The mystery of God

Suppose you have never heard music, and you are watching a video of a superb ballet, with the sound turned off. And then someone turns the sound on. You now know a dimension of the dance you wouldn’t have expected or thought of. It transforms your understanding of the ballet radically.

Similarly, but more radically, when we humans learned that the perfectly one God is three persons, we learned something that we would not have expected, something that not only we wouldn’t have thought of, but something that we would have likely denied is at all possible. It is something that should radically (in both the etymological and the common senses of the word) transform all of our understanding of God. Of course, what we learned turns out to be logically compatible with the doctrine of God’s unity, but that it was compatible is a part of the surprise.

I suspect that similar transformations of our understanding of God await in heaven. Doctrines that are related to our doctrinal understanding of God as the doctrine of the Trinity is to the unity and simplicity of God. Experience that are radically different in kind from anything we have had.

But is it not plausible that God is such that any finite understanding of him is subject to such transformation? If so, then this gives us one way of countering the “eternal ennui” worry about heaven. For such transformations of our understanding of, and hence of our loving relationship with, God could occur for eternity then.

The "more"

Consider such pairs of terms as:

• good — holy
• impressive — awe-full
• immoral — sinful
• promise — vow
• puzzle — mystery
• fearsome — spooky

The second term in each pair implies something of the first. In fact, in many (though not all—the last pair is a clear exception) cases, the second term implies the first in a superlative way. However, there is something "more" to the second of each of these terms, something qualitatively different. Moreover, these pairs are analogous to each other—there is an analogy between the "more" in each case.

Thesis: None of the second terms in the above list would have application if naturalism were true. Something might still seem mysterious, but in fact it would be just be very puzzling. It might still appear that a graveyard is spooky, but in fact it is at most fearsome, and if so, only accidentally (e.g., if there is a vicious dog there).

So if naturalism were true, our experience of the "more" in the second term of each pair will always be mistaken. But that would be really puzzling—how could there be an experience type that is always mistaken? So if the thesis is true, then we have good reason to think naturalism false.

I am not here offering an argument for the thesis—I am here just presenting it as something that seems very clear to me.