Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: lums@soggy-fibers.ai.mit.edu (Andrew Lumsdaine) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Is there a God? Message-ID: Date: 9 Mar 91 06:19:56 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics Lines: 40 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article st0o+@andrew.cmu.edu (Steven Timm) writes: >(To be fair, following the Bible line requires that you first believe in >God for these things to happen, so in a way it's circular reasoning. But >if the postulate of God's existence is inconsistent , it will show up.) Well . . . . One could argue that God's existence is akin to Euclid's parallel postulate or the continuum hypthesis. God's existence may be unprovable. One can then either assume it or not, and obtain a consistent system. I think most atheists and agnostics would agree with this and cite Occam's razor as a reason for *not* believing in God. The question really is, which choice corresponds with REALITY? Taking the prallel postulate as an example -- one can make a different assumption and obtain an alternate geometry. However, the world as we experience it seems to be Euclidian. (This may not be the best example -- I'm on somewhat shaky ground when it comes to modern physics.) So, the postulate of God's existence might not be logically inconsistent at all -- however, I believe that assuming His existence *is* consistent with reality (and assuming He does not exist is *not* consistent with reality). One reason is (as you mentioned above) the visible changes in the lives of Christians I know, my own life included. Another reason is answered prayer (as you mention below). The most convincing to me is that there really does seem to be an absolute morality (see _Mere_Christianity_ about this -- C.S. Lewis explains it much better than I). >The experimental result I cannot shake is, that although there's no reason >why praying to omniscient God should make a difference, I know it does. Isn't that amazing? I don't understand this either, but this experiment has been verified in my own life time and again. Regards, Andrew Andrew Lumsdaine "We don't understand the software, and lums@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu sometimes we don't understand the hardware, MIT RLE but we can *see* the blinking lights!"