Occasionally, someone will mention “the universe will do such and such” or “praying to the universe” or “the universe will balance things,” which are all subtle statements of the desire for and the appreciation of a Divine Personal Arbiter or Judge. Only persons can express intention and only a Divine Person can respond to the notion of prayer. Science and/or natural laws are the realm of cause and effect, of action and reaction; persons are the realm of recognition and responding, of consideration and deliberate intentional action. Similarly, only persons can express morality: persons can say and do what ought be done; science and natural law only express what is, not what should be. Thus, appeals to Karma as a cosmic judge that will see a situation righted or a person appropriately punished are really an invocation of a Person with moral capacity to fix things. While I will admit Karma is a complex and non-unitary idea across its many forms, Karma is generally understood as a force, not a person. More generally, it is a force that is about ensuring balance. What is missed is that this idea of balance can belong strictly to science or strictly to morality. I may balance a weight against so many ounces of fruit, this is the scientific use of balance. The moral usage of “balance” is already to use it analogously, or in a strictly metaphorical way: we imagine that some wrong done has 5 lbs of weight and that 20 months imprisonment is worth 5 lbs of weight: we then declare that justice has been served because the scales are returned to balance. There is much that only a person can do, and not a force: imagining, caring about justice at all, creatively trying to determine what will balance the scale, and understanding a person’s deprivation of good to be a moral reality and not just a scientific thing that happens. This said, Karma as a force taking on personal adjudicating capacities is a promotion for how great and how desirable the God of the Bible is. Neither the universe nor karma can take intentional action without first assigning personal capabilities of the moral kind to them. If we must do this though, why bother with the ideas of karma or the universe when we are already expressing a desire for a Personal God who is a Moral Judge?

Dr. Scalise