A logical proof of God’s existence, personality, and goodness

The earlier thread, “An argument that made a non-believer think that God might exist,” turned into a theological discussion among commenters on the existence of God and the problem of infinite regress, some of which was beyond me. Kristor has now sent a follow-up which puts the issue together in a way that even I—who am not normally drawn to abstract discussions of God’s existence—find understandable, coherent, and persuasive.

Kristor writes:

Julien says that, “The theistic God is (i.e., has the property of being) logically prior to all things,” and … “God = what is logically prior to all things (whatever that might be),” are not equivalent, because only the second statement is an identity. I’m pretty sure that’s not correct. If, as the first statement says, God has the property of being logically prior to all things, then he just is logically prior to all things, which is to say, God = what is logically prior to all things. Having the property and being the entity that has the property are not different. So both statements are identities.

That said, I now see the difficulty Julien was trying to get at. Even if both those statements are equivalent, and granted that there must be something or other that is logically prior to all things (this being a necessary truth, an analytical truth), how are we justified in saying that that something or other is anything like the biblical God? Might it not be like the Platonic Form of the Good, for example? A mere principle?

The traditional way of getting at the question is to revert to the question why there is something, rather than nothing. Never mind Hawaii; why does anything exist, at all? How do you get from sheer nothingness to an actual world, any actual world? You don’t. It can’t be done; for if nothing existed, where would we find the ontological resources to create something? So there had to be something that existed before whatever it is that exists; and this must have been the case from all eternity. In other words, no matter how far back you look, there had to have been something there beforehand.

Here the difficulty of the infinite regress presents itself. An infinite regress is no more satisfying than the transition from absolutely nothing to something. Either way you are confronted with an infinity; of the regress, or of the ontological distance between absolute nothingness and the very first iota of actuality. To avoid both these infinities we must advert to Aristotle’s Unmoved First Mover: a necessarily existent being, who, because he is necessary, has always existed, and always will, and who therefore stands in no need of any cause or explanation outside himself. Note well that the First Mover cannot be a mere principle, a disembodied Platonic Form. To satisfy the condition that something can come only from something, he must, rather, be a something, a concrete actuality. Augustine argued that he is the original concrete instantiation of the Platonic Forms. Thus we avoid the difficulty of postulating two discrete modes of existence, one for actualities, another for the Platonic Form of the Good, and then of explaining how the two can interact (a difficult problem, for it would involve bridging another infinite gap).

But so far we have only the God of the philosophers, not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Actual he may be, but how are we justified in calling him loving, or just, or powerful, or good? How are we justified in thinking of him as a person, conscious, or alive? The traditional answer is that, just as you can’t get something from nothing, likewise you can’t get a single jot of goodness or justice, beauty or power, consciousness or life, from a pre-existing state of affairs in which there has never been any such thing. If there is beauty or goodness or power in the world, if there is mindfulness or love, then it must originally have been somehow inherited or derived from a pre-existing being who is good, powerful, conscious, etc.

Since we have already established the Unmoved Mover as the indispensable entity that is prior to any other actuality, and since there can obviously be only one such entity, it must therefore be the case that the Unmoved Mover is identical with the original source of all the positive values in the world. Notice now that there can be no upper bound to the beauty and goodness that could potentially find actual creaturely expression in some possible world (in just the same way that there can be no upper bound to the integers). Since any given instance of beauty or goodness, no matter how great, must be derived in the first instance from the beauty and goodness of the Unmoved Mover, it must be the case that he expresses in himself from all eternity all the positive values that can ever possibly find actual creaturely expression, but to a boundless degree. Thus the Unmoved Mover must be boundlessly loving, just, merciful, lively, mindful, good, beautiful, potent, wise, and so forth; he must be all the things that make him like the God of Israel.

LA replies to Kristor:

This is excellent. It is the best logical discourse explaining the existence and characteristics of God that I have seen. As you can probably tell, I am not much interested in logical arguments about God’s existence, but this clicked with me.

Your explanation, leading to God’s infinite existence and goodness, reminds me of God Speaks, by the Indian spiritual master Meher Baba. Like you, he says God is infinite being, infinite goodness, infinite bliss, infinite power, and that everything comes out of him.

