When people talk about the attributes of God, know they are speaking from their opinions, not sharing epistemic evidence. In fact, if I claimed to know beyond question that what I'm about to say is absolutely true I'd be lying. There is a difference between what is true and what I believe to be true. I'd be claiming to intimately know God on a personal basis, and that would simply not be true. I may wholeheartedly believe I've had one intense personal experience with my Creator, but that doesn't mean I know God well enough to describe Him to you. What are the most commonly accepted "attributes" of God? Most people would say that God is omniscient, or all-knowing. Does God know everything there is to know? I can't speak from knowledge or experience because I've never had an extended conversation with God, but my best guess is that if it is worth knowing, God knows it. He probably even knows everything that isn't worth knowing, too. We're talking about the supernatural creator of our planned universe--the alternative of an unplanned universe is simply untenable. In a planned universe, the odds of success are improved to 100 percent guaranteed because an intelligent mind is responsible for guiding creation through every decision-making possibility that must be resolved in order for planned universe to exist. In the unplanned universe, statistical improbability dictates whether or not it is reasonable to expect success of any given anomaly, whether it be the origin of the universe (Big Bang), the initial expansion of the universe (cosmic inflation), or the … [Read more...]
The magic of Time
It's funny how sharing a silly cartoon can turn into a teachable moment. My cohort-in-crime Wilfred recently posted this cartoon poking gentle fun at the theory of macroevolution to my Facebook page titled The God Conclusion, which is aptly named after my book. The cartoon is silly because no one in their right mind would ever look at a snowman and think it could have come to exist due to random natural processes. Obviously, the snowman must be a human creation, the product of a primitive but nevertheless intelligent design. How can we know this? In part, due to entropy. Before a snowman could ever form by purely natural processes, the ambient temperature would rise and the snow would melt. No matter how much snow accumulates and how much time elapses, before the snowman could ever acquire two wooden arms, a knit cap, a carrot for a nose, and various buttons to represent eyes, mouth, and vest due to purely random processes. But first and foremost, a snowman isn't a living organism. Snowmen don't have DNA to analyze. Comparative anatomy doesn't really work, either, when one of the items being compared doesn't have an anatomy. There is no fossil record of a snowman. Nothing about a snowman would ever suggest it could exist due to random selection taking place over a very long period of time, even though a snowman is comprised of only one basic ingredient, which is snow. You can't use any of the tools an ordinary evolutionary biologist would use to determine any relationships allegedly due to common descent because a snowman isn't alive. By comparison, … [Read more...]
The Bulldog Hypothesis
I'm not superstitious. I've made an entire career out of my ability to think logically. I was a software developer for twenty years, and more recently I've written a book called The God Conclusion, which applies logic to existential scientific evidence to reach a conclusion that completely conflicts with the claims made by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion. I believe in luck, but certainly not the sort of luck required to make a fine-tuned universe from nothing, and living organisms from inanimate matter. Well, maybe I'm just a tiny bit superstitious, but not much. For example, I'm not sure I really believe what I'm about to tell you, but so far the results of the experiment have been 100 percent success, so I'm not inclined to rock the boat by testing an alternative hypothesis at the moment. In short, I think I might be the Georgia Bulldog's X-factor that has propelled them to two consecutive national championships and an unbeaten streak that is currently the longest in college football. And exactly how have I contributed to the team's success? It's simple, really. At critical moments, when things appear to be darkest for the team, I stop watching the game. Usually, I storm away from the television and plop down in front of my computer, immediately opening a new browser window to ESPN so I can continue to follow the game. We have to be losing by at least one touchdown and the other team currently has the ball or appears to have it for me to walk away as nervous stress temporarily overwhelms me. The first time this happened was the 2021 Championship … [Read more...]
The Loretto Staircase
The Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico was constructed in 1878. However, French architect Projectus Mouly died unexpectedly before a staircase could be completed to the choir loft twenty feet above the floor. That was a big problem because nobody else knew how to make a way up there. Local builders suggested using a long ladder to reach the choir loft, but the nuns responsible for Loretto Chapel weren't interested in climbing a ladder while wearing a habit. Allegedly the Sisters of Loretto had consulted with every builder in the area to find someone suitable to complete the project, but no one proposed a workable solution given the confined spaces involved and didn't require a ladder. Legend has it that the nuns then prayed a special prayer called a novena for nine straight days to St. Joseph (the patron saint of carpenters) and on the final day of the prayer, a mysterious man rode out of the desert on a donkey, offering to build the staircase on one condition -- no one could watch him work. Several months later, the project was completed, and as the story goes, that mysterious carpenter vanished as quickly as he appeared, without accepting any payment for his labor or the materials used to construct this architectural masterpiece. However, if a story sounds a little too good to be true, it's probably been embellished. While it is often difficult to separate fact from fiction, the documented facts include an entry in a nun's daybook dating back to 1881 claims that a man named Rochas was paid for wood. We might reasonably assume the wood purchased was used to … [Read more...]
Did Egypt Warn Israel Before the Attack?
I'll be brutally honest -- I really hate the question. I wasn't the first one to ask that question, though, and I also intend to answer it. Fire and smoke rise after an Israeli air strike targeted the National Bank on Gaza City, on October 8, 2023. Israel, reeling from the deadliest attack on its territory in half a century, formally declared war on Hamas Sunday as the conflict's death toll neared 1,000 after the Palestinian militant group launched a massive surprise assault from Gaza. (Photo by Ahmed ZAKOUT / AFP) To me, the idea is preposterous...that the Israeli government knew in advance that last Saturday, more than one thousand Palestinian terrorists would invade their country from the Gaza Strip with their objective being to rape and murder hundreds of Israeli civilians. What sort of immoral monster would you have to be to know something like that was coming and deliberately choose to allow it to happen? I can think of a few people who might do something like that but they were vicious dictators like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao, not the leaders of a free world nation. It's a stupid question. It presumes that leaders of a country selected by free and fair elections could deliberately ignore verified and actionable information about a pending attack merely to give themselves an excuse to retaliate afterward. Similar claims have been made about Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor, but why blame a horrific attack on a conspiracy when simple incompetence might be an equally reasonable argument? Historian Craig Shirley didn't blame FDR. He attributed the … [Read more...]
