The Lord does not have many attributes. The Lord does not have any attributes. He IS. Bottom line–We believe. We cannot prove God’s existence. We have good arguments, but that is not proof. We do call them proofs. We are well aware that they are arguments, as we call these arguments proof.
You said much in your post, Jim Baur, that is praiseworthy. I’m extracting the above for a reason. First, because you are one of the precious few religious people I’ve encountered who admit and know that faith and knowledge are not the same thing. Certainly there is religious knowledge, as in knowing the Bible and the Magesterium or whatever. But that is what might be called “internal” knowledge of a paradigm, or relative knowledge. That operates as does any knowledge, and the rules of logic apply. The difference is what is accepted as a premise, that difference showing up when religious knowledge from different systems are compared, or when interpretive information is put against what is quantifiable.
Now religion addresses a need which the industrial ontology of today denies, thereby making the world “flat” as distinct from the depth given it by the interior dimensions ascribed to existence by religion, spirituality, and the “ghost in the machine” that scientism uses but denies as a ground even for its own machinations.
Yet we cannot agree, or I cannot, with such as the Baptist marquee I quoted elsewhere that says “Reason is the greatest enemy faith has.” Again, reason is used even by such fundamentalists, only the premise being different. So do we accept the parameters as the seem to be, or go to another dimension which allows a view of the ones we seem to be in? If we can do so and retain a grasp on sanity and reason, it might be, like Gandhi said about Western civilization, “a very good idea.”
For that reason, rather than attempting to cram a simplistic line of inquiry and discovery into this small space, I would like to recommend to you, E_G, a work which explicates a “third way” or maybe a fourth, from which to view this crucial question. I am encouraged to do so my your statements I’ve quoted above and the intelligence they reveal. That work is called
The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object by Franklin Merrell-Wolff. He was an electrical engineer with a gift for analysis beyond most and this work and the previous one are rich in useful gold of a kind you might appreciate.
I truly enjoyed the simplicity and honesty of your post. Thank you.
