What God Can't Do

 I'm struck today by a number of things. I could start again with the proposition, endless repeated these thousand years, that a good God, all powerful, all loving would never had created this universe. I could start too with the notion what with logic, as with math, the notion that X is logically necessary, it exists. Mathematical necessity has led science to find any number of things that they would not even have looked for had not the equations led them there. We assume logic does the same. And yet math equally takes us places that don't exist or don't work. Math allows time to go backwards. Math allows for an infinite division between any two moments or objects. Math and logic are representations, good, helpful, limited. Tools. I can use my hammer to drive smaller and smaller nails until the hammer is too big for the job. 

Listen: Believe in God requires that we accept apparent contradictions. We don't do it blindly or capriciously. But we do it. We justify this on the grounds that the infinite God is bigger than our representations and that our minds are incapable of grasping God in God's self. All representation is partial, incomplete, limited, good only as far as it goes, but alloyed and misleading, impure. This is not just true of God. It's true of whatever does not represent itself--it's good in every case in with the thing represented is its own representation--which is the case with numbers and possibly music and little if anything else. The closest we can get the signifier to the signified. 

It's been known since at least Aquinas that God cannot do what is logically contradictory because what is logically contradictory isn't a thing. It's a signifier without any possible signified. The stone too large for God to move. 

We who are believers in God have to say--in our partial representation--that God could not have created a more perfect world, that world without suffering, that had us in it. God must have wanted to do so--if want is a concept compatible with God. We have to posit a God that--by our representational powers--can't just do whatever he wants. What force is bigger than God that stays God's hand? 

God wants us to be fully realized creatures. Happy, sure, also free. Capable of love and of being loved. The image of God.

Monotheism is compelled to believe that being as such constrains Go such that God has to do what he would prefer not to do. Despite infinite freedom, God cannot both make the universe i which the problem we call "evil" does not exist and make us. The constraint upon the infinite God can't be avoided in any model in which language works. 

But could God have made any changes, any improvements and still allowed for us? Those who complain don't always complain that the universe contains evil but that it contains unnecessary evil. It's not a simple question.

Where is the line? If there is a line, God must have drawn it. There must be any number of things that could be that God decided, as it were, against. You say all you want is the world as it but without mosquitos. I say I'll take a world with mosquitos as long is it doesn't have a virus that will kill everyone and can't be stopped. But you'll say, so that you'll accept a virus that gets us back to one Adam and one Eve. And I'll say this is a very silly conversation. I'll say I don't know if this line metaphor is adequate but I do know that if we establish it, you'll always want to move it. I'll say the problem isn't mosquitos or viruses. It's not earthquakes or the sweetness of lead. It's death. Everything else is a problem only insofar as it keeps death before us as a problem.