[athanatos]

I am headin' to Calvin Seminary tomorrow, bright and early to check it out. Hopefully, I'll have camera and notebook in hand as I travel. Grand Rapids should be a pretty nice change too. Full day!

- Immaculate Nocturnal Tribunal Purifies

[athanatos]

Greetings from Calvin Seminary!

Okay, so I'ma have to post more on this later, but my first impression is that this is an amazing campus with amazing faculty, and I am really encouraged to go here. If I don't find a place that tops this, this is where I am going.

- International Natal Trifecta Proposes

[Chrysostom]

Great! I haven't been and know little about the campus. Glad to hear you're having a good time!

[athanatos]

So, I was in my kitchen reheating some homemade soup and toasting some toast. Then on the corner of my eye something moves: but nothing is there when I look. First thought is that it could be a mouse. As my bowl revolves, absorbing radiation, I stare a little longer where I thought something moved. Sure enough, a little nose with whiskers pops out, two adorable black beady eyes see me and zip back under the oven. I was right! Unfortunately, I've got to kill this cute, big-eared shrew. So I make my way upstairs and tell my parents, trying not to spook them or set them on edge, asking where the traps are and such.

Mind you, I still want my soup.

So they tell me where to find them, yet I can't find the traps in the garage. I am kinda losing my attention on the search, thinking that since I can't find them, I might as well go to the store and get a trap or two. So I come down stairs, finish my cheesy broccoli and potato soup, complemented with a side of french bread toasted and buttered to perfection. It was amazing, by the way. I have some more to share if you want some.

I go to my room and get some stuff on so I can get out of here to get some traps. I get on the compy, as per my bad habits, and as I am surfing -- much to my surprise -- the shrew hops on my shoe! Eh-eh-ehwwwww! I shake it off and it flies, crashing against the metal computer tower and running away. My door is closed.

Me and the shrew. Alone.

I decide I am going to clean my room a little bit. Don't want it hiding in my sweatshirt lying on the floor. Don't want it snuggled under my socks. Don't want it wedged between my stack of papers ...and the other stack of papers. Clean! ... Now time to tear my room apart! ... the couch moves across the room hastily, and so does the shrew. Darting back and forth, where does it go? I get poster board and block off sections of the room. It scurries along the wall. What will I do with it? I see my viking helmet: perfect! I jump across the room and quake the couch, seeing it move frantically as I pounce with the helmet cupping the ground a mere instant after the shrew was present. I block it in a corner: 3-4 feet by 3-4 feet. Enough poster board and all. It's got an end table in there, so it isn't an easy place to trap it with a helmet. Plus, there lay wires for the LAN. A nice arena when you think about it.

The critter gets out, under a poster with the crack of a mere cable's width. Impressive how it can fit through there! Things get quiet in here. It walks around, hop hop, stop. Hop hop, stop. Unmoving, I watch the precious creature God has made, and try to convince myself "You can't keep it, Jon. It must die tonight." It slowly makes its way to my feet and I close in, shoving the viking helmet to the ground once more: another failed attempt. Yet the event scared it back into the corner, the same route taken under the poster board prior. I patch up the holes and firmly press the walls in.

Going upstairs in haste, I call for my cat. I can't find her right off, so I turn on more lights in adjacent rooms to my parent's bedroom, and then I see her: the wonderful orange and white Molly, with a pink nose pointing straight at me, "Meew!"... I call her to me, trying to remain softer than the snores saturating the bedroom. She comes obediently, and I pick her up, trying to keep her calm as I quickly move down the stairs and into the basement. I open the door to my room, and it what a mess it is! I will need to fix this soon. I drop my cat into the corner where the shrew was last seen. Where is it?

I take some pieces of paper and other articles of mess and toss them behind the end-table. It darts out. My cat oblivious to the movement. She tries to jump out, due to boredom of the moment and the anxiety of being trapped in a corner. I grasp her and toss her back where I think the shrew is. The rodent crouches down, hoping not to be seen. Success for the shrew a second time! I push my cat and point. Nothing. What on earth! How can you not see it? ... so the shrew makes its way back into the shadows. At this point, both the cat and I are frustrated, so I toss my cat back behind the end-table for another go. Thud. Chingaling-ling. The rodent goes into a wild frenzy, as Molly follows right behind, claws widely drawn and flailing about.

She circles the end table as the prey tries to conceal itself. Next moment, you can see the shrew -- drenched in drool -- flying as she has made it a trajectory. It plays dead. She keeps batting it. She stops a while, it gets up... then pounce and ...CRUNCH. The head is limp. She totes it around in her mouth with pride. I go to her and congratulate her for her victory. She gnaws and gnaws, allowing you only to see the tail coming out of her mouth. Another moment, all that remains is a blood stained floor in the corner of a disheveled room. My cat leaves satisfied.

I love my cat. She's adorably fierce. And now I can rest peacefully tonight, without needing to spend a dime!

- Interposed Nordically Through Propitiation

[athanatos]

I have been thinking about my life change over the course of my college career, and seeing how my focus and my maturity has changed -- and also how much further I need to go. But one thing I was reminded about was the goal I had to prove God's existence. After taking a logic class, I thought it fitting to prove God's existence; after finding nothing conclusive, taking more classes that dealt with Christian arguments, etc., I thought to myself "I will create a new argument, one that doesn't fit any of these logical forms; it will be so convincing and conclusive! perhaps I will become famous as Anselm or Paley or Plantinga!"

And how I really have absolutely no desire to do that anymore. I don't feel the need to prove God's existence via argumentation. That feels actually morbidly immoral in some ways. What's more is I don't have any compulsion to prove it to myself either. It is like trying to prove my mom is in fact my biological mother; sure, I don't have 100% conclusive evidence, but demanding a maternity test would not only be awkward and unnecessary, it would be damaging to our relationship at best. At some point, you must trust the person.

That, and I don't think an argument could even prove God's existence conclusively (relevant dissimilarity to the maternity test). So the project fails before it starts. What's more, I am convinced that if I could produce an argument for God's existence, where the premises are true and the logical form is neither invalid nor fallacious, it would still be rejected on the basis that our hearts will not submit to God due to depravity, such that our minds and actions will follow suit. There will be no assent to the conclusion unless the Holy Spirit moves first.

So why not just go with the Holy Spirit and be real to people? Isn't that more effective? It's certainly less rigid, formulaic, proud and controversial.

- In Nostradamus' Tumbling Prairie

[Chrysostom]

I couldn't agree more. It's fascinating if you look into those three people you mentioned -- Anselm, Paley, Plantinga. Anselm's "proof" is in fact a prayer, and his argument is not designed to convince atheists to be theists but rather to contemplate the mystery of God's being. Similarly, if you actually look at the body of Plantinga's work, when he fixed the ontological argument he did not do so in order to convince atheists, and in fact he says this explicitly several times. (Even Aquinas, according to recent interpretation, was not "proving" God's existence in the sense of modern natural theology.)

Paley is the only one of these who was actually trying to prove God's existence in the sense that most people think of today, and it's interesting that of all the people we've mentioned he was the only one who was not a major theologian or philosopher. In fact, he was simply trying to fulfill a task that Descartes presented, Kant explained, and the rise of positivism amplified. Christians who weren't/aren't trying to fulfill the modern quest have not thought that the issue of proving God's existence was a particularly significant one.

To use your terms, this task of proving God's existence trades trust in the Spirit and the ministry of the Church for an abstract epistemological method -- and this should tell us that something has gone terribly wrong indeed.