Is Daredevil Nik Wallenda Tempting God?

After his death-defying, history-making walk last year on a tightrope, several hundred feet above Niagara Falls, Nik Wallenda this evening will defy death yet again in his live televised walk across the Grand Canyon.

The walk will be 1,500 feet above northern Arizona’s Little Colorado River Gorge, known by locals as “Grand Canyon East.” The distance between Wallenda’s tightrope and the bottom of the gorge is equivalent to the distance between the top of Empire State Building and the sidewalk below.

So if Wallenda is off his game Sunday evening, if he suddenly encounters high winds or other deleterious conditions, he can easily plunge to his death.

Like his great-grandfather Karl Wallenda, who in 1978 attempted a walk between the twin ten-story towers of the Condado Plaza Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, only to fall to his death before a live audience.

Many think the late Karl Wallenda’s great-grandson is tempting God by continuing to undertake extremely dangerous “skywalks” without benefit of a harness or a net. But 34-year-old Nck Wallenda, a purpose-driven Christian, sees it differently.

“Keeping the faith is all that keeps me balanced,” writes young man Wallenda, in his just-released memoir, “Balance: A Story of Faith, Family, and Life on the Line.” “If I didn’t believe, I’d fall in any number of ways. By believing, my spirit stays afloat.”

Wallenda professes that his high-wire act, which will be viewed by a national television audience, brings glory to God. He holds fast to his faith that God will be walking alongside him when he’s high above Grand Canyon East, as He was when the daredevil was high above Niagara Falls.

I’m praying for Wallenda. I believe that every time he successfully completes one of his death-defying walks, he confirms the pronouncement of the Apostle Paul that “we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.”

I also am persuaded that Wallenda has a unique anointing. Indeed, there were many, no doubt, who witnessed his Niagara Falls walk on TV, who heard Wallenda calling upon the name of the Lord during the live telecast, who were motivated by the Holy Spirit to seek Christ..

Similarly, there will be many who tune in tonight to see if Wallenda loses his life on live TV while attempting to traverse the spectacularly terrifying Little Colorado River Gorge or if Wallenda’s God once again delivers him from the clutches of death.

I, for one, believe God is with Nik Wallenda. And if the daredevil looks heavenward during his skywalk tonight, I believe he will see the Lord, high and lifted up.

I’m not entirely convinced this is coherent. You seem to have the process ass backwards. It’s not that I have chosen to define what good is. Good... IS GOD. I cannot judge good from bad on an objective level any more than you can. Of course it’s not subjective, because I didn’t write the law that says “you shall not bear false witness”. God did. If I had written this law, it would be a subjective one.
If it was as you say, my religion would have 100s of commandments, because it would be shaped around what I want, but it isn’t. It was shaped long before me by God. I have nothing to do with it.

“So too can a Muslim make arguments about the violent commandments in the Quran”

You seem to think this is some sort of good point, when really it isn’t. If Islam is the true religion, and the true vision of God’s nature, then yes, Muslims would be absolutely justified to follow those words in the Quran...

But I don’t believe Islam to be true, and I don’t think the arguments for its truth are very convincing, just like atheism’s arguments. For instance, I don’t think “Allah” has the same great making properties as the Christian God. He is not all-loving. This is a deficiency no god should have.

I’m not sure why we’re continuing. You hold a deep-seated belief that there is no God, and I hold the opposite to be true. It’s hardly likely we’re going to agree on anything in this field.

You said:

“I don’t think...”

“I don’t believe...” and so on, all based on SUBJECTIVE reasoning.

An all-loving god cannot order a man to slaughter infants conceived to be born, but extinguished before they can exercise free will (this is a deficiency no true god can afford to have). Or indulge in other barbarism. If you think it’s good for your god to order so, then even your definition of “love” becomes subjective, trapping you into that same circular logic used to define what “good” is.

Besides, all your information about your god was derived from human sources, beyond the hundredth hand. As such, you must have greater faith in the ability of mere men transmitting you that information without corruption than the faith you have in your deity. Why would a true god arrange for the circumstances to be such that you are dependent on your faith in human integrity to build upon it your faith in the very deity? Your faith is a subjective choice, more to do with the randomness of the things that defined your geography and history than with any objective reasoning on your part.

In using terms like “think” and “believe”, even novice debaters know that those terms are used to assert a way in which we perceive something. If I say that “I believe there is a country called Japan”, this is not some wild assertion just because I have said that I believe it. I have good evidence to back up the claim. Not only do I know that Japan is a country, but I believe it because I know it.

You ignore chaos theory (the butterfly effect) in your assertion that an all-loving god “could not” do something you deem to be terrible. You have no way of knowing if one child’s death might save millions of children hundreds of years later. As I have already stated, your definition of “barbarism” is subjective itself. You are playing god by trying to apply your own ideas of right and wrong (which frankly are no more relevant than a sadist’s) to God. From an atheistic viewpoint, these children who would die are just biological matter anyway, similar to any other kind of biological matter you might find in a garden.
Any value you might place on such children, is simply the result of social conditioning and chemical reactions in the brain you might call ‘empathy’. In reality though, the dying child is of no value.

“If you think it’s good for your god to order so”

You’re again appealing to my own subjective morality, which I have not appealed to.
Your reasoning is as follows

I believe it to be good -—> it was good when God did it

When the logical reason that would follow from a situation in which God actually existed is as follows

God did it -—> it was good because God did it, even if the goodness is not apparent to me as a finite, non-transcendent being.

