Let no man glory in the greatness of his mind,
but rather keep watch o’er his wits.
Cautious and silent let him enter a dwelling;
to the heedful comes seldom harm,
for none can find a more faithful friend
than the wealth of mother wit—Hávamál 6
Today’s post marks the second installment of my Heathen Apologetics series. For those of you who may have missed the first entry in this series, I recommend checking out my initial post on the matter to get a better understanding of my motivations and purpose in writing these– also, so you can see the Heathen version of Pascal’s Wager. Today, however, I’ll tackle another popular argument for God’s existence. This argument is known in scholarly circles as the teleological argument. But despite the complex name, it’s so commonly argued that you’ve probably heard such an argument, before, without realizing what it was called.
The universe contains patterns, complexity, and order which must have been intentionally designed by the gods.
When I was in high school, I took a class called “Myths, Dreams, and Cultures” (or MDC, for short). Now, I attended a fairly upscale private Catholic school, and all but a very few students came from Christian upbringings. As such, one of the main goals of MDC was to open the students up to the understanding that we were a product of our culture, and that other cultures often had very different pictures of the world. To that end, we would play a game called “Stump the Aborigine.” Our teacher took on the role of an idealized traditionalist Native American, living off the land, completely divorced from modern, American culture. Our job was to be the representatives of Modern America in order to convince this “primitive” of the superiority of our way of life. If anyone could succeed at convincing the aborigine to leave his culture for the one we were selling, our teacher promised to buy that student a brand-new car.
It did not take long for me to realize that the game was rigged.
 | Anthony on Egyptian Math: Multiplication… |
 | Olivia H on Proof that π=2√3 |
 | Boxing Pythagoras on William Lane Craig’s The… |
 | Matthew Damore on William Lane Craig’s The… |
 | Frank on Dissecting “The Sacred G… |
Boxing Pythagoras 