Daniel Dwyer

As a financial planner, I have had two books published,  “Personal Financial Planning,” 1987, Prentice Hall and “The Seven Stages of Financial Planning,” 1991, Longman Group USA (now Dearborn Financial Publishing).  The first financial book came about from conducting financial seminars for some of the largest corporations in America.  The second one is the result of developing a financial counseling course for Adelphi University, where I taught for nine years.  I am 62 years old, married 28 years, living in Bayside New York, have two girls, both of whom are out of college and working.   

I am a Certified Financial Planner who advises people on various and sundry financial matters like where to put their money, their estate plan, their retirement plan and their contingency plan, which includes dying too soon and living too long.  I have been doing this work for 26 years, and have gotten a lot of satisfaction from it.  Dealing with people at a very personal level is something I have always liked to do.  Now, I would like to tell them about what really matters.

At one time when I was much younger, I wanted to become a priest.  My vocation dropped from under me about the time I graduated from college with a BA in Philosophy and English in 1967, just in time to get drafted in the Army.  I spent my time luckily in Germany, where I read “Double Helix” by Thomas Watson and Francis Crick, I waited on a mock battle field for the Soviet armor to come thundering over the rolling green hills and purple mountains somewhere in Bavaria, while several thousand miles away in Vietnam guys my age and younger were dying by the hundreds a day. Since then I have kept up my interest in Philosophy and Theology.

What made me write this book? I am one of those very few people who survived a double pulmonary embolism, a heart attack and a stroke all within a ten day span of time.  I am what they call a medical outlier. I had my first heart attack three months before, and it was the experience of this one in particular that allowed me to weather over forty days in hospitals as a result of the second.  The experience of this time led me to write “Peekaboo God.”

PageOneLit.com:  Where did you grow up and was reading and writing a part of your life? Who were your earliest influences and why?

Daniel Dwyer:  I grew up in Roxbury, Mission Hill Section of Boston.  Mission Hill gets its name from Mission Church, which was built by the Redemptorist Order over a hundred years ago.  Later, I joined that order to become a priest.  By the way, the book Peekaboo God is dedicated to the Redemptorists.  I am one of four children.  My mother was a devout Catholic; my father was also religious to a certain extent, but he was an avid reader, and I think all of us picked up his habit of reading.  I went to the Mission Church parochial school growing up, and attended one year at Mission High School before leaving for the seminary.  When I was in the fifth grade, a nun told me and my parents that I should seek help for a stuttering problem.  My parents agreed to send me to an after school speech program.  Because of this disability a whole new world opened to me.  The greatest stutterer of all time was Demosthenes, an ancient Greek, whom a nun told me put marbles in his mouth to deal with the stuttering and his lisp.  Oh, yes, I also had a lisp.  I was fascinated that Demosthenes would go to such lengths to become the most famous orator in ancient Greece.  I found the same resolve in Ted Williams, my boyhood idol.  All Ted wanted to be was that guy strolling down the street to whom passers-by would say: “There goes the greatest hitter that ever lived.”  Many sports writers believe he had realized his goal.  His favorite nick name was “The Kid.”  And he was a kid at heart.  Getting back to Demosthenes, as I flipped through the pages of a library book on the ancient Greeks, I came across such people as Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.  One day I bought a book entitled Greek Philosophy.  I must have been in the sixth grade.  I remember it was a bright red glossy cover.  My mother turned me into the Redemptorist pastor because she thought I was reading heresy.  The pastor sent Father Anderson up to our apartment to enquire.  He looked at the book, smiled, asked me a few questions, smiled again and then turned to my mother: “If this is what he is reading, Mrs. Dwyer, I would not worry a bit about him.”  From then on she never questioned what I read.  At Mission High I had to write quite a bit because I had joined the debating team.  And of course, the focus of the seminary academic program was writing and speaking.

 

PageOneLit.com:  Talk about your near-death experience....

