The End of Time

The word sadness fails to capture the feeling I had after reading "The End of Time" by David Horowitz. Although written beautifully and powerfully, the emptiness of life without God permeates the pages. Horowitz represents the secular conservative movement; those who believe in the wisdom of the Judeo-Christian tradition but reject divinity. Although Horowitz is primarily writes on social and political issues, you will find very little politics in this work as he reflects on his mortality.

No human being truly wants non-existence. Even a suicide only seeks escape, not necessarily oblivion. Even the terrorist martyr believes in the promise of paradise on the other side of his physical disintegration. If the Stoic resigns himself to suffering or death, it is not because he desires these things, but rather, he courageously endures reality.

In the last chapter of the book, Horowitz quotes from the poem "Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens. Here is the complete stanza:

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.


So Stevens (and Horowitz) elevate death to a place of honor. A tree that never drops its fruit loses its charm. A river that never empties into the sea flows endlessly without a destination. The demarcation of our lives with birth and death define our significance because our being stands against the background of non-being. Endless summer brings endless ennui; seasons heighten our sense of living.

A life without hope must find some justification in hopelessness.

The melancholy which permeates this book carries the one seed of hope in an otherwise bleak moonscape. Something deep within our soul hungers for immortality. We do not want to cease to be, so the approaching end of our time brings sadness. Yes, we can be noble, we can find dignity, or honor, or we can even pretend that life's worthiness issues from transience, but in our honest, deepest and most fearful heart, death is very, very ugly. Wallace Stevens portrays a changeless paradise; he implies that the death of death destroys life and replaces it with a still life, pretty but nevertheless lifeless.

But could this be the sour grapes of a soul tormented by the inevitability of death? Like a child who eagerly waits to see his Xbox 500000 under the Christmas tree and is disappointed when it is only a Nintendo DS, he stoically puffs up his indifference and says, "I wouldn't have really enjoyed it anyway." Agnosticism is the faith that everything will turn out different and usually worse than we could ever hope, and that it is better not to know than to be wrong.

This is unfair to Horowitz, and it is only in the dying pages of his book that he counters his wife's faith in God with a frail faith in the here and now. Much of the book is devoted to his experience with prostate cancer, and this reveals the optimism which seems to come naturally from Horowitz. Like Socrates, he vows to continue his dialogue without a tear while the hemlock slowly freezes his heart. After all, hasn't this life been good? Haven't blessings of unknown origin, fallen upon his charmed existence? Since his guardian angel will not reveal herself, she gets no credit, but neither will she receive curses. The angel might as well not exist, because she doesn't, does she?

Agnosticism is like prostate cancer. You may overcome it. You may live with it. You may succomb to it, but you never really know when it might return. It may be dormant or it may suddenly become malignant, but it carves a cavern in your soul, a place you long again to explore, but from which there is no exit except by the way you came in, if you can still find it.

I know I missed the real message of this book because I was numbed by the pain of separation from God. It was a reminder of my own spiritual spelunking adventures, how they began with the promise of clinical knowledge but ended with the fear of being lost forever in the cavern. But like Gollum delving for secrets in the roots of the Misty Mountains, he finds nothing but blind fish and weariness. Maybe Horowitz will turn around and find his way back to the place he entered. After all, the radical son has reinvented himself once before.

The End of Time

Radical Son

The future has already been

I have always been disatisfied with the portrayal of time travel in fiction. In most cases, the author adopts the deterministic view of time. Any intervention in the past has already become a part of history. There are any number of problems with this crude view of time travel.

First, the use of the word "travel" is problematic, since travel normally means traversing some distance (xyz) in some finite time (t) interval. We could probably call it spacetime transfer. With this in mind, if a device could tranfer a finite bubble of spacetime/matter fabric from spacetime point A to spacetime point B, then this would be roughly the equivalent of time travel.

For example, in the novel and movies "The Time Machine", the machine itself does transfer from one time to another, but it magically moves with the Earth as the Earth move through the universe. This may be OK if we divide the transfer into increments and assume that with each infinitesimal transfer in time, the machine somehow retains its relative relationship to the Earth's surface as the Earth tries to move out from under it. Still, there is a sense that this concept of spacetime transfer is not consistent with maintaining a constant relative space position. A spacetime transfer would more likely involve all 4 coordinates -- flying saucers would probably be better in this regard than "stationary" devices.

