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From: ka@hou3c.UUCP (Kenneth Almquist)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Re: Religious Test
Message-ID: <141@hou3c.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 15-Dec-83 01:35:40 EST
Article-I.D.: hou3c.141
Posted: Thu Dec 15 01:35:40 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 17-Dec-83 01:10:58 EST
References: <673@ssc-vax.UUCP>
Organization: Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ
Lines: 31

David Norris asks about reactions to the questions:
>> "If I proved that Christ was the Son of God, would you consider Him?"    <<
>> "If I proved the Bible to be a reliable document, would you believe it?" <<

The first question is confusing (consider Him what?), but both
questions seem to call for my reaction to a proof of the
existence of God.  My reaction would be negative.  Take the
example of a programmer who starts out life on a batch system.
He wants his programs to be easy to use, so he has all his
programs print out their input data.  Then time sharing systems
come along and his methods of designing user interfaces is
obsolete.  So he writes programs which are nice and terse to make
the user's happy on their 110 baud terminal.  Then terminals
become faster and discovers that users no longer like programs
whose only response to errors is to print a question mark.  These
sorts of changes make computer science exciting, but if they come
too fast can be frustrating because they make it difficult to
build a useful body of knowledge.  Returning to the question at
hand, a proof of the existence of God would cause an unpleasantly
large change in my view of the world, because I have a large body
of ideas which assume that God does not exist and I would not
like to part with that investment.

This is not mean that I hate Christianity or that I cannot be
moved by rational arguments.  I have concluded, after giving the
matter fairly careful consideration, that it is highly unlikely
that God exists.  Therefore I don't expect to see any convincing
proof of the existence of God.  If I do I will have to revise my
beliefs, but not before taking a pretty careful look at the
proof.
				     Kenneth Almquist