I read Veatch’s review of Kiefer with great interest, but I am hardly in the best of all possible positions to comment on Kiefer myself, not having been exposed to his tape.

If I read Veatch correctly, then Kiefer’s theistic argument uses an approach I find most compelling.... [sic] The most fruitful approach to the theistic problem is to begin with an effort to understand our own mind and its functioning.

We speak of the processes of nature, with reference to such sequences of events as iron rusting, food disgesting, water falling, trees growing, and so on. Now, there is one process which is utterly different from all others; it is the sequence of events by means of which the other processes are known. The knowing event is unique; the act of awareness or consciousness is radically different from all other sequences. There’s no getting around the dualism of knower and the known. Which is to say that mind is sui generis. Mind is an ultimate real; there’s no way the non-rational could give rise to the rational, no way for the mental to be derived from the non-mental, for thinking to be a mere reflex of neural events.

To realize that the mind is an ultimate real is to agree that it is not a mere epiphenomenon; mind was here ab initio — and we have arrived at the God of the philosophers, the cornerstone of religion.

Compression involves distortion, and I’m not sure that the above is intelligible to anyone except myself!