Aquinas and Plantinga, part 1

As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active power of the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of a woman comes from defect in the active power.
-- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

What I'm going to demonstrate in the posts that follow is that modern science has dealt a serious blow to what Thomas Aquinas once thought was sound reasoning. Cosmology, Evolution, quantum mechanics, neuroscience and research into artificial intelligence have shattered many of Thomas Aquinas's first principles and led us to a picture of the universe, and our place in it, that is profoundly at odds with what the ancient theologians thought. Modern religious apologists, like Alvin Plantinga, have not been able to get beyond some of Aquinas's worst errors because Christian theology (and Islamic and Jewish theology) are rooted in and depend on those wrong assumptions and presuppositions.

However, before I get into that, I want to explain why I'm going to be doing this. It started when I was visiting another "So Say We All" Galactica carnival blogger's site, Kenneth Hynek's to be precise, and stumbled upon his post, "On following a religion." I left a comment there and his response finally led to his dredging up of the arguments of Thomas Aquinas and Alvin Plantinga. He didn't restate their arguments, he just pointed to them as an explanation for why he thought his religious beliefs were well founded.

I seriously disagree, but if I'm going to dig through Aquinas and Plantinga yet again then I'm not going to just leave the work on the comments section of someone else's blog. No, I'm leaving a record here on my blog that I, and others, can point to the next time someone brings up arguments by Aquinas or Plantinga. I'll post a link on Mr. Hynek's blog that points here. He can leave links to his blog in my comments section if he really wants to get into this.

If we were to just point to the arguments of others, like Mr. Hynek did, without even giving a coherent summary of those arguments, then we'd fail to communicate our own ideas and reasons. There is already too much writing on the web about this now. Here are just a few of the pro and con arguments on the cosmological arguments for the existence of a God from infidels.org. There's plenty more like it to dig up. Before we can really get into this Mr. Hynek is going to have to point to specific links and explain why he is making bizarre claims like this:

There is the potential for error in attributing certain qualities to the First Cause, which must satisfy (at minimum) two conditions — simplicity and immutability.

Why must a "First Cause" be simple or immutable? And what does simplicity and immutability even mean in this context?

If you think God has mental qualities like "intention," "knowledge," "will," "emotion," "desire" etc. then how can you even imagine those are simple? You're talking about some magical form of human-like intelligence that needs no material substrate and of which there is no example to point to.

Obviously the first thing to do in such a situation is define terms. For example, if you ask me if I believe in God, I’ll usually say "No." However, that's likely to lead to the theist using the most open-ended definition of God he can get away with, like God is the first cause. But if the first cause is merely a quantum fluctuation, then a quantum fluctuation is God. But quantum fluctuations do not have mental qualities, they don't have emotions or thoughts. You may have, by some rules of the game, proved a kind of "god," (a first cause), but you've disproved the concept of God that Catholic theology is founded on.

So we must ask Mr. Hynek, "What do you mean by God?" Even deistic religions must answer it and define the term.

Also, lets settle on some texts if we're going to talk about Aquinas and Plantinga. We're not going to get anywhere if we're reading different writings even by the same authors. I'll be quoting Aquinas from the Project Gutenberg version of Summa Theologica, here:

Part I
Part II A
Part II B
Part III

If forgers and malefactors are put to death by the secular power, there is much more reason for excommunicating and even putting to death one convicted of heresy.
-- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

For a sample of Alvin Plantinga's thought process, check out "The Dawkins Confusion" (also on Dawkins' site), "Naturalism vs. Evolution: A Religion/Science Conflict?" and "Against 'Sensible' Naturalism."

If Mr. Hynek wants to get into this then let's start by defining terms and settling on which texts we're going to talk about. Once done then I can move on to giving a simple outline of my arguments against Aquinas and Plantinga. More details will follow later.

That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more abundantly they are permitted to see the punishment of the damned in hell.
-- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

Pascal’s Wager and Scare Tactics

Skatje Myers posted some thoughts on Pascal’s Wager and the discussion of it in the comments section got me thinking about the Sci-Fi Channel Reality Television Series called Scare Tactics.

Note: The rest of this post was re-written and transfered to a Hub article.
Click the link below to read it:
http://hubpages.com/hub/Pascals-Scare-Tactic

In the future I will be transferring more of my posts over to the Hub and only providing summaries and introductions here.

