The Conflagrations of Philosophy

One of the few nice things about getting old is having lived long enough to work out the smartass logical paradoxes bright schoolboys fling like so many snowballs at the tophats of the Age. The one that always annoyed me was an innocence-feigning question: "Can God make a weight so heavy He can't lift it?"

Not that the farrago isn't funny — it is. The issue for me was that I refused to accept the paradox. I could see the nasty class of sophistry it belonged to, but I couldn't for many decades answer the riddle on its own terms, by exposing the cunning hook inside it.

This morning, whilst humming Theme from Harry Potter† on the white throne, the dumb imps of insolence flapped their razor wings near my inner ear and It Came To Me: Imagine, if you will, a tiny ant trying to lift a silver dollar. Now suggest to yourself the equally ludicrous lemma that the ant is a silversmith who made the dollar it's trying to lift. Just so.

The answer to the riddle about God and weights is, God cannot be His own creature, unless you buy into the Trinity in which case Jesus stumbled under the cedars of Lebanon. The purest retort to the moral retards who think this stuff up with their 160 I.Q.'s and Anglo condescensions, is that they've got a bad case of Insufficient Axiom. God is Uncreate, and so — Paradox Lost is simply that She doesn't riverdance in the flickering firelight of narrative fallacy, both here and there, any more than She is bound like Andromeda to the whirling maelstroms of Time.

†Whenever I go to the bathroom
I deliver a Number 2.
My exploits would be even greater than that
But I mayn't go dumping on you.