reputations

My sliding scale of favourite commentators has undergone some revision this past year.
Mark Steyn, Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter would normally have been right up  there among my fave raves.
Since each has more or less endorsed President Trump, I am more leery of them. I think they've made a seismic error of judgement there.
Time will tell.
For more than a decade Steyn, Ingraham and Coulter had been very strong advocating President Bush's decisive interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, yet each seems to have now acquiesced to what I regard as President Trump's opportunistic critique of President Bush and the reasons for those wars.
Hey Mark, Laura, Ann! You don't spend fifteen years telling our troops to die for us and then just change your mind on a whim.
A whim is what I am calling your decision to abandon all your previously stated positions on the Jihad wars due to your penchant for Mr Trump.
Having said that.
Mark Steyn is the finest writer of prose in the English speaking world. Laura Ingraham has a combatively principled depth to her every analysis. Ann Coulter is valorous and vainglorious beyond belief.
But they all plumped for Mr Trump and so our relations have grown strained.
I no longer attend their dinner parties or holiday with them in the Caribbean or send them presents on birthdays and anniversaries.
Of course I never did attend their dinner parties etc etc, but I'm just saying that now, if the chance arose, I probably mightn't.
And so on.
Charles Krauthammer is a commentator of insight, wit and cultured mien, whose contribution to discourse I always classified under the rubrique "a tame Mark Steyn."
In these mordantly unsettled times, I now value much more the insights of the tamer, saner man.
His assessments of Mr Trump were fair and also frank and often funny.
With some self deprecation he never failed to point out how he himself had predicted repeatedly that Mr Trump would never be President.
In the early months of the Trump Presidency, Krauthammer said that it was essential for the President's opponents and the media to give the President a chance to govern.
But he would also comment quietly and to my mind correctly that Mr Trump was not fit for office.
This was real commentary.
Honest. Insightful. And not based on a whim or a fad.
Unfortunately after a particularly trenchant debate about President Trump with Laura Ingraham on the Fox News channel last August, he disappeared off the airwaves.
Reports are circulating that he is receiving medical treatment following an operation.
So there you go.
Of my four nominees for great commentators of our age, one of them is in hospital and the other three have gone completely doolally.
Be careful bold readers.
It could happen to you.

thoughts

The glory of God is the source of all goodness.
His love for us rings in the melodies of life.
All things on earth proclaim him by their very being.
He finds us wherever we are because he has made us for himself.

points of contact between atheists and believers in god regarding the origin of the universe

There are some similarities in understandings advocated by those who believe in God and by those who are atheists in their scientific postulations as to how reality came to exist.
Most atheistic scientists seem essentially to believe the universe was created by an all powerful energy.
That is to say they believe that all the power in the universe came from a single point at the origin event they call The Big Bang.
But they do not accept that an all powerful energy, or Singularity, or wave fluctuating Multiverse, could ever do anything on purpose.
The believer in God says that the concept of an "all powerful" energy or wave fluctuation or eternal causal probability, (ie something that contains, or is the source of, all power, all essence, all time, all everything) may imply consciousness.
If something is all powerful, containing all the power that is or every was or ever will be, might it not also know things?
After all, we're conscious and we're not that powerful in the grand scheme of things.
So why not at least consider the possibility that the source of all energy, all light, all good jokes, etc etc, is at least as conscious of itself as atheistic biologist Richard Dawkins is of himself.
The Christian might say to the atheist: "You're right enough when you say an energy created the universe. But why do you presume to know the mind of that energy? How on earth have you established that the energy (or singularity or wave fluctuation or probability) that caused the universe has no mind?"
The discussion for us then goes to the ordered quality of certain mapped realities, a consideration of the consistencies we call laws of nature, a reflection on the staggering intricacies of cells and DNA molecules, an appreciation of the dignity of life and creatures, and a weighing of the testimonies of the Judaeo Christian tradition, all of which we suggest are pointing explicitly to God as an all powerful, all knowing, all loving, eternal creator.
There are still some atheistic scientists who advocate without blinking what they call the Steady States vision of the universe, saying the universe didn't come from anything, was never created, but simply eternally existed.
Bit like what I say about God really.

