goodness gracious, this is slightly overdue, but happy two-year anniversary! two years ago in texas, we were probably still talking about god.

i think a lot of people are generally comfortable with the idea of believing in god, i.e. in his existence, as opposed to in god. and i admit, this is as far as my cafeteria catholicism takes me personally. but the question i've heard less discussed is the what-then of it all. so what if he exists? the earlier philosophers who tried to approach god's existence through logic deemed him necessary as (in the order we read them, alex) a first cause, the source of the [ap]perceptions external to the cartesian ego, the being that justifies the existence of the contingent universe; god was mostly (i) a creator of the world-machine, and often simultaneously (ii) the one who keeps it running. i deviate from what the dead philosophers would have said and make the generalization that, looking at god logically gets you a logical god: in the case of (i), one who doesn't interfere with the logical ways of the world because he was only the creator*, or (ii), a pantheistic god who harmonizes.

[*a quote from a Milan Kundera character (thanks again to alex for letting me bully the book from him): "Praying to God is like praying to Edison everytime a light bulb goes out." the (i) view.]

god-(iii) is our beyond-our-logic, four-dimensional being, it seems, and what i think john means when he says "to believe in God is to believe that God can create an immovable object and an unstoppable force and have them collide without any trouble."

this is a really annoying situation, what i put in is exactly what i'm getting out, but i hope i've (somewhat) addressed adrian's original question. the question is a paradox playing off the rules of logic, and it seems that if we are to play by the same rules the answer is no. it is only when we try to resolve the paradox - the question itself - that we have to step outside the box and re-contextualize. if god is, say, four-dimensional, then the time-1 at which he creates unliftable object might be able to coincide with time-2 at which he lifts it, in the way we can fold a piece of paper to let two distinct points on Flatland suddenly become one.

posted by Tae-Yeoun Keum   [6:29 AM]

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