But with a twist. Baba says that at the beginning, God is unconscious of himself. He is in a deep, dreamless sleep. He IS infinite being, infinite power, infinite God, but does not know himself as infinite God. Then he stirs in his sleep, and asks the question, “Who am I?”, and the entire universe springs into being in order to answer that question. Individualized souls, who are all part of God as a drop of water is part of the ocean, take the form of all things, starting with the most basic gases, then stone, then plants. At each stage, the soul identifies itself with that limited form, thinking, “I am stone,” “I am plant,” “I am worm.” But the soul, having this extremely limited awareness of itself, doesn’t know what it really is, which is God. The driving force of evolution is the soul’s desire to know itself. So the soul keeps taking higher and more complex and more conscious forms, going from plant to lower animals, then to higher animals, then to man. At the human stage, the soul says, “I am man.” But the soul still doesn’t know what it really is, which is the infinite God. But at the human stage, because all the physical organs of consciousness now exist, it becomes possible for the first time for the soul to realize that it is really God, like a drop of water realizing it is a part of the ocean. God-realization, which is the goal of creation, takes place when the soul realizes, “I am God,” without losing the individualized consciousness of the individual soul.

I am not a follower of Meher Baba, and I do not accept his explanation overall, because, for one thing, according to him, God at the beginning of the creation is unconscious, which contradicts Genesis. I do not accept any statement that is not compatible with, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” But Baba is nevertheless very much worth reading. His explanation of evolution as a process driven by the soul’s desire for larger and larger consciousness is illuminating to any discussion of evolution.

In any case, it can be useful for Christians to familiarize themselves with a non-Christian and non-Western but nevertheless coherent view of the universe, life, and consciousness.

LA continues:

As an example of the kind of thing that Meher Baba’s view explains and puts in a new light, even for Westerners and Christians who reject his “Eastern” or “gnostic” view of God, he says that physical evolution comes to an end at the human stage. There is no physical evolution beyond man. Of course this goes against Darwinian assumptions. Why should there be any bound to evolution? Why can’t physical evolution keep going further, to something “better” than man? And the answer is: the goal of evolution is for the soul to become conscious that it is God. At the human stage, the physical organs of consciousness are fully developed. No further physical evolution is needed (though spiritual evolution, what Baba calls involution, is still needed).

Thus there is a limit and bound set to evolution, provided by the very purpose for which evolution occurred in the first place.

Darwinism can supply no such upper bound to evolution (indeed, Darwinism even denies that there are any boundaries between species), because Darwinism says there is no purpose to evolution. According to Darwinism, evolution, i.e., the progress to ever more complex and “higher” life forms, is merely the accidental and serendipitous by-product of random mutations which are selected because they help the possessor live longer and have more offspring. According to Meher Baba, evolution is the purposeful product of the soul’s taking on ever more complex and higher biological forms into order to develop greater consciousness of itself.

Julien writes:

Kristor is making a logical mistake when he says that “God has the property of being logically prior to all things” is equivalent to “God = what is logically prior to all things.” He is right that “having the property and being the entity that has the property are not different.” However, having a property (or being an entity that has that property) is definitely not the same as being identical with whatever has that property. Hawaii has the property of being on earth, but it’s obviously false that Hawaii = whatever is on earth. Hawaii is not the same as Mount Everest, for example, which also happens to have that property. This is why we can’t infer from the fact that God is has the property of being logically prior to all things to the conclusion that God = whatever is logically prior to all things.

Kristor has actually acknowledged this by allowing that certain things might be logically prior, such as the Platonic Forms, without being identical with the theistic God. This is important for two reasons. First, because Kristor’s main argument is that the theistic God is rationally necessary as the explanation of such things as beauty and goodness. He may be right that particular instances of beauty (for example), cannot exist without something logically prior to them: an Unmoved Mover whose beauty (for example) is the source of those particulars. But even if this is true, some additional reason is needed to say that good things, like beauty, require this kind of “logical” explanation but bad things don’t. On purely logical grounds, there is no obvious reason why we shouldn’t reason in the same way to the conclusion that the Unmoved Mover is the source of ugliness and evil.

A second thing to notice is that, according to Kristor, the theistic God is “the original concrete instantiation of the Platonic Forms.” But notice that if this is true, God (unlike the forms) is not logically prior to all things. Particular instances of a property can never be logically necessary, by definition, so they can never be logically prior to all things. It’s contradictory to say that X is logically prior to all things, which implies that it’s logically necessary, and yet that X is a particular instance of some property, which implies it is logically contingent.