Let's set aside the crude physics for a "moment". Even more problematic than defining or describing spacetime transfer are the philosophical problems associated with time travel. Assume that time travel is possible in the H.G. Wells manner, i.e., the traveler could move through time while maintaining a constant position relative to the rotating surface of the Earth. Let us also assume that time travel in this (or any) sense is possible. Lastly, let us assume that mankind will indeed survive, thrive, expand into space, and continue to advance both technologically and socially to the point that time travel is possible. What does this imply?

The first assumption we must make is that whatever interventions our future progeny have made, have already been made. In other words, the past has already been altered. In fact, history itself is the net result of the unfolding of events and interventions. History in this sense cannot be changed because the interventions are already a part of history.

If this assumption is incorrect, then it implies an infinity of universes, slightly or greatly different from one another, a branching at the points of intervention, and the "ability" to "create" new alternate universes by going back in time and intervening. A simplistic way of looking at this is that it would be physically impossible to intervene because the energy required to create a new universe would be infinite.

All these silly notions spring from what may be a flawed model of the structure of spacetime. To treat time as simply another coordinate axis is not really a valid paradigm. Since the direction of time is axiomatic for concepts such as cause and effect, sequentiality, beginnings and endings, and entropy, time travel is almost impossible to conceptualize. Which is why we have such a problem with the concept of a God who transcends time.

A transcendent God, omniscient and omnipotent, must be "outside of" spacetime. The Alpha and the Omega must transcend the entire framework. Creation was not an event which occurred in time. Even the sentence I just wrote does not actually make sense in a transcendent frame. Words using tense or spatial reference do not apply to a transcendent frame; we only use them because we do not have words or concepts which can transcend the spacetime fabric we call the universe. From within the universe we can talk about a beginning in the sense that time is unidirectional. As we look back to the beginning, spacetime will take on characteristics which can only be described mathematically because the Alpha point cannot really be described at all. If God "looks" at His creation "from the outside" of it, then His observation cannot really be called observation, it is apprehension, spaceless, timeless, without bounds as we understand them. No eyes, no light, no transmission of electromagnetic energy, no sequential stimulus and response, none of these concepts make any sense when we step outside the spacetime universe (whatever that means.)

Here is a paradox which will truly enrage the radical materialist. Suppose that time travel and intervention were possible. Then couldn't an atheist go back and kill Jesus as a child, or perform an abortion to prevent His birth? Wouldn't it have already happened? In a practically infinite universe of possibilities with a practically infinite future, and with the possibility of mankind filling our galaxy, if not universe, with cultures and civilizations, and nearly limitless human beings, if time travel and intervention is possible, what would stop a mad future terrorist from going all the way back to the origins of life and destroying it? If it can be imagined, then it can probably be done, right?

Perhaps evolutionists will embrace the concept of punctuated intervention by the future in order to solve their inability to explain speciation through natural selection. This would provide both intelligent design advocates and radical materialists with a mechanism they would both agree upon. There is no God, only future humans who have beneficially altered the past. Of course, there is one small problem. Were these interventions deterministically bound, or did a whole series of impossible universes get created only to sputter out, to be devoured by the Langoliers?

Well, the sophisticated agnostic knows better than to adopt any point of view here; but since I am neither sophisticated nor agnostic, I will go out on a limb. Time travel is NOT possible because of all of the above and more. Spacetime distortion, gravitational mechanics, tachyons, wormholes and all such physical possibilities remain on the table, but historical intervention by the future is not possible. It is nonsensical. Take that, Captain Kirk!

Ishmael

A friend recommended that I read the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. The book is written as a novel, but is really a socratic dialogue between a cynical and concerned young man and a gorilla with human intelligence and telepathic power. The story begins when Ishmael puts an ad in the paper as a teacher looking for a pupil. One gets the impression that this is a guru seaching for a disciple, which sets the tone for the novel. I use the term "socratic" because the gorilla painfully (for the reader) walks his student through a long series of questions about the philosophical underpinnings of modern civilization.

