by marc schultz Faced with the dogmatic forces of my curiosity here is my push for truth in human ontology.   From a plastic beach chair in Cape Hatteras North Carolina I sat outside my tent and listened to a young preacher give an outdoor sermon to a crowd of about forty. "God has a path set out for all of us, he defies all logic so he can do these things, he has a plan for each one of us and we must accept him in our heart. Have faith because God is good."   The last part proved fatal to my indolent good mood. I squirmed with desire to ask why a church billboard in central Maryland boasted the community message: KKK Meeting, Saturday 7pm; perhaps god is confused about goodness? Granted, this may sound more like a cheap shot at organised religion than a constructive argument, but this was, to a large extent, the position of many agnostics such as Voltaire and Bertrand Russell.   Theodicy is the vindication of the existence of god through the existence of moral and non-moral evils. Dachau Germany 1943, cadavers are used as land fill, decapitations in the streets of Mernova, the shifting of the earths plates kills hundreds in San Fransisco California. This type of carnage makes the god pill hard to swallow. I will grant that this may be exiguous to dismiss divinity all together for some people but the argument is not yet complete. The uneducated counter argument to this verbal attack is: god works in mysterious ways and uses misery in our world to reveal the fragility and value of life. This would mean that god is forfeiting the lives of some for the lives of others, an immoral act that breaks one of his own commandments. What happened to the biblical claim that all men are created equal; perhaps god is confused about equity?   In a college debate class I was presented with what seemed to be (at the time) the second best argument for the existence of god. The argument goes as follows: god gives you life as a gift and it is up to you to make the "right" decisions. When your time has come your choices in life will govern your admittance into heaven or hell. The following counter argument is the most salient point of this article and completes the argument of theodicy. Imagine you build a radio. You will understand every component inside that radio and if a part is to malfunction you will be able to understand the problem with a few trial-and-error experiments. Nothing will transpire within the radio that you would not understand or not be able to predict. If god is omnipotent, omniscient, incorporeal and all knowing, he, by virtue of his nature, will know all that is going on and all that will transpire in the physical world; if he doesn't then he is imperfect like you and me. This means god knows that a woman will be sexually violated every eight minutes in this country, he must know if he is the creator. Countless times people tell me "god doesn't kill people, people kill each other." I couldn't agree more. If god existed, and was the great-goodness, we wouldn't kill each other, but we do, at about nineteen-thousand violent crimes a day in North America alone. I know most of these logically conclusive arguments fall on deaf ears and my efforts are in vain, but don't be fooled by the human affinity for fiction and imagination, facts are boring and reality is probably twice as prosaic.   So from the serenity and solitude of my plastic beach chair in North Carolina I sit with both my feet in the sand, and to the background hum of the young preacher I ponder the logistics of my existence. Paul Birac said "God used beautiful mathematics to create the earth." In retrospect, if he had, it might have been a beautiful place.