Meaningful contradictions

Whenever someone says "Don't you impose your God on me; your religion might be true for you, but not for me," I wonder how sound that person's math skills are. Does two plus two equal four only for me? Is that true for me, but not everyone else? Or how about their grasp of elementary science: is gravity true only for me? If you're sufficiently exercised at all the suffering caused by gravity (people falling down, buildings collapsing, avalanches), can you simply reject it? Step off a skyscraper and fly around like a bird?

But then, just a couple of weeks back, I wrote a blog entry about my take on evolution, and I said that God, by choice, leaves His existence in the realm of that which could be otherwise, which the Greeks categorized as phronesis, as distinct from episteme, true knowledge. God leaves enough looseness and slippage in the world, enough plausible alternative explanations, that people come to Him only by choice, and never because they're trapped into it. But if that's the case, then I bump up against a contradiction: above, I'm asserting that His existence, sovereignty, role in creating and sustaining the universe all are features of reality, universally and uniformly applicable everywhere and to everyone, meaning they're in the realm that which could not be otherwise, the true knowledge that Chaïm Perelman says is the product of demonstration, not argumentation.

Not long after I spotted this knot, its solution also struck me, much to my delight. I've never been terribly convinced by attempts to disprove God's existence through reductio ad absurdum. Using language, a finite system, to try to map the features of God, a transcendent being, is a sketchy undertaking in the first place. And where we find that things we believe to be true about God result in contradictions, it's foolishness to spring to the conclusion that we've just eliminated the possibility of His existence. What's far more likely is that the reconciliation of His attributes requires knowledge that our brains can't contain.

A week or so ago, I stumbled across a YouTube clip of Carl Sagan discussing the fourth dimension and showing a 3D shadow of a hypercube. The best we can do in understanding dimensions beyond the three of our senses is cobble together mathematical equations about them; we can't visualize them, and there seems widespread acceptance that this is just a shortcoming of our brain architecture. If that's easily accepted, then why do we struggle so mightily to understand that a far more complex problem might not yield all its nuances to our ability to capture meaning in words? God is all powerful, all knowing, all good, and evil exists in the world; the fourth statement in that series contradicts the first three. But it doesn't, because it simply describes a problem whose answer we don't know. To claim that no answer can exist, just because no human with a human brain has produced the answer, is hogwash. Another example: God is sovereign and orders all things, yet human beings have free will. Those two conditions can't both exist as propositions, but that simply means the logic that reconciles them is more than we can grasp.

A lot of times, I imagine a three-year-old toddler trying to tell her toddler friend what her mommy does all day at work. Does the toddler understand it all? Does she have the vocabulary and sophistication to explain it? Do those failings mean that her mother's job simply doesn't exist? Of course not.

So the reality of God's existence belongs both in the realm of that which could, and could not, be otherwise. And all I've found is that those categories of knowledge, however useful they've been since ancient times, are still of human construction and thus, necessarily, incomplete and imperfect.