In brief, the world is composed of Givers and Takers. We take more than we need from those with whom we share this planet, that is, other species of life. We are descendants of Cain, and the beginning of our exploitation of the environment can be traced to the origins of agriculture. The few remnants of hunter-gatherers that remain are the Givers, those who live in harmony with their environment, who take only what they need and accept each day as a gift from "the gods". For millions of years we too lived in harmony with our world, but about 8000 years ago we rebelled against "the gods" by eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. We made a decision that we would no longer depend on the whims of the gods and the capricious forces of nature, but that we would begin to harness and establish dominion over our world, to guarantee our food supply and to control our destiny. We declared war on creation.

Ishmael sees the first few chapters of Genesis as a powerful myth which, when properly understood, reveals not only our ancient history but also our motivations as a species: our fear of death, our desire to be gods, our basic selfishness, and our special ability to lie to ourselves, even to the point of extinction. He advocates a return to Eden and even paraphrases Jesus admonition not to worry about tomorrow in Matthew 6:31-32 Therefore do not worry, saying, "What will we eat?' or "What will we drink?' or "What will we wear?' For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. So we can conclude that it is our faithlessness which compels us to build our modern civilization, and in the process we will continue to consume our world until there is nothing left.

Perhaps Ishmael should have continued with the passage, which goes on to say, "But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well." Not "the gods", but God. Ishmael chastises St. Francis for hypocrisy because he lived off of the produce from those who gather food into barns (Takers), but then selectively ignores the primary Gospel message which is that we cannot return to Eden, because we are a fallen humanity. Adam and Eve were created to be immortal, so that they were justly warned that they would surely die if they ate the fruit from the forbidden tree. Givers and Takers both live their short lives and return to dust, and whether their actions are beneficial or detrimental to the species with whom they coexist, the end result is the same for all species, death and disintegration. Ishmael takes great liberties with the myth by assigning the Fall of Man to the discovery of agriculture and the beginning of civilization as we know it. A more Biblical interpretation would say that agriculture was a necessity for a fallen humanity, not that Adam and Eve chose agriculture in defiance of God's perfect order.

Ishmael has already tipped his hand in reinterpreting the "Taker Story" as a big lie when he refers to the gods, rather than talking about God. We already know that Ishmael's moral system does not come from divine revelation. So what is the source of Ishmael's moral authority?

Before we can accept Ishmael's conclusions about how we should behave, we must first understand the premises behind his moral system. In an earlier post, I concluded that materialistic naturalism a la Dawkins cannot support a moral system on its own authority since the moral system is merely an artifact of some underlying mindless genetic imperative. Ishmael's underlying moral premise for choosing Giver over Taker is that the entire ecosystem of the world has intrinsic worth, and that the life of the entire system and the greater common survival and harmony of all the species within the system is intrinsically good. This harmonious balance stands in beautiful contrast to the ugliness of modern civilization.

If we assume that the Giver system is the most beneficial, it is only fair that we look at the reality of the Giver world rather than the idealization as found in Ishmael's dialogue. The reality of the natural world is that the harmony with which species coexist includes a continuous state of misery as well, assuming that sickness, carnage and death are deemed miserable. Our world is less tormented by man-made disaster than by environmental forces which are beyond our control. The world lost untold priceless strands of DNA when it was plunged into the first Ice Age. This massive de-speciation was part of the "natural" order. The new balance which emerged was neither better nor worse than the previous balance, unless we arbitrarily decide that biodiversity has intrinsic moral goodness.

Yet Ishmael and his disciple both derive their moral judgment from the same principle, a principle left unstated throughout the novel.

Natural is good, artificial is bad.

This is the foundation of the entire naturalistic world view, the ultimate principle, the unquestioned assumption. We have heard this for years, even in crass television commercials. We have seen it on billboards. We no longer question the validity of the statement -- it is the story beneath the story.

The perfect companion novel to Ishmael would be Lord of the Flies by William Golding. It might provide a different perspective on the nature of evil and a glimpse into the lives of the Givers. But alas, Ishmael cleverly covers his bases by concluding that we cannot simply go back, we must go forward. Sorry Ishmael, you cannot have it both ways, in fact, this is the whole problem with naturalism as a moral philosophy. Many people dream of returning to nature, but when the machine of civilization is disrupted, nature once again can be seen for what it is: a heartless war of all against all. The harmony we think we see is a view from the eye of civilization; take away the civilization and the harmony turns to danger and survival. Yes, it is true that we cannot go back, but to destroy our civilization in the process of seeking utopia will take us all the way back to nature.

