Thank you all again. I suppose it asking a lot of her. I forget that what comes easily to us is difficult for others without religion. I guess it even bothers me some that I cannot answer her question. I’d like to be able to explain why God is not only necessary, and that it is impossible for Him not to exist, but that He is also a Person, an Intellect. Because I cannot prove this I feel I am taking it based solely on faith and without any philosophical back up other than the “evidence from creation model”. I never like, if I can help it, having resort to faith alone in these things because since I cannot *prove *and *know *it without room for rational error, I feel it is like sand that could potentially slip from my hands. I feel security in certain inerrant knowledge. Since God is a reality, I find it necessary to have not a single qualm about His existence. Not knowing]with complete certainty from logic makes me nervous.
I guess I want to be able to explain to the everyday atheist, "Do not accuse me of using blind faith to believe in God, I have incontestable logical proof in the face of which your universal paradigm of there being no God has no grounds. Abandon now, in view of perfect logic, and submit therefore to the yoke of God, whom you can no longer hide from or deny.
Before you start trying to psychoanalyse God (big job that one), I’d suggest you ask the same question of yourself and your girlfriend, that is, “Why are
we rational and personal beings?”
In the Judeo-Christian tradition we’re rational and personal beings because we’re made in God’s image. We’re trinitarian in our natures for the same reason - body, mind and soul.
Now unless she can show evidence that a bunch of mindless chemicals are just going to get together and cause personality and rationality without any motivation or reason (or even possibility for that matter), then it stands to reason there’s a creator who wanted to create creatures with personality and the ability to reason. This implies a creator who Himself is both rational and personal.
As to “why” God is a rational being, you’ll have to ask God Himself. You’re literally asking God to explain why and how He exists. The fact is that He just is, or as He said to Moses, “I am who I am”. It’s the great mystery along the same lines as “Why is there something rather than nothing?”
We talk about God is love. Why is God love? I mean nature doesn’t display that with each animal dependent on either the destruction and assimilation of other creatures to survive, or at least parasitism. Yesterday I was driving past a bunch of chickens in small cages on a truck, presumably on their way to the abattoir. They were on borrowed time, the poor birds. They’re probably all dead now.
I wonder if they thought “God is love”. Assuming He is, then we have another mystery - in the light of the mutual destruction of other life so that we ourselves may live, then what is “divine love”?
We could go on and on with these questions, and never get any closer to the answer. It reminds me of the story about some old monk or priest who’d been pondering for years about the Trinity and how God could be three in one.
As he walked along the beach he saw a kid filling up a hole with sea water, then going down to the water’s edge, walking back, and filling the hole again, and doing this over and over.
Finally he went to the young lad, and said, “Son, why are you pouring sea water into this hole. All it does is go into the sand.”
The boy answered, “I’m trying to fit the ocean into this hole”.
The old priest laughed. “Son” he said, “You’ll never pour the whole ocean into that little hole”.
The boy looked at him with this strange glint in his eyes and replied, “I’ve got more chance of putting the ocean into this hole, than you have of solving what you’ve been thinking about.”
Then he just disappeared.
.
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