Chapter 12
Tolerating paradoxes
It appears that we are unable to explain how the Universe and everything in it, including life and us humans, came to exist. If it was all created by God, then we can't explain how God came to exist. If it wasn't created by God, then we can't explain how matter came to exist and how non-living stuff came to life. Either way, we don't have a fully consistent model regarding our origins. A handy satement for such cases is that one should learn to tolerate paradoxes. Indeed, should one?
Generally no, one should not tolerate paradoxes. A paradox is a contradictory situation where logic doesn't seem to yield a useful result. Most of life's paradoxes are pseudo-contradictions and we should not learn to tolerate them: we should learn to analyse and solve them instead.
We should not learn to live with poverty, hunger, suffering, injustice, inequality and unfairness in the world. A lot of excuses are advanced for these thorny problems, and people tend to give up the fight against them after a while. This is not right, you should never learn to tolerate these unacceptable pseudo-contradictory problems. Example: bleeding-heart philantropists send food to people starving in Africa, whose leaders mysteriously turn that food into arms to fight the neighbouring countries. While it may appear paradoxical that you send food to stop people dying and you end up causing even more people to die, it is not a genuine paradox. Actually, it is foolish to help corrupt dictators as opposed to their people. You have to make sure food reaches those in need. That solves the thorny-looking pseudo-paradox. You must never accept helplessness in the face of such problems.
It's a different story when it comes to the ultimate questions of life. We don't have an ultimately consistent model for the origins of the Universe and of life. One option is to accept God as Creator and live with one paradox (i.e. we don't know how God came to be). This is a weak paradox, since we are not even supposed to know how mysterious God came to be, so not knowing it is sort of OK. The other option is that we accept matter as the eternal source of our reality, which leaves us with two paradoxes plus one (i.e. we don't know how matter came to be, we have no idea how some matter could turn into life, and we don't know that matter would ever turn into life). This is a strong series of paradoxes, made worse by the fact that matter is supposed to be readily available for examination and modelling, whereas God is not. Putting matter in the centre of our model and then having some many contradictory assumptions about it is just not OK. So-called materialists have a four-way paradox on their hand.
How do we know whether a paradox is genuine or not? By doing our best to solve it. If we can solve it, it's a pseudo-paradox. If we can't solve it and know exactly why we can't, it's a genuine paradox. We know the creation paradox is a genuine one, because we have established a model that tells us exactly why we can't solve it.
In short, one should learn to tolerate paradoxes that are shown to be unsolveable, but one should not tolerate paradoxes that can be solved through the use of reason.
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