My eyes were intense in the weak blue light from the kitchen window. He had it all wrong. She killed a man and covered it up. She was not a blessing at all. If anything, she was a curse. I did not ask for her hand in marriage. You should have seen the stir in our tiny post office, everyone gathered to watch me read my first letter from a “dead fan,” as you Americans would say. I think the poor souls thought no one outside our island had ever laid eyes on my articles. I do not know which was more thrilling to them—that someone had indeed read one of my books or that someone was an American. You are all outlaws and cowboys, are you not? I myself admit to some surprise that my humble little works have fled as far as America. I would not have thought it had time to wing across the ocean yet. However, you have acquired it, I am just glad to know I am not the only one who reads the blasted thing. Let me tell you something, in the popular apologetic pronouncements of liberal believers, it is customary to contrast the agnostic, who is praised for his circumspection, with the atheist, who is accused of arrogant inflexibility and who, like the orthodox or conservative believer, claims to know what, from the nature of the case, no mere human being can possibly know. #RyanPhillippe 1 of 8

The atheist is a contemporary Unitarian, and they believe that each person is free to search for their own personal truth on issues, such as the existence, nature, and meaning of life, deities, creation, and afterlife. Unitarian Universalists can come from any religious background, and hold beliefs and adhere to morals from a variety of cultures or religions. However, a Unitarian can be just as obstinate as the man who knows everything. The atheist just knows everything in a negative direction. If I knew all it would take to lure you to the house was a dish of Mackie’s cakes, I would have tried it ages ago, sugar ration or no! Reasoning of this kind figured prominently in several influential works by the nineteenth-century Protestant theology. Their favorite argument was the following reductio ad absurdum: Atheism could be known to be true only if the atheist knew everything; but this is of course impossible; hence, atheism cannot be known to be true. For a man to deny God, he must be a God himself. He must arrogate the ubiquity and omniscience of the Godhead. However, the believer has a great initial polemical advantage over the atheist. For, some limited segment of the Universe may provide the believer with a strong or even decisive evidence, with an unequivocal token of God’s existence. The atheist, on the other hand, would have to walk the whole expanse of infinity to make out his case. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 8

If you only knew how my heart wrenches to read your note on the table, amidst the crumbs on the empty cake plate. If you knew how it feels to run after someone for a brief snatch of time, how the World stops spinning, just for a moment, when you hold them in your arms, and then starts again so fast that you fall to the ground, dizzy. If you knew how every hello hurts more than a hundred goodbyes. If you knew. However, you do not. I never told you. You have no secrets from me, but I have kept a part of myself locked away, always. A part of me that started scratching at the wall the day this other war stared, that started howling to get out right now, the day you ran off to meet your soldier. I should have told you, should have taught you to steel your heart. Taught you that a letter is not always just a letter. Words on the page can drench the soul. If you only knew. By what miracle can an atheist acquire the immense intelligence required for this task? Unless he is omnipresent—unless he is at this moment at every place in the Universe—he cannot know but there may be in some place manifestations of a Deity by which even he would be overpowered. And what is true of space equally applies to the immeasurable ages that are past. The atheist could not know that there is no God unless he had examined every part of the Universe at every past moment to make sure that at no time was there a trace of divine activity. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 8

The situation should be clear to anybody who reflects on the difficulty of proving negative. If a man landed on an unknown island, any number of traces in almost any spot would be sufficient to show that a living creature has been there, but he would have to traverse the whole island, examine every nook and corner, every object and every inch of space in it, before he was entitled to affirm that no living creature has been there. The larger the territory in question, the more difficult it would become to show that it had not a single animal inhabitant. If, then, it is proverbially difficult to prove a negative, there can surely be no negative so difficult to prove as there is no God. This is plain if we reflect that before we can be sure that nothing testifies to His existence, we must know all things. The territory in this case is the Universe in all its length and breadth. To know that there is no trace of God anywhere in eternal time and boundless space, a man would have had to examine and to comprehend every object that every existed. This would indeed require omnipresence and omniscience, and the claim is perfectly right when one maintained that the atheist’s claim implies that he himself is God—ibid (the same source). #RyanPhillippe 4 of 8