Josh F. writes:

Julien states, “On purely logical grounds, there is no obvious reason why we shouldn’t reason in the same way to the conclusion that the Unmoved Mover is the source of ugliness and evil.”

It seems that if God could choose between the creation of good logic and bad logic, the choice would obviously be good logic. Therefore, there isn’t any logic in the idea that God would create bad anything including bad logic.

Kristor writes:

Many thanks. But I hasten to tell you that I deserve only a stenographer’s credit for the comment I sent along. Well, actually that’s not totally correct. Here’s the really curious thing. I arrived at that argument pretty much all by myself, and it felt like it was an original discovery. But, of course, it’s thousands of years old. I have become convinced that it has been well understood since long before Aristotle, indeed for at least 4,000 years. It’s just monotheism, right? It’s spooky to find your argument was written down millennia ago; hair-raising. But in a nice way, a comfortable way; for it means that you have traversed a logical landscape, that is objectively real; and that you must be on something like the right path, given all the cairns left along the trail by ancient travellers.

Still, I cannot claim to have blazed any new trails. Aquinas made them highways in the desert, where I have so long stumbled.

I would also enter the caveat that I don’t believe the argument rises to the level of a proof. It may, but I haven’t yet devoted any thought to the question, or to the attempt to cast it in rigorous form. I have been guided, not by logic, so much, as by the test whether a given hypothesis first fits with experience, and second is adequate to experience. I have found over the years that most erroneous doctrines end up logically entailing the impossibility of experience as such. In this sense, only, do I think that the doctrines of the infinite regress and absolute nothingness are erroneous: if they are true, then it can’t be possible for me to think they are true. Indeed, if they are true, it can’t even be possible for me to have the illusion of thinking that they are true. Still, I have not proved by a valid syllogism that they are untrue.

I have not read Meher Baba, but have known quite a few of his devotees, and that has been enough for me to respect the guy. By his fruit I know him. He must have been onto something, right? Based on your recommendation, I’ll add him to the list (but he’s going to have to wait for me to get through Voegelin first). “His explanation of evolution as a process driven by the soul’s desire for larger and larger consciousness,” has been explicated in Christian terms by Teilhard de Chardin. Meister Eckhart called that expansion of consciousness “spatiosissimus:” the increase of epistemological reach, of ontological capacity, and of sublime bliss, that comes with the nearer and nearer approach of the soul to the imitatio dei, and thus to the mind of Christ, to the Divine perspective sub specie aeternitatis. The Orthodox name for that our ultimate destiny is theosis: godhood.

Evolution has been at the core of biblical religion since the Fall; what is the Incarnation but a gigantic saltation in the course of evolution? “He came into the world, and the world knew him not.” Of course it knew him not! Before they entered in upon the world, it knew not, neither did it encompass or contain, any of the novelties it has produced. They came from somewhere outside the world, as strangers thereto.

Baba’s idea that creation is the mechanism of God’s self-discovery is pretty old, too. Again, it’s just monotheism. If all the values expressed in creation derive from the Unmoved First Mover—“all things come of thee, O LORD”—then everything that every creature does is done with the ontological resources it has inherited from God, and with nothing else whatsoever - “and of thine own have we given thee”—and does it to fellow relicts of those same ontological resources—“inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” All that is, is chips off the old Uncarved Block.

But long, long before Meher Baba, monotheists cottoned to the problem of his theogony, to which you refer: namely, that it begins with God asleep. The Israelites realized that making Divine omniscience conditional on the self-realization of a worm was problematic. God cannot have begun his career unconscious. Before there were any worlds at all, indeed from all eternity, God must have been perfectly aware of himself—or he would not have been at any time (and would never yet be) fully God. And this would make him deficient as a creative power, for just the reasons I adduce in the comment you have already posted. For if God was not always far more mindful than the worm, then it is to the worm that we would have to give credit for creating his own degree of mindfulness. But to create his own mindfulness, out of a prior situation wherein that degree of mindfulness had never yet existed, the worm would have had to pull it out of absolute nothingness. And that can’t work.

