Chez Joel is thinking about what kinds of choices are truly available to us:
This universe, and we ourselves are neither completely random, nor are we trivially simple. We and our world are somewhere between the two. And as I contemplated this on my drive home, a Psalm came into my head: "Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of mine enemies." Suddenly the Psalm became a cryptogram unraveling. A table is simple, predictable, safe. Enemies are complex, volitile, dangerous and difficult to predict. God, in preparing an ordered space for us in the midst of chaos, has deftly wrapped these two diametric forces into a single, paradoxical whole: a universe which is not so simple that we do not have room to make choices, nor so complex that we cannot observe it and make some predictions. He provided paths in which we might cross the blind spots of self change, but at the same time made a world in which we might actually observe ourselves and others in order to make informed choices.Read the whole thing.