Daniel Dwyer:  Unless you have been shot close to the heart or are in the jaws of a shark, I cannot imagine thinking you are going to die when something like a heart attack hits you.  Your first reaction is denial, like this is not happening to me.  It was a Sunday afternoon and I was shopping in Targets to get something for an upcoming hospital stay.  I was going to have a bilateral knee replacement in a few days.  I got the attack then.  I knew something was wrong but I went ahead with what I had to do.  Buying socks and stuff.  It was stupid.  Then, the heaviness and the pain went away.  I felt relieved.  It was nothing after all, or so I thought.  I went home, ate and a few hours later it hit me again.  I told my wife, Eileen, I thought the pain was serious and to call 911.  I was rushed to North Shore hospital.  Luckily there was a team of surgeons on duty…for someone else as it turns out, who was late for his appointment.  They put a couple of stents in my right coronary artery and whisked me off to ICU, intensive care unit.  It was there that I had this incredible experience that I described in the book, stillness, and a realization that I am loved.  From that moment on, any kind of concerns or fears that I might have would be washed away with this realization.  I am loved by the one who is Love.  Little did I know how much I would need that strength!  Three months later when I finally had my knees replaced, I survived a double pulmonary embolism, a heart attack and a stroke within ten days of each other.  I spent another month in the hospital undergoing certain heart related procedures.  I developed internal bleeding and a resistance to blood transfusions.  Eventually, they found where the bleeding was coming from, and I was finally on the way to recovery.  Throughout this latter episode I can truthfully say that I was not concerned.  I went with the flow because I had already been told months earlier, not to worry.  I am loved.

 

PageOneLit.com: Why did you write  'Peekaboo God ' ?

Daniel Dwyer:  You have to tell someone about an experience like this: it is so definable, but I could not yet come to terms with it because my faith was pretty weak, even in face of all of that, and so I did not talk to anyone about it.  Not even to my wife.  I did mention it to my atheist client-friend because I thought it would comfort him as he was dying of brain cancer.  All he showed me was good natured scoffing.  Another reason not to talk about it!  And so, who was I to talk about a near death experience?  Instead I wrote about it, more to collect my thoughts which were very random at first.  I had continued writing for a year and a half, almost anywhere where my thoughts would take me, on human nature and science, especially biology and cosmology, and God’s relationship to us.  One thing led to another and before I knew it, I had the stuff of a book on my hands.  But the writing had no direction or outline, until one day I stumbled upon an old seminarian philosophy book which had listed the branches of philosophy.  When I looked at it closely I realized that what I was piecing together in my writing was the outline of my philosophy course in the seminary.  It is amazing how life comes around.  I did not read it as a sign or anything like that, as some people might attribute such coincidences, although it just might be that.  I have learned not to rule out anything these days.  What I saw was a book that might help people who were struggling with their faith, especially on an intellectual level, because it was helping me get through a terrible patch.  I also thought it might benefit atheists, whom I believe get a much distorted view of believers.

 

PageOneLit.com:  'Peekaboo God ' -- Describe the title as it relates to the 'book'.

Daniel Dwyer:   Peekaboo, as we all know, is what adults say to very small children.  It’s a game.  It is a natural way for us to break down the barrier between adult and child.  We have to get their attention first, so we scare them in a way, but as soon as they begin to think it is real and cry, we reveal ourselves to them.  That revelation creates a bond.  We say sorry and laugh as we do because we know the child is going to forgive us.  Children are very forgiving because as we see, the child responds appropriately.  He suddenly likes the game and wants to do it again, at least some do, if some are not traumatized by adults who go a little too far with it, like the Godfather at the end of the movie.  So, in a way God is a Peekaboo God in that he scares us with the uncertainties of life, but if we come close to him at the center of ourselves, a place and state I call “aloneness,” we will feel his presence.  It may not be an epiphany, but it is a sense of otherness that we are drawn to explore, and the more we do that the more we come to this realization that we are loved.  Our whole purpose in life is to be loved and to return the favor to each other.  Peekaboo also means that in the end we must be like little children if we are to discover God’s love and grace.  “Unless you are like one of these little ones, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven,” said Jesus.  We are rational and social animals, but we are also believing animals, and that means we shall always have the capacity to be one of the little ones.  Whether we are atheists or theists we are all called to believe in someone or something to make sense of life, even if it is to say that life does not make any sense.  That too is a belief.  Only by the grace of God have I come to believe in Him as a personal God.  He gave us the means to prove his existence as a Supreme Being.  Once we plummet the depths of that rational and deductive discovery, I believe He gives us the grace to believe in Him as a personal and loving God.