Thinking it can is the fundamental error of nominalism. It is also the metaphysical weakness of Darwinism: the random mutation pulls a novel form into actual existence—from where, exactly?

It won’t do; the worm can’t create himself mindful, for to do so would require that he be already thus mindful beforehand. He must, rather, have pulled the idea of wormy mindfulness out of the many potential modes of being God had eternally considered, via a creaturely participation in and echo of that portion of the Divine Providence that is devoted to worms, thus infusing it in a novel creaturely actualization.

So God had to have known all about himself from all eternity. To be properly God at any time, He would sempiternally have had to know all about everything, with immaculate clarity.

But how could God be mindful of himself before all worlds, since at that time he was the only being in existence? At first blush, you wouldn’t think that self-awareness would be that hard for a single entity, since we do it all the time. Or seem to. But really it is not possible for a single completed being to be aware of the fact that he is a completed being: for the awareness of the completion would have to be an aspect of the completion, which would mean that the completion couldn’t be achieved until after the awareness of the completion had been achieved—a paradox. So, all awareness must be of some other beings; our own self-awareness, for example, is really awareness of those other beings that constitute our own immediate past, feeling the feelings of the completed moments of our lives (as an element of, but distinct from, the way we feel right now).

OK, then; if God is simply One, there is a problem: he can never know himself, and he can of course also never know that he knows himself. He can’t even be as conscious as we are! This is one of the problems that is solved by the doctrine of the Trinity, which long predates Jesus. With the Trinity, Divine self-awareness is accomplished by the mutual adoration of the coeternal Persons, all of whom are God, none of whom are each other. God’s self-awareness is effected by the reflexion of the Logos upon the Father, and his awareness that he is aware of himself is effected by the reflexion of the Holy Spirit upon the relation of the Logos and the Father (the Eastern and Western churches approach this differently, but the basic structure is the same (as I write this, I hunker down in anticipation of outraged howls from both sides of the filioque dispute)). It is what the Church means by the Life of God. Because all three Persons are coeternal, the perfected self-knowledge of God does not depend on any contingent creature. This corrects the defect in Meher Baba’s system.

The Latin word for the mutual adoration of the Persons of the Trinity is circumincession: the Persons rotate about each other, and penetrate and participate in each other. But I much prefer the Greek term, of which circumincession is a more precise but far less evocative translation: perichoresis, or dance-about. A chora is a dancing ground, or a walled garden; the Persian word for walled garden is, “paradise.” Chora also means host, as in heavenly host; perhaps because most primitive dance is group dance, and likely contributed to the idea of formations in battle, whence the angelic host, or Sabaoth. From chora, we also get choir, the organized group song that accompanied primitive group dance. Thus the choirs of angels, who sing the Pythagorean music of the seven spherical heavens as they dance in ordered array of battle, and sang that same Sanctus to the LORD of the Dance there in the choir of the chapel at Newton’s college (which they do to this day). What then is the Dancing Ground, what the Receptacle and Container and Foundation of this precession of the spheres? It is the Unmoved Mover, the Godhead, he who cannot be named, because he is the very possibility of naming.

Is this not a compelling vision? All created orders, dancing about the central original dance of the Trinity, and carried along, in lawful harmony with its grave, awful, inexorable, momentous joy, the strangest attractor of all, toward their own final consummation?

Is it really surprising that Christians invented science? Note that word, “invent.” It is to allow the breath of God to enter in, to allow the Forms of the Logos to fill us up.

Sorry. Sorry for the lapse into rhapsody. I got carried away.

Thanks, Lawrence, for being the occasion of this my great happiness.

Julien B. replies:

I’m sorry to be so insistent on logical rigour, but since Kristor thinks that’s the strength of his argument, it seems fair. Josh says: “if God could choose between the creation of good logic and bad logic, the choice would obviously be good logic. Therefore, there isn’t any logic in the idea that God would create bad anything including bad logic.”

It’s true that if (i) what is logically prior to all things = the theistic God, then (ii) something bad can’t be logically prior to all things. But how do we know that statement (i) is true? Kristor was giving an argument for statement (i), but now Josh is defending that argument with an argument that simply presupposes the truth of (i).