The evil in the heart of man does not come from modern society; it is intrinsic and part of our being. Modern civilization increases the magnitude of our decisions, whether good or evil, but it is not in itself evil. Our inability to live in harmony with nature as good stewards is not an outcome of capitalism, agriculture, or any other aspect of civilization, but as with all human activity, it carries with it the potential to do great good and great evil. The moral authority and the moral imperative to care for our planet come from God, not from the gods or from genetics. Without God, neither gorilla nor mankind can survive.

Staking a claim is victory

In a world muddled with moral equivalency, even the most nonsensical position wins territory in the intellectual battleground simply by assertion. Maybe this is the nature of our legal system, and the philosophy behind legal discourse has permeated all aspects of civilization.

The main stream media implicitly adopts this point/counterpoint method and calls it objectivity. The force of the argument, or even the credibility of the arguer do not mitigate the supposedly balanced presentation of both points of view. Is it any wonder that opinion polls tend to be so narrowly balanced in three portions: those for, those against and those who say "duh"? Take any issue, the war in Iraq, evolution, capitalism, abortion, globalism, nuclear weapons, global warming, things which cause cancer, it really doesn't matter. A Google search of any of these topics results in a fairly equal mix of those who support an issue and those who oppose an issue. Is it any wonder that so many people exhibit indifference to the major issues affecting our world today?

Smugness and indifference have become a sign of sophistication. The great philosophies of history have all risen and fallen to be replaced with a single word: whatever.

Prophets of doom in the twentieth century warned us of the information overload which was already underway even prior to the introduction of the personal computer or the internet. But maybe the problem is not that there is too much information; rather, it is our inability to process the information correctly.

When we cannot distinguish between murder and war, freedom fighters and terrorists, or democracy and dictatorship, then do we suffer from information overload or from a deficit of reason? Moral cloudiness is a result of the way in which information is presented, point counterpoint, pro and con, our side and their side, our perspective and their perspective. All points of view are equal. All points of view are valid from the perspective of the viewer. The virus has an equal standing with the patient in a world without moral distinction.

Unfortunately, this legalistic approach to reality has consequences. In a morally blind world, I can file a lawsuit against anyone for anything, and I have already won some ground simply by making the case. In all too many instances, the plaintiff wins simply by complaining. It all depends on the risk calculation: how much do I stand to lose and what are my chances.

Our radical open mindedness has castrated our moral sensibility and judgment. So the barbarians stake their claims and win the war by simply engaging in battle. Meanwhile, most of us intellectually retreat from the issues because there are "two sides to every issue". Or not. Whatever.

Why ask why?

The empirically testable idea that the here and now is all there is and that life begins at birth and ends at death is so dangerous that it has cost the lives of millions and threatens the future of civilization. The danger comes not from the idea itself, but from its opponents, those religious leaders and followers who ruthlessly advocate and defend their empirically improbable afterlife and man-in-the-sky cosmological perspectives.

Robert R. Provine
Full essay can be found here.

At the risk of beating an inanimate mass of purposeless protoplasm once used for human transport, here we go again...

Let us assume for a moment that Professor Provine is correct. It begs the question: What danger? Why do we care about "future civilization"? If "the here and now is all there is", then what is future? For that matter, what is civilization? If I exist in an atomistic nightmare a la early Wittgenstein, where each moment bears no causality with the previous moment, only an empirically verifiable association, then why should I care about a future which does not objectively exist? In fact, I have not delved deeply enough into this deconstruction of reality. An even more pertinent question is: what does it mean to "care"?

The most ironic aspect of radical empiricism is that it bleeds the value out of all values. All that remains are the words, like placeholders. The empiricist lives his life, uses the words, feels the emotions, but he must do so in brackets. He must live inconsistently with his intellectual belief, and he must not be aware that he is doing so.

Francis Schaeffer discusses this at length in his work "Escape from Reason" when he describes the upper and lower storeys of our existence. Those who live in the lower storey (empiricists for example) must constantly borrow meaning from the upper storey while simultaneously rejecting the validity of the upper storey altogether.

