TGD commentary 3

Pg 78: About God and omniscience and omnipotence:
God exists outside of time. He sees all of time at once. If time is a conveyor belt with us on it gliding along, then God is the foreman watching the belt move. God not only created the universe and everything in it, he also created time itself. He knows “the future” in the sense that we perceive “the future.” But to him, really he is already there, yet existing outside of it. He is powerful to do whatever he wants at whatever time he wants to do it. He has a higher understanding, a higher observation and a different experience of time than we do.

Pg 78: Aquinas is simply asking, what was before the universe?

Bottom pg 79: I think it’s still relevant to ask, “What started it?” And what are the probabilities of the possible answers? What’s the probability that evolution happened?

Pg 85: These “proofs” for God are hilarious! I don’t believe these prove anything, so I agree with the point Dawkins is making. I also then go back to my opening statement of shame over my and my fellow Christians’ display of action, knowledge (or the lack thereof) and intelligence.

Let me remind myself again, that only the Holy Spirit can do any of the convincing. It’s His job, not mine; I am forever humbled if he chooses to use me to speak to anyone. Having said that – I will provide my brief discussion of God’s existence: “God exists far outside of my ability to say He does.” If there were no humans on this earth, God would be. He doesn’t need an argument. He doesn’t need a proof. He simply is.

Pg 88: Sanity in numbers. But why has the number of Christians been so high?

Pg 92: Dawkins uses 1 example of many people observing a supposed miracle, the miracle of Fatima in 1917. How about other observations? For example, I know a man who had an inflamed appendix, then some people prayed over it, and it disappeared out of his body. Hundreds, thousands of these types of things have happened and are happening today. How come Dawkins isn’t explaining these away? If you want to talk probability, it’s improbable that in every situation where someone experiences a “miracle” it was a brain trick.

Pg 93: Actually, the gospels were not written that long after Jesus’ death. They were written within the time where people who knew Jesus personally were still alive. And, the “Chinese whisperers” effect is not a valid argument because we have documents from less than 100 years after Jesus death and we can go and read them right now if we like.

Pg 94: It is likely that people would remember if they were in the lineage of David or not. He was a pretty important person, so important and historically famous that people would certainly know if they were in his direct lineage.

Pg 96: How do you know the gospels are made up? You think they are, because in your mind it seems to make sense that they’re not real. You are doing the same thing that you blame many Christians for doing. You find “proofs” that support your way of thinking and Christians find “proofs” that support their line of thinking. The evidences when compiled disproportionately, unrepresentatively and speculatively can support either side. But when presented wholly and truthfully, disclosing all absolutely known facts (excluding “facts” that are in doubt) which direction does it lean?

Pg 96: Not a good logical progression. This just points out Dawkins’s personal musings. Phrases like “perhaps,” “are as factually dubious” are not warranted when in Biblical canon they took works that were already verified by history. It wasn’t whimsical. Read history of the canon to find why. You say authors of the gospels “almost certainly never met Jesus personally.” Please back that statement up with facts and evidence. Also you state a translation of Joseph’s occupation should read “craftsman” instead of “carpenter.” What’s the difference? This is not a flagrant mistake in translation. If that’s the best “mistake” you can come up with, then my trust in accurate translation only deepens.

If the Bible’s all made up, why has it survived and thrived? Why are there so many Christians today? And it’s not a cultural phenomenon- there are true Bible believing Christians in almost every culture. Why were and are so many people willing to die for Christianity? Why would the authors of the Bible risk everything and subject themselves to constant beatings and finally execution for something contrived? Each author would have to have been exceedingly intelligent to make sure everything they wrote about Jesus lined up with previous writings predicting what he would do. How was the canon committee able to find all these texts that just happened to agree with each other?

Here’s the basis of everything:

We were created for communion with God. In the beginning God created a perfect world where we (humans) had perfect communion with him. And we were to praise him and bring him glory because he is. That is still what we are to do today. We are intended for perfect communion and to give him glory and recognition and praise simply for the reason that he is.

On this globe we perverted that. We decided to do something other than what he would have us do: we chose communion with something other than God. So now perfect communion cannot be achieved until after we die. (This world is but a passing shadow.) This has led to all problems, all confusion, all misgivings, all doubts and all outright denial of God’s existence. Our struggle on Earth is to try and commune with a God on our own merits, which we have found impossible. Jesus then provided the way to do this so that we are now redeemed and found perfect and no longer accused. The experience of perfect communion with God will not be fulfilled, however, until life in this sin-filled world passes.

Lord, it is such a struggle! And all a result of my own rebellion and yielding to temptation. Bending, giving in, kowtowing. Hebrews 11:7, 10, 13-16, 26, 38, 40. “God planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.”

Pg 104: Dawkins asks, “What’s so special [to Christianity] about believing?” – here Dawkins demonstrates that he does not understand or even know the basics of Christian doctrine. I would hope that anyone considering dismissing Christianity would at least have an intellectual understanding of what it is.

Pg 121: Dawkins keeps pushing natural selection as the cause of life and everything. Natural selection is a fact. It’s observable. But any move from micro- to macro-evolution is faith-based. There is no proof or suggestion or observation that natural selection over thousands and millions of years produces evolution. Don’t confuse those 2 terms.

Also to address “If the world is designed by a creator, then who designed the creator?”: Why does this question need to be asked? If a god designed all that is physical, the physical realm and even time itself, then why are you subjecting him to the rules we observe in the physical realm? It does not “regress to a problem.”

Pg 122: Again, in Dawkins metaphor of evolution being a long gradual climb up a softly sloped mountain, he’s assuming that natural selection = evolution, which it doesn’t.

Pg 123: Your dealing with the smooth gradient of evolutionary change with a wing or an eye is not logical. I quote: “The thought experiment of trees of different height, from which one might fall, is just one way to see, in theory, that there must be a smooth gradient of advantage all the way from 1 percent of a wing to 100 percent.” This is not a sound or scientific statement. There are many things that need to develop for a wing or an eye to be even slightly useful. A human with 25% of the necessary biology for an eye cannot see ¼ as well as a human with a complete eye. Every piece must be in place for the eye to work at all. The human eye will not just be fuzzy without an optic nerve, it will be completely useless. Or substitute 1 of hundreds of biological intricacies found in the eye. It is not a “smooth gradient.” Not to mention the thousands of processes within a body that must develop (“evolve”) simultaneously for any one of them to be useful to the species.

Saying that a human eye is more developed than a flatworm’s eye, thus proving gradients, is an illogical statement as well because you have to compare the eye against that species parent and its parent and its parent, etc. Take 50% (or whatever percentage) out of a human eye and you don’t get a flatworm eye.