I think this issue is at the heart of this debate. Kristor’s argument is that “if there is beauty or goodness or power in the world, if there is mindfulness or love, then it must originally have been somehow inherited or derived from a pre-existing being who is good, powerful, conscious, etc.” Maybe that’s right. But by the same logic we can reason that ugliness, evil and hate exist must have “been somehow inherited or derived from a pre-existing being”: an ugly, evil and hateful being. I am not saying that this argument is good, but merely that it’s no worse logically than Kristor’s.

The reasoning is this: “If there are things that are F, they must derive their F-ness from some pre-existing thing that is F.” That form of argument works for any property at all, not just the ones associated with the theistic God. Again, it begs the question to prefer Kristor’s argument on the assumption that the theistic God is the source of all things.

It would be pretty astounding if one could actually reason to the truth of Christianity in this completely a priori, logical way. If that were possible, surely people like Plato or Aristotle would have seen it. Kristor is greatly over-estimating the power of logic.

Kristor writes:

Julien writes, “[Kristor] is right that “having the property and being the entity that has the property are not different.” However, having a property (or being an entity that has that property) is definitely not the same as being identical with whatever has that property. Hawaii has the property of being on earth, but it’s obviously false that Hawaii = whatever is on earth.” This is absolutely correct for any property that can possibly characterize more than one entity. But the property of being logically prior to all things cannot possibly characterize more than one entity. If there were two entities that were logically prior to all things, they would have to be prior to each other. That dog won’t hunt. It will just run around in circles in the yard, confused about which came first, the laws of logic or the actuality of the laws of logic.

Thus howsoever many items there be that we decide must be logically prior to all things—the Realm of the Platonic Ideas, the laws of logic and math, the infinite set of all potential states of affairs, all the possible musical compositions and systems of natural law, and so forth—they must all, however multifarious they seem to us, be really aspects of a single something. They might be subject to analysis and abstraction in practice—we might, e.g., be able to analyze musical compositions as a category discrete from systems of natural law—but as concretely instantiated in the primordial entity, they must be, not composite, but simple and indivisible. And theists have always insisted that God is simple. You can treat his mercy as distinct from his justice, his creative will as distinct from his being in himself, his omniscient knowledge of all possible states of affairs as distinct from his moral and aesthetic evaluations thereof, but in classical theism these are all aspects of a single indivisible primordial act, a single eternal fact.

Julien brings up the Problem of Evil. I had a hunch that someone would! He writes, “some additional reason is needed to say that good things, like beauty, require this kind of “logical” explanation but bad things don’t. On purely logical grounds, there is no obvious reason why we shouldn’t reason in the same way to the conclusion that the Unmoved Mover is the source of ugliness and evil.” Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite decisively solved this problem in the fifth century AD. He began with Augustine’s understanding that evil is not a positive value in its own right, but is rather a derogation of some positive value from its ideal optimum, due to creaturely errors arising from the impossibility that any finite creature could perfectly embody the Divine Will (at dusk in Gethsemane on Maundy Thursday, the animal nature of Jesus earnestly desired that the cup of death might pass him by). In Augustine’s view, evil is a privation of good; this is called the privatio boni solution to the Problem of Evil. Thus while there is wickedness in me, it is a defect and lack of the good that could be in me, had I made better decisions. It is not that I have this quantity of goodness in me, and then this quite different quantity of badness, and the two net each other out. Rather, I have only that goodness that I have managed not to muck up, and there is nothing more to me than this residual goodness. Dionysius points out that even Satan is not perfectly evil—yet—because he still reproduces from moment to moment, and enjoys, the goodness of concrete angelic existence. The perfection of Satan’s evil would be the extinction of every positive value he embodies, and thus the end of his concrete existence. So, to the extent that a thing exists, it is to some minimal degree good; its evil lies only in the loss to history of the good it might have contributed thereto, had it been better.

It is true nonetheless that the Unmoved Mover is indeed the source of evil in one sense, for in his primordial embodiment of the whole realm of potential states of affairs, he embodies also the possibility of Satan and Hitler. His existence makes their Fall possible, because it makes creaturely existence possible. But this is not something that is optional for God; it makes no more sense to expect of him that he should have made evil impossible, than it does to ask whether he could create a stone that he cannot lift. That he cannot create such a stone is not a defect in God, but rather a logical impossibility—i.e., mere nonsense. Ditto for the idea that he could have made any creaturely Fall impossible; because, obviously, the entire realm of the possible exists necessarily, qua possibilities. Therefore, that God logically cannot rule out the possibility of evil does not make him culpable.

