Now how do I know that?

On occasion it would be very convenient if human beings could read minds,
perhaps when interrogating crime suspects or when waiting for the moment to ask a girl out on a date. On balance, however, it's probably a good thing that they can't. Aside from laying bare all our deepest hopes and the ideas we'd never speak aloud, it would completely devastate a good game of chess.  Ah well, such is fantasy. As fantasy, it cannot serve as a neat little answer to a more fundamental question: how do we know things?

Some things, of course, we know because our senses tell us. We feel a switch flick beneath our fingers and see the room be bathed in light. While philosophers argue about the trustworthiness of our senses, broadly speaking we all agree that they're normally reliable.

A paradox of power

Every so often, people try to point out the inconsistencies inherent in being truly omnipotent. Could your omnipotent God make a sandwich too big for him to eat? Could he create a rock too heavy for him to lift? Could he create a problem beyond his ability to solve?
The standard answer is rather boring, delving into formal logic and contradictions in the definitions of the words. Strictly speaking it's "A rock an omnipotent being can't lift is a logical impossibility. Omnipotence doesn't imply the ability to perform logical impossible tasks."
Being asked the last one, however, I realised that there is something more significant about the questions: they focus on what God can do but ignore who God is. Moreover, God can and did get himself into a problem he couldn't solve!

The year is about 30 A.D.
The scene, a small hillside garden about 2 miles east of Jerusalem. It's a chilly spring night, and a small band of Jewish men are asleep on the grass. Their mentor comes down to awaken them, visibly distressed.
He has been desperately praying to his omnipotent God to rescue him from his approaching doom, but has ultimately resigned himself to continue as the Lord intended.

But you would say that...

"I plead innocent of course.
If I say otherwise, I'll be trapped behind iron for the next few years at least."

When a defendant files an innocent plea, you can't just believe them. When a salesman heaps praise upon his product, you look for independent reviews before snapping up the offer. When a hopeful politician questions the character of the incumbent MP, you start to question their own integrity instead. In each case the person's report is suspect because they're clearly biased, and bias always tints their perception of  reality and sometimes pushes them to outright lie. They may be right, but it would be a mistake to take their word at face value.

However, it would be an even bigger mistake to dismiss every form of opinion as bias. A witness in aforementioned courtroom would be invaluable in finding the truth. Of course they will have their own rather definite account on whether the accused committed the crime; an account formed not by what is in their own interest but by what they saw and heard at the scene. While some may have subtle biases of their own, a witnesses word should be trusted much more readily than a defendant's. Similarly, if an expert were arguing for a policy, it would foolish to ignore their decades of training and years of research into the matter because they support one side rather than the other. You can't trust an expert to settle the matter with a word, but you should at least pay attention to what they have to say.

Third most beautiful

"Now you see, this isn't going to work. I already told Dave that for all his protests he must have a distant second, 'cause I've clearly got the first. And if he's got the second, your darling can't be more than the third most beautiful girl in the world."
Really, such a declaration deserves a very swift thump to the nose.

There is no logic behind a man's treatment of the woman who whistles in his dreams, nor of the grubby little toddler who stumbles toward the slide in the local park. There is only love. Such is the nature of love, it promotes a vast array of absurd beliefs so profound and precious to the lover it would be almost criminal to point out their absurdity. It is with this as a reference point that Henry Mencken opined, "We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." In other words, those who can see the world in all its harsh reality do not have to believe that their neighbour is best buddies with some invisible all-powerful immaterial entity, but they should be sensitive enough to leave the illusion intact for their neighbour.