Why the new Battlestar Galactica is more important than "Expelled!" or Vox Day's writings

I've been following the crowd, blogging on some of the same subjects I find that PZ Myers and others are writing about. They've decided subjects like Vox Day's WorldNutDaily articles and his book, "The Irrational Atheist," and the soon upcoming movie, "Expelled!", are deserving of attention and here I am having already decided that I'm not going to watch "Expelled!" merely after reading Ben Stein's and Kevin Miller's writings nor am I going to finish Vox's book after reading one chapter.

Sure, they're probably dangerous propaganda and should be dealt with, but they're also looking to be rather dull and unpleasant experiences. I'm just not that kind of masochist. It isn't a pleasant job to slog through the dull, tendentious and insulting prose of Vox Day or bore myself with media hype for "Expelled!." The more I'm exposed to their drivel, the less I care. An atheist would have to be just as masochistic to deal with that stuff as a liberal would be to watch Fox News (not that watching Battlestar Galactica isn't a bit masochistic too, they love to torture their characters). Besides, PZ and kellym78 are on the job.

I've been following the crowd and I'm beginning to think the blogging crowd is wrong about what is effective and important. I would suggest that for our culture that the new Battlestar Galactica, on the sci-fi channel, is more subtly influential, more accurate a reflection of our society, than most of the flea books, propaganda outfits and stupid partisan websites that have tended to be the subject of my blog so far.

Sure, there are also many blogs and forums already dealing with the show, but they're mostly fannish and going after it from a different angle than the one I'll be taking.

What I'm going to do is look at the issues of atheism versus theism and the role of religion as it is seen through the Battlestar Galactica lens. And this, the show's 4th and final season, looks to be a rich vein considering how it started. From the beginning the show has been morally challenging, psychologically complex and politically controversial and it looks like it will get more so.

In fact, Galactica's contribution to the religious and political debate seems to be the best reason to watch it since when considered as mere drama it's full of apparent plot holes and soap opera level characters.

One thing the show gets right is the way it undercuts the divisive partisanship of the internet religious and political debates. Both sides of the war, Cylons and humans, have their atheists and their theists. In the end the atheists and theists on the human side are working together just to survive, yet the mutually antagonistic feelings are still there. In one episode the president of the colonies, Laura Roslin, starts getting religious visions and heads off with some separatists to find Earth, a place the less religiously literal consider mere myth. Adama says of the separatists, at first, "let them go, we don't need them," and "I can't believe anyone could be that stupid."

Of course, it turns out that Roslin's visions and ancient scroll interpretations do lead to evidence that Earth exists and a clue as to how to find it. Adama changes his mind and that leads to the next more accurate depiction of belief and non-belief in our society: Religious beliefs among the Galactica characters are fluid, just as they are in real life. People change their minds and move back and forth through shades of gray between belief and non-belief. One of the most clear examples of this is the character of Gaius Baltar.

Gaius Baltar starts out as an out spoken atheist, apparently he had written books advocating atheism, perhaps much like Richard Dawkins or at least Carl Sagan. However, he is having some new and strange experiences that have started him on path towards religious belief. I think Baltar is basically getting mindfraked by a Cylon android.

I'll have more to say on that in future posts here as the show progresses. In the meantime here's a brief recap of what they've been doing with Gaius Baltar:

In the very first episodes (miniseries? pilot?) Baltar unintentionally gave the Cylons access to the Colonial defense mainframe and thus he nearly destroyed humanity. At the time he was sexually involved with a tall, beautiful blond that he thought worked for a corporation in the defense industry. Wanting to keep her around he gave her the access codes so her employers would have an illegal advantage in future contract bidding. In exchange, she helped him design a navigation program used by Colonial warships, and she sneaked back-doors in the program that disable all but a few Colonial ships.

The day the attack happens the beautiful blond, Caprica 6, reveals to Baltar that she is a Cylon and that she used the information given to her to shut down the Colonial defenses. Baltar's planet is getting nuked when he eventually finds a Raptor, a small military shuttle type spacecraft, that's willing to take on a few passengers. The pilots use a lottery to decide who gets on, and Baltar doesn't win it. Then one of the pilots, Karl Agathon also known as Helo, recognizes Baltar as a brilliant scientist and gives up his place on the ship feeling that his own life is less important than to get a famed scientist aboard the Battlestar Galactica.

