"Call me Ishmael."  So goes the immortal first line of Herman Melville's Moby Dick.  A genuinely masterful novel, Moby Dick is many things.  Most deeply, however, it is the story of a person wrestling with the two most perennially vexing ideas in the universe:  divine sovereignty and human choice.

     Curiously, the name Ishmael means, "God hears."  Does he?  If God hears, we have a way out of this puzzle.  If God does not hear, we are left bereft.  Absent the idea and/or presence of God, human choice is meaningless:  we are making decisions in a pointless world.  Yet the idea and presence of God are confounding when set against choice:  how do we know which is which?
     The answer is that we don't.  As Ahab shouts to the sky, "This whole act's immutably decreed.  'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled" . . . then, later on, "I thrust the spear [into the whale]!"  Only me!
     And God hears.  We're the only ones here, yes, but God's the only one who hears us.