Barry Lyons
3 min readJun 26, 2019

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I’ll try to be brief in my comments to your comments:

  1. Citing Job or a Psalm or any other line from the Bible only amounts to offering citations from elsewhere in the Bible, which is to say that offering citations don’t add up to evidence.
  2. “As far as miracles go, science wouldn’t be able to explain them because they’re moments when the Transcendent One decided to bypass any Laws.” We live in a world of Natural Law, or as people sometimes call them, Laws of Nature. I argue that these laws are never broken. If they could be broken, then they wouldn’t be Laws of Nature.
  3. “Miracles don’t originate in the Natural realm, rather, the Supernatural.” There is no evidence for a super-natural realm. (I use a hyphen for that word for emphasis.) Also, and as answer to your second entry as well, I’m not aware of any “miracle” happening in the history of the world.
  4. “…it follows that God has also revealed His Will and Word elsewhere…” Once again you’re only professing what you believe. There is no evidence for what you’re saying here.
  5. As far as I know, no Catholic would be able to provide a materialistic answer. All they can do is fall back on what they believe.
  6. “Emergence of the gaps” is an interesting idea but it doesn’t hold here. Enough analysis and experimentation has been done across the animal spectrum (and don’t forget that humans are animals, too) show that altruism, for example, is connected to evolution, or more specifically, evolutionary psychology. All human conscious (mental) experience is rooted in our selves, and the only means that we have to understand our biological selves (and all life, for that matter) is through evolution. For anyone to suggest evolution isn’t true is to say there’s a competing argument with evidence that knocks evolution out of the water. No such argument exists. There is no evidence to show that all life just suddenly *poofed* into existence or was “created” over a few days’ time.
  7. Calvinism (or Calvinistic theology) is nutty. I don’t know what “supernatural evil” you could be referring to because I’m not aware of any super-natural realm to existence (a repeat of what I said above). “God’s wisdom” and “God’s will” are just beliefs. They’re not grounded in anything we know about the world and the universe.
  8. Lots of stuff in this response about miracles. Once again, it’s my view that there has never been a single “miracle” in the history of the world — and by “miracle” I’m referring to the strict religious use of the word (an intervention into the world and/or an irruption of natural law caused by an Unseen Celestial Being). “It’s a miracle that our house wasn’t hit by the tornado!” “It’s a miracle that the baby survived!” No, there are reasons (if they’re available) to explain why your house wasn’t hit or why the baby survived.
  9. Any discussion about Hell — where it is, what it really means, etc. — falls into the realm of fiction. Discussing Hell in whatever context as a thing that many people believe in is akin to discussing Dante or Milton (good of you to mention both writers). It’s all imaginative literature.
  10. Someone else called me a “smartass” for bringing this up. I wonder why. After all, if The Great Deceiver is capable of Great Deceptions, well, the deception I mentioned is the greatest deception of all. Of course, I’m just having fun here. I’m an atheist, which means I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe in Satan, and I don’t believe in angels (“fallen” or otherwise).

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Barry Lyons
Barry Lyons

Written by Barry Lyons

Lives in New York City, owns too many books and CDs. But then again, there's no such thing as "too many" books and CDs.

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