And the guilty secrets they throw on Baltar just keep piling up from there.

Aboard Galactica, Baltar also started "hallucinating" a relationship with Caprica 6. No one but Baltar can see her and she gives him answers to questions Baltar shouldn't know. She has the uncanny ability to know future events. Is she in tune with another plain of existence outside of spacetime? Like God? She plays games with Baltar's head, sometimes claiming to be a chip in his head, sometimes a symptom of his psychosis, sometimes an angel of God. When claiming to speak for God she is often loving but intolerant of Baltar's lack of faith, stern and abusive when he turns from the path laid out by the one true God.

But don't let that Biblical phrase "one true God" throw you. Galactica has not, so far, been a Christian show. The allegorically Christian elements have been there from the start, but the mix was odd and the religion of the characters has tended to be more like ancient, pagan Greek religion. However, that "one true God" may have just popped up in the last show I saw, which was called: "He That Believeth in Me," and performed a miracle.

Still, I doubt if they're going in that direction because if Caprica 6 was really a believer in a monotheistic, Christian-like, God when she helped to nuke humanity then she was the kind of believer whose ethical grounding was similar to future toddle chopper, Vox Day's morals: Morality was what God wanted and there were no humanistic principles involved. The well being of her fellow sentient creatures didn't enter into her morality.

Helo (the guy who sacrificed his means of escaping a nuked planet for Baltar's sake), by contrast, when faced with a similar choice decided to save the Cylons from genocide when the president and Adama tried to infect the Cylons with a virus, (see "A Measure of Salvation") And Helo, as far as I know, has never talked about his religious beliefs. But I sure get the impression that if God herself came down and told Helo to do something like genocide, then Helo would tell God to frak off, unlike Caprica 6 or Vox Day.

Helo's ethical principles seem to be not only above fleet and presidential orders but also above any religious belief he has (if he has any). Also, when Helo saved the Sagittarion refugees from a murderous doctor, in the 3rd season episode "The Woman King," he never cited any religious principles or spoke of any shared beliefs with Mrs. King. In that way he also seems to contrast with Baltar because, apparently being in the atheist and agnostic camp (if he is), Helo and Baltar would represent alternative atheistic moral groundings.

But then again, even though the original Caprica 6 was initially comfortable with the near genocide of humanity, later when she is reawakened in a new body aboard a Cylon ship she is having "hallucinations" of Baltar and suddenly, (out of nowhere and seemingly inconsistently) developing a radically different conception of what God wants -- and she's decided God didn't want humanity to die after all. And the only Jesus figure around is her "hallucinated" version of Gaius Baltar.

Well, if you haven't been watching the series you are probably totally confused by now. Don't worry, you'd still be confused if you had watched the whole series. Still, if you want to understand what looks to be the bulk of my next blog posts you might want to start watching Battlestar Galactica now. If you already are watching it, stay tuned to this blog because I'm going to be speculating in more depth as to why I think the child Balter was willing to die for in "He That Believeth in Me" is the 5th Cylon (hint: the virus that killed the Cylons in "A Measure of Salvation" was lymphocytic encephalitis. Galactica humans are immune, but as I recall that was the same encephalitis that the child had). Why the Cylons attacked humanity in the first place and more.

Battlestar Galactica is several orders of magnitude more useful to the religious debates between theists and atheists than all the partisan propaganda that's spewed by both sides in the blog wars I've covered here so far.

Harris versus Sullivan, the battle continues

Andrew Sullivan's latest response to Sam Harris, called "The Unclean Glass," is up.



Andrew begins, of course, by distorting Sam's position because if he didn't Andrew's head would explode. The longer this goes on, the more insane moderate Christianity seems. Andrew Sullivan does a great job on politics, he seems clear and rational, but when it comes to his faith we can begin to see how his thoughts have been befogged.

Sam asked Andrew to "Imagine a discourse about ethics and mystical experience that is as contingency-free as the discourse of science already is." Andrew distorts that into being "completely contingency-free" (meaning contingency in an absurdly ultra-broad way) rather than "as contingency-free as the discourse of science already is." There's a difference, because, as Andrew correctly notes, science is not "completely contingency-free." Science, is however, far more free of contingency than any religion is. Everything in science is open to question. There is, contrary to creationist claims, no dogma in science and "dogma" is the word Sam should have used.