Here is a thought experiment. Let us assume that a belief in God is simply wishful, perhaps even dangerous thinking. Let us agree with the Professor that it is the religious nuts who threaten to usher in a third millenium Dark Age. Suppose that I am a brilliant scientist (just pretend) and that I have made two radical and secret discoveries. First, I have discovered a way to be immortal. Second, in order to be immortal, I must destroy all other human beings. Would I be wrong to implement my secret discoveries? Who then would be the arbiter of my decision after I carry it out?

Fortunately for humanity, my cerebral deficiency not only prevents me from discovering such a doomsday device, but it also lulls me into peaceful mediocrity with an imaginary belief in God and a false hope of eternal life beyond the grave.

Misplaced outrage of the Left

In the inverted world of the New York Times, there is no outrage over real atrocity, and no celebration over the defeat of evil. Instead, the leftist intelligentsia have focused on second and third order "outrages", manufactured by their own delicate sensibilities and an utter disconnect with the real danger we face as a civilization. Like dinner guests who fume over the wrong choice of wine, they seem oblivious to the barbarians waiting outside the castle walls, ready to saw off their heads.

The latest example can be found in a piece by David S. Cloud and Jeff Gerth titled "Iraqi clerics found on Pentagon payroll". Gasp!! Is it possible that the United States might buy some good press and good will with evil dollars? Say it isn't so!

No, we must depend instead on the pristine objectivity of the NYT/WAPO news machine to not only tell the truth to the American public, but to tell the truth to the Iraqis as well. We must put our trust, indeed our faith, in the high standards of journalists who not only despise Bush, but also despise our military, our capitalist system, and our way of life. Only they can be objective because they see through the webs of deceit cast by the Bush cabal. So then, this tempest du jour fits a pattern of disinformation. Who else might Halliburton be paying to mislead not only Iraqis, but the world? Let's see if I can manage to plot the points on a line: the evil American military dictatorship in Iraq is buying favorable press from local journalists, paying off amateur bloggers to feed the conservative base back home, and now they are buying good will from clerics. Next thing you know they will be broadcasting Radio Free Islam on XM radio. How insidious!! How dare our government engage in the business of the exhalted Fourth Estate!

Why does the Left protest against the very tactics they have mastered so well? It is the ideological color of the tactic which determines its ethical status. Advertising and editorializing are perfectly acceptable as long as one is of the correct political persuasion. It would be intellectually honest (even if it is wrongheaded) to say that war is wrong, killing is evil and the United States is trying to achieve world dominion at the expense of exploiting the poor masses. Unfortunately for the Left, this message does not sell on its own. So they must also insist that the Pentagon is out of bounds for waging this war using information as well as military muscle. Only the leftist media has the exclusive moral authority to wage an information war -- against the United States.

So the strength of the fabric derives from being woven one thread at a time. The New York Times already has their agenda and sequence, but as with any new product introduction, timing is everything. Stories must be fed slowly to the public, so that they maintain the appearance of enterprising investigative journalists, digging their way through the parking lots and bars of the powerful, somehow narrowly escaping the roving Eye of Lord Bush, then bravely splashing their latest findings on Page One. Take that, Evil One!

In the meantime, history unfolds and the stakes get higher. If or when the United States preemptively takes out the nuclear facilities in Iran, the stories have already been written. This is a war, but it isn't just a war between the United States and Islamofascists. It is also a war between Western Civilization and the nihilistic spawn who want to bring it down, namely, the Western leftist intelligentsia.

Intelligent design of reality

The creation versus evolution debate is a misnomer because it is not a debate. No debate on this subject can be possible without name-calling and foregone conclusions on all sides. Laughter and ridule have replaced discussion. Analysis has been trumped by an irrational fear of a return to medieval darkness or an equally dark Huxleyan biofuture. The Darwinist holds that naturalistic mechanisms have painted the role of deity into an ever shrinking corner, so that the supernatural consists only of phenomena for which no naturalistic explanation has yet been discovered. The Creationist holds that Darwinism is Satan's latest and perhaps last attempt at wresting souls from the Kingdom of Heaven. How can there be any debate when each side trashes the motivations of the other side?

I am not on the side of naturalism. Neither do I believe that the world is roughly 10,000 years young. In Romans 1, Paul states that the evidence of God can be found plainly in the world He created, but likewise the overwhelming evidence of geology and cosmology points to billions, not thousand, of years of physical change for our planet and for the cosmos in general. My faith in Christ as well as my belief in the Fall of Man do not depend on a Young Earth interpretation of Genesis, but this faith defines the boundaries of my outlook.

