Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

Asks Theodore M. Drange in constructing his “argument from nonbelief.” (The Improbability of God, 341) My answer to that is that we are saved by Christ not by Christianity. It is OK if you do not know. But it is ironic that Drange, who presumably knows enough about Christianity to work with its doctrines, himself [...]

Thomas Metcalf commits an elementary blunder. He assumes that all evil is justified, “grants to the defender of theism that gratuitous evil does not exist,” (The Improbability of God, 329) and argues that “the position according to which there is no gratuitous evil will lead to a new argument from evil, a strong evidential argument [...]

After a rather inauspicious beginning — and middle, and end — William L. Rowe comes up with a real gem in the last paragraph: “There are,” he says, “four different things a theodicy might aim at doing, each more difficult than its predecessor. First, a theodicy might seek to explain why [God] would permit any [...]

Finally, someone, namely Quentin Smith, responds to my challenge to “design a better world,” thereby showing that if God did not actualize it, then this must not be the best possible world or even a good world, and if it’s not, then God does not exist. (The Improbability of God, 3, 1) Behind his complex [...]

Martin falls victim to the grossest possible anthropomorphism. Repeatedly, he makes an argument of the following form: (1) In terms of our experience, all created entities of the kinds we have so far examined are created by one or more beings with bodies. [Empirical evidence] (2) The universe is a created entity. [Supposition] (2a) If [...]

Victor Stenger, the toughest-minded NT stone-cold sonofabitch this side of Californie, angrily rips apart the mystical anthropic principle and its allegedly theism-friendly consequences. Apart from that scary spectacle, there is an interesting note that “André Linde proposed that a background spacetime ‘foam’ empty of matter and radiation will experience local quantum fluctuations in curvature, forming [...]

And I thought I first generalized intelligent design as a form of grace! But William Dembski got there before me: “In book two of the Physics Aristotle referred to design as completing ‘what nature cannot bring to a finish.’ (Note that Thomas Aquinas took this idea and sacramentalized it into grace completing nature.)” (The Design [...]

Suppose there are 100 balls in the urn. Each ball is either red or black, but you don’t know how many balls are of what color. You start taking the balls out of the urn one by one. Each time you get a red ball. What is the probability after you have taken out 99 [...]

The universe is too big, says Nickolas Everitt. And why has much time passed since the beginning of the universe until humans came onto the scene? It’s just so… “inapt,” unfitting given what theists take God to be, unlike even the Genesis account. (The Improbability of God, 2, 1) So far this is the funniest [...]

Our author invokes the Hartle-Hawking model of the Big Bang to prove that the universe appeared by itself out of nothing. (The Improbability of God, Ch. 7, “Why Stephen Hawking’s Cosmology Precludes a Creator”) Stephen Barr explains: “Some idea of what is involved can be had by the analogy of a mathematical cone. Such a [...]

Quentin Smith objects to the theistic implications of Big Bang cosmology as follows: If God intends to create a universe that contains living beings at some stage in it history, then there is no reason for him to begin the universe with an inherently unpredictable singularity. Indeed, it is positively irrational. It is a sign [...]

On p. 32 of The Improbability of God Theodore Schick Jr. writes that “An infinitely long causal chain is not a logical impossibility. Most of us have no trouble conceiving of the universe existing infinitely into the future. Similarly we should have no trouble conceiving of it existing infinitely long into the past.” Actually, I [...]

The Catholic (and Christian in general) Church will endure long after the United States and its numerous governments have crumbled into dust.

… an infinite point and at the same time an explosion of His simple self, reaching everywhere.

Says Huston Smith: “The chief attributes to be linked with the name are sat, chit, and ananda; God is [infinite] being, awareness, and bliss. Utter reality, utter consciousness, and utterly beyond all possibility of frustration — this is the basic Hindu view of God.” (The World’s Religions, 60)

To love God is to desire to describe the Father to whoever will listen but especially to God the Son. Though the Son knows the Father perfectly, the way no human, being only potentially infinite, can, nevertheless He will listen to us with joy as we talk of what we learned of perfection again and [...]

“… is facing two counts of attempted aggravated murder of a police officer, two counts of felonious assault, … and drug abuse of marijuana.” (The Akron Beacon Journal, April 15th, 2008, B1) Well, maybe we can forgive his shooting at cops but smoking marijuana?! String the monster overbearing up!

I said they did without elaboration and have recently been challenged to explain myself. There are a number of reasons why perfect memory is best postulated as being a condition of heavenly existence. First, for identity. In order to be what you are, you must know how you became this way, and since every human [...]

God’s infinity can be thought of as applying to either nature or power. As far as God’s nature is concerned, God is infinite form, which means that to describe Him would require an actually infinite amount of information. At this point it may be asked: “I don’t want to comprehend God fully, but tell me [...]

Christ agrees that He is “a hard man,” and “he harvests where he has not sown and gathers where he has not scattered seed.” (Mt 25:26) What does that mean? I think it is best interpreted as saying that God relies on secondary causes to accomplish His will. God lets things happen how they may, [...]