Sam slipped. He didn't specify the kind of contingencies science is free from (it is dogma you meant, Sam. Don't throw Andrew's language back at him, it's loaded). Normally Sam wouldn't have to bother with such specificity and it should be obvious from context. However, when you talk to someone as deeply in denial as Andrew is, you have to speak with so much specificity that one's language becomes leaden and dull.

Andrew then goes on and on to preach to Sam things I'm pretty sure Sam already knows, such as about David Hume and faith in our own senses and memory. That helps Andrew feel superior to the assumed ignorance of the atheist. However, having faith in my senses isn't the same as having faith in dogma, and by dogma I mean stories passed down for generations that can't be checked on. My senses are me and what I seek to explain (even if they're the known illusions of itchy phantom limbs) the Christian dogma is a hand me down (I was raised Christian and rejected it).

Andrew, yet again, avoids answering Sam's questions about this dogma/contingency simply and directly. This was Sam's question: "...the specific beliefs that would make you a Christian and a Catholic, as opposed to a generic theist. Do you believe in the resurrection and the virgin birth? Is the divinity of the historical Jesus a fact...?" As I said, dogma is the contingency that Andrew's previous post was avoiding and Sam was asking about the clearest cases of Christian dogma. Andrew continues to avoid being direct about this. However, the implied answer is that, yes, Andrew believes in the resurrection and the virgin birth of Jesus as well as the divinity of the historical Jesus. (Why does Andrew avoid saying it directly? Does just saying it sound too dogmatic even for him?) Andrew's "rational, empirical explanation" for his belief in that dogma is that those whom saw Jesus saw something "so astonishing, so utterly unlike anything that had ever occurred before, that they became on fire with this new truth."

Hmmm, if Andrew saw David Blaine levitate off the ground, handle a few poison snakes and turn water into wine would he think it logical to assume Blaine was born of a virgin? Would he believe anything attributed to Blaine? If Criss Angel seemed to teleport out of a locked chest and then guessed Andrew's card would it mean that Criss Angel was the son of God? If Penn and Teller could do the cups and balls trick with clear plastic cups would Andrew have to conclude Penn and Teller were divine beings? Born of virgins? Would he get on fire with whatever Penn and Teller told him?

Andrew turns the question around, instead of answering why he believes Jesus rose from the dead he asks Sam why Andrew himself and so many others believe Jesus rose from the dead. He asks "What is your explanation? How do you account for why one person out of the billions who have ever lived had this impact? How probable is it that all these countless followers were all deluding themselves completely?"

Well, contrary to Andrew's assertions, it's obviously quite probable that all those followers are deluding themselves. What does Andrew make of the believers in Islam, Hinduism etc.? Look at all the things people do believe, Andrew, and then think that through again. Aliens abducting people, faith healers curing people, John Edward talking to the dead, Sylvia Brown telling you where the body is buried, Elvis sightings, Nazi holocausts that supposedly never happened, white supremacy, Ouija boards, voodoo, penis enlargement pills, breast creams, real estate scandals, Scientology, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Ted Haggart becoming a heterosexual, the honesty and integrity of George Bush … and on and on and on. People's brains are apparently full to the brim with BS.

Andrew points to the "many" Gospels (including Gnostic gospels Andrew? The gospels of Thomas, Judas and Mary?) testifying to the "power of his message," noting that only one of the thousands of Rome's victims is remembered in this way…" (well, two if you count Spartacus are remembered by name by me, scholars might come up with more names) and not just remembered but "worshiped over two millennia later…" Andrew then asks: "Does this not intrigue you?" Have you never asked how on earth did this happen? He then says: "As a simple piece of historical inquiry, it's an astonishingly unlikely turn of events."

