A Circular Argument

I've had many debates with atheists about the existence of God, and I just wanted to post here an argument I made recently. The general consensus between them seemed to be that:

1) There was no evidence for the non-existence of God
2) They did not know how the universe came into being, nor how life started but that was not relevant
3) They were confident that scientists would one day know these answers.

To this I posed the following hypothesis:

Imagine if I were to declare that the earth was not really round without giving any evidence; saying that I didn't know what shape it was but that I knew it wasn't round; and that while I didn't know what shape it was, I felt sure that scientists would know one day.

Would my theory be given any credence?

Apparently it wasn't a valid argument :D

Laughter is the best medicine?

I was having a little debate recently with some guys on a forum and one of them posted a clip of a "comedian" who was trying to rip apart the Ten Commandments. He was also saying obscene things and pushing all the right buttons about how the commandments were just created to control people. Perish the thought.

The audience was laughing away - enjoying themselves - all united in their love of hating faith and the faithful and seeing them get pulled to pieces. I don't think the comedian laughed once - he seemed kind of angry. He was pacing up and down the stage looking rather tense, intense and intent on doing his gladiatorial job of slaying the Christians. Well, I suppose that always was a crowd pleaser.

Going back to the forum, point by point I critiqued the "comedian's" theology, pointed out that his material was rather obscene and told them that I didn't find it funny. Apparently that means I lack a sense of humour.

Don't they say "laughter is the best medicine" and "you've got to be able to laugh at yourself". Who says those things? Where did those little bits of "wisdom" come from? Pretty soon everyone is laughing at everyone else - another little bit of human ingenuity turned sour. Well, we rarely bear fruit when we branch out on our own - when we insist on going our own sweet way.

No - laughter isn't the best medicine - especially not when it's at someone else's expense - then it'll just darken your heart and weaken your mind. Now love, faith and hope - those are good medicines - they're also virtues. They can make you happier too - not cackling happy, a more contented kind - a kinder kind. But laughter looks a bit like happiness doesn't it? Kind of like a fake Rolex sort of looks like the real thing, but it's just a cheap copy.

Darkness can masquerade as light. The moon can shine if it borrows a little sunlight - if it copies the sun. But I hear it's actually pretty cold up there.

I am therefore I think that "I think therefore I am." Or not...

Descartes has a lot to answer for. He turned the way people think on its head by declaring "I think, therefore I am." This deifies the concept of thought - it is a magician's argument, implying that we can simply will things into (or out of) existence and that things only exist if, or critically because, we think they do. It is actually nonsense - we do not think first and exist second - we are alive first, and that enables us to think.

So when Moses asked God who to say had sent him to speak to the Hebrew people, God replied with 4 words that translate literally from Hebrew as "I Am Who Am". In other words - "I Am What Is - I Am He Who And That Which Exists." God did not think first and therefore come into being - He first "Was" - as the only Unproduced Producer he always was and by virtue of His existence He was able to think and create.

As we are said to be made in His image, we follow the same basic principle - we have to have life in order to be able to think and be creative. The being comes first - we must "be" before we can think - the saying should really be "I am therefore I think."

A dangerous side-effect of the "I think therefore I am" culture, is the aforementioned deification of thought. "Thought" or "Argument" rather than Being is elevated to the status of God. That which is not viewed as thinking is devalued. So consequently a fetus is not really seen as alive and people consequently decide that it is morally acceptable to exterminate it if its existence is deemed as inconvenient. Many see nothing wrong in having recreational sex and then aborting any unwanted life that results from their pleasure making.

A senile elderly person is seen as having no quality of life and therefore the concept of euthanasia becomes considered acceptable. Sanctity of life is replaced with utilitarianism: "I think therefore I am" becomes "I think therefore I have a right to existence". Simply "being" is no longer valued in its own right - we are no longer valued if we are unable to be cognitive and creative and / or lack any further potential to become so, or simply if we are inconvenient within the lives of others - i.e. if we get in the way of their pursuit of pleasure: the pursuit of pleasure being another thing that has become elevated to the status of a right. Pleasure is another god of our time.

Another dangerous side-effect of the Descartes culture is that God is reduced to the status of a human concept. So even though we do not have any alternative explanation for how we or the universe came into being unless we were created, by elevating thought to be the god of our time, we declare that we do not need to know - we no longer need to exist so that we may be able to think. To think is enough, now that we can take our existence for granted. It is as if we are now declaring that we somehow managed to think ourselves into existence without first having to exist. And that makes no sense.

"To be or not to be - that is the question." If you want to think, you'd better be.

It is precisely because people love the product above the producer, the creature above the creator, that people love thought itself above the life that allows thought to happen - people love themselves more than their own parents and more than the God who made them.

God is...

God is...

Some people say that God is love.

Some people say that God is mercy.

Some people say that God is truth.

All of these things are true, but it could also be said that each of these definitions is only a partial truth. Each of these things are also good, so if I were to try to describe God's attributes in a single word, I would say that God is good.

Now the reason that self-indulgence is NOT good, is that it is concerned solely with the interests of the self, rather than the interests of the greater good. The more we indulge our selfish desires, the more they grow and the more our being becomes shaped and defined by the pursuit of those desires. Indulgence of those desires becomes increasingly habitual to the point of becoming all-consuming. The result is that the more self-indulgent we become, the more self-centred we become and vice versa (pun intended).

In Sikhism, this kind of self-indulgence is called being "Manmukh" (literally self-centred) and this is contrasted with being "Gurmukh" (literally God-centred.) To be God-centred means being focussed towards the greatest good for the whole of creation - not just yourself. To be God centred is to be good-centred - the addition of a single letter "o" might make the concept that little bit more palatable for the atheistically inclined.

