Shuck and Jive


Tuesday, April 08, 2008

God Does Exist by God

They are still wrestling with the big questions in our local newspapers. Another letter sparked by our Evolution Sunday appeared today.

If folks would only open their hearts, eyes, and taste buds, they would know the truth that the God who designed it all is none other than FSM.



Won't you allow His Noodley Appendage to touch you today?








God does exist
As a Christian who has been privileged to live 86 years in God’s earthly kingdom (the last 30 in beautiful East Tennessee) I am responding to the letter from Bruce M. Herbertson III denying that God exists.


St. Augustine, St. Francis of Assisi, Rene Decartes, Emanuel Kant, men of far greater perspicaciousness than Mr. Herbertson exhibits, have pondered this question over the ages.
(I usually don’t use words of this caliber, but since Herbertson has chosen the weapons, I defer to his presumption of intellectual prowess.)

They have advanced ontological, cosmological and teleological arguments.
The least complex of these, the teleological argument contains two premises: A general principal that ordering means to ends presupposes the existence of a designer whose intelligence and power are sufficient to account for what he has wrought.

And since nature exhibits a multitude of instances of means ordered to ends, the ordering of means to ends in nature presupposes a designer of intelligence and power sufficient to account for what he has wrought.
Therefore a designer exists. It doesn’t prove that he is the Elam, Yahweh or Jehovah of the Jews, the Allah of Muslims or the Christian Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but the designer, the creator or “God” exists.

Knowing that from the beginning, man has invented myths to account for mysteries not explained by observation, I can accept that the Genesis story that God created Adam out of the dust of the garden may be an apocryphal explanation of his evolving from lower organisms.

It matters not whether it was accomplished in a single modeling or in an evolutionary process. Belief in intelligent design does not disprove evolution nor does evolution prove that God does not exist.


MURVIN H. PERRY
Johnson City

2 comments:

  1. The gist seems to be that Murray Perry, Ph.D., can overcome the perspicaciousness of Mr. Herbertson by using looooooong words and name dropping (including misspelling René Descartes and Immanuel Kant). Some might argue this of all of them, but it's reasonably clear that St. Augustine and St. Francis of Assisi did have a particular axe to grind in the debate over the existence of God (He was their employer, after all).

    It seems, John, your hometown paper is reveling in one of the proudest traditions in American journalism:

    "God exists"
    "Does not"
    "Does too"
    "Does not"
    "Doth too"
    "Does not"
    "Does too to googolplex infinity!"

    ReplyDelete