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An infinite God Should Be Unreasonable


Here is an email I received in response to one of my essays.

An infinite God Should Be Unreasonable

Leon : leon@brooks.smileys.net : 2000-05-17

You can go diving in the Gulf of Aquaba (look on a satellite photo for a huge diamond-shaped beach on the western edge and draw a line east-south-east of the easternmost tip; dive along the line — here’s a picture (no longer available) — the beach is about 1/5 down and 1/6 in from the right) and find on the bottom chariots, weapons and the skeletons of horses and men — but no wrecked boats. An odd thing and only explained in the book of Genesis, where it is explained perfectly.

[The Bible purports to be a history book. Surely it should get the human history part right without difficulty. My complaint is the outlandish claim that God wrote it partly as an accurate physics text.]

A lot of the oopsies in that big book are simply us assuming that we know what’s going on, which for a finite God would be fine and reasonable, but for an infinite God is not.

[Most of the oopsies are not about great mysteries. They are about very mundane facts. You can’t weasel out of them so easily.]

Archaeology is constantly confirming the record it contains in finer and finer detail. Developments in linguistics, as well as a growing cultural understanding, are making a more and more of what seem like outright contradictions into perfect sense. But for the everyday user, we don’t need to know; just as perhaps 95% of computer users have never even seen the source for a C program.

[There has been zero scientific evidence for the great flood, the exceedingly young age of the earth and the mass extinction of all species to one pair. We can expect the Bible to get correct the history of its time. It cannot be expected to be accurate outside that time which it often attempts vainly to do.]

> The laws of the physical universe are simple, elegant and beautiful.

The laws governing biology are even more staggering. Each strand of DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid) in us houses at least 300,000 base pairs of codons (4 kinds). Each codon is itself a large, complex and delicate molecule. The whole DNA strand has a structure which is perfectly balanced untravelled, or folded down to a few nanometers across. Other complex and delicate molecules unzip sections of DNA through still other complex and delicate molecules to produce needed proteins and other complex and delicate molecules. Water is need for this process, yet it would destroy any of the complex and delicate molecules but for their structure. Catch-22.

[Where did you read that? DNA functions quite happily in the aqueous environment of the cell. It is fairly robust. We have been able to study samples millions of years old. Does the bungler described as God in the Bible (who thinks the world is flat) seem capable of devising DNA ?]

How did it start? Certainly not by accident, silly experiments featuring methane, electrodes and massive intelligent design input notwithstanding.

[Why do you call these experiments silly? They have already gone a long way toward creating primitive forms of life from non-living material. We can already create artificial strands of DNA. It is only a matter of time before we create the entire genetic complement for some creature.]

And much else. Have a look around… does this look like a perfect world? I think not and this is reassuring because God caused to be written a detailed explanation of why it is not perfect and when it will be. We are living in a battle zone and each of us, in our own way, is a casualty. One day the war will end.

> May you be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.

Your wish will be granted. I hope you’re there to see it. Fortunately, the choice is yours.

[Wishful thinking if you expect someone else to do it for us.]


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