The Human Question

He calls his central argument against God the 747 argument.  If God is doing all of the stuff that theists think, then God must be the supremely complicated being (like a Boeing 747).  But just as it is improbable that such a machine would come together spontaneously as the result of a tornado going through a scrap pile (a comparison he borrows),  so too it is supremely improbable that God's supremely complicated parts would come together without an antecedent designer.  God is the most improbable being of all. He chronicles how he expressed this objection at a Templeton sponsored meeting and how he was reprimanded by theologians who, in his opinion, just didn't get it. But it is a self-stultifying objection if there ever was one.  For the same arguments that support the existence of God also support the claim that God is simple.  It is clear from other passages in the text that Dawkins doesn't understand those arguments.  Or rather, his attempt at...

I listened to the unedited video of Dawkins' interview of McGrath for the former's BBC TV series titled "The Root of all Evil" or something like that.  They were most courteous to each other, and very careful in what they said.  They DID ask good questions as well as come up with interesting answers.  I really like McGrath, although I think that he sometimes kind of beats around the bush ... perhaps because the more direct, and more helpful answer hasn't come to his mind yet and he's buying time.  But in any case, he makes many excellent points, and is not to be matched for thoughtfulness. One answer that he gave was on target as far as it went but I think a bit incomplete.  Dawkins asked (and I paraphrase), if a whole village with the exception of one child was killed by tsunami or the like, would you thank God for saving the child?  McGrath said yes, thereby avoiding the move of resolving the problem of evil by settling for the God of the deists.  ...

Christopher Hitchens once made the point that a disproportionate percentage of persons in jail are theists: maybe it's because atheists are better at not getting caught.  Or perhaps they were atheists until the got arrested.

I just finished listening to an excellent debate between Michael Licona and Bart Ehrman on the radio/podcast "Unbelievable!" (this was the second time the two debated each other).  Ehrman denies that the Resurrection can be a historical fact because believing in it involves faith (he is not claiming that it is fiction, but that its veracity cannot be ascertained by historical reasoning).  Licona did a stellar job witnessing to the faith in the face of objections being advanced by his brilliant opponent.  But he missed the opportunity to make some distinctions that I think are needed to overcome Ehrman's objections: the distinctions between the ways in which secular history, philosophy and faith might regard the claim that Jesus rose from the dead.   Hence I would like to strengthen Licona's argument by adding a clarification or two.  Or maybe three. Here goes! Objection: One may object to the possibility of a secular affirmation of the Resurrection on...

Upon hearing Bill Craig report on Unbelievable about his debate with Dawkins, it seemed to me that one needs to examine carefully how on is relating God in creature in statements like: He initially asserts that if there is no God then there is no purpose in the universe. From which he infers, seemingly invalidly, that if there is a God then there is purpose in the universe. One may rescue him by saying that he means "if and only if."  Or one might say that his inference is invalid.  One may also try to find a more basic claim that justifies both of his assertions.  The latter might be doable by distinguishing the order of knowing from the order of being.  I'll try the third. Let's take his original claim: if there is no God then there is no purpose in the universe. This is the contrapositive of the following: if there is purpose in the universe, then there is a God who is the source of that purpose. This statement, I believe, correctly conveys the order o...

I firmly believe that the philosophical arguments about how human actions manifest a transcendence over the limitations of matter demonstrate the ability of the soul to survive death. But there are reasons to prefer approaching this question from a more practical than speculative vantage point.  (no: not about to get Kantian). To look at your future existence as something that may or may not be, but as a gift that God may freely give, is quite more on target if you will than to look at it as something that must be and can be demonstrated.  Well, it is on target in the following manner (and perhaps ONLY in this manner): it leads you to recognize that being itself is a gift, here and now.  And by letting go of the "I must survive" type of fear of non-being, you are able to accept the gift of being from the one who loves you into being. Another thought for another post: acceptance of the REALITY of the future resurrection of our bodies is both anti-dualistic yet affirm...

The relativist may point out in support of her position: there are no laws of morality to be found in nature. To which I reply: neither are there any laws of logic or mathematics.... ... to be found in nature (in the manner in which natural things are found).   Rather, there are something like concrete applications of the universal laws: but that's not the same thing as the laws themselves.

This is not a big discovery for others, and I probably heard it before somewhere.  But the Catholic sense of salvation is of being right with the Lord here and now.  And that sort of being-saved naturally gives rise to a process of growth that goes on throughout a lifetime.  And that process can, unfortunately, be terminated: one can get un-saved.  But one can also joyfully give the Lord the glory here and now while entrusting the future to Him. Certain flavors of Protestantism, however, seem to me to understand being saved as meaning one knows that one will go to heaven when one dies.  This meaning is more like the turning on of a switch, whereas the former was more like conception or the so-called animation of a seed. Note that the former is consistent with an ontological view of justification, while the second is consistent with a juridical view.  And that contrast parallels nicely the contrast between the natural law and the divine command approach ...

This is a tentative proposal. Perhaps we can use a the metaphor of a lens letting in light to describe the relation between the aspects of nature that can be grasped via a mathematised description and the aspects that are apparent in our experience.  This analogy might be helpful, especially with evolution-related discussions, inasmuch as it underscores the disproportion between nature is often conceived  as a kind of mathematics in motion and nature as given in experience.  That is, the mathematical conception leaves something crucial out that is nevertheless apparent in our everyday, non-scientific engagements.  That something extra has to do with formal and final causality (even efficient causality, rightly understood, cannot be comprehended by a purely mathematical description, for the expemplary case of efficient causality is a human agent--all other efficient causes are understood as either exceeding or falling short of human agency).   We'll call that s...