The author makes some good apologetic argument for the existence of God in ENTRY #9: I Don't Know How I Know What I Know, where he talks about the shallowness and weakness of the materialist viewpoint of reality. He brings up how we haven't seen Venus, the moon landing up-close or even the corpse of Elvis Presley. And some people actually have issues with the reality of those things, but he talks about how other things we can't see are commonly trusted in -- like love, hatred, jealousy, bitterness, anger, etc.
Then he delves into a short discussion on the weakness of trusting in our emotions. I thought about my own arguments from Friday's blog. I talked about how God had sort of "proven Himself" to me, like He had passed a series of reality tests that I had given Him. That's kind of funny and presumptious of me, but I won't get into that. I thought about how I have trusted in my emotions throughout my life. Some of the conclusions I have drawn about God are probably steeped in emotion and experience. The tingling sensations I've had while in "the presence of God" are certainly subjective. Perhaps they could be explained away? Would that weaken my faith? I hope that I have more logical foundations for my faith than just my experience. I really do. However, my "fear" or distrust of emotions and experience are not strong enough for me to choose to react against that and so nueter my life for the future to not allow myself to feel and experience emotional things. I really enjoy emotions and this side of life. Kept in its proper perspective and allowing myself to bask in emotions from time to time seems to me to be healthy. Going from one extreme to the other doesn't sound smart to me. A life void of emotions and relying strictly on logical and so-called "objective" testing sounds like a bummer of a life. Swinging the other direction (and from the charismatic chandeliers, so to speak) is surely a recipe for disaster at worse and error at best.
McManus pulls some fun stuff out at the end of this entry, where he talks about breathing. We would probably act a little bit different about these breaths if we knew they were the last two or three we would ever take. True that.
Posted by Doug Van Pelt at January 1, 2008 07:34 AM