Irrational Thoughts
One thing that I have been thinking about the past day or so is the idea of logic. What is logic? Where did it come from? Is it a universal measuring stick for sanity? This could be because I'm a software developer. My career revolves around this idea of logic. Structuring Object Oriented or procedural code to do something in a logical and controlled fashion is what I do. So now its second nature for me to apply such thoughts to life. But what about God?
Think about these statements for about a minute: If God has free will, then He can therefore do whatever He wants. If God is omnipotent, then He knows what He is going to do before he does it. God cannot be omnipotent and have free will.
Amazingly, these statements--given the actual definitions of the concepts of omnipotence and free will--are rock solid from a mathmatical perspective. One cannot be both omnipotent and have free will because you will know what you are going to do before you do it (omnipotence), and therefore have no choice in the matter (free will). So you can't be both.
The biggest gotcha in this strong atheist point of view is what I call the caged bird metaphor. By applying logic to God we are taking Him out of His character, and putting him in the cage called human reasoning; similar to caging a bird. We expect the bird to play by our rules. To hop around, eat nuts, and white out errors on newspapers. When you release the bird, a miracle occurs. It does something limited to only a few breathing mammals. It flies.
God is like this. When we release Him from the cage of logic He become real to us. A miracle worker. God can do things that we would otherwise dismiss as logically or reasonably impossible. Fortunately for us, God trancends reason. He is an irrational God. A complex number with infinite dimensions. That's exactly how amazing He is. Release Him, and He can do anything. But cage him, and He is limited in His works on our lives. Not because He isn't big enough, but because we stop His works. We keep him from blessing us or morphing us into the person that we are designed to be.
Thank God that He is irrational, else I would be the most hopeless man in the world =)!
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May 30th, 2006 - 22:44
That definitely gets the old hamster turning the wheel. Too bad mines dead. Been dead since about 11 this morning.
But, seriously, it makes sense. God isn’t a human, and isn’t limited by the human limit(for lack of a better word/phrase), so therefore He can do anything that he wishes, unless someone is too stubborn to let(or see) Him do it. And if that didn’t make any sense, then blame it on my lack of mental awareness at this moment.
Peace and chicken grease!
~Dave
May 30th, 2006 - 23:36
I think that God is a completely rational and logical God. Because like you say, God lives outside of human reason… a place where freewill as we know it does not exist. The bible says in many places the predictability of God to a certain degree. We know that God will always be just in his actions and that his love is un-waivering. In the Bible, God said through the Apostle Paul, that “when all other men are found to be unfaithful, God is faithful because he CANNOT DENY HIS NATURE.” God has a very defined nature–that doesn’t mean that men can understand it–because we can’t. I’m sure you’re familiar with the passage in which God says, His thoughts are higher than our thoughts. And that our greatest deeds are but filthy rags in comparison to his. The truth is, like you say, that we cannot compare ourselves to God. Many people arguing against the existence of a God do fall into the snare of you “caged bird” analogy. People wanna put God in a box… but I don’t know of any box that can contain the entire universe.
So i guess that i pretty much take the Calvinist’s stance and say that I pretty don’t believe in Free-will in the conventional sense of the word. A logical examination at the nature of omnipotence proves this point for me. If God knows everything, he knows the decisions you are going to make–accepting Christ as your saviour being one of them. To say that you have the freewill to choose who you serve, that is to say that God does not know a number of things, such as: the condition of your heart, the situations you’re in, or, above all, the answer you will make. The fact is that God knows these things, and he is guaranteed to know these things because God cannot deny what he is… that is that he is sovereign, omnipotent, and omniscient. That’s pretty logical to me.
Logic is important for humans. It is the way that God created us. He knew what he was doing; there is no doubt in my mind of that. I believe that logical christians make the greatest arguments for Christ because God is completely logical. If you don’t believe me, read some works by C.S. Lewis (e.g. Mere Christianity) for some hardcore logical christian apoligetics that are still making waves in Christians’ lives almost 100 years after he wrote them! If you’re still not impressed with him, check out Jonathan Edwards. I think between the two of them, you will have some VERY LOGICAL idea of the workings of God and, yet, still not have a clue. That’s the way God is. That’s the way God was. And that’s the way that He will always be.
May 31st, 2006 - 01:03
Your statement: “God lives outside of human reason” and “I think that God is a completely rational and logical God” contradict one another. The very definition of being irrational is living outside of human reason. You make some good points, but I stand by my statment that logic cannot be applied to God in the conventional sense. I have read alot of Lewis and a little of Edwards, and they do take a quite scientific and mathematical approach to theology. I enjoy those methods of serving the Gospel very much. Alot of what you talk about requires a key element: Faith. Of which, I realize that you have an overabundance of =). However, from a dry and logical front most of tautology style proofs against God tend to hold (the example I gave isn’t the only one out there, check wikipedia). Take the faith out of the equation and you have a mathematically binding proof. You cannot prove or disprove the existance of God, and although you have proved that logic can be a strong point for a believer and a case for God; I have proved that it is quite possibly one of the largest stumbling blocks we face. Specifically when coupled with pride.
I agree wholeheartedly when you say that God’s nature is defined. He exists to glorify himself (thus sayeth the Piper). But even that doesn’t make alot of sense to the casual reader. It takes some deep meditation and communion to understand the true meaning behind that five word sentence. Well, at least it did for dumb old me. It’s easy to look at that statement and say that God is out for only Himself and hence He is a selfish and prideful God. But looking deeper you truely understand that if God is not for Himself, then things just plain don’t work.
Also, Logic isn’t important to everyone. Ask a teenager to approach a dating situation logically and you will probably go crazy trying to advise the poor young person on how to go about it. In addition, it’s no small secret that our better halves (I speak of the female side of the species
) tend to favor emotion over logic. But eh, I could be nitpicking technicalities.
And finally, the argument isn’t whether or not God or His nature follows reason–which to a Christian is obvious, but to a non-believer is total insanity–it was the application of logic to God; hence putting him in a box. Brush up on those critical reading skillz Bentard =P. Thanks for the awesome comment!