I am now 2 more books into my search (Kenneth Miller's Finding Darwin's God and Christopher Hitchins' God Is Not Great; I also read Swinburne's Is There a God? in there but didn't find anything new/enlightening) and have reached the tenuous conclusion that there is a god of some sort - in the sense that there is some supernatural being who is eternal and upon whose existence the laws of the universe are based.

Of course, since this is not much more than calling the constants "god", I'm not sure how much progress this is but it feels like a start.

coolest xmas gift

Last summer a friend of mine from work, Lisa Gellens, was showing my friend Jenn & myself some of the jewelry that she had been designing - really cool stuff. She and her sister, Stephanie, have set up a business which you can find online here. I immediately asked her if she would design something for me but had no idea what to even ask for. Jenn jumped in and said "Oh, let me work with her - I think I know what you'd like and then I can give it to you for Christmas." The result is this gorgeous necklace & earring set that are just so beautiful, I almost feel too nervous to wear them.

The stone is called larimar and is absolutely exquisite -- beyond words. It comes from the Dominican Republic. The color, the detail in the stone, and the unique setting make this my all-time favorite Christmas gift.

Here are the points which make up Dawkins' central argument (taken verbatim from God Delusion, my comments in orange):

1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect... has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.- Agreed


2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. - Agreed


3. The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer....It is no solution to postulate something even more improbably. We need a "crane", not a "skyhook", for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually & plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity. - This is where I disagree. To me, it makes more sense that an eternal God is a less improbable and easier explanation than something from nothing.


4. The most ingenious & powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by natural selection... - Agreed


5. We don't yet have an equivalent crane for physics. Some kind of multiverse theory could in principle do for physics the same explanatory work as Darwinism does for biology. This kind of explanation is superficially less satisfying than the biological version of Darwinism, because it makes heavier demands on luck. But the anthropic principle entitles us to postulate far more luck than our limited human intuition is comfortable with. - Agreed


6. We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. But even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer. - Agreed, somewhat.

(Dawkins, The God Delusion, 2006, pp 157-158)

If there is no God, what existed before? How did life come into being ex nihilo? Despite the difficulty in wrapping my mind around an eternal being who always existed, it is even more difficult to imagine nothingness and then suddenly something. Perhaps I've just had more practice believing the former and I will admit that I have an interest in coming to the conclusion that God exists.

Although maybe that too is a lie. In some ways life would be much easier if there were no God. It would then simply be a matter of making life as rich and meaningful as possible based solely on my own interests. And if there truly is no God, then it doesn't really matter if I do or do not continue to go to church, etc since the net result is ultimately the same and I have the advantage of a community & friendship either way. But that all just seems so....wrong.

I've been researching it online, since Dawkins did not really address the question in God Delusion and have not found anything that satisfactorily answers it for me. All admit that it is a good question...and then most seem to gloss right over it and assume that it happened ("we know that it happened because we exist" which seems like a complete tautology to me.)

Here are some of the better examples I could find:

Big Bang Theory
University of Wisconsin Physics Dept

What existed before the Big Bang?
by Alison Snyder, posted August 21st, 2006.

I have acquired a new book Kenneth R Miller's Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution but it almost seems too soon for that. I have no issue with believing evolution; in fact, I suspect that this will go right along with my own theories with regard to how the world began. But I fear moving on to a theory that assumes God's existence without having first definitely proved that it is solid. It seems so precarious to all come down to one tenant - God exists because otherwise something would have come from nothing and that would be impossible.

richard dawkins' the god delusion

The time has come to write about a book that has certainly changed my life in the short-term and perhaps forever. It certainly feels that way at the moment and to say that determining how to react has been an obsession for me this last month would not be an overstatement.

For the first couple of chapters, I was quite unimpressed and found myself thinking that this book would be easily dismissed as the diatribes of a fanatic. Perhaps this lured me into a sense of false security but, for whatever reason, beginning with the third or fourth chapter, I found myself blind-sided with well-reasoned, compelling arguments that have forced me to re-examine my entire belief structure.I will admit that there have always been underlying doubts. What height of arrogance to imagine that a supreme being of this vast universe (over 100 billion billion visible solar systems as a friend of mine has pointed out) would take an interest in a single, solitary planet and more than that, a single solitary human being such as myself. Even assuming that God exists, how can we really know that we have the correct version of worship. Who is to say whether it is Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism that is correct? I admit, my first instinct is to think "But isn't is more practical to continue to ascribe to Christianity since if it is true, it is the only way to avoid eternal damnation and if it is false, it won't matter anyway." Somehow I doubt that a "safety net" belief system would count for much in the final analysis. Besides, without that belief at the core, I cannot go back to that innocent faith anyway. I must figure out what I believe because until I do, everything feels like a lie.