Friday, December 03, 2010
Silly?
Joe Carter at First Thoughts posted twice a while back, in two posts on calculating the probability of the existence of God. Reasonable work - but in the end I think it is silly.
I was recently in a discussion with some Roman Catholic friends that wanted to know if I thought the Shroud of Turin was "the real deal." My response was "we'll never know" - and I like it that way.
The "assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen" lies at the very heart of who we are as Christians. Without it, we are in a very real sense no different than a secularist.
Sometimes as Christians we focus on salvation and works that we forget some of the genuine underlying things about being Christian. One of them is a belief in and contact with the supernatural. By definition the supernatural is beyond our science, mathematics and even our logic.
When we attempt to reduce faith in God into something that we can encounter on our own terms, as opposed to His, we reduce Christianity itself. It becomes in some sense our religion when in fact it should be us becoming God's people.
I believe a large part of the Christian walk to be a walk towards transcendence. We should be moving away from that which grounds us in the here and now and towards an eternal perspective. For only by gaining such an eternal perspective can we effectively be transformed in the here and now.
I have always thought that the best way to reach those with "logical" objections to belief in God is to change the subject. Somewhere in them is a piece of the transcendent God. It is to that which we must appeal.
I was recently in a discussion with some Roman Catholic friends that wanted to know if I thought the Shroud of Turin was "the real deal." My response was "we'll never know" - and I like it that way.
The "assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen" lies at the very heart of who we are as Christians. Without it, we are in a very real sense no different than a secularist.
Sometimes as Christians we focus on salvation and works that we forget some of the genuine underlying things about being Christian. One of them is a belief in and contact with the supernatural. By definition the supernatural is beyond our science, mathematics and even our logic.
When we attempt to reduce faith in God into something that we can encounter on our own terms, as opposed to His, we reduce Christianity itself. It becomes in some sense our religion when in fact it should be us becoming God's people.
I believe a large part of the Christian walk to be a walk towards transcendence. We should be moving away from that which grounds us in the here and now and towards an eternal perspective. For only by gaining such an eternal perspective can we effectively be transformed in the here and now.
I have always thought that the best way to reach those with "logical" objections to belief in God is to change the subject. Somewhere in them is a piece of the transcendent God. It is to that which we must appeal.
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