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Being Kind and the Ultimate Being
February 17, 2005 - 6:20 p.m.

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Amy and I watched Amelie the other night. I recommend it, without hesitation, as one of the most charming movies I've ever seen. It's quirky, funny, beautifully filmed, well acted and the central message is delightful. It's a call to care about one another and to be purposeful about bringing good into the world.

The world needs more people who are making an effort to be kind.


I've been preparing for a debate in Christian Apologetics (Sorry. Sorry! My fault. Sorry!) which has put me in an odd place. In order to form a decent defence of the faith one has to explore an attack on the faith, and in an upcoming in-class debate I was randomly* selected for the "con" side. This means I will be arguing against the existence of God, something I did on my own (and not for a grade) for many years.

The thing is, when I argued against the existence of God what I was really doing was arguing against a literal translation of the Bible which some well-meaning soul was attempting to foist upon me. This is no difficult task, since a literal, verbatim reading provides enough internal contradictions to "win" most arguments.

For example...Noah gets into the ark twice and stays there for different amounts of time; Genesis features two creations with different chronologies; Jesus has two different genealogies, in which people move about and become their own grandfathers; Jesus spends three gospels trying to keep his identity quiet and then lets it all out in John, etc. Not to mention "Where did North American buffalo and South American poison tree frogs come from if the great flood covered the whole earth? Did Noah discover the Americas and forget to tell anyone? Did tree frogs hop all the way from the Mediterranean?" A literal Bible poses more difficulties than it solves.

Arguing against the very existence of God, of a necessary being, a being whose existence is not contingent upon any other creature...well, that's harder. It turns out that, even in the realm of pure logic, God is awfully hard to dismiss.

An interesting ontological argument comes from Anselm. While this isn't the most convincing, it's an early formula worth a look. We operate from premises to conclusion...

  1. Persons have the idea of a greatest possible being.
  2. Suppose the greatest possible being exists only in the mind.
  3. Existence in reality is greater than existence only in the mind.
  4. Therefore, we can conceive of a being greater than the imagined greatest possible being, that is, a being that also exists in reality.
  5. But there can be no being greater than the greatest possible being.
  6. Therefore, a greatest possible being exists in reality.

I have difficulty with an argument that goes from imagination to reality, and I think that this just might make God a contingent being, since existence hinges on our ability to imagine God. Of course a contingent being is, by definition, not the greatest possible and the whole thing comes falling about one's ears. Still, it's a fun logic puzzle, and if you operate within its confines you really can't prove it wrong.

* A note about my "random" selection to the "against God" team...yeah, I think I'm being challenged here. Better underpin that faith, pal.

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