Sunny Days in Heaven
Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven


Monday, April 01, 2002  

On God

Mark Goldblatt at NRO has this article here.

"The fact that 86 percent of Americans believe in God is well known. Less well known is that, according to a 2001 Gallup poll, 46 percent of Americans with postgraduate degrees think the Bible "answers all or most of the basic questions of life." It's a startling figure if you've attended graduate school in the last quarter century — for nowhere is belief in divine inspiration, or in divinity itself, more often pooh-poohed than in masters and doctoral classrooms. This, despite the fact that the smartest people in history have believed in a Higher Power. Socrates. Plato. Aristotle. Augustine. Maimonides. Aquinas. Da Vinci. Copernicus. Newton. Jefferson. Einstein. What unites them is not faith in the Judeo-Christian God, or even in a personal god, but rather in a divine presence whose existence somehow sustains the natural world. "

And briefly explains a paradox on theodicy concluding:

"What happens to one person is inherently unpredictable. But what happens in the aggregate is absolutely determined. That is, you and I are free to create our own fates. But the course of history, the outcomes of multitudes of fates, is subject to God's guiding hand. In this view, good triumphs over evil in the long run for the same reason that order emerges from the seeming chaos of electrons or that coin tosses eventually come out even. All are manifestations of God's ongoing creation of the world."

posted by Mark Butterworth | 8:42 PM |

links
archives