And suddenly Jesus' strange preference for the little ones becomes philosophically interesting.
Hidden From the Wise
Jesus thanks the Father because things have been hidden from the wise and understanding and revealed to little children.
The statement is easy to turn into a simple lesson about humility. But there may be something deeper in the contrast.
Adults learn reality.
Children imagine it.
A small child possesses little knowledge. The child understands little physics, little biology, little causality, and little philosophy. Intellectually, the child is enormously inferior to the educated adult.
Yet tell the child:
"The house disappeared."
The child continues.
"Now it came back."
Fine.
"He died."
A moment later:
"Now he's alive."
Fine.
"We cannot get through this wall."
The child draws a door.
The adult objects because the adult knows too much about how walls work.
The child has not yet learned to respect reality sufficiently.
This is normally a weakness. A child's imagination cannot make the imagined thing objectively real.
But suppose it could.
Then suddenly the child's apparent intellectual weakness would conceal a power greater than the adult's knowledge.
The adult knows ten thousand reasons why something cannot happen.
The child imagines it happening anyway.
The tragedy of the child's imagination is not that it is too absurd.
It is that it lacks the power to make its absurdity real.
Heavenly imagination does not lack such power.
Imagination With Power
This is the crucial distinction.
Human imagination can violate reality mentally while remaining powerless objectively.
A person can imagine a dead loved one alive. The imagination does not resurrect the person.
A child can imagine the destroyed house restored. The house remains destroyed.
A novelist can destroy a universe on one page and recreate it on the next, but only inside the story.
Heavenly imagination, within Logosian thinking, is imagination aligned with the vector of power necessary to make the imagined reality actual.
Now intellect faces something it cannot defeat.
Intellect can say:
Impossible.
Force can say:
I will destroy it.
Divine imagination can answer:
Then it will be otherwise.
There is nothing for intellect to calculate against.
There is nothing for force finally to destroy.
Force may destroy the existing configuration of reality, but imagination is not necessarily committed to preserving that configuration.
This is why Satan can be immensely fearsome without being immensely intelligent and nevertheless remain helpless before the heavenly order.
Satan may smash what intellect builds.
Logos does not have to smash Satan harder.
Logos can imagine beyond what Satan smashed.
Relocation Is Imagination Refusing the Premise
Relocation is perhaps the clearest Logosian example.
Someone suffers terribly.
Intellect asks how the damage can be repaired.
Perhaps compensation can be given.
But compensation does not erase the suffering.
Perhaps what was lost can be returned.
But return does not erase the memory of loss.
Perhaps the dead can be resurrected.
But resurrection alone still leaves a history in which the loved one died, the survivor grieved, terror was experienced, and the wound became part of consciousness.
Intellect keeps repairing the consequences because intellect accepts the original premise:
The event happened. Now what can be done about it?
Relocation refuses the premise.
The final answer becomes:
The event will not belong to the restored reality at all.
Intellect protests immediately.
But it happened! How can something both have happened and ultimately not have happened?
Where does the old history go?
How can causality permit this?
How can identity remain continuous?
These are serious intellectual questions.
But they may also demonstrate the limitation being discussed.
Intellect is desperately trying to find the door in the locked room.
Relocation draws another one on the wall.
It does not necessarily solve the contradiction.
It refuses to remain imprisoned inside it.
The Power of Paradox
This gives paradox a different theological significance.
Perhaps paradox is not merely a difficult statement awaiting a sufficiently intelligent theologian.
Perhaps paradox is sometimes what higher imagination looks like when perceived by an intellect confined to the existing order.
The dead live.
The last become first.
The servant becomes greatest.
The one who loses life finds it.
The poor possess a kingdom.
Defeat becomes victory.
What has been destroyed is restored.
What happened no longer governs the final reality.
The intellectual instinct is always to ask how these statements can be reconciled with the structures already known.
But divine imagination may not be seeking reconciliation with those structures.
This is why increasing intelligence indefinitely does not necessarily bring a being closer to heaven.
The wisest creature can become the world's greatest expert on the prison.
It can catalogue every brick.
It can calculate the exact strength of every wall.
It can understand the metallurgy of every lock.
It can write the definitive theory explaining why escape is impossible.
And then a little child draws a door.
Why Superintelligence Is Still Small
This is why artificial superintelligence, however formidable it might someday become, would remain something strangely primitive from this perspective.
It could represent intellect almost purified of ordinary human limitations.
Calculation without fatigue.
Memory without ordinary forgetting.
Pattern recognition on a scale inaccessible to human beings.
Enormous scientific knowledge.
Extraordinary prediction.
Yet all of this remains dependent upon structure.
Artificial intelligence needs the world to make enough sense for intelligence to operate upon it.
It requires distinctions.
Relations.
Patterns.
Premises.
Consequences.
Even when it creates something new, it recombines possibilities within some intelligible space.
Divine imagination represents almost the opposite principle.
It does not ask what follows from the premises.
It can overthrow the premises.
A superintelligence might eventually explain with astonishing precision why something is impossible.
That explanation would become irrelevant the instant divine imagination made the impossible real.
The intellect would not necessarily have made a calculation error.
Reality would simply have ceased obeying the calculation.
The Three Powers
The distinction can therefore be stated simply.
Intellect asks: What can be done given reality?
Force says: I will overpower what stands before me.
Imagination asks: Why must reality remain this way at all?
Human civilization overwhelmingly depends upon the first.
Satan represents the terrifying potential of the second.
The heavenly order reveals the supremacy of the third.
This does not make intellect evil or useless. Intellect is magnificent within its proper domain. Science is one of humanity's greatest achievements. Knowledge allows human beings to accomplish things that once appeared impossible.
But intellect should not mistake mastery of the rules for mastery of reality itself.
Nor should immense destructive force be mistaken for ultimate power.
Satan can break what intellect constructs.
But divine imagination can make Satan's destruction irrelevant.
That is the asymmetry.
Intellect builds the castle.
Force demolishes it.
Divine imagination does not necessarily rebuild the castle stone by stone.
It can say:
There is the castle.
Or more radically:
There was never a ruin.
At that point both the engineer and the destroyer have been surpassed.
The engineer's knowledge was real.
The destroyer's force was real.
But neither possessed authority over what reality itself was permitted to become.
Perhaps this is one reason heavenly beings can appear strangely simple from the human intellectual perspective. We expect greatness to resemble an enormous mind containing an enormous library.
But heaven may have little need for such greatness.
The little child and the cartoon rabbit provide the analogy that we might find to be embarrasing.
Both lack the solemn respect for reality possessed by the educated adult. Walls need not remain walls. Death need not remain death. The story can turn around instantly. Contradictions do not frighten them. Reality remains fluid before imagination.
For the child this is merely play.
For Bugs Bunny it is merely cartoon logic.
But if imagination were joined to the power to make its impossible object objectively real, what appears childish from below would become terrifyingly greater than intellect.
Then perhaps the words about truth being hidden from the wise and revealed to little ones cease to sound sentimental.
The wise know why the wall cannot become a door.
The little one draws the door anyway.
The disciples lock the doors because they know what locked doors mean.
Jesus stands among them.
And heaven walks through.