Energy, Information, and the Preservation of Choice
A Companion to From Gravity to Grace
(c)Matthew J. Habecker, MS, CPO
Moral Architecture Thought Experiments
November 2026
“Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him.”
Revelation 3:20
Abstract
God can act on the world in two ways without overriding a human choice: by putting energy into the physical world, and by giving information to the person choosing. This paper argues that scripture’s accounts of divine action fit those two channels, and that choice itself is the one thing God consistently refuses to override.
It begins with purpose. If God is love, and love cannot be forced, then the physical world exists to make real choice possible, and humans were made in God’s image to bear it. It then describes the two channels. Energy enters the morally neutral physical world and changes the circumstances, like a switch thrown on a railroad, while the engineer still runs the train. Information enters the chooser as clearer sight, through illumination, dreams, and visions, without making the decision. Third, it offers a mechanical model for the hardest case, God “hardening” Pharaoh’s heart: the heart behaves like a hardening spring, whose resistance rises faster than the load placed on it. Finally, it tests the model against the passages that most challenge it. The paper concludes that God preserves choice at all cost, and that the Cross shows what that cost was.
1. Introduction
From Gravity to Grace proposed that the physical world is a stage for choice (§8). The Hand on the Domino proposed that faith is the open boundary through which outside help enters, and that many miracles may come as a small nudge at a choice point, often as clearer sight. An earlier paper, Faith as Force Mechanics (Habecker, 2025), proposed that the same outside force produces healing in a receptive heart and hardening in a resistant one.
This paper draws those threads into one claim: God changes circumstances and gives light, but He does not make the choice. It keeps the claim types used in the earlier papers: physics, analogy, interpretation, and testimony. Scripture is quoted from the King James Version and is read on its own terms, without the frameworks of any particular denomination.
Type of claim in this section: Method only.
2. Why There Is a Physical World
2.1 Love Requires Choice
The argument starts with one sentence of scripture and follows it:
1. God is love (1 John 4:8).
2. Love cannot be forced. Love that is compelled is not love. It requires a real choice.
3. Real choice requires a real world. A choice must matter, be final, have foreseeable results, and cost something. From Gravity to Grace (Table 4) showed that the physical world supplies each of these: nothing has exactly zero effect, time runs one way, the laws are stable, and energy and time are limited.
4. Someone must bear the choice. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him” (Genesis 1:27).
On this reading, the physical world exists so that choice can exist, and humans were made to carry it.
2.2 The Image Is the Ability to Choose
Genesis joins the image to action in the same breath: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion” (Genesis 1:26). To have dominion is to make decisions that shape the world. Creation itself was God’s free choice; nothing compelled Him to make anything. To bear His image is to be able to choose for real: to cause what would not otherwise happen, and to love freely.
This explains why choice is guarded so carefully. If the image consists in choosing, then overriding a person’s choice would erase the image in the act of rescuing the person.
2.3 Every Person Is Adam
The Hebrew adam means “human” or “mankind” before it becomes a name. Genesis 3 reads as every human choice in miniature:
• A standard from outside. God’s word about the tree came from beyond the garden (Genesis 2:17).
• Competing information. Another voice offered a different reading: “Ye shall not surely die” (Genesis 3:4). The contest was between two sources of information, not between force and freedom.
• An unforced choice. The tree was not fenced off.
• Consequences that spread. “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22).
• Blaming the nearest domino. “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree” (Genesis 3:12). “The serpent beguiled me” (Genesis 3:13). Each points to the link nearest them, the proximity error of From Gravity to Grace (§4).
• God answers with a question. “Where art thou?” (Genesis 3:9). God already knew. The question invites Adam to see where he stands.
Type of claim in this section: Interpretation.
3. Two Channels: Energy and Information
God’s input reaches the world through two channels. Neither one makes the choice.
Table 1. Two channels of divine input.
| Channel | What it changes | What it leaves alone | Examples |
| Energy into the physical world | Circumstances: what is possible, what happens next | The chooser’s will | The Red Sea, healing, provision, rescue |
| Information into the chooser | What the person can see | The decision itself | Illumination, dreams, visions, prophecy |
3.1 Energy into the Physical World
From Gravity to Grace (§8.2) showed that adding energy from outside breaks no law. The energy balance is:
ΔE = Ein − Eout (1)
In a closed system both terms are zero. If energy enters from outside, the system’s energy rises and no law is broken.
The physical world is neutral in sign (From Gravity to Grace, §5). It carries effects but no moral label. So God can put energy into it at will. That produces new physical consequences, but it does not touch the place where moral meaning lives, which is the human choice.
