Burn of the Day

A. Within classical theism, God didn’t create the universe just so He could have a personal relationship with us; His creative act is completely gratuitous and can only be reasoned at obliquely in terms of “motivation” by noting the “diffusive” nature of love.

B. Within the created order there are also the angels who are rational beings not bound by extension in space; as such, the size and age of the universe (whatever those might be) would be immaterial (pun alert!) to that.

C. Within classical theism God is not only omnipresent but also the source of any existing thing’s being at all times, which means that God is just as “present” to each subatomic particle as much as to each person at all times. There is thus a certain metaphysical relativity in respect to every created thing.

D. Things like extension in space (size) and linear duration (time) are taxonomies that limited creatures apply to created material things, and thus measured in relation to the measurer. The meme and its author thus engage in what I like to call the “God-too-small” fallacy in which one judges relative importance by these taxonomies and projects them as absolute measurements upon the created order.

E. That a whole is “big” doesn’t entail that one of its “small” parts is therefore unimportant. Unless the author of the meme thinks his own DNA is of no consequence since compared to his pinky toe it is unfathomably smaller.

F. The meme’s author is of course welcome to create his own universe from nothing that has proportions more amenable to his liking. I’ll wait.

G. Materialism: The belief that a meaningless void brought forth a meaningless universe 13.75 billion years ago containing 200 billion galaxies, each containing about 200 billion stars, just so a meaningless meat sack could create a meaningless meme that would try to convince another meaningless meat sack that there is some meaning to the meme.

As my catechist priest liked to say, materialists would have you believe that the wristwatch they found on the ground occurred through natural forces alone, without design. The most basic cell in creation is more complex than the wristwatch.

Makes. No. Sense.

materialists would have you believe that the wristwatch they found on the ground occurred through natural forces alone, without design. 

What makes even less sense (IMO) is that materialists will state there’s no teleology (which I would argue is necessary for materialism) but then use a wristwatch (or their eyes, or reason, ad infinitum) as if it has a teleology. For to “use” a wristwatch one must implicitly acknowledge there is in the symbols and movements of the watch an about-ness that is not embedded in the material components alone; for even if a wristwatch could randomly be assembled (which is itself a word implicitly presuming teleology…) and work (same here) as a wristwatch does, there is nothing in 12 lines around a circle and two or more rotating rods at regular intervals that bespeaks its relation to time; even the notion of a regular interval must be imposed from without, as regular and irregular as terms denote a basis of comparison outside of the object or the material components themselves.

It’s also mystifying how a meatball (brain) inside of a meat sack (human) can apply (read: smuggle in) meaning to anything enough to reason or speak about it; language and science would be impossible under a strict materialist conception as neither would have an about-ness since they would be purely material phenomenon. But if language and science cannot be about something, they are equally meaningless concepts and thus could have no expectation (also implicitly about something) of actually describing the things they purport to describe. Strict materialism would, I would argue, make description itself impossible.