Oh, really ...

... OF GOD AND GARDENS.

I suppose Wisdom's parable of the garden is a reference to the Garden of Eden. But the point of that story is that man was created to be the gardener. Gottlieb goes on to say: "What is even more baffling is the idea that one can talk about a wholly indescribable God who cannot be said to 'exist' but who nevertheless in some sense 'is'." And he concludes thus: "One trenchant critic of the New Atheists is Terry Eagleton, a leading literary critic (and Catholic), who defines God as 'what sustains all things in being by his love, and...is the reason why there is something instead of nothing, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever.' Some find it comforting or inspiring to utter such statements. But unless they can explain what those ideas mean and how one might tell whether they are right (which Eagleton never does), this is a self-deluding comfort. A wiser response to the apparent inexpressibility of statements about God may be simply not to express them, and just get on with the gardening.

Well, let's consider the Big Bang, which, last time I checked, was still considered a scientific thesis in good standing. In 1989, John Maddox wrote a piece in the journal Nature called "Down With the Big Bang," in which he not only called the Big Bang "philosophically unacceptable," but also suggested "it is unlikely to survive the decade ahead." This was 23 years after the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation provided powerful confirmation for the Big Bang, which, however philosophically unacceptable, is still with us. The basis for Maddox's distress is interesting: "For one thing, the implication is that there was an instant at which time literally began and, so, by extension, an instant before which there was no time. That in turn implies that even if the origin of the Universe may be successfully supposed to lie in the Big Bang, the origin of the Big Bang itself is not susceptible to discussion. It is an effect whose cause cannot be identified or even discussed."
Well, as I say, the Big Bang is still with us and is still, I believe, scientifically acceptable. So it would seem that science has it's own example of something "wholly indescribable." As Maddox put it, "an important issue, that of the ultimate origin of our world, cannot be discussed.”

By the way, in his article, Maddox comes off exactly as Maxine has described him: straightforward and forthright. No weasel-words from him. Would have been wonderful to discuss this with him.