💥Why you should read my book

Twenty-five years ago, as I was getting my masters in mathematics and wondering what to research further, I was surprised to find an unsolved puzzle about infinity at the heart of modern mathematics. Some of my first thoughts were published in philosophy journals, so I went on to do a masters in philosophy. I got it with distinction, and by thinking laterally as well as logically, I eventually found the solution that academics would not find in a hundred years. I decided to write my discovery up for a general reader with no background in philosophy, logic or mathematics, and five years later I had it down to 25,000 words.

In my book I describe and solve logical puzzles, because the only perfectly logical solution to one of the puzzles—that puzzle about infinity—is only a logical possibility if there is a logical kind of God. In short, my book amounts to a perfectly logical proof that there is such a God.

      A hundred years ago, the mathematical puzzle was proving to be so puzzling that mathematicians translated the whole of mathematics into a new "language" (akin to a programming language) in order to lose it in that translation. And that sea-change to academic mathematics trickled down to school mathematics in the form of the new math. Which you may have heard of, because it was quite controversial fifty years ago. The mathematicians’ responses were logical enough, but this puzzle is essentially a logical puzzle. And philosophers like Bertrand Russell responded to it by modernizing logic.

      For a hundred years, scientific philosophers have been treating logical thinking as though it was a kind of computing: Something that might be done better on a computer. By explaining these logical puzzles properly, my book will revitalize philosophy. My book may also help to defuse America’s "culture war" by making logic more interesting to religious people while simultaneously showing that atheism is not really very scientific. And because scientific research will progress in directions that are more realistic as a result of my book, my book could even herald the next scientific revolution. And of course, a lot of people will find it helpful to know that there is a reasonable sort of God.

🔥The Dark Vulcan

Vulcan was "discovered" by Lescarbault in 1859, in the sense that he saw something that he took to be the planet hypothesized by Le Verrier earlier that year. Le Verrier was already famous for his 1846 prediction of the existence and position of Uranus:

That prediction was based on observations of the planet Neptune. Neptune was not behaving as Newtonian dynamics predicted it would, not unless there was an unobserved planet like Uranus. A few days later, Uranus was discovered by Galle, who saw it roughly where Le Verrier had said it would be.

In 1859, Le Verrier hypothesized that observations of the planet Mercury might be similarly explained, by there being a planet between Mercury and the sun. And Le Verrier was sure that Lescarbault had discovered Vulcan. But whatever Lescarbault had seen, it was not Vulcan. And in the following decades, many observations of the absence of Vulcan were made. Some astronomers claimed to have seen Vulcan, but there seemed, on balance, to be no such planet. And the motion of Mercury was eventually explained in 1915, by Einstein.

My question is this:

Why was the balance of opinion before then not for the existence of a dark Vulcan?

Physicists only had to hypothesize the existence of dark matter, out of which Vulcan was made, in order to explain their observations:

If dark matter was a very heavy and very dark form of matter, ubiquitous in the universe, then most of the dark matter in the solar system would be clustered around the sun, possibly in the form of a dark Vulcan.

Physicists had good reasons not to hypothesize dark matter, of course. And they also had good reasons to deny the existence of celestial epicycles, which had, much earlier, been hypothesized to explain other astronomical observations (within a medieval culture).

But physicists do say that there is dark matter in the universe. Its existence is said to explain modern astronomical observations: the stars do not behave as Einsteinian dynamics predicts, unless there is dark matter.

In other words, those observations contradict Einsteinian dynamics, to some extent. And Einsteinian dynamics has also been contradicted by quantum-mechanical observations of Bell's inequality, to some extent, so my next question is this:

Did something happen to physics in the twentieth century?

And physics did become more of a cultural phenomenon in the twentieth century.