God has come up on the short end of a lot of syllogisms lately.
“I can’t believe in a God that would…”
“I can’t accept that God would…”
“A loving God would never…”
From the disaster in Japan to the question of what happens to the unconverted after death, God has been pushed into the back seat and human logic has taken the reins. If we can’t figure it out, then it’s just not true. If we can’t fully understand and explain it, then it must not exist.
It’s an exaltation of the human mind, a return to the principles of the Greek philosophers. Alexander the Great would be proud, knowing that his quest to spread Hellenism across the world is still affecting the ways we interact with one another.
The irony, of course, is that I use logic all the time on this blog. And in my daily life. I reason with people. I work through patterns of thinking. I use the tools which my modernistic upbringing provided me, logic being one of the main ones.
I think it requires faith to accept that some things are unknowable and incomprehensible for us. I know that it takes courage, for such a view is ridiculed today as shallow and provincial. Could that be why Jesus said we have to be willing to be like a child to enter the Kingdom? It certainly fits with the teachings that the world will hate us and the intellectuals of this world will scoff at our gospel.
The other extreme, of course, is to reject all scholarship, to lock yourself into “the traditions handed down by our fathers.” I’m not advocating that. But I do think that we need to see the limits to our logic. Reason can take us only so far; we go the rest of the way by faith, or we never complete the journey.
When someone says, “I just can’t accept…”, they are being honest and accurate. When they say, “No thinking person can accept…”, they are peddling that which farmers offer us to spread around our gardens. One view accepts personal responsibility; the other places the blame on the concept itself.
Fact is, at some point we choose to believe. Or choose not to believe. And we do that for a wide variety of factors. Logic is one of them, but it is almost never the chief factor. Those that desire not to believe will often point to logic as the reason, but it’s rarely as objective as that. More often than not, we choose not to believe in God or some aspect of God’s nature because of our own wishes and desires, the way we wish things were.
Having thrown logic out the window, I guess I’m rambling a bit with this post. The main thing that I’m trying to say is that I think it takes a lot of courage to say, “I don’t know” or even “I can’t know.” Some see it as a cop out. I see it as accepting the limits of our logic.
