FOUND'EM !

I was just about , JUST ABOUT ! to rip this place apart and search and sort it room by room in a dedicated search pattern.

Then I emptied the garbage can and when I pulled the bag out the keys popped out, they were hiding between the bag and the garbage can.. so not technically the last place I looked because I was not actually looking for them yet.

Fun story. They were gone for days, teach me to clean my counters the way I had.

It is credible to believe that the Universe was designed and created by God.


This is something I should have clarified before - my use of the word "universe" includes any sort of God (who would, then, have created the rest of it - presumably). This term gets used a lot of different ways in different contexts, and I don't think the way I'm using it is, in any way, more correct and my use of the term over different conversations is likely inconsistent. Anyways, how we're using the term certainly has a huge impact on the discussion. So, to be clear, when I say universe I mean absolutely everything: God (or Gods or whatever), laws, matter, and anything else that can be said to be. So it makes no sense for me to say "God created the Universe", but it certainly makes sense to say "God created everything else in the Universe" or (if you see things a different way) "Everything in the Universe is part of God" (or some variation). Hopefully that clarifies my position.

Anyways, if you have a universe that includes a God with certain properties, that God goes ahead and designs and creates a bunch of other stuff and you end up "here". The minimum we need for this kind of universe to proceed is one being, with certain properties.

The minimum we need for a Godless universe to get to "here" is a certain set of arbitrary physical laws, and possibly some matter (matter may be optional - but, to be clear, "nothing" is not an option - the universe at very least would need physical laws to get going.. and that is very much something, and it's something that's unavoidably arbitrary).

The point I'm trying to make is, I don't know isn't a theory. What most atheists mean when they say "I don't know" is "I know it isn't the Christian God, but otherwise I don't know". The next thing they say is, you believe in God because you're afraid. That I "chose" God because I am scared of death, or because the Universe is too big and scary for my mind to handle the uncertainty of not knowing.


Well.. I, for one, don't know it isn't the Christian God. I just don't have any real reason to believe that right now. And I didn't mean to suggest YOU accepted an idea because you're "scared" - rather, what I meant to say (and didn't say clearly) is that it wouldn't be a good idea to accept something just because "something" is better than "I don't know". I prefer no explanation to accepting one that I don't have reasons to accept (and, again, I'm not saying you don't have reasons - I'm saying I don't have them).

And to be clear: I wasn't saying Devil's Tower is a current mystery (one of sufficient import) or that it wasn't caused by water action (I was making a little crack at old timey semi-scientists that explained lots of stuff away by referencing the Biblical flood).

Rather, I was suggesting a hypothetical wherein I had discovered Devil's Tower and didn't have any ideas about it's cause (which is not incomparable with where we're at with abiogenesis). In both cases, my point is that even without a real candidate theory it's not crazy to assume the explanation will be similar to other explanations we've accepted, and to guess that the explanation will not introduce large new assumptions.

For a geologic feature, you'd expect to be able to explain the feature through known mechanisms - erosion, glaciation, deposition, tectonic activity, geothermal weirdness, etc.. and you'd try to find an explanation using those sorts of things before you'd look further afield. You certainly couldn't guarantee the explanation isn't something more extraordinary, but your incoming bias against that possibility is not irrational - it's just following a reasonable search pattern.

Luckily I wrote this out for somebody a few days ago:

When I was still fairly new in the air and about 22 years old, I was flying from Montreal to Winnipeg by myself in a rented Cessna as part of my pilot training. Because a Cessna 172 goes about 200 KPH and has enough fuel for four hours maximum, and the total distance was over 2,000 km, this meant many hours of flight and a lot of fuel stops.

Nearing the Quebec-Ontario border, I landed in Val d'Or to refuel and get a new weather briefing for my route. I called the weather service and they said I could probably expect to get to Timmins, ON, an hour away, without the three thousand foot ceiling coming down on me. I took off and flew west, and after about half an hour, it sure as hell did.

A hard rain drummed so intensely on my wings that it drowned out the loud drone of the engine and the cloudbase fell rapidly so that I couldn't see far at all. I had just passed Rouyn-Noranda with its airport and I turned back towards it, but by the time I was over downtown the weather made it so I couldn't see the airport anymore even though it was only four miles away. At the time I wasn't qualified to fly by instruments only and I was already in a pickle, and if the weather lowered much more then I would be basically blind and with diminishing hopes of getting to terra firma since only helicopters can land without at least a bit of forward visibility.

I was on the radio with the unicom operator at the airport, but as with most medium-small airports, he was no air-traffic controller, basically just a guy with a radio and a couple other gizmos but no radar and no real training when it came to helping a pilot in trouble -- which I was on the verge of becoming.

I was beginning to fly a sort of ersatz search pattern looking for the airport and I was starting to just head for whatever lights I could see through the darkening fog but they kept turning out to be this farm or that one and the weather seemed to be getting worse, with its attendant visibility loss and my odds slowly but steadily falling off more yet. It was a bit like going 100 on the freeway in fog when you can only see one second in front of you but no way to really slow down or otherwise make things safer. The rainclouds were creeping into the cockpit, damp and cold, and I couldn't help thinking it was the kind of air you find in a tomb.

Then all at once the next cluster of lights turned out to be the Noranda airport and I shouted my glee and relief over the radio. The landing itself was utterly simple and I taxiied to the apron and got out and got wet in the steady rain as I tied the airplane down. As I was finishing up, the rain came down much harder and the sky fell much more and I thanked God I wasn't still up there because getting down without a crash would've been twice as hard. I visited the stubby aerie where the unicom guy sat alone -- we were about the same age -- and I thanked him for his help and hung out for a little while, unwinding, before I called a cab to take me to a hotel in town.