How I am surviving a heart attack and quadruple bypass, and maybe even surviving life...

Monday, April 7, 2008

Thoughts on D'Souza's "What's So Great About Christianity"

I'm about 120 pages into Dinesh D'Souza's What's So Great About Christianity. At this point he is discussing the old theism deductive argument that there must have been that which from which, or by which, everything else was created. An Original Cause. Which had no causation of its own, which "holds" the universe in its arms, so to speak.

But...

There is a HUGE, unsupportable leap, that this Original Cause, this self-causation, was the Abrahamic God. The only way to make this justification is by referring to the Christian holy texts, the biblical scriptures.

D'Souza also argues Anselm's argument (whom and which I have never heard of before) that defines God as "that than which no greater can be thought". If we can think such a thought - which we can - then unlike many other thoughts we think of that do not necessarily exist (like unicorns), then, uniquely, "that than which no greater can be thought" MUST exist, purely by its self-referencial definintion.

But...

That STILL does not prove that "that than which no greater can be thought" is the Abrahamic God.


There is a distinction that we MUST call upon scriptural Christians to make (unlike, say, very spiritual Christians such as my friend Marty Croese, or songwriter Leonard Cohen), between a god as a Force that can be deduced or induced by reason and even science, and the Abrahamic God.


Also, Fundamentalists, scripturalists both literal and interpretive, lack true spirituality. But that is for another day.

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