After a book is released there is time to reflect on what was said, and as a result there are new thoughts that might be slightly different than what was in the book. While not drastically different, they are more like additional information and insight. I want to share those reflections with you. These thoughts are probably the most important of all my Blogs to date.
First, there is the realization of a new thought that is so important it should be added to the attributes God gave Homo sapiens 200kya. I expected that there would be such a realization and discussed the possibility on page 122 of HUMANS. That new thought is that there is life after death. Dinesh D’Souza in his book, Life after Death, The Evidence[1], made the comment, “The universality of belief in an afterlife is astonishing, because life after death is not one of those empirically obvious beliefs that one would expect every society from the dawn of mankind to share.” D’Souza also pointed out that life after death is not only a religious idea, but also one of the early Greek philosophers. Given the universality of the thought, it meets the criteria of NEA, and therefore was part of the attributes and thoughts that God gave Homo sapiens. Now if it is just a thought, one might ask if it is really true. I suggest that since God gave us the idea, then it is the absolute truth. The fact of this thought being given humans at the beginning of Homo sapiens might one of the strongest arguments for life after death.
Second, consider this. What starts off as fairly weak and maybe nebulous thoughts, such as our realization of the moral code, is now transferred back to the beginning of Homo sapiens and is shown to be given by God. That means that the weak thought we might have had now has the strength of coming directly from God. It is an amazing transformation of a weak thought to one that is rock solid, all realized by thinking and the rules of logic that God gave us humans.
Third, I believe I was too conservative in my presentation of these key attributes given by God. I now think that the strength of the logic, in effect, proves the source of these ideas was God and the thoughts are absolutely true. Some naturalists might object to the interpretation of the supernatural event being an act of God, since they do not believe in the supernatural or God. However, the most reasonable explanation is that God was involved. In Appendix A of HUMANS, I point out that anyone who lets their mere opinion, such as rejecting the supernatural without any evidence, precede the beginning of an investigation is practicing poor science.
Because of the importance of the things realized in HUMANS, I would like to summarize the specific items that were the result of specific actions of God:
- Origin-of-life
- Consciousness and all the attributes
- The moral code
- The fact that there is life after death
- Our conscience
- The sense of a god
- Our free will
For the first time that I am aware, all of these items were realized using secular analysis and logic and confirm what was already known from the Bible.
Fourth, I am more convinced that the above attributes, our HDS (Human Defining Set) really is our soul, especially since we now see that life after death is true. It makes such sense and is the obvious definition of our soul. This is significant since now we know what constitutes our soul and we now know how we acquired it.
Fifth, all of this discussion provides more evidence of the existence of God.
God bless,
Shaun
[1] D’Souza, Dinese, 2009. Life after Death, The Evidence. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc. p 40.