Re: Re: Re: the hiddenness of God

(Previously, on Dragon Ball Z…)

To sum up SuperLutheran’s answer, we don’t see God because his proximity to him means the immediate destruction of imperfect things and, by extension, anything associated with those imperfections (the destruction of most of the things in your body, for example, which is one of the reasons it would kill you). Why proximity in particular? Maybe it’s a metaphysics thing, as in a literal distance along some supernatural fourth dimensional axis, or maybe it’s a materialistic metaphor like when we talk about feeling “distant” from or “close” to someone in a nonliteral way.

I’d like to pick a nit with SuperLutheran about saying it’s inconceivable that God is everywhere while also being in some places more than others, because we have a direct analogy for understanding this now in the quantum mechanical nature of electrons. Electrons are technically everywhere at once, but in practice they’re mostly in one or more places at a time. E.g. the “particle in a box” problem:

It’s not a perfect analogy because the y-axis in electron localization is “probability”, whereas we don’t know what the y-axis of the graph would be for God’s presence.

I’d say this mostly answered the question by nailing down the exact mechanic. To be precise, it creates a straight-line dependency between the question “Why does God hide himself?” and “Why does God allow man to have a sinful nature?” That’s a more or less separate question of comparable significance and a subject of debate. Most Christians today would say it’s a necessary consequence of free will, whereas the determinists (e.g. Calvinists) would have to offer some other reason. Leibniz, for example, believed that God created the best possible universe, given the constraints of logic. Questions of the form “why doesn’t everyone get a road to Damascus moment” can be traced directly back to the question of why God allows man to have a sinful nature, so they don’t need to be answered separately.

It also raises a secondary question that’s more of a metaphysical curiosity unless you’re a prophet, which is “Why is God able to very occasionally not hide himself?” As mentioned, Isaiah saw God and didn’t die on account of the coal touched to his lips. How does that work?

But as I said, that’s a very secondary question. The important followup question re: hiddenness is “Why does God’s creation have problems in it?”