Open Questions · A Theory of Everything

[A Theory of Everything](/#contents)

Companion C:

# [Open Questions](/open-questions)

*   [1\. The Substitutability Assumption](#1-the-substitutability-assumption)
*   [2\. Is Gethsemane Finished?](#2-is-gethsemane-finished)
*   [3\. Physics: What the Analogies Show](#3-physics-what-the-analogies-show)
*   [An Invitation](#an-invitation)
*   [Notes](#notes)

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Any serious model should name the places where it is under the most pressure. Here are three.

## 1\. The Substitutability Assumption

The model holds that God can fix outcomes without ever forcing a choice. But suppose everyone who could bring about a decreed outcome freely refused. At some point, it seems, either the decree fails or someone’s choice is overridden.

The model’s answer, implicit in the story of Joseph Smith and in the case studies, is that there are always enough substitutes and alternate routes. If Joseph falls, another can be planted in his stead. If the pages are lost, the small plates can take their place. If one path to an outcome closes, God, who sees every possible history, has already ensured that others remain.

That answer may well be right, but it is an assumption, and it should be stated outright as a principle:

> *For every outcome God decrees, the space of free histories that reach it is never empty, whatever any individual chooses.*

Stating it openly invites the next questions. Is that guaranteed by God’s foreknowledge, by His power to establish conditions, or by the nature of agency itself?A second difficulty is quantitative. Suppose a decree is satisfied, but only along a few narrow histories, so that one option at some fork leads almost entirely to pruned branches. The person at that fork is still technically free, but the deck looks stacked. How much pruning is compatible with genuine freedom? The model does not yet say. [↓](#note-1)

The hardest test case is the Atonement itself. It is a decreed outcome, “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world,”[Revelation 13:8](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/nt/rev/13?lang=eng&id=p8#p8). [↓](#note-2) and yet no substitute was possible: only Christ could accomplish it. So the principle above cannot be satisfied there by a backup agent. One response is that this outcome rested, uniquely, on the free and perfect obedience of one Person, and that its certainty came from who He is rather than from substitutability.Maximus the Confessor’s insistence that Christ had a real human will, freely aligned with the Father’s, is an ancient version of that response. See the Maximus section in “Echoes in Early Christianity.” [↓](#note-3) If that is right, the model needs a second principle alongside the first: some decrees are secured by substitutability, and at least one was secured by the character of the One who freely chose it.

## 2\. Is Gethsemane Finished?

If Christ in Gethsemane co-experiences the history that we freely actualize, and that history is still being actualized, then in some sense what happened in Gethsemane is not complete until history is.

That is a striking claim, and it is worth owning on purpose rather than leaving implicit. It might mean that Gethsemane was a single event, completed in time, whose content is the whole of history as God knew it in every possibility. Or it might mean that the connection established there remains open and is still being filled as we live.

Each reading has costs. The first keeps Gethsemane complete and in the past, but implies Christ bore an unimaginable weight of lives that never became actual, and makes His knowledge of us less specifically “according to the flesh” of the life we actually lived.[Alma 7:12–13](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/alma/7?lang=eng&id=p12-p13#p12); see Chapter Ten. [↓](#note-4) The second keeps the knowledge exact and personal, but means the Atonement’s content is still being added to, which sits uneasily with Christ’s words “It is finished.”[John 19:30](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/nt/john/19?lang=eng&id=p30#p30). [↓](#note-5) A possible middle path is that the *act* is finished while the *relationship* it established is ongoing, which would fit Chapter Eleven’s reading of the Light of Christ as that relationship felt from our side.

## 3\. Physics: What the Analogies Show

This book uses physics as a source of pictures. Two areas of real physics are especially close to the “global constraint” idea.

**Ken Wharton’s “all-at-once” view.** Physicist Ken Wharton argues that we have assumed too quickly that the universe computes itself forward step by step from an initial state.Ken Wharton, [“The Universe Is Not a Computer”](https://arxiv.org/abs/1211.7081) (FQXi essay contest, 2012). A *Lagrangian* formulation describes a system through its action, the quantity at the heart of the principle of least action (see Chapter Five). [↓](#note-6) He proposes instead taking seriously a “Lagrangian” picture, modeled on action principles, in which the physical history is solved “all at once,” as a four-dimensional problem with boundary conditions at both ends. In such models, future boundary conditions help constrain earlier events. Wharton openly describes this as a kind of hidden retrocausation, though not one that would let anyone send signals into the past.

**The two-state vector formalism.** Developed from work by Yakir Aharonov, Peter Bergmann, and Joel Lebowitz (1964), and later by Aharonov and Lev Vaidman, this formulation describes a system between two measurements using two states: one evolving forward from the earlier measurement, and one evolving backward from the later one. The past and the future both enter the description of the present. It reproduces the ordinary predictions of quantum mechanics.Y. Aharonov, P. G. Bergmann, and J. L. Lebowitz, [“Time Symmetry in the Quantum Process of Measurement,”](https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRev.134.B1410) *Physical Review* 134 (1964). For the later formalism, see Aharonov and Vaidman, [“The Two-State Vector Formalism of Quantum Mechanics: An Updated Review”](https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0105101) (2001). [↓](#note-7)

Both are suggestive, because they show that respected physics can describe a history as shaped by conditions on the whole, including its end, rather than only by pushes from the past.

