two quotations: ears to hear

James Wood:

This objection to the free will argument seems decisive. It raises the most uncomfortable questions about why God bothered to create the world at all. If Heaven was not created on earth, then earth is a testing-ground for Heaven. But there is something more. For a world without freedom would be a world in which God controlled all our actions, it would be a world in which God spoke directly to us without the need of faith. We would all believe. Faith is, apparently, part of the test visited on us. I have always found Philip’s cry to Jesus in John 14, piercing: ‘Philip saith unto him, Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us.’ It seems obvious to theologians like Richard Swinburne that a world of limited freedom and absolute transparency of knowledge, in which not one of us was in any doubt about our creator, would be a limited, useless place. But it would not, presumably, be useless to God. It is what Heaven would be like; and why, before Heaven, must we move through this unhappy, painful, rehearsal, this desperate antechamber in which so few of us can find our way?

Kołakowski:

There are people who claim to be able to break this perplexing code (albeit only in part, never fully); but they do not necessarily attribute their success to some kind of gnostic initiation or privileged access to an esoteric treasury of knowledge. Rather, they claim to have adopted a special spiritual attitude, opened themselves up to the voice of the meaning-carrying mind; and they say that anyone can “tune in“ in this way. They might be wrong, of course, and certainly those of us who do not wish to hear this voice cannot be brought round by their arguments; rather, we will classify them as victims of delusions. But if they are right, and the voice really is audible to anyone who wants to hear it, then the question “Why is the message hidden?” is the wrong question.