📖The Hiddenness of God

As the twentieth century began, the atheist philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell was thinking about some puzzling arithmetic, which he correctly took to be a logical puzzle. And as he was thinking about that puzzle, he found another. Now, his answer to both puzzles was a scientific theory of logic—a mathematical model of logic—and since then, logicians have done a lot of mathematical modelling. So, logic looks very scientific nowadays. But if scientists, by thinking logically, reached an outlandish conclusion, would they think that something was wrong with logic? Or is science more logical than that?

Does that puzzling arithmetic actually amount to a scientific proof of something scientifically revolutionary?

That possibility is outlined in chapter 1 of The Hiddenness of God. The puzzle that Russell found is of a kind with two ancient puzzles—the heap paradox and the liar paradox—so chapter 1 begins with them, and chapter 2 shows why they give us no good reason to doubt the reliability of logical thinking. We should therefore think very logically about that puzzling arithmetic, which chapter 3 describes in relatively plain English, to bring out the underlying logic. Chapter 4 shows how that logical puzzle makes sense if—and in all likelihood, only if—there is a creator of all things who is above and beyond the concept of a thing but not completely above and beyond time and change.

🙏The Odyssey Theodicy

Religious people do wonder, from time to time, why bad things happen to good people. And it is an interesting metaphysical question: why, if there is a God, do bad things happen to good people? Why, if there was a good Creator of all things, would that Creator not have made all creatures naturally good, in a world where only good things would ever happen to them? And one logical possibility is that God did just that:

Maybe God created a heavenly world in which a variety of good people were much closer to their Creator than we are here. In their heavenly home, only good things happened to them. Wiser and better informed about that creation than we are about this universe, might some of those people have wanted to spend some of their limitless time in a less heavenly world?

There are various reasons why they might have. Maybe they thought that their relationships with each other would improve if they spent some time in a world like ours. From their heavenly perspective, it might have seemed like going camping seems to children. It might not have seemed like that once they were there, of course. But presumably a God could guarantee that they would all end up at least as well off as they had started. Maybe they reincarnate, for example, with some of their later incarnations being therapeutic (the fact that we cannot recall past lives does not tell against that possibility because we cannot even recall being born). Still, a lot of them did not like it once they were there (here). And because some of them dimly recalled having set out on a heroic expedition, they told stories about how it had all gone wrong. Others were more philosophical. And those with a mystical bent said that life was death and death life. But the main thing is that they all lived happily ever after, in heaven.

Note that their Creator would presumably have been above and beyond that heavenly creation (a bit like how a story’s author is above and beyond that story).

That means that there could conceivably have been limits to the relationships that those people could have had with their creator. Now, those people might have had many other interests, music, maths, and each other, for example. Some of them might have been good at music, and wanted to be as good at maths, and eventually they would have got better at maths. And some of them might have wondered if they could get better at their relationships with their creator. It is hard to imagine how such people would think, but perhaps they wondered if their creator knew about a lot of very horrible possibilities (and associated virtues), possibilities (and virtues) that those people would not be dreaming of in their heavenly home. Perhaps they were gifted nightmares. Anyway, some of those people could conceivably, for some reason or other, have asked God if there was any way in which they could get even closer to their Creator. And spending a relatively small amount of time in a world in which their creator was even less evident could conceivably have made sense to them. Perhaps they became religious people.

🎵Wishful thinking at dawn