📖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

Why, if there is a God, do bad things happen to good people? Why, given a good creator of all things, did that creator not make all creatures naturally good, in a world where only good things would ever happen to them? Well, maybe that is what God did do:

Maybe God originally created a heavenly world in which there were a wide variety of very good people and only good things happened to them there.

Those people would have been much closer to their creator than we are here. Wiser and better informed about their heavenly home than we are, about this universe, might some of them have wanted to spend some of their limitless time in a less heavenly world?
......Perhaps they thought that their relationships with each other might improve if they spent some relatively small amount of time in a world like this universe. From their heavenly perspective, it might have seemed like going camping. And it would have been safer than going camping, because God could have guaranteed that they would all end up at least as well off as they had started. If, for example, they reincarnated around the universe or multiverse, then some of their later incarnations could have been therapeutic (the fact that we cannot recall past lives does not tell against that possibility because we cannot even recall being born). Maybe some of them could dimly recall having set out on a heroic expedition, and told each other stories about how it had all gone wrong (whence the name of this theodicy). The main thing is that they would all live happily ever after in their heavenly home.
......Still, even in their heavenly home there could conceivably have been limits to the relationships that those people could have had with their creator, because their creator would presumably have been above and beyond that heavenly creation much as a story’s author is above and beyond that story. And some of those good people, in their heavenly home, might have been very clever; they might have wondered if their creator knew about a lot of very horrible possibilities, and associated virtues. They might have conceived of that possibility in an abstract way, and gone on to conjecture that spending a relatively small amount of time in a world in which their creator was less evident might be a way of developing their relationships with their creator. It would have been daunting, but not actually unsafe.
......And they might even have been able to help their creator by coming to a world like this one, where their creator can seem so very remote. It is, for example, conceivable that not even creators of universes would be able to know for sure that there were no others of their kind (such a creator would be able to think of a lot of very strange possibilities). Nevertheless, very sensitive creatures trying to sense the presence of their creator in such a world as ours might be able to sense, much more remotely (presumably without being able to tell the difference themselves), the existence of other beings of that kind if there were any others.
......Indeed, there could conceivably be many other reasons why good people in a heavenly world might have wanted to spend some of their limitless time in a less heavenly world, reasons that we may well be unable to imagine, here in this universe. The main thing is that they would all live happily ever after in their heavenly home, had they originated there.

🎵Wishful thinking at dawn