📖If

If logic led scientists to an unwelcome discovery, would they change logic until it gave them something they preferred?

Some puzzles appear impossible to solve. They can only be solved by considering more possibilities than it seems reasonable to consider. The more puzzling the puzzle, the more outlandish those possibilities might have to be. And a very puzzling puzzle was discovered by a mathematician at the end of the nineteenth century:

Its solution is only a logical possibility if there is a God.

Bertrand Russell was thinking about that puzzle when he found another puzzle, which he tried to solve by making logic more mathematical. And logicians have carried on finding puzzles and modernizing logic. Modern logic now looks very scientific. But when scientists discover something outlandish by thinking logically, do they change the meaning of the word logic? Or do they revise their worldviews?

That nineteenth-century puzzle amounts to a scientific proof that there is, in all probability, a God:

Chapter 1 explains how that is possible.

Chapter 2 runs through the mathematics.

Chapter 3 shows the probability to be high.

Chapter 4 solves the other puzzles.

That is the preface to my 10,705-word book: If (updated 23 November)

🙏The Odyssey Theodicy

Why, if there is a God who created all things out of nothing, did God not just make good people, in a world in which only good things could happen to them? Maybe that is what God did.

Maybe God created a heavenly world in which a variety of good people were much closer to their creator than we are here. Wiser and better informed about creation than we are, 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.

If their creator was above and beyond creation, much as any story’s author is above and beyond that story, then there would, for example, be some sort of limit to the relationships that those people could have had with their creator in their heavenly home. It is hard to imagine such a limit; but I imagine that their creator would, for instance, have known about a lot of horrible possibilities (and associated virtues), possibilities that those people would not have dreamt of in their heavenly home. For some reason or other, those people might have thought that their relationships with God would improve if they spent a relatively small amount of time in a world in which their creator was even less evident.

Or 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. 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.

🎵Wishful thinking at dawn

🌺Why are flowers so lazy?

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin

Flowers clearly are lazy, as Matthew 6:28 tells us.

Because they spend all day in bed (the flower bed).

🐶Nibi

❄️Spring jingles

✨How I wonder what you are

🥧February made me shiver

🖤Lisa Marie Presley

🧡Eight years ago today