It's not really astonishing if we look at the bigger picture of human history, not just Christian history. Andrew is impressed because Jesus is not just remembered but worshiped over two millennia later. Let's compare that with Egyptian religion, with how long Isis, Osiris and Ra were worshipped. It kicks off sometime before the "Archaic Period" (3414-3100 BC) when there is the unification of all Egypt. By 3000 BC at the very least, people had already been worshipping Isis, Osiris, Ra, and the Amen but now it's big. Further south, the Kushites seem to have also worshipped them. This religion lasts for more than 2,000 years as a state religion, closer to 3,000 years, and that is longer than Christianity has lasted. It sort of, but not quite ends, as a state religion with the Persian Period (517-425 BC) I think. But if being a state religion is the rule, Christianity died after the Enlightenment (perhaps its own Persian Period?) and that makes Christianity's life span significantly shorter than that of the Egyptian religion. In some ways, however, Isis, Osiris and Ra get incorporated into some forms of Gnostic Christianity and they continue far into the first centuries of AD.

If Andrew is going to accept long endurance, great numbers of worshippers and huge temples as indicators of "truth" rather than "truthiness" he'll have to start believing in Isis, Osiris and Ra. He'll also have to consider Hinduism and believing in Zeus. The point there is that it's not just the Egyptians, it's the Babylonians, Sumerians, the ancient Chinese, Indian Hinduism and other religions that have had, and continue to have, long lives and that have shaped their cultures with their own dogma. Is Andrew going to have to give them equal belief?

Looking at the bigger picture we can see that religion evolves and dogma like that about the names of specific saviors and what they did to save us is the most ephemeral part of religion. The part that continues through all of them, from Sumerian sun gods to the Islamic Koran to L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology, is a belief in a life after death, belief in magic and of powers beyond man's feeble abilities.

Andrew also asks, "...if Jesus wasn't nothing, … what was he in your eyes?" What Jesus was to me (I don't know about Sam) was a man who twisted an old religious meme into a new and more viral form. I explained my views in two essays over a decade ago, those are here:

http://www.textfiles.com/occult/notcrst1.txt
http://www.textfiles.com/occult/notcrst2.txt

Also here:

http://artofhacking.com/IET/CHRIST/live/aoh_notcrst1.htm
http://artofhacking.com/IET/CHRIST/live/aoh_notcrst2.htm

"What secret did he hold that so many others haven't?" The secret was that into those gospel stories about Jesus got weaved the greatest religious mind-fuck yet invented. And also because his followers would kill and die for the religion because they got so mind-fucked. Read my essays and future entries in this blog for more detail on all that.

"That is an empirical question. And it merits an empirical answer." And there are such answers. But even if I'm wrong about Christianity being rooted in a mind-fuck we just have to consider that if you flipped a few million coins and get a specific number of heads up, the odds against the number you got would be millions to one. Only one number can come up on one throw and that's the way it is with state religions. One religion wins, the others die, and Christianity became a state religion that then persecuted others as they were persecuted for believing the wrong religion.

Andrew then goes on to cut his nose off to spite his face. He says; "No human society has ever functioned without the large faith that underpins all the little faiths: religion." Yes, Andrew, and prior to the Enlightenment no secular societies had ever existed. America was one of the first. Before then they all had state religions. You don't want that, do you? Your fundy friends would like it.

Andrew says; "No society has ever existed without the mature human acceptance of what we do not know and what is greater than we are. No civilization has ever been atheist at its core." America comes pretty close to being agnostic to its core by introducing freedom of religion and the two biggest competitors in governing the largest masses of people are officially atheistic, Russia and China. Are they somehow not atheistic to the core? What is the core here? If it's about what the majority believes I think Sweden is more than fifty percent atheist.

Andrew says; "No polity has ever been constructed in the absence of faith, or in the absence of a tradition of faith that makes belief in the present possible at all. Earth to Sam: Does this not tell you something?" It should tell Sam that Andrew is losing it. A lot of things have happened that have never happened before. Secular states, walls of separation between church and state, end of slavery, gay rights, women voting and this internet we're all using. We are certainly moving in a direction in which there will be a polity constructed in the absence of faith.

Andrew asks; "Or is it plausible that human beings tomorrow will become something that in all of human history and pre-history they have never, ever been?"

Yes! Andrew, yes! We are becoming something different; we already have become something that never existed before. If we hadn't changed and become secular gays wouldn't have any change of getting married and America would have a state religion. Already a majority of the worlds top scientists are atheists – can you account for that Andrew?

Andrew even commented on another aspect of it in his blog. Here:

Faith and the Universe

Andrew quoted Carl Sagan on the intersection of science and faith and said that what our generation has internalized is the utter insignificance of this planet and human beings, in the context of what we have come to know about the universe. Such knowledge was not only unknown to those who wrote the Bible, it was unknown to every human being before. It is brand-spanking new and it has changed everything. Andrew only noted, via Sagan, Galileo's push into the new ideas about our universe. What about Darwin, Freud and Turing?

