I’d think the non-cuddly theism of the Will Newsome or Philip K. Dick sort would be sort of like paranoid schizophrenia, but without the consoling part that it’s all just misfirings in your brain and not all actually out there. Not quite sure you’d want to live there, though it might certainly be occasionally more interesting than staid materialism. Muflax used to have a post about something that sounds like that, but it got disappeared.
Pretty much anyone who at some point goes “and therefore it must obviously be that God is benevolent” sounds like a candidate. My vague impression is that a bunch of religious philosophers like Bishop Berkeley and Descartes had arguments you could caricature as “reality might actually be really messed up, so it’s a good thing God has to be benevolent then and see that thing stay fixed up”. Usually only the “reality might be really messed up” part is what stays in the philosophical canon.
Also there’s Raymond Smullyan’s Who Knows? which I read and liked some years ago.
I’d think the non-cuddly theism of the Will Newsome or Philip K. Dick sort would be sort of like paranoid schizophrenia, but without the consoling part that it’s all just misfirings in your brain and not all actually out there. Not quite sure you’d want to live there, though it might certainly be occasionally more interesting than staid materialism. Muflax used to have a post about something that sounds like that, but it got disappeared.
I got a backup here. Screenshot here.
Are there any serious cuddly theists? “He is not a tame lion.”—C.S. Lewis. (I don’t like C.S. Lewis).
Pretty much anyone who at some point goes “and therefore it must obviously be that God is benevolent” sounds like a candidate. My vague impression is that a bunch of religious philosophers like Bishop Berkeley and Descartes had arguments you could caricature as “reality might actually be really messed up, so it’s a good thing God has to be benevolent then and see that thing stay fixed up”. Usually only the “reality might be really messed up” part is what stays in the philosophical canon.
Also there’s Raymond Smullyan’s Who Knows? which I read and liked some years ago.