Nov 23, 2009

36 arguments, 37 disappointments

If each of the 36 arguments for God's existence is underwhelming, well, that's disappointment enough. But there's an additional letdown: the book subjecting all 36 to scrutiny is a mildly comic novel--and a very badly written one at that.
It's not like Cass Seltzer to be out in the middle of an icy night, lost in thought while losing sensation in his extremities. Excitement had gotten the better of him. He had lain in his empty bed for hours, mind racing, until he gave up and crawled out from under the luxe comforter that his girlfriend Lucinda Mandelbaum had brought with her when she moved in with him at the end of June. This comforter has pockets for the hands and feet and a softness that's the result of impregnation with aloe vera. As a man, Cass had been skeptical, but he's become a begrudging believer in Lucinda's comforter, and in her Tempur-Pedic pillow, too, suffused with the fragrance of her coconut shampoo, making it all the more remarkable that he'd forsake his bed for this no-man's stretch of frigid night....

Lucinda's away tonight, away for the entire bleak week to come. Cass is missing Lucinda in his bones, missing her in the marrow that's presently crystallizing into ice. She's in warmer climes, at a conference in Santa Barbara on "Non-Nash Equilibria in Zero-Sum Games." Among these equilibria is one that's called the "Mandelbaum Equilibrium," and it's Cass's ambition to have the Mandelbaum Equilibrium mastered by the time he picks her up from the airport Friday night.
"Cass Seltzer" and "Lucinda Mandelbaum" and "impregnation with aloe vera" are trying too hard. "Bleak week" isn't trying hard enough. And the present tense is simply wrong.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Try Dennis Prager's column "If there is no God" on his website dennisprager.com. It is not an argument on why God exists, rather, why God is necessary. It convinced me enough (although I acknowledge it is probably because of my inferior intellect.)

Anonymous said...

If indeed you are convinced by a second-rate mind like Prager, you are indeed an inferior intellect.

John A. Davison said...

As an old fan of mine I thought you might be interested in this link to my successful invasion of richarddawkins.net blog in October, 2006.

http://forum.richarddawkins.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=341&start=275

It bears on the question of the existence of God which seems to be the subject of this thread. I happened upon it when I searched with the clues 'John A. Davison evolution' I found it with BING but not with GOOGLE which I long suspected was in the atheist tank with Dawkins and Myers. This episode which consisted of 12 pages over a ten day period set a forum record with over 60,000 views and terminated with my lifetime banishment, one of my proudest achievements. The Bing link is the only way that exchange can now be viewed unless one is a member of the Dawkins inner circle. They are anxious that it remain hidden from public scrutiny.

It sumarizes my views on the question of God as it also demonstrates the refusal of Dawkins and his disciples to consider that a God or Gods ever existed.

William Paley is famous for his remark - "Where there is design there is a designer."

His comment can be vastly improved by sustituting "was" for the second "is."

By rejecting God or Gods, both past and present, Richard Dawkins and Paul Zachary Myers have painted themselves into a corner from which there is no escape. They represent the last spastic twitches of the most infantile proposal ever to escape the human imagination to find the printed page, a phylogeny produced by natural selection. How that hoax has survived for a century and a half is a scandal unsurpassed in the history of science. It has been possible for one reason only. The Darwinians have always pretended that they had no credible critics when nothing could be further from the truth.

When you arrive at my website I recommend you poke the essay button on the top of the page where you will find the essays "What's wrong with Darwinism," "What is an atheist?" and "What is a creationist?" all three of which bear on the subject of this thread.

Enjoy!

http://www.jadavison.wordpress.com