Julien says that, “It’s contradictory to say that X is logically prior to all things, which implies that it’s logically necessary, and yet that X is a particular instance of some property, which implies it is logically contingent.” This would be true, if it were true that particular things are necessarily contingent. But the crux of the argument is that there must be one particular something that is not contingent. If there were no such particular something, there would be nothing at all that was not contingent. In that case, the laws of math and logic would have no necessary embodiment, meaning that they would not be necessarily true of anything; and this would mean simply that they would not be necessarily true in any respect whatsoever. They would not be laws at all, but mere conventions; which is to say, mere noise. Such a conclusion makes all existence just chaos.

For properties than can be instantiated in more than one entity, it is indeed the case that any particular instantiation thereof must be contingent. But, again, the property under consideration—of being logically prior to all things—can be true of at most one entity. And, since it is necessarily true that something or other is logically prior to all things, the existence of the particular entity that instantiates the property of being logically prior to all things is necessary. Whoa: hold on. I’ll have to think about it, but I’m pretty sure that was a proof of God’s existence.

Julien says, “It would be pretty astounding if one could actually reason to the truth of Christianity in this completely a priori, logical way. If that were possible, surely people like Plato or Aristotle would have seen it. Kristor is greatly over-estimating the power of logic.” But I am not reasoning to the truth of Christianity from mere logic. Even Aquinas didn’t try to do that. He insisted rather that there are certain aspects of the faith that are known to be true only through revelation. For example, knowledge of the truth that the Logos is incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth cannot be logically derived from a priori principles, because its truth depends upon the contingent historical situation that produced Earth, Israel, Judea, Rome, Mary, and so forth. I am not reasoning to Christianity, but to biblical theism.

That said, a case can be made that Aristotle and Plato did argue to certain truths of the Christian religion. The theologians of the first 1400 years AD—a set coterminous with the philosophers of the same period—all thought that they had. Even Nietzsche thought that Christianity was “Platonism for the masses.”

Julien B. writes:

Kristor says that the property of being logically prior to all things belongs to at most one thing, because if two things were that way each would have to be prior to the other. This is really just a verbal problem. Notice that, strictly speaking, if something is “logically prior to all things,” it is logically prior to itself, which generates the same kind of paradox.

The paradox is resolved by saying that this thing is logically prior to all things except itself. (Of course that’s what we really had in mind all along.) In the same way, Kristor’s worry can be dispelled by putting my suggestion this way: for all we know, there could be two things X and Y that are logically prior to everything except X and Y. There is no deep logical problem with the idea that more than one thing has this kind of priority: in that case, there would be two things logically prior to all things in space and time, which is really what we’re concerned with here.

I’m lost by Kristor’s later claim that the many seemingly distinct logically prior entities must be indivisible “in the primordial entity.” If we are talking about, for example, the laws of logic, it seems to me that that these just are abstractions, Platonic entities. How things may be with their instances is irrelevant to the identity conditions of the Platonic entities. If we can distinguish between different kinds of abstractions, e.g., laws of logic and possible musical compositions, that seems sufficient to say that there are two (distinct) logically prior things. In short, I think that the inference from “There is an instance I of properties F and G such that F and G are indivisible in I” to “F and G are indivisible.” But maybe I’m just not getting Kristor’s point here.

LA replies:

I’m feeling it’s time to wrap up this discussion, which has gone on for some time. If the commenters would like to continue it privately, I’ll facilitate that.

Hannon writes:

Just wanted to say thanks very much for your illuminating mention of Meher Baba. However his ideas may be categorized, as you have transmitted them, I would have to agree with most of it. Many years ago a mentor of mine, a devout Christian (who never spoke of the Word with me), a nurseryman of German ancestry, said to me “God lives through us.” Then he said “You wouldn’t understand” and at the time he was correct as I was only about 14 years old. I think this agrees with what Baba and others have said over the centuries. It is a concept that brings trepidation and exaltation simultaneously and appears to me to be a more “natural” realization. For me it is a challenge to try to relate to the intercession, as it were, of Revelation.

The notion of spiritual evolution I think puts man on a path of fruitful discussion.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 26, 2008 11:09 PM | Send