Enjoy the Oasis

My family moved around a lot while I was growing up. One year we'd be on the aptly named Emerald Isle complaining in true British fashion about the amount of rain. The next we'd be in one of the arid provinces of Mozambique complaining in a universally human fashion about the temperatures that topped 40 degrees centigrade. Perhaps the hardest thing about such a nomadic lifestyle was the frequency with which I had to say goodbye to my friends. When the average duration for living in a given place is under 2 years, bonds just start to take shape before they get shattered. No matter how good the new place may be, no matter how infrequent the power failures, how clean the water, how likeable the neighbours, or how plentiful the chocolate, the absence of Ron or Mike knocks it several dozen steps away from idyllic. It's worst at night; something about the cold, lonesome darkness simply devours hope and joy.

One of the hardest questions that I've encountered as a Christian takes this problem to an extreme. How can heaven possibly be paradise if your neighbours and friends aren't there? It may have gold paved roads and orchards of life-giving fruit trees, but in loneliness all that would quickly grow stale. The oasis of life may be marvellous, but the memory of those lost in the desert sullies it with sorrow.

The Miracle Car

Computers can usually be considered fairly predictable. They work to rule; rules determine how they accept your input and rules determine what they give you back. In fact, you could use the experimental scientific method to find out and document exactly how those rules work. They might say "in response to pressing the 'W' key the car accelerates in a forward direction by 10 miles per hour per second" or "When the car hits a wall head on it comes to a complete stop." The tenth wall will stop you just as effectively as the first. These investigations in cyberspace could be as rigorous as those used to investigate the physical world around us.

Now let us imagine that you're racing around this virtual universe when another car, completely unlike any other, appears from nowhere right in front of you. You see a steep bend coming up and hope to overtake when this mysterious vehicle slows down for it. Instead the other car runs toward, into and straight through the wall! As it happens, one of your opponents is the programmer who designed the game and he is using his knowledge of the inner workings of the game to subvert the basic laws of that in-game universe. The laws you so painstakingly measured aren't wrong, they just can't address the possibility of an external influence like the cheating programmer.

Michelangelo of the Gaps

Ask a typical geologist, or even a competent GCSE student, how sand forms on the beach and you can expect a step by step procedure as large chunks of rock are split and weathered by the relentless beating of the ocean tides. This is a very slow, perfectly natural process that has been going on for millennia.
Ask how the famous Giant's causeway came about, those striking arrays of hexagonal pillars rising out of the sea on the Irish coast. You'll get a story that starts violently, with a rush of lava at hundreds of degrees, but again is both perfectly natural and unguided.
Ask about any rock form of any size on any continent, and through the gnarled roots of trees, the whipping of the desert winds, the pounding of rivers or the surging of magma from far below us they will provide an explanation, and for the most part those explanations will be perfectly solid.

Now ask instead about David.  The seventeen foot tall marble replica of a man, complete with muscles, bones, joints, and even sideburns, has and can have no unguided natural explanation. The only explanation that explains this phenomenon is the meticulous planning and dexterous hand of the great Renaissance artist and sculptor Michaelangelo. Geologists all agree with the accepted account of the origin of this sculpture, even as they agree on the natural processes that formed the smooth river stones the original David used in his most famous accomplishment.

Which 'God' Wouldn't...?

"Why would Jesus have to go for the whole martyr route anyway? Wouldn't he know that he could be far more effective if he lived on to impart his wisdom to the world?"

"Why would the Holy Spirit kill his own followers for a little white lie? That doesn't sound very 'holy'!"

"Why would God exile us to Hell for eternity over an apple? That's hardly a loving thing to do?"

While each is worthy of an in depth response, they are illustrative of a much broader objection. The objection says that since something would be irrational, evil, or otherwise deeply against the character of God, the whole framework must be wrong.
The Bible must be faulty.
We must have Jesus' identity mixed up.
Somehow, if his existence would create such paradoxes, God himself cannot exist.


The move from "The whole framework must be wrong" to the others isn't a logically valid jump. Our understanding could be imperfect, and certain aspects could be wrong, while most of our beliefs could still be true and proper. However the real problem appears before you even get to that jump. It is a deep-seated misunderstanding of the purpose of the Church and the character of God.