I've been fairly busy lately and haven't been able to give a sufficient amount of effort to my posts over the last couple of months, as no doubt you've noticed. But let me try to explain myself as unambiguously as possible.

I'm ultimately an idealist in debates such as these in that I have a subconscious conviction that, given enough time and reasoning, and given two mutually exclusive points of view, one of them can be logically proven false. Of course, this is not the case. But it is the assumption that I operate under, willingly or not. This is probably why our discussions tend to run in tight circles: I'm trying to convince you that you're probably wrong, and you are trying to convince me that you MIGHT be right. So, since both of us are making what amounts to probabalistic statements, we are both "right" in the context of our argument: we're both making the exact same argument, only attacking it from different angles. To you, the glass is half full, to me it's half empty. You aim for the area of hope that God exists, I aim for the evidence against.

This is, almost definitely, obvious to you, as it seems that way to me after typing this. But, subconsciously, I think I am a naive person. I would like to believe that peoples' beliefs are rooted in reason and solid evidence rather than just good guesses. So I think I have been approaching the problem from entirely the wrong angle. I'll try to stop doing that. But I still sense a good deal of assumption with you. You start off with a great foundation for your belief in a Cosmic Order, but then slide down into the deep end and make assumptions about God's plan for this universe and his love of intelligent life, which are just guesses (and, as far as I can tell, guesses with little or no grounding in evidence, for that matter.) Why even bother with belief?

• Wow - carefuluniverse - January 12, 2002 - 06:22 UTC