The railroad switch. Picture a person pulling the switch on a railroad track so that the train goes another way. In this analogy the person choosing is the engineer, not the train. God throws the switch and changes the track ahead. The engineer still controls the throttle and the brake, and still decides how to respond to the new route. God changes the tracks, not the engineer.
The Red Sea. “The LORD caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land” (Exodus 14:21). God changed the physical world, and ordinary physics, a wind, carried the change forward. Then both sides chose. Israel had to walk into the opening. “And the Egyptians pursued, and went in after them to the midst of the sea” (Exodus 14:23). The same change in circumstances met two different choices.
3.2 Information into the Chooser
The second channel does not move the world. It lets the person see it.
LORD, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see. (2 Kings 6:17)
Nothing on the mountain changed for Elisha’s servant. He simply saw the horses and chariots of fire that were already there. On the road to Emmaus, “their eyes were opened” (Luke 24:31). The psalmist calls God’s word “a lamp unto my feet” (Psalm 119:105): a lamp shows the next step, not the whole road.
From Gravity to Grace (§10) describes human judgment as a measurement with error: M = T + ε. Illumination reduces the error, ε. It does not reveal the whole chain of causes; it sharpens sight just enough for the choice at hand.
Clear sight does not compel. The rich young ruler saw exactly what was asked of him and “went away grieved” (Mark 10:22). Seeing and choosing are separate acts.
3.3 Dreams and Visions
A dream or vision is a physical event, activity in the brain, so it takes a small amount of energy. What it carries is information. Scripture consistently shows the person still choosing afterward:
• Joseph was told in a dream to take Mary as his wife, then “did as the angel of the Lord had bidden him” (Matthew 1:24).
• Peter’s vision came three times, and afterward Peter “doubted in himself what this vision which he had seen should mean” (Acts 10:17). He still had to decide.
• Paul’s Macedonian vision was followed by “assuredly gathering that the Lord had called us” (Acts 16:10). Later he said, “I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision” (Acts 26:19), which implies that he could have been.
• Pilate’s wife warned him because of a dream: “Have thou nothing to do with that just man” (Matthew 27:19). Pilate went ahead anyway. True information was given and declined.
Not every dream comes from God. Scripture warns against prophets who “prophesy lies in my name, saying, I have dreamed” (Jeremiah 23:25). The Hand on the Domino (§6.2) proposed peace as the calibration signal: “Let the peace of God rule in your hearts” (Colossians 3:15).
Type of claim in this section: Physics (Equation 1). Analogy (the railroad switch). Interpretation (the two channels).
4. The Hardening Spring
4.1 The Problem
Scripture says that “the LORD hardened the heart of Pharaoh, and he hearkened not unto them” (Exodus 9:12). Read alone, this looks like God acting directly on a will, and toward refusal. It is the strongest challenge to the claim that God preserves choice.
4.2 The Model
Faith as Force Mechanics (Habecker, 2025) proposed that Pharaoh’s heart behaves like a spring under load. The model has three parts:
• The default position. Pharaoh’s own stance, the shape he chose before anything pressed on him.
• The load. The plagues. God put the energy into those circumstances from outside.
• The stiffening. The spring’s own property. More load met more resistance because of how Pharaoh was built, not because God made him stiff.
4.3 The Right Spring
An ordinary spring follows Hooke’s law:
F = kx (2)
Here F is the size of the push-back force, x is how far the spring is compressed, and k is its stiffness. (The textbook form, F = −kx, adds a minus sign only to show that the force pushes back against the compression.) Under Hooke’s law, k never changes. The push-back grows only because the spring is compressed farther. An ordinary spring does not get stiffer.
Engineers have a name for a spring that does: a hardening spring. Its standard model, the Duffing equation (Duffing, 1918), adds a term:
F = kx + βx³ (3)
At small loads it acts like an ordinary spring. As the load grows, the cubic term takes over, and resistance rises much faster than the load. Real examples include progressive-rate suspension springs, conical springs, air springs, rubber bump stops, and living tissue such as tendon and ligament, which is easy to stretch at first and then increasingly stiff.
Figure 1. An ordinary spring and a hardening spring under the same rising load. The ordinary spring’s resistance grows in a straight line. The hardening spring’s resistance climbs faster with every increase, as Pharaoh’s did from the early plagues to the later ones. Drawn from Equations 2 and 3, in relative units.
4.4 What the Text Shows
The pattern of the Exodus account matches the model closely.
