Re: Defense of Theism pt 1

Glenn wrote:

"I am looking for a critique of these ideas. Be hard, be thorough, be critical. I want to know where these ideas are weak, even if I disagree, I want to know."

Your main thrust is that God as a solution to the problem of existence is no more far-fetched than any of the atheists' proposed solutions. In fact, God may be the preferred solution, because traditionally people impute powers to him that they don't commonly attribute to the other, impersonal solutions.

You touch only briefly on the properties of existence (i.e., the universe) as we find it. You emphasize the complexity of the math required to model aspects of the universe, but you ignore the complexity of things themselves. What's more basic, the math or the things themselves? The math at best provides a very limited description of a very limited portion of reality. There are much deeper truths about the world than the few things about it that our math can model. (If we had a TOE, I'd maybe be a bit more circumspect here, but as yet we don't.) Recommendation: Tone down the emphases on math and logic and lean more heavily on the things themselves. There's a lot to lean on: all the evidences for cosmological fine tuning, for example, plus all biological complexity, etc. For NOTHING to give rise to some complex math is nothing compared to what it would take to give rise to the real things of the world.

Given what we know about our world today there's no good reason an honest and conscientious atheist should not convert to agnosticism or perhaps even to theism. But Gen. 1 and Gen. 6-8 unfortunately give him an abundance of reasons not to convert to Christianity.

Best wishes in your struggle with atheists. That's a struggle I'm intimately familiar with myself.

Don

 
Received on Sun Jun 26 02:36:42 2005