One Man Mormon Blues Band: Blog

I am writing a novel. It is well constructed, logical and coherent. Now, in my novel no one gets killed. But let’s suppose that I have one of my characters cause the death of another character. Would I be prosecuted as an accessory to a crime?

Of course not! I am the creator and stand outside the story. I am not a part of the story. If I showed up in the story you would ask, “Who is this author fellow? What is he doing in here?” I do not exist in the same time frame as the story. This seems so obvious. Yet let’s look at another story and how some people view that story. This is the story of the creation of the universe and time.

Before today, we knew there was a yesterday. And there was a day before that day. Does this chain of day-before-yesterday go back infinitely? I suppose so, since I can’t imagine what a day without a day before would look like. But if there were such a day, then we would call that day the beginning.

If there were a beginning, there [...]

Some scientists and atheists wishes to claim that God does not exist because he does not stop evil in the world. However, the concept of evil is a value judgment and the definition can shift around a lot. What is evil in one situation may not be as evil in another. We will debate a long time about whether killing thousands of Japanese with an atomic bomb to save thousands of American soldiers lives was evil or not.

We might all agree that malaria is a curse. However, if you have it you probably live in very poor circumstances and you are almost for sure going to be protected from some forms of hepatitis. And you can live productively with only occasional outbreaks. So is Malaria evil in those circumstances?

The things that we commonly call evil are disease, suffering and death. yet these are not only natural, they are necessary part of nature. The First Law of Thermodynamics states that the amount of energy in the Universe is finite, and new energy is not created or destroyed. [...]

No, really, I mean horrible things. The German concentration camps of WWII where millions died are an example. Other examples might be an ocean tsunami that wipes out thousands of innocent men, women and children, a psychopath who opens fire and kills dozens of innocent people in a school, or a serial killer who tortures and murders innocent victims. On a personal basis many of us even struggle with the death of family members and loved ones, sometimes due to untimely accidents or even due to natural causes.

None of this seems to have an explanation, and so many atheists have decided that these events are proof that there is no God. Their argument goes like this. If there is a God, He is by definition all powerful. If He is all-powerful He is in a position to stop pain and suffering. But it is obvious that pain and suffering continues in the world, hence there must not be a God.

In fact, all pain and suffering prove is that we presently have no generally accepted explanation [...]

“In the beginning was the word . . . .” The term used for word in the ancient Greek version of the Bible was logos. Logos means more than word, in Greek it can be translated as “thought” or “rationality”. Early Christians believed God created the Universe and that it operated according to divine laws of order and rationality. Since man is “created in His image” there is a spark of divine reason in humankind. As Alfred North Whitehead observed in his book Science and the Modern World, “Faith in the possibility of science . . . is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.”

The medieval monastery was a place to retrieve, collect, and preserve classical knowledge. Much of this knowledge had been destroyed by the barbarian destruction of the Roman Empire and Europe. But from these Monasteries came schools of various kinds until by the twelfth century Universities began to be established. All early Universities were associated with the Church. However, they [...]

Why does the Universe seem to make sense? Why do the planets appear to follow discreet laws of motion and gravity? Why does energy seem to be conserved? Why are chemical reactions predictable? There is nothing that suggests this need be so. Given tremendous periods of time and random events such as proposed by scientists, why would we suppose that some kind of order would come from a massive explosion, the Big Bang?

Would it not seem just as likely that such a chaotic event would lead to purely random subsequent events, that disorder, entropy would overwhelm the Universe and that any pockets of order would soon be dissolved in entropic doom?

Evolution is a series of random events, each selected by the environment to succeed or fail. But they in turn change the environment that selects the next random changes. Even the biologists that believe in the process admit that it is a chaotic affair that has required huge spans of time and random chance. They also admit that the trend [...]