(May 11, 2025 at 8:45 am)Belacqua Wrote: I don't care what the majority taste in novels is, and I don't care what the majority views of religion are. Quality is a completely separate issue.
There may be some monk somewhere that's got it all tied up in a neat theological bundle, but he doesn't matter very much if nobody believes in his deity. When writing a book for popular consumption you don't go out and find the most obscure variants of religion and tackle them. You'd rightly call that out as absurd. You tackle a common issue, and what's common is a pretty simple deity with some pretty common super powers. Your rigorously-defined theologically-sound deity doesn't get any airtime outside of the hallowed halls of academia. Trying to feed that to the masses would see church attendance plummet as the average believer simply tuned out. Without the unwashed masses and their simple god belief would dwindle to a few scholars clinging to some rarefied theological concepts that we could all safely ignore.
As for that "theologically-sound" deity, simply coating absurdity in ever-deepening layers of obfuscating bullshit doesn't make them rational. A very quick reading of the "divine simplicity" reveals phrases that a child of twelve would rightly question, including "God is without parts or composition, that His essence and attributes are one and the same, and that He is not subject to change or potentiality." While I'm sure that sounded like a good idea to somebody, all you're doing is patching over one absurdity with three more. None of that is observed anywhere in reality and you'd have shit yourself laughing if an atheist had made an argument that patently absurd. It's nothing more than compartmentalization and long-winded justification for people who are just clever enough to need a bit more than the average mass-produced pulp paperback deity.
