CADRE Comments

Even people unschooled in the Bible know the basics of the story of David and Goliath – if for no other reason then the analogy is used whenever something small takes on something large and powerful. Just to prepare to write this blog, I searched for “David and Goliath” on Google News and found stories about residents in a small town in Ireland fighting a large developer , a battle between McDonald’s and a small Irish food chain over the trademark to Big Mac , and the violent stoush resulting when a large galaxy and a small galaxy get too close to each other among other stories. Yes, the story of the future King David, while still too young to join his brothers in a fight for the new kingdom of Israel, against the biggest, baddest Philistine of the time is well-known even to those who have a stunted education of the Bible. Of course, many will say, the story is nonsense. A 9 foot-tall giant being defeated by a young boy and his sling? There couldn’t be anything to it, right? ...

I had an interesting discussion on the  Secular Outpost Blog.  The atheists were reacting to the concept  That ,  "God is beyond human comprehension". They argue that this means we can;t know anything about God  thus we can't  make a rational belief. This was part of a larger argument, Bradley Bowen; argument against Christian  apologist Kreft, part 87 or something. Poster Susan Humphreys in the comment section starts thinking down a tributary of that discussion Susan Humphreys   •   5 days ago I was watching the news one evening, only half listening and a Cardinal was being interviewed (possibly Dolan). The interviewer asked a question that I don't think the Cardinal wanted to answer because he said, in an attempt to stop the questions I think, "God is beyond human comprehension". This is taken from several places in the Bible.  At the time I thought does the Cardinal realize what he just said? If God is beyo...

based on an untitled image by  Ralf Kunze There's a sense where nothing can be all-encompassing. At some point, every child realizes Santa's toy sack has to be bottomless. It doesn't matter how many toys you throw into Santa's sack, it holds them all. But, no matter how many toys you throw in Santa's sack, there's always something more: the sack itself. No set, no matter who big can include itself. In mathematics, they call this the incompleteness theorem: a set can't contain itself. It seems an unbounded all-encompassing infinity is an illusion. This where the story gets interesting. When we talk about infinity, like walking that circle (again and again and again), we have a sense of something that continues to "grow" as we discover it. If we take all the numbers between two and three, we'll have another example of infinity. Instead of walking around a circle forever, we can zoom in forever  —2.1 to 2.9... 2.01 to 2.99... 2.001...

Jason Thibodeau writes a long article, "Can Humans Create Meaning? Can God?"  [1]  I will concern myself  with only a  small part of the article, the argument that God cannot create meaning. Jason argues: "The conception of meaning is not altered by whether God, or any other supernatural entity, exists. Whether life is meaningful depends on whether there are, in our lives, things that matter."  [2] He sets up a dichotomy in arguing that God bestowing meaning is an ambiguous claim: The claim that God makes life meaningful is ambiguous. There are two different things that it might mean: (A) God creates the things in life that are valuable and worthwhile (and that, in virtue of being valuable and worthwhile, give our lives meaning). (B) God makes it the case that the things in life that are valuable and worthwhile are valuable and worthwhile. Thus, by making these things valuable and worthwhile, God makes it the case that our lives are meaningful....

based on an untitled image by Ralf Kunze Tim Wood  joins us this week. He has had articles, interviews, reviews, profiles, poetry and fiction published in various places. He serves as an editor for GrandViaduct press and previously was publisher of artsDFW: the monthly guide to the arts in Dallas , editor for Negations: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Social Criticism and has been cited in The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry. He holds a Bachelors Degree in Physics and has completed course work for a Masters in Humanities. Follow him on twitter: @4til7. When Joe asked me to contribute, he was pretty open ended about what I could write. He suggested I could share my testimony. The short version of that is that I went off to college and had some long talks about Gd 0 with several people and I ended up praying the sinner's prayer. Which isn't much of a story. Certainly not an exciting one involving divine light (although I ran into that latter) ...

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Garden of the Gods The point is to show the decision making process and what goes into belief or disbelief. Gardener parables are a tradition in philosophy of religion. I always think those like Flew's and Wisdom's are loaded against the believer. The basic parable, although in many versions, goes like this: two men see a garden. The state of the garden makes one suspect there is a gardener, the other suspects there is none. In some versions they steak out the place, keep watch all night. They see no garden and the believer decides he's invisible and the other decides he's non existent. In Felw's version they put up electric wires, search lights, dogs, all kinds of things. No sign of a gardener. The believer decides he's oderless, colorless,invisible,intangible and doesn't do much. The sketic asks what's the difference in that and no gardener at all. Flew gives the moral: "the death of a fine brash hypothesis comes through a million qualificati...