Anti-Climacus

WELL: If you've not been following this discussion on naturalism and intelligent design (also here, with a slightly-too-smug for my tastes rebuttal here), I thought I'd throw in my entirely tangental two cents:

The appealing thing about Christianity to me (and why I particularly like the Kierkegaardian-Augustinian tradition within Christianity) is the notion that we believe not in spite of the fact that our belief is paradoxical, but rather because our belief is paradoxical. If you're not particularly hung up on Enlightenment Rationalism (everything has to have a comprehensible explanation because, you know, we say it has to), this is unproblematic.

One of Kierkegaard's books (The Concept of Anxiety) deals with this problem rather more particularly, and argues that faith is always (can only be) quantitative steps to a qualitative leap--that is, any argument for the existence of God or the truth of Christianity can only take you so far. And to that end, I'm pretty much willing to leave arguments for or against intelligent design alone.

This isn't to say I don't care, exactly: mostly I care about the way the universe is because of how it impacts the problem of free will. I tend towards believing in a deterministic theory of how the universe functions of roughly the van Inwagen type (the conjunction of the state of the world at any given time plus the laws of nature entails the state of the world at another given time) though I'd make a minor adjustment to how he argues it (the entailment works backwards in time in a straightforward manner, but it doesn't quite work the same going forward (even though it kind of does)--Principle of Alternate Possibilities and all). Any physical theory that is consistent with the truth of determinism is fine by me*--I take it by faith that God stands behind whatever it is, as a wise man once said:

"Our Sages have said (Yemen Midrash on Gen. i. 1)," It is impossible to give a full account of the Creation to man. Therefore Scripture simply tells us, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Gen. i. 1)."

*then again, I think you can read valid free-will preservation into indeterminism, too, so maybe I'm just biased.