Pope John Paul II explains in his book "Memory & Identity - Personal Reflections" pp. 6-7 that the nature of the "original sin", as described by Saint Augustine is:
"amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei - self-love to the point of contempt for God. It was amor sui which drove our first parents towards that initial rebellion and then gave rise to the spread of sin throughout human history. The book of Genesis speaks of this: 'you will be like God, knowing good and evil" (Gen. 3:5), in other words, you yourselves will decide what is good and evil.
The only way to overcome this dimension of original sin is through a corresponding amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui - love for God to the point of contempt of self."

The Church, through the power of the Holy Spirit, attempts to 'convince the world about sin'
"...and the purpose of this 'convincing' is not to condemn the world. If the Church, though the power of the Holy Spirit, can call evil by its name, it does so only in order to demonstrate that evil can be overcome if we open ourselves to amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui."

So the ultimate aim for us all is to become as fully good-centred as we can be, and to keep pushing the boundaries of what we can achieve - Mother Theresa talked of "giving until it hurts". Naturally, we all fall short of this ideal much of the time, but we should at the very least agree with the basic premise of seeking to become increasingly good-centred through right action and less self-centred through self-indulgent pleasure seeking. You may be surprised by how many people today will attack even that basic premise.

God bless.

Original Sin in Brief

I just wanted to briefly explain the concept of original sin, as so far, I've only touched on it. 

Original sin was the sin of succumbing to the temptation of "eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil" even when we'd been told not to by God. This is quite a powerful metaphor for us human beings trying to go our own way and decide for ourselves what right and wrong are, (based on our own desires and using our intellect to try to justify our selfish actions) rather than obeying the knowledge of right and wrong that is imprinted on our hearts. 

Original sin is said to have darkened our minds and weakened our hearts. Because of our self-serving natures and our ability to use arguments and philosophical tricks to try to "prove" just about anything, we've actually made it much harder for ourselves to recognise the difference between right and wrong, and we've made it harder for ourselves to do the right thing. We lack faith and commitment, so even when we know the right thing to do, we often find that we are unable to do it. 

Faith can move mountains, but if we convince ourselves that we're not sure what right and wrong are "really", we will inevitably lack that faith.

We've got original sin - what's your excuse?

Atheist evolutionists are often keen to point out imperfections in the world as some kind of indication that God is not really all-powerful or all-loving.

Everything, they say, is solely a result of evolutionary changes - all creatures pre-programmed with a mechanism that seeks constantly to improve itself through genetic mutation and evolution. In such a world, all changes are put down to "evolutionary advantage".

So, what are the evolutionary advantages of the rampant obesity, wanton drunkenness, drug taking, cigarette smoking, serial adultery, prostitution, people trafficking, gangland killings, cash crops, terrorism, war and other destructive and self-destructive behaviours so prevalent in the world today?

Atheist evolutionists often point to theists and say - "well if God is perfect, why did He make people imperfect?" I'd like to pose that question back to the atheists for a moment - not because we don't have an answer - we do have one - but how is it that this intrinsically self-correcting evolutionary process has gone so wrong? If we are subject to a mechanism by which all living things strive for perfection, why are people now as they are?

Why are human beings so decadent and self-indulgent that in spite of having devised fantastic theories such as evolutionary science and even making scientific claims to the effect that "science has eradicated the need for a creator God," we are in grave danger of destroying the planet we live on? 

Why are we in the "developed world" eating ourselves to death? Sure - evolutionists can point to evolution and say we have evolved to survive in famine conditions, but we have not always had massive obesity problems - are we now going backwards instead of forwards? I'm sure they'll try to put it down to having such efficient access to food now that we never need to go hungry, but why haven't we evolved a solution to our overeating? Is that mutation still to come? Can we be sure it will arrive in time? 

We've been killing each other through war since history began - the last century produced the biggest wars and revolutions ever seen, with people being slaughtered on an astronomical scale. Why haven't we yet evolved a solution to war? Why have the numbers of casualties of war steadily increased? 

And why haven't we yet evolved a fairer world? Is consumer capitalism really the best we can do? Is it really efficient to let half the world starve while the other half eats itself to death? It really doesn't take a genius to work out the solution to that little problem. (People usually put it down to greed - oh, so they do have sin then, after all?)

Atheist evolutionists might argue that evolution has not yet had time to evolve solutions to all our problems, but why hasn't evolution yet evolved a solution to this shortcoming within its own mechanism - namely that evolution takes vast amounts of time? Couldn't that problem have been ironed out by now? And, crucially, why can't we simply put into practice the knowledge we already have?

We know that if we eat too much, it kills us. We know that if we smoke cigarettes or take heroin it kills us, so why can't we put our amazingly evolved brains into action and just not do it? We have the knowledge, why are we so willful in our refusal to use it? Why do we abuse ourselves ever more? Are we complacent in the knowledge that medical science will probably be able to patch us up and even if it doesn't, we've got to die of something, so who cares? OK - I'll be blunt - why are we so stupid? I'll also point something interesting out - it isn't just uneducated or supposedly unintelligent people who indulge themselves to death.

So, are we actually quite a poor design - one that is destined for failure? Are we doomed to suicidal decadence? Is evolution actually a self-destructive mechanism when all is said and done, designed to destroy the very creatures it has allegedly been perfecting? And if we can do nothing to halt our own demise, can we really be so sure that our scientific theories are so perfect? As a species, we could hardly be described as a great success right now.

We need to be very careful about what we attempt to destroy. It is one thing to destroy the planet and everything on it, but once we declare (as the Neitzschians are so keen on doing) that "God is dead," we have no excuses - we are on our own.