Under load, Pharaoh gives way. During the plague of frogs he says, “I will let the people go” (Exodus 8:8). During the hail he says, “I have sinned this time” (Exodus 9:27).
When the load is lifted, he springs back. “But when Pharaoh saw that there was respite, he hardened his heart” (Exodus 8:15). “And when Pharaoh saw that the rain and the hail and the thunders were ceased, he sinned yet more, and hardened his heart” (Exodus 9:34). A spring returns to its own shape when released.
Three phrasings describe one event. Scripture says “Pharaoh’s heart was hardened” (Exodus 7:22), “Pharaoh hardened his heart” (Exodus 8:32), and “the LORD hardened the heart of Pharaoh” (Exodus 9:12). Under the model these do not conflict. One is neutral, one is seen from the spring’s side, and one is seen from the side of the One who applied the load. We say “I hardened the spring” even though the stiffness belongs to the spring.
More pressure meets more resistance. John records the same pattern in Jesus’ ministry: “But though he had done so many miracles before them, yet they believed not on him” (John 12:37). The verses that follow speak of blinded eyes and hardened hearts (John 12:40).
Hardening follows an earlier refusal. Paul says that God sends “strong delusion” to those who perish “because they received not the love of the truth” (2 Thessalonians 2:10–11). The load meets a heart already set.
4.5 When Hardening Becomes Permanent
A spring returns to its shape. Metal bent past its elastic limit, again and again, does not. It becomes permanently harder and more brittle, a process called work hardening, and in the end it cracks rather than bends. Pharaoh’s arc follows both stages: he springs back after the early plagues, grows harder with each cycle, and at the Red Sea breaks rather than bends.
4.6 The Same Source, Two Results
The central insight of Faith as Force Mechanics follows: the same outside source produces healing in one heart and hardening in another, depending on the receiver. The woman who touched Jesus’ garment and the Pharaoh who faced the plagues met the same power. The difference was the state of the heart it met.
Type of claim in this section: Physics (Equations 2 and 3, work hardening). Analogy (the heart as a hardening spring). Interpretation (the Exodus pattern).
5. Faith and the Open Boundary
The Hand on the Domino (§3) proposed that faith is the permeability of the boundary: it does not produce the restoring input, it lets it in. Faith as Force Mechanics described the same idea as resistance reduction. The two descriptions agree.
One refinement matters here. Faith does not need to be perfect, or “zero resistance,” for help to come. When Peter began to sink, “he cried, saying, Lord, save me. And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him” (Matthew 14:30–31). Help came during the doubt, in answer to a cry. The woman with the issue of blood was hiding and half-superstitious, and she was still healed. Faith seems to work by opening the door even partway.
Faith can also open the boundary on someone else’s behalf. The centurion’s servant was healed through the centurion’s faith: “as thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee” (Matthew 8:13). And some healings involved no faith from the one healed at all, such as Lazarus (John 11) and Malchus, an enemy (Luke 22:51). God’s willingness comes first: “I will; be thou clean” (Mark 1:41). Faith opens the door to a supply that is already on.
Type of claim in this section: Interpretation.
6. Testing the Model Against Scripture
A model should be tested against the passages that most challenge it. Table 2 lists the strongest ones.
Table 2. Passages that test the model.
| Passage | Apparent challenge | Reading under the model |
| Exodus 9:12 | God hardens Pharaoh’s heart | A hardening spring under God’s load; Pharaoh hardened first (8:15) |
| John 12:40 | God blinds eyes | Follows 12:37: more signs met more resistance |
| 2 Thessalonians 2:11 | God sends strong delusion | Given “because they received not the love of the truth” (2:10) |
| Ezra 1:1 | God “stirred up the spirit of Cyrus” | Likely through information: Isaiah named Cyrus beforehand (Isaiah 44:28; 45:1), and Josephus records that Cyrus read it |
| Ezekiel 36:26 | God gives a new heart | Also commanded: “make you a new heart” (Ezekiel 18:31). Gift and choice together |
| Philippians 2:13 | God works “to will and to do” | Joined to “work out your own salvation” (2:12). Cooperation, not override |
| Romans 7:19 | Seeing clearly is not enough | People may need strength as well as light; strength still serves the choice |
| Proverbs 21:1 | The king’s heart “in the hand of the LORD” | Consistent with pressure, light, and circumstance; not decided by the text |
| 1 Samuel 16:14 | “An evil spirit from the LORD troubled him” | Consistent with influence on circumstance and mind; not decided by the text |
Most of these passages, read in context, show the same pattern: God’s input meets a choice that is still the person’s. Two, Proverbs 21:1 and 1 Samuel 16:14, could be read either way. The model is consistent with them but not proven by them.
