Thank you so much for this. I can already tell we're on the same wavelength, and I'm looking forward to a lazy Sunday afternoon of reading. >One interesting t

Thank you so much for this. I can already tell we're on the same wavelength, and I'm looking forward to a lazy Sunday afternoon of reading. >One interesting thing studying theology/philosophy/... is that my working set of metaphors has somewhat switched. Believe it or not, I come from a literary background (my B.A. was in literature and I switched to a STEM field afterwards) so I know exactly what you mean. There's always a tension between picking the metaphor that's most fitting and the metaphor that your audience will understand. On a related note, have you ever read Leibniz's Monadology [0]? It's an attempt at a bottom-up, constructive approach to proving the existence of God. Unsurprisingly, it fails at this task, but I've always been fascinated by how close he gets, at least on the surface. You have to think very hard to see where the proof breaks down; I had to look it up. [0] https://plato-philosophy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/The-Monadology-1714-by-Gottfried-Wilhelm-LEIBNIZ-1646-1716.pdf https://plato-philosophy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/The-...