Dr Craig Bart Erman has been doing a lot of heavy thinking lately and a lot of

people have sent me this article saying, wow, check this out.

And it got a lot of people's attention because the title of the article is a

revelatory moment about God from Bart Ehrman, who is great and well-known

textual critic who deconverted from Christianity. You've had an opportunity to

debate him. Basically, he spells out his agnosticism and he says he has a

meditation practice and he's been meditating on consciousness a lot. But then

some things occur to him, and I think we can sum it up this way.

What occurs to him is that a rock has no way of recognizing that an animate object such as the dandelion exist.

And then a dandelion has no way of recognizing that a panther exists.

Now it gets a bit tricky, he says.

A panther has no way of recognizing that a superior intelligence exists.

Yes, a panther does recognize in some

instinctual sense that there are things out there to look out for, but the

panther has no way of realizing that there are people who can engineer skyscrapers or split

atoms or reconstruct the history of Rome.

It is simply not in its purview.

And so he's got this hierarchy. Yes. And then he says humans can and do

recognize analyze study and think about reflect on these other forms of life. But he's just saying that we all think, we as people

think that we are the pinnacle of life and that there's nothing above us.

And if a slug or a dandelion or something had thinking abilities,

it would think the same thing.

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