The sermon today really was about the healing of the blind man in John 9, though it might be hard to see that from these notes:

1. Man chose a random universe. If this part is left out, the rest makes no sense. And this is the part secularists insist on leaving out, so that the rest makes no sense. In other words, they choose a random universe, re-capitulating Adam’s choice. 5 minutes later, they object to the very notion of a federal head.

2. Bad things happen, randomly. See: statistics.

3. God stops some bad things. This is an assertion. By definition, it is untestable, as are all assertions about the intangible universe. That it is untestable means exactly nothing, unless you’ve already decided that all truth is testable. That decision has nothing to do with the nature of the world, and everything to do with how you want to spend your short time in it. It makes sense to hold that all truth is testable, if there are no truths outside the means of testing. That the testers can’t see this logical circle is my personal all-time greatest mystery of life.

4. Love does not excise bad things from the relationship, but instead builds them into the relationship, the design. The artist integrates mistakes. ( All watercolorists will now say “amen”.) So, in the end, love is the intelligent design. We cannot know the universe as it was built originally; the stamp of design from the act of creation has been written over by the palimpsest on our retinae. Love is the intelligent design. This is also an untestable assertion. You can either live in this universe, if you like, or another kind, if you like. Why you like what you like will always be perceived by yourself as an axiom. The theological term for axiom is “ex nihilo”; the phenomenological term for the same…well, phenomenon…is “miracle” . Since the atheist mind simply labels things that appear in his mind as axioms, he actually has more experience with miracles than the rest of us. He has merely internalized them.

5. The materialist might not allow for “love”, it might be just “the will to survive”. Yet, in this view, isn’t the will to survive just another random event, seen from the inside? So, the species has the will to survive, because the sun exists, but that the sun exists means nothing at all. It just exists. Therefore, the cessation of the will to survive is the loss of nothing at all. Therefore, to live is not preferable to suicide, and suicide is not preferable to life. But the materialist is left with: “It is axiomatic for me to want to live.” I believe you — but all you are saying is that this impulse drops into your brain from an unknown source. Suppose Hitler would have an impulse to kill you. In the end, isn’t the war between his impulse and yours simply two particles, colliding at random?