I’m quite pleased with my effort in writing The God Conclusion, but I will be the first to admit it is not a perfect book. It was thoroughly and professionally edited, of course, but even so, I’ve found a couple of minor mistakes post-publication. For example, I only intended for one quote to be repeated in the manuscript, but in the final published version somehow two other quotes were accidentally repeated. I believe the problem was due to copy-and-paste versus cut-and-paste, and I wonder if many people even noticed, but all that really matters is that I noticed.
The mistakes seem to be a little more obvious in the audiobook.
However, one mistake stands out as my worst.
I admit that I had some difficulty finding the right words to describe the ultimate dichotomy that must be applied to our existential questions if we are ever going to have any hope of finding some real answers. What were the right words? In my book, I didn’t know, so I tried several: God versus good luck (which I also called good fortune and serendipity.) Order versus chaos. Intelligent Design versus evolution. Accident versus on purpose. Lots of oppositional words.
In other words, I had no idea of what were the best words to use in describing this dichotomy, so I used too many “other” words. Even when it came to a dichotomy like God versus good luck, I’d substitute other words for God like “supernatural intelligence” and for luck I’d use “good fortune” or “serendipity.”
Probably the biggest problem was that my choices were often not truly oppositional words. The logical alternative to “God” is “no God”, or atheism, not good luck. I might argue there is no such thing as a planned accident, but even so, “accident” versus “deliberate intent” failed to perfectly convey this critical dichotomy. The universe was created by God, or what?
Society usually frames the debate as between biblical creation and evolution, but somewhere along the way I realized that is a false dichotomy because evolution doesn’t even become possible until creation has already occurred. Life cannot evolve until it exists. Simple but irrefutable logic. I guess that means society isn’t right about everything.
This is my shocked face, showing my surprise at the very idea that society could be wrong about something — like boys playing girl’s sports or using their bathrooms, for example.
Then one day after the book was published, I met a friend for lunch. We’ve been friends for decades, making it very difficult for me to bluff my way out of a corner when confronted about my imprecision. During our conversation, he said that he’d been reading my book and complained about my lack of specificity and imprecise choice of words to describe this dichotomy that he agreed existed. He said that I had used multiple words to describe this dichotomy probably because I hadn’t thought of the right ones, and I realized he was absolutely correct.
Even better, at that very moment I had an epiphany. Suddenly I knew the precise words I’d been looking for: planned versus unplanned. God, or an Intelligent Designer, would create the universe and the life within according to a plan. The alternative is to believe that life and the universe were merely the result of a series of unplanned events.
Even now I find it somewhat tempting to put the word “fortuitous” in front of unplanned, but that would be superfluous because it would seem to imply that creation could possibly be a bad thing. Darwinists naturally point to examples like the ichneumon wasps doing that whole “Alien” thing to spiders by infecting them with larvae that eats the spider alive, but my response to them is to say just because you don’t understand the plan doesn’t mean the plan doesn’t exist.
In fact, evidence that a plan exists is literally ubiquitous. Mandelbrot’s fractals. Fibonacci’s spirals. Trophic cascades. Repeated patterns. Intelligence is required to recognize that these patterns exist.
A byte within a computer is nothing more than a meaningless stream of zeros and ones until a compiler recognizes its value as data and processes that data into information. Raw data is processed from input into useful information with the application of intelligence.
Intelligence is also required to understand The God Conclusion.
Yep
What you said…
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