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But romantic love is ordered toward procreation, too. Men and women fall in love because this is nature's way of compelling them toward procreation. Those who feel passion will have more sex. Those who have more sex will have more kids.


Therefore, romantic love that is not ordered to procreation is as disordered as sex that is not ordered to procreation.


To live according to our conscience and reason is, of course, our highest calling as human persons. But we have an obligation to mold our conscience around what reason discerns for us is true: and to discern what is true we need a coherent methodology. This is where philosophy comes in.




I would not say it's applying mathematics to the question of God. It's merely using the same principles and rational methods used to uncover mathematical truths to uncover metaphysical truths. Mathematics are, after all, metaphysical truths -- they correspond to real-world realities but exist independent of them. I can see that 2 + 2 = 4; but that truth would exist even if I did not (or any person).


Of course, it is an axiom only if self-evidently true. If there is reason to doubt it, the argument falls apart. But this is why philosophy begins with such self-evidently true statements as: "Everything which changes must be acted upon by something outside itself." The obvious example being that a rock does not spontaneously begin to move through space but must be pushed by someone's hand, or pulled down a slope by gravity.




I disagree. As the Unmoved Mover argument demonstrates, God could not have walked away. He must necessarily be sustaining all of existence in every moment.




That may be the case with certain individual proponents of ID or even the whole of the modern ID movement. But William Paley, the man who first argued ID, himself was simply making a probabilistic argument, in perfect accordance with the assumptions underlying modern statistical analysis: given a purely materialistic universe, it is highly unlikely for complexity to emerge (the probability is vanishingly small); therefore, it is highly unlikely that the universe is purely materialistic. As you can see, there is nothing in the argument itself that necessitates the supposed designer to be anything but in existence.


I see no reason to concede the notion of a mechanistic and deterministic universe to the materialists. It is foolish precisely because it veers out of the realm of metaphysics.


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