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Hi Greg, just now have gotten around to reading your engaging essay. A thought: It's hard to be a theist if you don't perceive the transcendental character of Goodness, Truth and Beauty. I have a great deal of sympathy for St. Anselm's proposed proof of God's existence, which is effectively, "God is too good not to be true." Whatever its status as a philosophical argument, it resonates as a truth of experience. (I've personally experienced this in discovering some combinatorics theorems--I'm an amateur mathematician--by following my conviction that some number pattern was too beautiful not to be true.)

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Yes, this is all true. You can kind of explain rather ordinary goodness, or superficial beauty, or prosaic truth on secular grounds. But exceptional truth, goodness, beauty remains a miracle inexplicable within an honest naturalism. Incidentally, very great evil can't really be explained on naturalistic grounds. Some evil is so horrendous that only a diabolical or Satanic explanation will do.

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