📖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

🐮Eight years ago

today, there was a male bullfinch in our garden

🦆Village Life

🐤Village Life

 

✨How I wonder what you are

🥧February made me shiver

🖤Lisa Marie Presley

🧡Eight years ago today

 

🥳The number 23

1 + 23 = 4 × (5 – 6 + 7)
1 = 23 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7

Furthermore, 23 is two less than 25, which is a square number;
and in two years time it will be 2025, which is another square number:

               2025 = (20 + 25) × (20 + 25)

🎁 Conceit precedes defeat

😳Plain Speaking

The Plain is a two-dimensional plane, inhabited by round people and square people. Because there is not much to do in the Plain, its inhabitants spend a lot of time arguing over whether the pentagon is a circular disc with five thorns on it, or a square with one corner squashed flat and its four sides pushed out slightly by that squashing.

In the three-dimensional space around the Plain, a cylindrical person called Cyril has been watching them arguing, and he decides to give them something else to think about. As he passes through the Plain, Cyril can look like a round person or a square person, because his height is the same length as the diameter of his circular cross-section, so he pauses at various places in the Plain—sometimes looking like a round person, sometimes a square one—and says, very loudly, “I am Cyril!”

The round people take the Cyrils to be a race of round and square people who can flip over to this side of the Plain from the other side.

The square people correctly assume that “Cyril” names a single person. However, they go on to conclude that Cyril is a round square person, who is somewhere impossible when he is not visiting them. They suppose that he is visiting them now in order to show them that they were all made in his image.

Should I let them know that it was me who made them all up? A square person called Martin appears and says “I made the Plain and everyone in it.”

The other square people take him to be Cyril, and they think that he is telling them that they are right, so they set out to correct the round people.

I blame myself.

💥Cantoring away from being Russelled

Twenty-five years ago, as I was getting my masters in mathematics, 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 found the solution and decided to write it up as a book for a general reader with no background in philosophy, logic or mathematics. Five years later, it is down to 25,000 words.

In the book (which was 28,000 words in July, and which I will re-post when I get it below 10,000 words), various logical puzzles are described and solved because the only perfectly logical solution to one of those puzzles—the 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, as 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. Indeed, it is not very progressive: how could people growing up in a world with profound problems possibly acquire enough wisdom to change their world for the better? On a more mundane note, scientific research will progress in directions that are more realistic as a result of my book, so my book could herald the next scientific revolution. And of course, a lot of people will simply find it helpful to know that there is a reasonable sort of God.

☀️A 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.

Whatever Lescarbault had seen, it was not Vulcan. In the following decades, many observations of the absence of Vulcan were made. And while some astronomers claimed to have seen Vulcan, there seemed on balance to be no such planet. Now, the motion of Mercury was eventually explained in 1915, by Einstein. But 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, 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 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. Now, Einsteinian dynamics has also been contradicted by quantum-mechanical observations of Bell's inequality, to some extent. And particle physics is increasingly reminiscent of celestial epicycles, which had, much earlier, been hypothesized to explain other astronomical observations.

Did something happen to physics in the twentieth century?

Well, science did become more of a cultural phenomenon in the twentieth century.

🎃Have a Harrowing Halloween

💗feel good Friday

📚Current version of my booklet

This links to a 28,000-word Google document

♫May's Plays