This Is Not a Blog Post

"You shall not bow down to idols or worship them, for I, Yhwh your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of their parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments."
~ Exodus 20: 5-6

In my calling as student of scripture I find myself confronting paradoxes on a regular basis. The text from Exodus contributes to a paradox when we note that almost no two successive generations of Israelites were faithful to Yhwh; their history is a pendulum of back-and-forth commitment to God. How, then, can punishment or blessing be promised so categorically across generations?

Add to the paradoxes of scripture those of theology--the Incarnation and Trinity, to name the two catholic examples--and I find myself swimming in apparent contradictions.

You might imagine, then, how a book entitled Paradox (Margaret Cuonzo, MIT Press, 2014) caught my eye. Cuonzo offers, in a handbook-sized volume, a brief historical survey of classic paradoxes, various solutions to them, and intriguing descriptions of how paradoxes function in our world.

Paradox reads easily by virtue of its conversational style. As a 210-page book with such a sweeping trajectory must, it keeps the reader moving through Zeno, bald people with full heads of hair, bivalence versus excluded middles, and philosophy of science. The writing has the tone of a professor who has invited us over for lunch on a summer afternoon to chat about her favorite topics. Paradox is a friendly read.

This amicable flavor, however, does not neutralize the challenging character of the material. Cuonzo does not shy away from tackling the conundra of the Liar's Paradox, the Sorites Paradox, or whether scientific inquiry can actually prove anything. She also offers a helpful way of thinking about solutions to (or ways out of) paradoxes by drawing distinctions between typical approaches. In a mind-stretching effort, subjective probability is enlisted to produce an novel assessment of paradoxicality, by which we might determine which paradoxes are more paradoxical than others.

At these innovative junctures the work of Paradox shows its limitation. Subjective probability has its usefulness, I think, but the premise of a paradox is precisely that statements assembled together show inconsistency under the objective order of logic. Introducing subjectivity at the place where objectivity presents the challenge seems dodgy. I am not convinced that paradoxes, even with Cuonzo's rubric of subjective probability, can be ranked quantitatively. She has convinced me that their solution-types bear out qualitative differences, but numerically assessing paradoxicality is, I think, not especially helpful.

The book's real power is in showing that struggling with apparent paradoxes bears the fruit of important distinctions and, in the realm of science, further discovery. However we evaluate, categorize, or quantify paradoxes, it is in struggling with the seeming contradictions in life that we uncover our assumptions and discover new ways of thinking. The work of swimming through life's inconsistencies is some of the most important work of all. For the fascinating, challenging, and entertaining opportunity to learn this lesson, I am grateful for Cuonzo's work.

~ emrys