Andrew says this new knowledge alters his faith. Alters it? It should have demolished it.

He says; "Denial of evolution, in my view, is a sign of weak faith, not strong faith. It's a function of terrible fear, not the confidence of a loving God." Evolution is somewhat compatible with some deistic notions of God, but evolution is not something a "loving God" would do to his creatures. Evolution needs a thousand dead failures for every incremental move forward. Evolution isn't going to stop because man arrived, so stop thinking of yourself as the crown of creation.

Christianity has some other core doctrines, like that of original sin, like that of "the fall," that evolution demolishes. If Darwinian evolution is true then there was no original sin, there was no fall after which man is thrown out of paradise. Murder, theft, deception, rape and more existed long before our first ancestors walked onto land. Man didn't fall into these sins because they were part of the survival strategies of prehistoric fish. God would have had to have invented and injected sin into the world before man emerged and that contradicts the core message of Genesis.

Evolution means there was no Garden of Eden and no original sin and no fall. Now, some would say that this Eden and original sin are being read too literally. They come up with allegorical meanings for Genesis' first chapters, like how man's original sin, really eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, was about man first becoming conscious. Oh, sooo, Jesus will save you from consciousness? Are you sure you like that interpretation?

Andrew then, poseur alert, poseur alert, writes: "Religion at its deepest is the attempt to reconcile this profound human predicament: that we exist in bodies but dream beyond them, that we are caught between the irrational instinct of beasts but endowed with the serene hope of angels. This paradox of humanity - which you would erase into a clean slate - is what religion responds to and has always responded to…" And this is from the guy who likes to expose others as poseurs. Then from some guy called Oakeshott; "…in the poetic quality, humble or magnificent, of the images, the rites, the observances, and the offerings (the wisp of wheat on the wayside calvary) in which it recalls to us that 'eternity is in love with the productions of time' and invites us to live 'so far as is possible' as an immortal."

Doesn't that narcissistic interpretation of religion sound grand! He calls it humility. He has the "serene hope of angels," and the gullibility of a child that believes in Santa Claus. He lives 'so far as is possible' as an immortal because he doesn't want to face his own imminent death. He writes so glowingly, so poserly, in wonder of his religious superstitions. What utter mush!

Sam, don't give this guy the clean glass, he is obviously the guy who shit in the last one.

Yes, Andrew, there is a God.

There is a debate that's been going on between atheist Sam Harris and pro-religion blogger Andrew Sullivan over at beliefnet.com, here:

And now, with apologies to the most reprinted newspaper editorial ever; Francis Pharcellus Church's Sept. 21, 1897 response to Virginia O'Hanlon's letter to the editor of New York's Sun.

here is my letter to Andrew:


Yes, Andrew, there is a God.

Andrew, your little friend Sam is wrong. He has been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what they see and reason. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Andrew, whether they be men's or children's or Nobel laureates like Steven Weinberg, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge. In this great ignorance of ours man sees the boundless possibilities of the world about him, and the more ignorant the more possibilities there are and if you are ignorant enough, then all things seem possible you just won't be able to imagine any of them without knowledge. And that is why men believe in things they can't imagine.

Yes, Andrew, there is a God. He exists as certainly as fear and gullibility and lies told to children exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no God. It would be as dreary as if there were no Andrew. There would be no childlike faith then, no obfuscation, no comforting delusion to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight and art and love and other things like that. The eternal gullibility with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished. No longer could you conquer your death in the same way that Pastor Ted Haggard has conquered his homosexuality and so became a heterosexual in just three weeks.

Not believe in God! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might as well not believe in Santa Claus! You might hire scientists to examine your stomach after communion for signs of the transubstantiation of the wine and wafer, but even if they did not see evidence of your cannibalism, what would that prove? Nobody sees God, but that is no sign that there is no God. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fear of death, gullibility and delusions can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Andrew, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No God! Thank Santa Claus! He lives, nay a million, billion Gods live forever. A thousand years from now, Andrew, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, they will continue to make terrified the heart of childhood and bring violence and misery into the world.