To keep this bite-sized, and because I ran out of time for today (Canadian income tax deadline day) here's a response to just one of your paragraphs.


I wouldn't say that God doesn't challenge us (by making us deal with complicated scenarios). It's more that I see in the world around me, and in God, and in the way He works in my life, an inherent elegance and simplicity. It seems strange to talk about God and His ways like this, but that's how I see it, and I tend to frame my thinking in similar terms. It might help to consider music. People have very different tastes in music, I know, but for me, the most sublime pieces of music often have at their core a very simple musical idea. There is beauty in simplicity! And I feel that idea is, in essence, at the core of God's operation in this world and in our lives. Jesus dying on the cross for our salvation -- while in one sense completely radical and unthinkable -- is also probably the most simple, elegant, solution to the problem of sin that could ever be conceived.


Well, we certainly do see the world differently. Not that I disagree with anything you say, but I also have a vision of all creativity, especially God’s, ceaselessly expanding by creating novelties. When you think of all those simple strains of music you like – well, it’s amazing how many of them there are. And that’s just in our culture, most likely; when you are a fan of Indian, Arabic and Turkish music, you hear a whole lot more. I write music myself, so I pull them out of thin air occasionally. Where do they all come from? Suddenly you have simplicity combined with an endless profusion, which can be thought of as indefinitely complicated. There is, in fact, a process that foments this profusion, and to me it is linked to the process that generates other diverse beauties: individual faces, biological species, and, yes, harmonious human sexual dispositions. One biological wag once said that ‘if God created the animals as we know them, He must have had a particularly strong love of beetles.” There are an estimated 5 to 8 million species of beetles in existence today. Heterosexuals to me are the beetles, the starlings, the pines, the Mozart symphonies, of the sexual world – magnificent, prevalent, and abundant, but by no means the be-all and end-all of the beauty God has unfolded and/or let unfold in this world. I am being a little tongue-in-cheek, but I do think there’s more to God as a creator than simple rules and engaging simplicities. And again, I doubt we differ on this last bit of phrasing… it’s all a matter of how much of this sort of thing we want to express openly as part of this discussion.