 

PageOneLit.com:  'Peekaboo God'  tackles subject matter that is long overdue -- The goal to answer atheists questions and views is brave and difficult -- List two questions here that are in  'Peekaboo God ' and answer them... The atheist believes in science, in the eternity of matter and in life as good or pathetic, depending solely upon the randomness of it all, for which no one should infer any meaning than what is at face value - How do you answer these questions? Give us a "peekaboo' into the book....

Daniel Dwyer: This is a two edge book.  One is to cut through the underbrush in order to explore traces of God in our lives and the other is to cut down the arguments of atheists whose books have grown like an epidemic, especially those of the aggressive types like Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Fred Harris and now Christopher Hitchens, whom I am surprised hasn’t changed his name to ‘opher Hitchens.  Francis Collins’ book Language of God is perhaps the only book on the market in the last year that has tried to stand up for God on a scientific level, but some think it falls short because he relies on ethical arguments for the existence of God, and as a scientist does not put too much stock on the cosmological arguments of First Cause, Prime Mover and Necessary Being.  These are arguments from deduction, and are still valid because God is immeasurable which would preclude any argument from induction or the scientific method. 

The problem I have with some of these atheists is the set of assumptions that they bring to the table in order to pitch their theses that God does not exist and that religion is responsible for all the evils and ills of mankind.  They do not properly disclose these assumptions because if they did, most people with a modicum of good sense would quickly see the error of their ways.  For example, they say that natural selection does not need a cause for its activity.  It simply is the activity of biological being, an effect without a cause.  The activity is its own cause.  No external cause for an activity means that there is no agency or one to bring natural selection into being.  The clear assumption here is that matter is eternal, having no beginning and no end.  Einstein initially thought this way, but could no longer hold to the idea of a universe without a beginning, because that is what his own General Theory of Relativity ultimately says.  The Big Bang has also resolved that discussion, the speculation of parallel universes notwithstanding. They also assume that all reality is measurable, but scientists can no longer hold to that belief either.  The Uncertainty Principle of Werner Heisenberg has done away with any hope of being able to measure matter at its most elemental level without also compromising any data from such measurement.  According to Heisenberg we cannot give the location and speed of direction of a particle at the same time.  One or the other is the most we can get from measurement.  The same principle, I believe, is true in microbiology.  No two neuronal pathways in the human brain are the same from one person to the other.  It’s like DNA, a signature of the uniqueness of every human being.  According to Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman, it is unlikely for us to be able to measure directly any neuronal activity in the brain without also degrading the neurons or the synaptic action we are measuring.  Both the cosmologist and the microbiologist, however, have ruled out any non-material cause for either the creation of the universe or the soul of man.  My answer is that neuronal activity in the brain that is shown lit up in fMRIs when people are consciously engaged in one activity or thought process or another are mere biological correlates of the person, whose soul is ultimately responsible for the higher levels of conceptualization and the use of language.  I maintain that science is unlikely to determine how the human brain uses language to communicate to the world as well as to oneself.  I maintain this because I do not see how materiality explains the non-materiality of so many features of the human person such as morality, language, conceptualization and human love.

 

PageOneLit.com:  The aggressive atheist, is strongly convinced that religion is the source of all evil in the world and has been throughout history. Explain.

Daniel Dwyer:  Unfortunately, enough people of religion have not acquitted themselves too well over the centuries.  Pope John Paul II has apologized many times for the sins of the church and his predecessors.  So, there is a recognition of the scandal caused by religious people, whatever their motivation was.  With that having been said, to conclude that religion is the source of all evil in the world is laughable.  It destroys the atheists’ credibility to make a statement like that.  If you do a fair analysis of the violence of man against man you will find more political, economic and cultural reasons for such violence than you will find religious.  It is not religion per se that is responsible for much of the violence that in some cases can be fairly attributed to it, such as the elimination of heretics both during the early church and at the time of the Spanish Inquisition.  You cannot lay at the feet of religion the cause of the worse wars in the twentieth century, for example.  Hitler, Stalin and Mao Tse-tung were all atheists, who were responsible for tens of millions of deaths, despite the ignorant claims of Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion.  I cannot and therefore will not speak for Jews and Muslims, but the wars and battles between Protestants and Catholics that occupied so much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe were mainly political.  A very good example of this was one of the first battles between these two religious groups, the sacking of Rome in 1527 by German Protestant noblemen who had joined Martin Luther against popery.  Who gave this group permission to invade Italy and sack Rome?  The Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, who was himself a Catholic, at least acquiesced.  Then, who began to fight each other?  The Catholic king of France came to the rescue of the pope against the Catholic emperor, who three years later the pope forgave and crowned Holy Roman Emeror. The Reformation, while religiously inspired, manifested itself in violence for mostly political reasons, on both sides.  Violence is more about power than religion, and yet it is true that so much evil was done in the name of religion as a rallying cry, but one has to underscore the fact that it was in the name of religion and not for the sake of religion that much of this violence occurred.

