A liability of my writing process is that I love research, even (or especially) when it takes me down obscure paths. Some paths do turn out to be useful for the plot or characters I’m struggling with but just as often I find myself lost in a backwater and all I’ve accomplished is satisfying my curiosity or horror! – wandering even further afield. In the meantime I’ve cleverly avoided the hard work of writing the next scene. Does anyone hear procrastination?
What occasions this confession is recent reading I’ve been doing about the “Problem of Evil,” with an emphasis on the 17th C. moral philosopher and inventor of calculus, Leibniz. (By the way, what were they drinking in the 1600s to produce polymaths like Newton, Descartes, Hobbes and Leibniz? That century seems full of these geniuses who recognized no bounds on their thinking – yesterday geometry, today governance – hey, no problem – next week the nature of God.)
As I understand it, the “problem of evil” is why it is present in the world and why do bad things happen to good people. I say “as I understand it” because nothing makes me feel more dim-witted than professional philosophy. Higher mathematics and quantum physics don’t cause this problem because I can’t even find my way in to those circles, but I can penetrate philosophy, just not very well. When an hour’s gone by and I’ve read three pages I’m probably in over my head, don’t you think?
I’ve been trying to recall what I learned about Deism in my undergraduate studies – how America’s founding fathers, heirs to the Enlightenment, saw God as this clockmaker who made the clock, aka our world. But then he retired, leaving us to fend for ourselves – big mistake.
Reading about Leibniz makes me realize the clockmaker metaphor is much too simple. Did Geppetto really retire? Didn’t he care about his creation? Why did he make our particular clock and not other ones? Or did he produce an infinitude of clocks and we are only aware of the one we hear tick-tock? Are all other extant and possible clocks inferior to ours, hoisting us into in first place? (Come on, is this really the best someone armed with omniscience can come up with?) And if our clock is indeed a good one, is it good simply because it was produced on a whim by the Perfect Can-Only-Do-Good Clockmaker or is it good because the clockmaker carefully planned it that way?
I worry that all this will prove of little benefit to my play. Enough already! I really need to write that next scene.
As I understand it, the “problem of evil” is why it is present in the world and why do bad things happen to good people. I say “as I understand it” because nothing makes me feel more dim-witted than professional philosophy. Higher mathematics and quantum physics don’t cause this problem because I can’t even find my way in to those circles, but I can penetrate philosophy, just not very well. When an hour’s gone by and I’ve read three pages I’m probably in over my head, don’t you think?
I’ve been trying to recall what I learned about Deism in my undergraduate studies – how America’s founding fathers, heirs to the Enlightenment, saw God as this clockmaker who made the clock, aka our world. But then he retired, leaving us to fend for ourselves – big mistake.
Reading about Leibniz makes me realize the clockmaker metaphor is much too simple. Did Geppetto really retire? Didn’t he care about his creation? Why did he make our particular clock and not other ones? Or did he produce an infinitude of clocks and we are only aware of the one we hear tick-tock? Are all other extant and possible clocks inferior to ours, hoisting us into in first place? (Come on, is this really the best someone armed with omniscience can come up with?) And if our clock is indeed a good one, is it good simply because it was produced on a whim by the Perfect Can-Only-Do-Good Clockmaker or is it good because the clockmaker carefully planned it that way?
I worry that all this will prove of little benefit to my play. Enough already! I really need to write that next scene.
