In the fourth installation of our twelve assertions and answers, Siegfried gets very candid about his feelings toward an authority about which he has no choice. But in the process, he erodes his own secular position. As usual, Siegfried is first up and then the Christian response...

I'm quite happy with the idea of a multiverse; it removes any kind of god further away from me. And the last 250 years in the outworking of political theory tells us that the only legitimate government is that which derives its authority from the consent of the governed. Your god will have nothing to do with this, of course. He is the biggest bully on the playground, and we will play by his rules or not play at all. Christopher Hitchens remarked that we could escape the dictatorship of North Korea, at least, by dying, but we can't escape the divine dictator. When we die, things get exponentially worse for someone like me. Thankfully, there is no evidence for his existence.

Siegfried admits his marked antipathy for any unbridled authority over which he has no say-so, benign or otherwise. From a logical standpoint - logical consistency - I have no idea why he went here; it doesn't jive with his worldview at all. He's a naturalist and a materialist; he's a Darwinist! Nothing in the animal kingdom has ever worked this way. In a Darwinian world, the strong survive. The strong rule the weak; in fact, they eat them routinely. The weak in nature have no recourse to claim their animal rights, or time to. Nor has this been the case for nearly all of human history - from the Chinese, the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, right up to Genghis Khan. Until we get to the early Middle Ages, when the Christian population in Western Europe begins to wake up to the fact that we're made in God's image. We have an intrinsic worth - in fact, an incalculable worth. And since God is one, and we are all made in that one image, we're all equal! All mankind is created equal. So Siegfried is simply co-opting the Christian worldview here, as it pertains to you and me - the governed. The rub is that it can't be extended to the ultimate creator of the universe. As Karl Barth described him: God is the "divine Other."

Something else... At the same time it began to dawn on us that we were God's image bearers, we also began to wake up to the fact that the world we live in can be figured out; it can be known. Einstein famously said that "the most incomprehensible thing about our world is that it's comprehensible." In fact, there is an uncanny correlation between nature and math. Why would this be? Maybe because the world was made by a single rational being; we'd, therefore, be dealing with a singular set of natural laws. And being made in His image means we should be able to comprehend the world He's made; in the words of Johannes Kepler, we should be able to "think His thoughts after Him." Natural science was born in Christian Western Europe.

In fact there is a Ted Talk about scientists developing a computer based on Quantum Mechanics that will be worlds ahead of current technology in terms of speed. On what are they basing their design technology? On a leaf, and how the plant leaf turns sunlight into oxygen using something physicists call "superposition". From a leaf...

"As high as the heavens are above the earth are My ways above your ways, My thoughts above your thoughts." (Isa. 55:9)