considerations of the atheistic propositions of richard dawkins

The scientist Richard Dawkins has been claiming that his atheistic explanation for the universe is more likely to be true because it is simpler than any alternative explanation claiming God created the universe.
I want to try to answer his assertion that a universe creating itself by accident is a simpler concept than God creating the universe on purpose.
I am quibbling solely with his ascription of the word simplicity to his own atheistic theory.
In making his appeal to simplicity, Mr Dawkins is referencing the principle known as Occam's Razor.
The principle is a suggestion that in the realm of putative explanations of any mode of reality, the simplest explanation will often be the best.
It is a counsel to seek simplicity.
We might otherwise state it that in postulating explanations we should not multiply mysteries unnecessarily.
Occam's Razor was devised by a Catholic monk known as William of Ockam who lived in the fourteenth century..
His insight is not a law.
It's more a perspective.
A useful metalogical reminder for those investigating the nature of reality.
Where possible keep it simple.
I would state it: Don't unnecessarily multiply mysteries to make reality fit your theory.
Perhaps we might best understand it as an aspiration towards a methodology of the scientific method, an intellectual weather eye, for those engaged in the search for knowledge.
A timely suggestion coming down through centuries for all those seeking to explain what is.
Occam's Razor is not exhaustive.
If every complex scientific discovery was thrown away because it wasn't simple enough, we would lose a lot of what Mr Dawkins holds dear, some of it even possibly true.
Occam's Razor is just a wise way of trying to figure out the nature of things.
Misapplied, we would figure out nothing with it, including Deoxyribonucleic acid, background radiation as a key to human conceptions of the observable age of the universe, the alluring effect of Heidi Flurgendorf playing with her hair, and on and on.
Because these theories are all complex at every level of their iteration.
So Occam's Razor, like any truth, can be nonsense if misapplied.
I am suggesting that Mr Dawkins has misapplied Occam's Razor in claiming that his notion of a universe that caused itself and has essentially always existed without cause in some form, either as a singularity, or an energy, or something else, is a simpler explanation than the explanation positing an eternally existing God who created the universe and us on purpose.
I do not see that Mr Dawkins' proposed explanations of the universe are in any way simple or indeed simpler in the logical positive sense than the reality of God.
We're both certainly making an act of faith.
Mr Dawkins thinks limitlessly powerful energies have always existed and can make a universe.
I think a limitlessly powerful energy has always existed and made the universe and knew precisely what it was doing.
Which viewpoint, when it comes down to it, is simpler?
Believing Christians and Mr Dawkins are both claiming that a mighty powerful energy that makes a universe and human beings has always existed in some form.
Mr Dawkins says it does things by accident.
I have never seen any direct evidence produced by Mr Dawkins or anyone else, to demonstrate that the energy which made the universe hadn't a clue what it was doing.
The believing Christian says it knows exactly what it is doing and is an eternally existing person.
Can we really accept the assertion that Mr Dawkins explanation is simpler?
Mr Dawkins has lately been reduced to throwing his hat in the ring with those rather desperate atheists who claim there are limitless numbers of causeless universes in which anything that can happen does happen.
This particularly lurid fantasy was contrived as an answer to the increasingly prevalent scientific assertion that there isn't enough time in recorded history for evolution to take place.
I am no fan of the astronomer Fred Hoyle but he put it most succinctly when he said: "The chances of life beginning spontaneously by chance are the same as that of a hurricane hitting a junkyard and assembling a 747 Jumbo Jet."
The teensy problem with Darwinian evolution adverted to by Mr Hoyle, is that it didn't happen and it couldn't have happened.
So why is Richard Dawkins insisting that it did happen?
Atheistic scientists responded to the growing scientific refutation of Evolutionary Darwinism, with their invention of the above mentioned postulation of limitlesss numbers of alternative unobservable universes perpetually creating and uncreating themselves on other planes of reality, again and always, for no reason. This was meant to solve the atheists' problem that with the timeline in one universe, Darwinian evolution is now being deemed impossible by an increasing number of their fellow scientists.
Talk about multiplying mysteries to make reality fit your theory!
An infinite number of alternative universes.
Created at a stroke.
By atheistic scientists themselves.
Just to justify Darwinism.
And they think God can't make one!
The theory of the multiverse, if we credit it with the name theory, is a massive multiplication of mysteries, a pseudo scientific hocus pocus, a shameless superstition, absolutely flying in the face of the methodological perspective known as Occam's Razor.
It is a desperate gambit by Mr Dawkins and his friends to avoid a rather obvious, inherently logical and sublimely simple conception of reality which for emotional rather than scientific reasons, they have spent a life time opposing.
God made the world.
I think William of Ockham might have a wry chuckle at seeing his great Principle coopted by Mr Dawkins as an emblem of simplicity in advocating the Benny Hill style hokum of the Multiverse over the existence of the one true, eternal, ever loving, ever living, creator God.

light of heaven

There is a light that shines from the Catholic Church, holy, ever living and true.
Nothing can diminish it.
The light is alive.
It glistens through twenty centuries of human history, and eternity.
The works of fair weather friends, infiltrators, devil worshippers, free masons, leftists, conflict theory feminists, even the occasional potentially false Pope, and any admixture of these, cannot alter the eternal glory writ from heaven in the Catholic Church.
Don't you see?
When God makes something it lasts forever.