**But they are analogies.** Neither shows that God exists, that prophecy works this way, or that human choice is a quantum event. Both remain minority or interpretive approaches within physics, debated by specialists. Their value to this book is the value of any good analogy: they show that the structure this model describes is coherent, not that it is true.There is also a mismatch worth stating plainly. In Wharton’s models and in the two-state formalism, the future boundary is a physical fact, a measurement that actually occurs. In this book’s model, the “future boundary” is a divine decree about an outcome, and Chapter Nine insists that the future is not yet actual. So the physics treats the future as real and constraining, while the theology treats only God’s *knowledge* and *decree* about the future as real now. The analogy carries the form of a global constraint, not the metaphysics behind it. Wheeler’s delayed-choice experiment, discussed with the 116 pages in Chapter Six, has the same limit. [↓](#note-8)

## An Invitation

None of these questions undermines the model. Each is an invitation to state it more precisely. A theory of everything, even a theological one, should grow by facing its hardest questions, and in that it follows the pattern Gregory of Nyssa described: perfection as endless reaching forward.On *epektasis*, see “Echoes in Early Christianity.” [↓](#note-9)

## Notes

1.  A second difficulty is quantitative. Suppose a decree is satisfied, but only along a few narrow histories, so that one option at some fork leads almost entirely to pruned branches. The person at that fork is still technically free, but the deck looks stacked. How much pruning is compatible with genuine freedom? The model does not yet say. [↑](#ref-1)
2.  [Revelation 13:8](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/nt/rev/13?lang=eng&id=p8#p8). [↑](#ref-2)
3.  Maximus the Confessor’s insistence that Christ had a real human will, freely aligned with the Father’s, is an ancient version of that response. See the Maximus section in “Echoes in Early Christianity.” [↑](#ref-3)
4.  [Alma 7:12–13](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/alma/7?lang=eng&id=p12-p13#p12); see Chapter Ten. [↑](#ref-4)
5.  [John 19:30](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/nt/john/19?lang=eng&id=p30#p30). [↑](#ref-5)
6.  Ken Wharton, [“The Universe Is Not a Computer”](https://arxiv.org/abs/1211.7081) (FQXi essay contest, 2012). A *Lagrangian* formulation describes a system through its action, the quantity at the heart of the principle of least action (see Chapter Five). [↑](#ref-6)
7.  Y. Aharonov, P. G. Bergmann, and J. L. Lebowitz, [“Time Symmetry in the Quantum Process of Measurement,”](https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRev.134.B1410) *Physical Review* 134 (1964). For the later formalism, see Aharonov and Vaidman, [“The Two-State Vector Formalism of Quantum Mechanics: An Updated Review”](https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0105101) (2001). [↑](#ref-7)
8.  There is also a mismatch worth stating plainly. In Wharton’s models and in the two-state formalism, the future boundary is a physical fact, a measurement that actually occurs. In this book’s model, the “future boundary” is a divine decree about an outcome, and Chapter Nine insists that the future is not yet actual. So the physics treats the future as real and constraining, while the theology treats only God’s *knowledge* and *decree* about the future as real now. The analogy carries the form of a global constraint, not the metaphysics behind it. Wheeler’s delayed-choice experiment, discussed with the 116 pages in Chapter Six, has the same limit. [↑](#ref-8)
9.  On *epektasis*, see “Echoes in Early Christianity.” [↑](#ref-9)

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A Theory of Everything · Draft edition, 2026

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[A Theory of Everything](/)

*   [Before the First ChapterIntroduction](/introduction)

Part One · The Model

*   [Chapter 1Agency](/agency)
*   [Chapter 2God Knows Every Possible Future](/possible-futures)
*   [Chapter 3Divine Decree and Prophecy](/decree-and-prophecy)
*   [Chapter 4God Collapses the Mission, Not the Person](/mission-not-person)
*   [Chapter 5Providence as Global Constraint](/providence)
*   [Chapter 6Three Case Studies](/case-studies)
*   [Chapter 7Miracles Without Micromanagement](/miracles)
*   [Chapter 8Wave-Function Collapse as an Analogy](/collapse)
*   [Chapter 9Time as Actualization](/time)
*   [Chapter 10The Atonement Across Time](/atonement)
*   [Chapter 11The Light of Christ](/light-of-christ)
*   [Chapter 12A Unified View of Providence](/unified-view)

Part Two · Companions

*   [Companion AEchoes in Early Christianity](/early-christianity)
*   [Companion BThe Forty-Day Ministry](/forty-days)
*   [Companion COpen Questions](/open-questions)