Day 29 of 1000
I walk around my neighborhood most nights for forty minutes or so. There is a loop that is almost exactly one mile, so I go at least two laps. I need to kick it up a notch to 3-5 laps like I did most of the summer. I listened to podcasts and audio books on my Zen Stone Plus (awesome product, but we think the SanDisk Sansa Clip+ is even better) as I walked, but wanted a change, so I decided to try to read my Nook Color Android Tablet instead. It is a quiet neighborhood with not too much traffic, so it has worked at pretty well. I have met a lot more of my neighbors because of my walks than in the previous three years. I like it a lot.
I am currently reading William Lane Craig‘s Reasonable Faith while I walk. I am a little over a quarter of the way through the book. Up until last night, the book covered Christian philosophers (Augustine, Aquinas, through Barth, Bultmann, Plantinga, etc.) and their proofs for the existence of God. It is an area where I had not previously done a lot of reading, so it was very interesting. It is not light reading and I am sure I would have been completely lost if it were not for Craig’s clear prose. It is impressive that there is such an ancient, clear defense for the existence of God. While you cannot do justice to such a large topic in a single book chapter, Craig does an admirable job of hitting the high points and laying out the big picture.
Last night, I got to the section that covers the Kalam Cosmological Argument and other arguments that engage with empirical cosmological work performed by Einstein, Hawking, Guth, and other physicists and mathematicians. It was a pretty heavy read, too, but Craig made it tractable. It was dark and the stars were out during the second half of my walk. He covers the life of the universe from the Big Bang and Planck time to heat death. He explains why neither an actual infinite nor an infinite regress of events is possible. He talks about the fact that one can not really talk about what happened before the Big Bang in a temporal sense because time and space did not exist until the Big Bang. He explained that the expansion of the universe is not expansion of material into new areas of space, but the expansion of space itself. All these topics and much more provide a foundation for Craig’s vigorous and rigorous defense of a couple arguments for the existence of God.
Walking in the dark with the stars overhead, this all made me feel very small and insignificant. Maybe it gave me a little more appreciation for the greatness of God.