The Philosophical Optimist

              I love finding pearls of wisdom in the rubbish pile of popular culture, and one particular pearl I found several years ago was a line spoken, appropriately, by the perpetually optimistic Barnabas T. Stinson, who said, “no one is hotter than God.”   This is a remark of deep theological wisdom with which the Christian mystics would concur, and the Muslim Sufis as well.   God is the end of all our desiring, especially those desires we will never admit to—and so, like any repressed desire, he is a perpetually hot topic of discussion, destined to be talked about—or at least around—not least by those who most passionately insist that he does not exist—and they do not desire him—at all.             And yet, in all this perpetual discussion, there is much confusion.   It seems to me that a great deal of this confusion on the topic of God could ...

            For the last few centuries, there has been a strong movement to reduce things to the formal and logical; in mathematics (Frege, Russell, Hilbert, Gödel); in physics (QCD, string theory); in chemistry (cf. Linus Pauling’s claim to have reduced the science to quantum physics in his book The Nature of the Chemical Bond and the Structure of Molecules and Crystals ); and in the study of language (analytic philosophy in general).               In recent decades, a counter-movement has emphasized the importance of figuration, narrative, imagination, and myth.   Literary scholars like Northrop Frye and Kenneth Burke insisted that “Figures of speech are not the ornaments of language, but the elements of both language and thought” (Frye “Elementary Teaching and Elemental Scholarship” The Stubborn Structure 94); now cognitive scientists show us how imagination shap...