Credunt Quia Absurdum Est

It struck me this morning, while I was reviewing one of Augustine’s book, that God, as presented in Christian theology, is rather like the set of all sets that made naïve set theory impossible to defend and that therefore led Russell to pursue his great, and ultimately futile, attempt to construct a consistent system of logic that would give rise to all of mathematical truth. God is given, by the theologian’s definitions, a set of mutually irreconcilable traits, and theology consists largely of the attempt to create enough ad hoc rules and to redefine enough items of daily-life’s vocabulary that one can sustain discussion of God’s nature without patently contradicting oneself. God’s omnipotence, His foreknowledge of all events, His absolute beneficence, His omnipresence: together these traits demand that the believer abandon reason itself and make of himself a great sophist to sustain his beliefs.