God can hide things from himself

We might consider that God is able to separate from himself to make an "other," which, to some degree, is not him.He can compartmentalize his consciousness.

He can want to see what one of his creatures, one of us, will do. Why would he have that desire if he knows everything past, present and future? Though that knowledge exists somewhere in his mind, he walls it off in order that he may enjoy his creatures, especially those among us who have received free will by being born again. But even those yet dead, he desires to rescue. God the Son may not know exactly when he will be able to save a person, just as he does not know when time will end and he will return in great power. God the Father knows that. But when God the Father is enjoying his Son, he may "forget" such foreknowledge.

What fun is a game if one knows in advance every move that will occur? That doesn't mean God does not retain all power. Through his Son -- though the dead cannot see this -- he is making our world better and better, more and more loving, with each passing day.

Footnote Sre19

Sre19. Ted Honderich, entry on unlikely philosophical propositions, Ted Honderich ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford 1995).

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Footnote Rir45

Rir45. Owen Flanagan, entry on mind, in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Ted Honderich, ed. (Oxford 1995). Flanagan is a professor of philosophy and of neurobiology at Duke University.

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Footnote pHH34

pHH34. In 1956, Russell lashed the plain language movement, which of course he knew to have been a legacy of Wittgenstein as championed by Ryle.

Russell gives us a fable:

The professor of mental philosophy, when called by his bedmaker one morning developed a dangerous frenzy, and had to be taken away by the police in an ambulance. I heard a colleague, a believer in "common usage," asking the poor philosopher's doctor about the occurrence. The doctor replied that the professor had had a temporary psychotic instability, which had subsided after an hour. The believer in "common usage," insofar as objecting to the doctor's language, repeated it to other inquirers. But it happened that I, who live on the professor's staircase, overheard the following dialogue between the bedmaker and the policeman:

Policeman: 'Ere, I want a word with yer.

Bedmaker: What do you mean -- 'a word'? I ain't done nothing.

Policeman: Ah, that's just it. Yer ought to 'ave done something. Couldn't yer see the pore gentleman was mental?

Bedmaker: That I could. For an 'ole 'our 'e went on something chronic. But when they're mental, you can't make them understand.

In this little dialogue, "word," "mean," "mental," and "chronic"are all used in accordance with common usage. They are not so used in the pages of Mind by those who pretend that common usage, as determined by mass observation, statistics, medians, standard deviations, and the rest of the apparatus. What they believe in is the usage of persons who have their amount of education, neither more nor less. Less is illiterate, more is pedantry -- as we are given to understand.

From Portraits from Memory (Allen and Unwin 1956) as quoted in The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, Robert E. Egner and Lester E. Dennon, editors (Simon and Schuster 1961).

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