Mister Moleman and his Friends

My philosophical friend Mr. Ben Finiti has reached the stage of life where he takes up the task of making sense of himself and the world, and asking whether it can be done without including God in the ruminations.

 He tells me that he has reached three very tentative conclusions.

 First, he has concluded that morality is not derivable or sustainable without religion, and religion (however useful) is false without God.  I may ask him to explain that to me at some point.

 Second, while random events (such as undirected evolution) may explain much or all of the physical world, they do not explain the human mind, which is more than a super-computer built of nerve ganglia.  Our very contemplation of God suggests that the mind is not fully explained by materialist science; the mind indicates that God exists. It is true that we can imagine things that don’t exist, such as unicorns; but horns and horses do exist.

 Third, God may be like the horizon – the framework against which everything else is placed and comprehended.  The horizon exists, though not as other things exist; it is the reference point-line, the directional, the seen and unseen background before which all else is locatable. Of course in practical terms it is the curved falling away of the earth’s surface, and as such it is tangible and measurable (I have heard that it is about five miles away from a six-foot-tall man at seaside or in Kansas.)  But it also has a strong and intangible reality.

Ben may be on to something here. But, I wonder, what if the earth were flat, unbounded, infinite?  Would there not still be a horizon?  Would it look the same as it presently does? 

 Maybe the relation of such an infinite horizon is to our actual horizon tells us something of our comprehension of God in relation to God’s reality.

 Oh well, that is all “beyond my pay grade”.  I must ask Mr. F to tell me more.

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