There will always be someone with a fear of the sea, and someone who lives so close to the ocean would see firsthand how frightening it can be. Have you never even crossed over a bridge? Okay, do you really want to know my secret? My parents do not know this, and my friends would bust a gut if they heard. If I could be anything in the World, I would be a dancer. A ballet dancer, like Nijinsky. I saw him dance in Paris and he would inflame me and I would feel the passion others seem to feel—that I knew, without a question, what I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing. However, here I am. I always assumed that I would follow my father into medicine. Well, I suppose he has always assume that. We are not always made for doing the same as the others. To establish that the existence of evil is incompatible with the view that the universe is the work if an all-powerful and all-good creator, to show that a given theory is too vague to be of any explanatory value, or to call attention to the fact that certain words have in a certain context lost their meaning—none of these require omniscience. I am sorry to burden you with such glum ponderings. Do not go jumping off your library tower, please! #RyanPhillippe 5 of 8

Some people seem to labor under the impression that as far as its refutability is concerned, God exists is on par with a statement like “A hippogriff exists, existed, or will exist in some place at some times.” It may be plausible to maintain that our not having found any hippogriffs on Earth is no conclusive evidence that such an animal does exist in some other part of the Universe to which we have no access. The same does not at all apply to the question of whether one is or can be entitled to reject the claims of believers in God. For, unlike the hippogriff, God is by some declared to be the all-powerful and all-good creator of the Universe; he is said by most believers to be a mind without a body; and it is asserted by some that predicates taken from ordinary experience can never be applied to God in their literal senses. These features of theological claims may make it possible to justify their rejection although one has not explored every small, out-of-the-way place or places where something can be hidden in the Universe. Do not look for a picture from me. No camera over here, and I do not think I could draw myself objectively. I would keep modifying and erasing until you had a picture of God. We always want to appear more attractive than we really are, would you not agree? I mean, if you had been sketching your picture instead of snapping it with a camera, would you really have drawn in that dreadful striped shirt? #RyanPhillippe 6 of 8

And dear boy, regardless if you have read Through the Looking-Glass more than one, you and I will get on beautifully. You spoke of having been in the hospital recently. What sort of livestock had you been using inappropriately at the time? Trying to waltz with a horse? Play football with a ram? Now that I have seen your picture, I can imagine you and your mates passing around Three Weeks.  You do not know how I worried about you, traveling all the way to Plymouth by yourself. You have never been so far from the house. You have gone down, you have cheered up your friend and satisfied yourself that he is as well as can be. You have even brought him every last crumb of the precious cakes bought with my money. You should come back to the house now. You should come back to the house before this becomes anything serious, please. Do not make any rash decisions. Not for my sake; for yours. It has been half a year since you have been in the same city as Chad. There are days when the two of you could not stop bickering. And then all this love and marriage out of nowhere? And then something happens—a fractured spine, a sprained wrist, a bullet that whizzes by too close for comfort—and suddenly they are grabbing for whatever they can hold on to.  #RyanPhillippe 7 of 8

That golden pool, it swirls around them, and they worry they might drown if they are not careful. They hold on tight and make whatever promises come to mind. You cannot believe anything said in a wartime. Emotions are as fleeting as a quite night. Please be careful. Last week, we had planes overhead and more than a hundred incendiaries around the Castle. Nothing on the city, thank God, but the planes go right above us. Two nights, hearing the air-raid sirens and the growling engines and the rattle of the anti-aircraft guns but not really knowing what was happening. It is wearing on me. All I want is my kids by my side. Please do not make any decision you will regret later. Please do not give away your heart without realizing it, because, my sweet boy, you may never get it back. Again, it has been held that without God the Universe becomes terrifying and a man’s life a lonely and gloomy affair. Antiquated age has the last word: a purely naturalistic look at life, however enthusiastically in may begin, is sure to end in sadness. I am particularly concerned about the terror of a silent Universe without God, in a similar vein that the last act is always tragic—a little Earth is thrown upon our head, and that is the end forever.  #RyanPhillippe 8 of 8

Love,

Dad