Theodicy: And Other Adventures($19.99Value)

Description

A book cannot pour an answer into you. It can only build one in front of you and hand it over to do with as you please. That is the contract on the first page, and this book keeps it. Theodicy and Other Adventures is a working account of why a world with real freedom has to be a world with real harm. It runs on ordinary things you can check for yourself: A dimmer switch. A sandcastle at the tideline. A bowl of cornstarch that dances on a speaker and goes flat the instant the music stops. Out of them comes one picture: An inexhaustible source, turned down to a strength a finite creature can survive. A cold frontier where everything new gets made (and gets made wrong). A God who chose to be less, so that there could be someone else in the room, and a void that turns out to have no army, no plan, and no opinion of you whatsoever. It does not explain away the suffering of a child. It marks plainly where its own argument runs out, and refuses to close the gap over her. The method is on the page: Much of this was worked out in a long argument with an artificial intelligence that was wrong a great deal of the time, where correcting it, out loud and in complete sentences, was the labor that delivered the ideas. A midwife does not have to be right. The third chair at the table is yours. Please have a seat.