 

PageOneLit.com: What did you learn from writing  'Peekaboo God ' ?

Daniel Dwyer:  I did a lot of research for this book and the main thing I learned is how connected everything is.  I recognize that this is an argument for evolution in the sense that more complicated organisms came from simpler and simpler organisms.  That is biological entropy, the simple gives way to the complicated and chaos is born of order, just as we see in physics.  Specialization and diversity have their roots in simplicity and unity.  So, I do believe in evolution, with two clear cut differences from the Darwinists.  First, it is more likely that multicellular organisms are responsible for the diversity that we have than unicellular organisms alone, and that human intelligence is a direct gift of God through his creation of the human soul within the person.  Evolution cannot explain human intelligence.  Pure and simple.  But we also cannot prove the existence of the soul using the scientific method, nor can we come to an ironclad proof of its existence through deduction, but I believe we can make a better case for it than against it.

 

PageOneLit.com: What do you want readers to take away from after reading  'Peekaboo God ' ?

Daniel Dwyer:  People have to realize that we are “believing” animals by nature.  That is so important to understand.  There is no such thing as a non-believer, even if a person must believe in nothing.  He has to believe that nothing is something.  Accepting that opening premise forces us to respect everyone’s view with dignity, even if we sometimes tear out our hair at the frustration the other side causes us.  If the reader of this book is a theist, he should not feel that the body of science lies overwhelmingly against him.  It does not.  Microbiology and Cosmology are not walls coming together to crowd God out, but windows through which we can see, or at least, infer his presence and his design at work through the natural law.  If the reader is an atheist, he should become less aggressive about his stand and more open to the possibility of man as a spiritual being meant for a spiritual plane.  That follows from the fact that man is a believing animal.

 

PageOneLit.com: What's next?

Daniel Dwyer:  By way of a book?  I want to follow up on Peekaboo God, because this book is only half the story, and I hope believers who read this book will understand that it is just the beginning.  Revelation is the second part of the story, and so the working title for the next book may be Peekaboo God Revealed, assuming that the original is successful enough to plow the way for the second.  Revelation can be summed up in one word: Resurrection.  I am looking forward to writing it.

 

PageOneLit.com: What was the last book you read? 

Daniel Dwyer:  The Genius Engine by Kathleen Stein.  She is an excellent reporter on the scientific findings of the operation of the brain.  She has followed many scientists who have made the brain their life’s work.  Her focus in this book is the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is the executive branch of the brain.  It is a very intriguing account of how each specific area coincides with respective thinking, actions, emotions and interactions within the other parts of the brain.  The book, however, appears to labor under the assumption that the brain’s activity in the form of these electrical flashes that we see in fMRIs is ultimately responsible for everything that man does and thinks and decides.  Again, for me the brain’s higher end activities are material correlates of the soul’s activity.

 

PageOneLit.com: Do you have any hobbies? What are they? How do they enhance your writing?

Daniel Dwyer:  I like to read.  I like to walk.  I like having friends over.  I like to watch sports and old movies, especially film noir.  The screenwriters of today have nothing on the old masters of the thirties and forties.  Who would dare do a remake of the Thin Man Series?  When I think of something to say or write I sometimes think about them.  They were very literate men and women who transformed – often enough – books into film.  They had an ear for the word, the origin of which I might add here is a mystery, which science has no way of understanding.  Our knowledge, I also believe, at the very basic level of being is bound to be limited.  That’s another reason for us to adopt the attitude of a child towards life and the stars.  We can get so close only to discover how far we are from the Tree of Knowledge.