June 11, 2009
I am a simple man. I believe in a reality, an existence, that is too big for me to fully see with my finite vision, fully perceive with my finite senses, fully measure with the impressive but finite tools at my disposal, fully grasp with my finite intellect, or fully conceive with my finite imagination. Yet I have been ridiculed for my belief in God by equally finite people who are confident in their ability to know and state categorically that there is no infinite and no God, although it is impossible to do so. They are like a man cut out of a sheet of notebook paper who tells his fellow two-dimensional paper people that to talk of other non-scientifically proveable dimensions and of a three-dimensional world inhabited by large, multicolored, three-dimensional beings who wear shoes and play basketball and eat tacos is foolish and even dangerous, and that only the ignorant and superstitious do so.
To try to understand existence with no reference point outside of that which is observable is like trying to lift oneself off the ground by standing on a rope on the floor with both feet and then pulling up on the rope with both hands. As Francis Schaeffer wrote in The God Who is There, to try to derive meaning for man with only man as a starting point is like wandering along the wall of a round, featureless, pitch-black room without windows or doors. They confidently deny the existence of the infinite God without understanding the meaning of finitum non capax infinitum - the finite cannot contain the infinite.
I am a simple man. I believe in a reality, an existence, that is too big for me to fully see with my finite vision, fully perceive with my finite senses, fully measure with the impressive but finite tools at my disposal, fully grasp with my finite intellect, or fully conceive with my finite imagination. Yet I have been ridiculed for my belief in God by equally finite people who are confident in their ability to know and state categorically that there is no infinite and no God, although it is impossible to do so. They are like a man cut out of a sheet of notebook paper who tells his fellow two-dimensional paper people that to talk of other non-scientifically proveable dimensions and of a three-dimensional world inhabited by large, multicolored, three-dimensional beings who wear shoes and play basketball and eat tacos is foolish and even dangerous, and that only the ignorant and superstitious do so.
To try to understand existence with no reference point outside of that which is observable is like trying to lift oneself off the ground by standing on a rope on the floor with both feet and then pulling up on the rope with both hands. As Francis Schaeffer wrote in The God Who is There, to try to derive meaning for man with only man as a starting point is like wandering along the wall of a round, featureless, pitch-black room without windows or doors. They confidently deny the existence of the infinite God without understanding the meaning of finitum non capax infinitum - the finite cannot contain the infinite.
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