Type of claim in this section: Interpretation.
7. Choice Preserved at All Cost
Scripture places choice at its most important moments:
I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life. (Deuteronomy 30:19)
Choose you this day whom ye will serve. (Joshua 24:15)
How often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! (Matthew 23:37)
In the last passage God wants one outcome, and still the choice remains theirs. In Revelation 3:20 He stands at the door and knocks; He does not break it down.
“At all cost” may be the deepest part of this. Choice let disorder into the world. God could have removed the choice. Instead, in the account From Gravity to Grace describes (§12), He stepped into the chain Himself and absorbed the consequences (specification R4). Then He offered restoration freely, to be accepted or refused (R7 and R8). He kept people’s freedom and paid the cost Himself.
Type of claim in this section: Interpretation.
8. Limitations
Two passages remain open. Proverbs 21:1 and 1 Samuel 16:14 are consistent with the model but do not require it. Scripture alone does not settle them.
The analogies are analogies. Equations 1 to 3 describe real physics. Applying them to the human heart is analogy, not measurement.
Some sources are outside scripture. The account of Cyrus reading Isaiah comes from Josephus, a first-century historian, not from the biblical text.
Information can mislead. Dreams and impressions can be false (Jeremiah 23:25–32). The model needs a test for discerning them, and peace is offered here as one test, not a proven one.
The hardest cases remain hard. The model explains how God can act without overriding choice. It does not explain why He acts in one case and not another. As From Gravity to Grace says, explanation is not comfort and should never replace presence.
9. Conclusion: The Engineer and the Switch
Table 3 summarizes the argument.
Table 3. The argument in seven steps.
| Step | Claim | Type |
| 1 | God is love, love requires choice, and the physical world exists to make real choice possible. | Interpretation |
| 2 | Humans bear God’s image as bearers of choice, and every person repeats Adam’s choice. | Interpretation |
| 3 | God can put energy into the morally neutral physical world without breaking a law or overriding a will. | Physics and analogy |
| 4 | God gives information, including illumination, dreams, and visions, that clarifies the choice without making it. | Interpretation |
| 5 | A hardened heart behaves like a hardening spring: its own resistance rises under God’s load. | Physics and analogy |
| 6 | The same outside source heals an open heart and hardens a closed one. | Interpretation |
| 7 | God preserves choice at all cost, and the Cross shows the cost. | Interpretation |
God throws the switch, and He gives light to see the track. He does not take the controls from the engineer. Every person stands where Adam stood, before a real choice in a real world, made in the image of the One who chose to create them.
Nothing is neutral in effect, and choice is never taken. God changes the tracks and lights the way, and the engineer still drives. He stands at the door and knocks.
References
Duffing, G. (1918). Erzwungene Schwingungen bei veränderlicher Eigenfrequenz und ihre technische Bedeutung [Forced oscillations with variable natural frequency and their technical significance]. Vieweg.
Habecker, M. J. (2025). Faith as force mechanics: A thermodynamic analysis of miracles in an open system. Moral Architecture Thought Experiments.
Habecker, M. J. (2026a). From gravity to grace: A moral architecture of consequence, restoration, and the unseen spectrum. Moral Architecture Thought Experiments.
Habecker, M. J. (2026b). The hand on the domino: Faith, providence, and ordinary miracles. Moral Architecture Thought Experiments.
Hooke, R. (1678). Lectures de potentia restitutiva, or of spring. John Martyn.
Josephus, F. (1737). The antiquities of the Jews (W. Whiston, Trans.), Book 11, Chapter 1. (Original work published c. 94)
The Holy Bible (King James Version). Genesis 1:26–27, 2:17, 3:4–13; Exodus 7:22, 8:8, 8:15, 8:32, 9:12, 9:27, 9:34, 14:21–23; Deuteronomy 30:19; Joshua 24:15; 1 Samuel 16:14; 2 Kings 6:17; Ezra 1:1; Psalm 119:105; Proverbs 21:1; Isaiah 44:28, 45:1; Jeremiah 23:25–32; Ezekiel 18:31, 36:26; Matthew 1:24, 8:13, 14:30–31, 23:37, 27:19; Mark 1:41, 10:22; Luke 22:51, 24:31; John 11, 12:37–40; Acts 10:17, 16:10, 26:19; Romans 7:19; 1 Corinthians 15:22; Philippians 2:12–13; Colossians 3:15; 2 Thessalonians 2:10–11; 1 John 4:8; Revelation 3:20.