So much has been written about the creation/evolution controversy, that there is little to add which would sway someone with conviction to change sides. The underlying assumptions interest me most, and it is these assumptions which transcend the debate.

Evolution and creation are mere branches of two profoundly different trees. The underlying philosophy which supports evolution is naturalistic materialism. It is a system of thought which assumes that the supernatural is nothing more than that which lies outside knowledge, and becomes natural as we apprehend and understand it. Spiritual phenomena do not conform to naturalistic interpretations, not because they are not subject to naturalistic and materialistic laws, but because we do not know enough about them. As the frontier of our knowledge advances, these phenomena will be understood and the laws which govern these phenomena will fall within a naturalistic frame.

The underlying philosophy which supports creation is theism, that is, a belief that there is a supernatural and transcendent intelligence which created the universe and sustains both the physical and rational laws which govern all matter AND thought. Spiritual phenomena are not bound by the physical laws, but represent the intervention of intelligences which impinge upon the material world.

Naturalism requires no objective moral order or purpose. It simply acknowledges that things are as they are. Theism requires not only an objective moral order and purpose for creation, but in the case of Christianity, that this moral order and purpose can be discerned through a personal relationship with the Creator.

It is therefore puzzling that the modern naturalist derives a moral framework for protecting our environment, preserving species, minimizing our human footprint on the world ecosystem. If there is no objective moral order, then what is the source of the moral imperative to care for the environment. A theist may find any number of reasons to be good stewards of God's creation, and will see the wanton destruction or abuse of natural resources as sinful. To what moral authority does the naturalist appeal? To a human construct or to an inherent moral law?

Whether human or inherent, the moral law which the naturalist defends has no defense. To use a specific and ultimate example, in a naturalistic frame, why is life the highest priority? The Darwinian scheme for evolving complexity and genetic success assumes that there are statistically very few winners and many losers in the natural history of our planet. If human beings do destroy themselves in a self inflicted cataclysm, then the grass and roaches survive and the natural order realigns to achieve a new equilibrium. Is this principle of equilibrium the apex of the implied moral order in a naturalistic frame?

What are the principles of naturalistic morality? Why is biodiversity better than biosimplicity? If a genetic program is completely erased, why is this bad? What does "bad" mean in a naturalistic view of existence? If 90 percent of humanity is destoyed by avian flu, and civilization crashes into tribalism, is this a bad thing for the world? Is it bad for the survivors? Isn't it natural?

The Nietzschean paradox is that without a transcendent moral order, there can be no meaningful hierarchy and no ability to discern what is better or worse, not for the world, not for society, not for the ants in my backyard, not for me personally. The Superman can only be called "Super" if there is some transcendent moral order. Without it, superiority has no meaning, or at best, a mountain is superior to a man with a stick of dynamite.

The naturalist wants it both ways:

1) There is no transcendent moral order
2) The moral order is implicit in naturalism

Having presented this dilemma to a number of naturalists, the only explanation I have received so far is sarcasm and invective, name-calling and bile. The lack of an intellectual and reasoned response does not prove my case, but it does weaken the naturalist's position.

Now, set aside the creation or natural evolution of the physical world. In the first chapter of John, the apostle says that "in the beginning was the Word." While we ponder the process of natural selection, or natural selection enhanced by some implied ribonucleic destiny vector, it might be worthwhile to ask how the structure of reality itself can be. How can the abstract domain of mathematics be congruent with the physical behavior of the world? How did our moral sense evolve from our biological experience? Why do we even consider such concepts as significance, purpose, destiny, hope, shame, or despair? Do these concepts exist apart from our mental process, or are they merely subroutines in a complicated bioreplication scheme?

I recently downloaded a portion of the human genome from Project Gutenberg. I noted at the top of the text file that the total genome consumes 348 Gbytes in ASCII text. This doesn't boggle the mind, it completely defies our understanding. I can grasp (almost) a Turing machine which unfolds into this kind of complexity; what I cannot grasp is how matter plus time plus chance can produce this kind of information content.

From Romans 1:19-21
For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.

Maybe the real debate is not about what we believe; maybe it has more to do with what we desire.