I think to believe in God is to believe that God can create an immovable object and an unstoppable force and have them collide without any trouble.

To us it would seem impossible, but to God it would be fine. I imagine it sort of like deja vu. In deja vu our senses and feelings (which are the way our bodies organize the world) tell us that something has happened before, or some such impossible thing. But we tend to trust our logic (which is how our brain organizes the world). And so what we "know" to be true conflicts with what we "see/feel" to be true. But it's not a paradox, because we just chose logic because logic has consistently been right when pitted against feelings.

Well to us it would seem the same with God's paradox, logically the collision would not be able to happen, and yet there we go, we would see/feel/know that the immovable object didn't move and the unstoppable force didn't stop and they collided anyhow.

That's the problem I've always had with believing in God. It seems that faith is throwing aside a tool that works for almost all things (logic) and picking up a tool which works for very little (faith without logic). Believing in God feels like having faith that there is someone up there who understands how it all works (supreme logic?), but believing just because we don't understand it all down here. Why can't we have faith that no one understands it all, and that logic is just how we'll have to go about life until we find out otherwise? It feels like God was invented by some Obsessive Compulisive humans who can't stand the thought of not being able to explain everything.

But why did God catch on so well? Why do I find myself believing?

I think we give into faith because no one wants to live in a world without love and supreme morality and goodness. And all of those are without real logic. We want them to be beyond logic; we want love to be beyond a tool or an emotion. We want it to be part of some supreme illogical thing.

I'm in love with a young woman here in Omaha. It feels completely illogical and makes me have faith in something that makes no sense and I love it and her and it makes me very very happy. But I'm headed to Chicago in the fall and she to Gustavus Adolphus, and at that point I'm guessing I'll lose my faith and go back to living a logical, if depressing, life. My faith is fickle I guess, based on human things. But from where I see it, all faith in God comes from humans.

I hope that's not insulting to anyone. I really would like to have a solid foundation to believe in God from, I just can't seem to build one out of logic.

posted by john owens-ream   [3:37 PM]

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