For crying out loud James, the pattern is always the same: you ask questions not in the pursuit of truth, but as a way of dodging it.
Your questions multiply endlessly because you have no answers of your own; they are simply placeholders to disguise the void. In all of our discussions, the substance comes from me, while you retreat into the safety of another question. And I have no doubt you will respond to this with yet another question, because that is your tediously predictable routine.
Am I certain that God exists? Absolutely; though not in the shallow, mechanistic sense an atheist like you demands, as if the Divine could be trapped under a microscope. My certainty comes from the convergence of multiple lines of evidence, rational and experiential, which together form a reality too cohesive to ignore.
First, reason itself inclines toward God. The human intellect is not satisfied with randomness; we are ordered toward truth, beauty, and final causes. To insist that this innate longing for transcendence is an evolutionary accident is like claiming hunger proves there is no such thing as food.
Second, the universe is not a chaos but a cosmos: governed by laws so finely tuned that physicists themselves admit its order is mathematically improbable to the point of absurdity without a Designer.
Then there is my life experience. I watched my pregnant wife fall down a staircase, only to be caught; literally placed on the ground as if by unseen hands. She herself testified it was her guardian angel. They way she was caught mid-fall and placed on the ground is physically impossible. At nineteen, I was pulled 10 yards out of the path of a joyrider’s car (which was inches from me) in an instant by someone, but there was nobody around. At my grandmother’s deathbed, she spoke of seeing heaven while an unearthly fragrance filled the nursing home, drawing nurses from around the nursing home into the room by its sweetness. I witnessed similar phenomena at my own mother’s passing. Add to this the testimony of those I know personally who were clinically dead, yet returned describing experiences astonishingly consistent with thousands of other near-death accounts across cultures and centuries: overwhelming peace, light, and presence. There are too many life experiences to mention.
So yes; I am certain, because reason, order, providential interventions, and the witness of the dying all point in the same direction. To deny God in the face of such cumulative evidence is not intellectual rigor, but intellectual cowardice. And this leads to the real question: if atheists are so confident that consciousness is extinguished at death, how do they account for the uncanny consistency of near-death experiences, testified by millions, and even verified under clinical conditions?
I recall that you used to regularly tell Fishalt that he was a coward for pulling the ‘agnostic’ card. And yet here you are doing the same now. Wishy-washy nonsense.
There have been several times in my life where I had "" another influence"" --I am one of the luckiest people alive .
I have described my life as being reared in a tumble drier .
I had a highly intelligent hugely destructive junkie/alcoholic as one parent and my father was in and out of intensive care for years and we were gathered by the hospitals to say our goodbyes on several occasions while I was put in boarding school to escape the alcoholic.
I was a total dizzy gobshite --I never knew what day sometimes what month it was -I had no idea what would happen tomorrow all I knew it would be mad as usual.
I drove a minibus at 16 for the FCA and I did a local bus service at 16 also when I was home as I was almost 6ft at 16 .
I am eternally grateful to the wonderful Sargent Dommo Doyle who spoke to me and mentored occasionally while I was parked at the range in the curragh and at 3 castles firing range .
he knew I had no money or food for the day and approx 1400 from a giant series of cardboard suitcases came the best ham sandwiches of my life with army tea made with sugar milk and tealeaves all together in the burko boiler .
he knew a lot more than he let on and I silently observed him for hours each day and I was 4 days a week with various fca companies parked with sheep and sheep shit for company all day long .
I observed his relationship with officers and I swore beneath my breath I would die before I would call any man sir and I secretly raged with the notion I would rid the world of all and any body who insisted I call them sir .
it took an age before I calmed down enough to see the respect from all the officers was profound for this man who did his job to perfection and he ran the day which involved a great deal of logistics and up to 300 men to be munitioned and supplied with food and arms and proper records kept of scores and refereed .
I slowly saw and more through slow osmosis learned that Dommo was a very tough man and truly unafraid of anything and had soldiered in various parts of Africa and elsewhere and was widely respected as a great soldier by all who knew him .
I discovered that when you are a total gobshite you need a huge amount of time with a figure you respect and you need the timeless time beyond measure where the silence is only broken By the whisper of sheepshit hitting the grass for you to absorb the importance of what you are witness to .
I took a long time but my mind saw Dommo Doyle in action --I saw things happen --important things which would not have happened if I were in charge .
for the first time in my life my peers were soldiers and the fork in the road I was presented with as all young me are --could have taken a dark turn but for the great Sargent Doyle who never knew the huge effect he had on me and I met him in a deli some 30 years later and I asked him could I speak with him .
I had a major job to keep from breaking down trying to explain what he had taught me and he supplied the backbone I needed so many times later on -- he smiled in his humble way when I told him nobody can cure a gobshite ,
he needs not hours of work he needs weeks of work for him to absorb the smallest thing and then incrementally day by day he regains his normal essence to deal with the world in a healthy fashion.
I tried to tell him how much I owed him but it was impossible to explain the madhouse I came from and he was the only light in that period and he never knew .
life is a school and American's have a saying ""difficult people are the faculty of life "".
I survived and went on to go to mad places at mad times and almost got killed on more than one occasion in Russia and Bangladesh and India .
I met all kinds and somehow got warning of their ill intent and I have been attacked by groups at different times of my life and I have survived .
on one occasion I was thrown 18ft through the air by being struck by travellers a transit van-- it should have killed me and it took me 2 years to learn to walk normally again.
time and time again I have felt the presence of not a person but almost a committee who say today is not the day .
I most importantly have been presented with life in a certain manner at times and had I been presented at a time I was more stressed or without the mental or physical or financial resources to deal with whatever was happening --it would have been a disaster --but the committee were in charge minding me and I have escaped huge misfortune so far .
I do not have the brains to explain further .
I am not unburdening my self----- I am merely as honestly as I can--- ( AS YOU NEED TO BE HONEST) ---trying to explain to anyone who reads this that great things happen when you are in the company of great people --take care what environment you choose to live in and somehow the committee will find you and then see you.
