It is so tiring to sit here sometimes. For most of the days in the month, I am content; when they retired us, we went freely and with a sense of relief. Ragnarok had been averted, now was the age of men, and old warriors like me could hang up our hammers and play chess. (I play a mean game; nothing I like better than hacking off a man's two bishops and leaving him to suffer. And I have no qualms about sacrificing a queen for rook-and-three-pawns. But I digress.)
I was sipping coffee and reading the
Annals Assessing An Aggravated Age And Auditing Antagonistic Adults (yes, typical alliteration) in peace, when my hammer, so long mounted on the wall, began to glow. This is not an everyday occurrence. My hammer is forged of
uru and it only glows when in the presence of the
svartalfar, the undead, or an
imp of the perverse.
Naturally, I stood up. The wielding of storm and lightning requires space (and time, of course) and I was not used to dealing with things sitting down. "Mjolnir, what is it?" I asked the hammer. Silly question. Most hammers are too dumb to answer questions, although not dumb in the sense of 'lacking vocal ability'. Lacking an aural answer, I looked around.
And there it was. On my carpet, someone had flung a pamphlet. It had a characteristically lurid cover and title for that kind of tract. Across its polychromatic cover was plastered the phrase
Why Your God Does Not Exist. I smiled grimly to myself. Feeding its author to
Huginn and Muninn would be fun, although a ravenous indigestion (or two) would probably be the result.
I opened the tract, knowing what I would find. As usual, the commonplace arguments. Let me summarise them for you; you, in this twenty-first century of the days of the Christ, have probably heard them in various forms before.
- A natural occurrence is by definition that which happens regularly and frequently. A miracle is by definition something that happens rarely and unpredictably. Evidence for the former is by definition more common than evidence for the latter. A reasonable person accepts that for which there is more evidence rather than that for which there is less. Hence reasonable persons prefer natural occurrences over miracles.
- If God is fully good, He would destroy evil. If God is fully powerful, He could destroy evil. Since evil exists, God is either not fully good or not fully powerful.
I laughed. There are gods, and there are gods. And there are spurious arguments. Huginn and Muninn, in the absence of my late (although, some say early) ancestor's continuing absence, had frequently parodied these arguments over my head. Let me summarise Huginn and Muninn.
- Humans are a natural phenomenon. They frequently use their intelligence to modify their environment to support their continuing existence. Yet it is clear that the spontaneous emergence of humanity has happened only once, and also that humans have an increasing tendency to not believe that a superior intelligence has adjusted cosmological constants to support their continuing existence. They prefer to believe that it a unique sequence of events occurred instead. Of course, there is no evidence that either is a superior case, since both look to be miraculous. Who is fooling whom?
- Let us assert that evil exists. Then if God is fully good, He would want evil to be destroyed. And if God is fully powerful, He would have the power to do so. Hence the fact that evil continues to exist implies that if God exists, evil will be destroyed one day.
Birds, birds. Those two are so funny. I told Mjolnir to switch itself off, took the pamphlet to the shredder, and went back to my journal and some Taiwanese coffee. I muttered to myself (or is that 'my self'?) the mystic phrase, "Lim peh ka li kong..." I am sure that there is plenty of
implicit deity in that phrase.
Labels: Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Thursday