You then go on to the old attacks on the historicity of these accounts. Why would God wish me to trust in the Gospels, instead of appearing to me at night in a flowing robe and saying “see, I exist”. Well, there would be no point to my life here on earth if this was the case, unless I was some kind of prophet. Why wouldn’t God just create me in Heaven, and give me the same awareness of Him?
This is you, again, trying to make out that you could understand the workings of a mind that transcended space and time. “why didn’t God do this?” “why didn’t God do that?”. I used the example before of a bug staring in at a mathematician, trying to figure out why he draws a line instead of a circle. Even if the bug were capable of coherent thought, it would be impossible for him to comprehend anything that the mathematician was doing. Your relationship to God would be similar.

Have you ever trusted anything you have heard? How many experiments described in textbooks have you carried out yourself? You trust that people who write these things (however fantastic some seem) are being honest. Look at history. The vast majority of historical knowledge we have comes from accounts. We haven’t gone back in time to see exactly which day Ceaser died, but we take the accounts of his death on good faith.

Don’t take my word for it though. Let’s consult the experts in the field of which we’re talking about. There is no physical evidence that Jesus Christ ever existed. I can’t show you his body, nor can I present a video or a photograph of him at the beach. Despite this however, the vast majority of historians today, of all faiths and backgrounds, will tell you that Jesus of Nazareth was a real person. Granted, a small minority of historians deny his existence, but a small minority of historians also deny the Holocaust.

If you want to argue that they’ve got it all wrong, and that we cannot believe anybody existed unless we have scientifically measurable confirmation of their existence because the source might be “corrupt”, then that’s okay, but I don’t think it carries much weight intellectually. Is it possible that Jesus was simply a legend, that his followers lied, or that his followers themselves were imaginary? I guess. But this doesn’t seem like a very likely conclusion.

“Your faith is a subjective choice, more to do with the randomness of the things that defined your geography and history than with any objective reasoning on your part”

And your lack of belief was not shaped at all by these things? None of the atheistic influences you may have had would have failed to reach you had you grown up somewhere else? Tough to believe to say the least.

Bingo. I have a relative who is Jewish and will not go to Germany because of the holocaust, also, he doesn't believe in God because why would God allow such a thing to happen? Well, what if the appx. 6 million deaths from the holocaust allowed billions of other lives to exist?

I have a couple of kittehs who are incredibly intelligent (for a cat or Democrat) but us understanding an infinite God whose perception of time we will never understand in this lifetime much like my cats will never understand something like the TV remote. Time for us is linear, I'm sure everyone would like to go back in time to correct a mistake but it isn't happening, for us time goes one way. Now, I don't know how God experiences time or whether time even exists for him and with our linear version of time, we'll never know how God sees time until we see him.

We know he can look forward to future events but much like the character Paul Atredes in the book Dune, he can see time and it is a curse for him because he knows how everything is going to happen, no surprises. Even after he's blinded in the 2nd book, he still walks and acts like he can see because he sees the future which makes me think that God, if he chooses can see every single event that will happen but I think he only looks at the big picture because I think he would like to be surprised. Incidentally, I didn't come up with this idea, Frank Herbert who wrote the Dune series did.

Otherwise, why doesn't God call in all our markers and move on to the thousand year reign of Christ?

Thank you for that theory. I hadn’t ever considered this idea of God keeping some future events from even himself. Would this be logically consistent for an entity that was omniscient by nature?

Time as we understand it only exists in our universe. God as described by Alvin Plantinga would have certain properties, among them spacelessness and timelessness.
Since God transcends the universe, he cannot require time or space to exist. He has to be able to exist entirely without the presence of the universe, similar to abstract objects.
You understand how foolish it is for us to try and apply our very sub-standard understanding of the universe and its workings to an entity that transcends space and time. There is simply no way we could ever comprehend such a being’s reason and thought in our current state. In fact, I would guess even in our state beyond this finite life, when we are joined with God, we will not understand Him completely although our knowledge with be cosmic compared to what it is now. Lucifer, who was also at least a semi-transcendental entity seemed to be ignorant of God’s design and ability despite being with Him, beyond the natural world.

As it relates to the Holocaust and the Jews, it’s important to look at this in the context of Biblical history. The Jews were enslaved in Egypt for over 400 years, and as we learn, there is a grand design and purpose behind this. Certain contingencies had to be met regarding the Canaanites. The dimmest flame of faith and devotion had to be snuffed out through toil and suffering before the inferno of commitment to God was ignited. The Hebrews witnessed the miracles of God firsthand as they were freed and Egypt fell into ruin.
If the Holocaust had not occurred, what would the world look like today, particularly the Middle East and Israel. What would Israel’s population look like? Would it even exist? There are so many variables that its impossible to say. Then you have the problem of human evil. Was the Holocaust simply Hitler’s exercising of free will to do unspeakable evil? Were the events that led to his rise part of a butterfly effect themselves, putting the right man in the right place at the right time?

It is fascinating to ponder such things. Some argue that God removes all mystery. That He is a way of explaining away tough questions. I think on the contrary, God’s existence raises even more questions for us to puzzle over. In the end, we only have one piece of a jigsaw almost infinite in size. We might know where it goes, but we can never see what image it is a part of.

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