Not long ago, I and a friend of mine, who is a person of faith, got into a spirited discussion about why I could not share her faith. She actually believes that the Universe is less than 7000 years old, that dinosaurs coexisted with human beings (the Fred Flintstone School of Paleontology) and that the flood of Noah laid out the fossil record (even though there’s no sedimentation process that would deposit the fossils in the particular layers we find them–were it true, we should find the heaviest creatures, e.g. dinosaurs on bottom, then lighter ones, e.g. humans and finally the lightest on top, e.g. trilobites. That’s not what we find. In addition, it also doesn’t explain why the pattern from simple to complex life repeats multiple times. Were there multiple floods?).
So, one by one I laid out my logical arguments, not to convince her that god didn’t exist, but that a literal interpretation of the stories in her holy book was not well founded. She is an intelligent woman and I thought that logic and reason would reach her, but she wasn’t having any of it. Finally, in a desperate attempt to reach the logician I knew was within her, I trotted out an old chestnut and asked her, “Can god create a stone so heavy even he cannot lift it.” As many of you know, the question shows the logical contradiction of any entity being omnipotent (all-powerful). A more general version is, “Can god perform an act that even he cannot undo?”
Anyway, she knew I had boxed her into a logical corner. But, instead of admitting that and rethinking her position, she did what most people of faith do and proclaimed, “You can’t apply logic to god!” She’ll never admit it, but at that point she had conceded the argument to me. Indeed, it’s really not even possible to win a rational argument defending a concept that is inherently irrational.
However, she did get me thinking (and I would like to thank her for that here–thinking is always a good thing). Was I really trying to apply logic to god? Was that really what I had done? Well, I thought about it for quite a while when I realized the truth. I wasn’t applying logic to god. I was applying logic to her concept of god. Those are not the same thing. While a god of some kind may very well exist, that doesn’t mean that her (or anyone else’s) concept of who and what he/she/it/they is/are is correct. In fact, the logical conundrum I presented to my friend is exactly why I think she and others like her are wrong. What they consider god cannot exist, because whenever you allow a contradiction, you cannot determine truth. In fact, things must be both true and false at the same time or neither true nor false but not unknown, conditions that simply cannot exist if we are to have any understanding. And, understanding is the key.
That got me thinking even further. What if she was actually right? I was applying logic to her concept of god. But, what if you really can’t apply logic to god at all?. What would be the implications of that possibility? I spent many weeks pondering that idea and came up with four possibilities. There may be more, but these were all I could come up with.
- You really can’t apply logic to god.
- You can apply logic, but he/she/it/they is/are so far beyond our understanding that we wouldn’t understand the logic anyway.
- You can apply logic and god is omnipotent/omniscient (a logical contradiction)
- You can apply logic and god is not omnipotent/omniscient
In my next post, I’ll start to examine each possibility and what I think the implications are. After examining them all, I’ll then draw a conclusion based on my findings.
Stay tuned…