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I've been involved in a lot of debates on this forum and others, and in person, about the subject of God.
Back when I was an atheist, I was quick to make the argument of the impossibility of God, the Trinity, seeming contradictions, and so on, that all really boiled down to the inconceivability of God. It wasn't until really my late 20s that I started to realize that if I were to be able to look myself in the mirror as an atheist I would need to start challenging my own arguments rather than just playing gatekeeper to other arguments. I challenged myself back then to read counter arguments, and settled on CS Lewis and my first step since I found in my search that CS Lewis was a convert.
I've long believed that your best source of cogent arguments for an against any subject are from those people who converted to their current opinions in adulthood. Those who hold their beliefs their whole life tend to maintain the beliefs of a child, I find.
Anyway, my first book by CS Lewis was actually the book that was published posthumously, "Letters to Malcom, Chiefly on Prayer". In that book, Lewis explores the relationship between man and God in ways that, as an Atheist, I felt at home with, but he carried the argument beyond my stopping point into follow-on questions and answers that I found uncomfortable because I found them so compelling. I have reread the book recently, and wanted to address one point.
That brings me to the topic: Imagining God.
In Lewis' book "Mere Christianity", he makes an interesting argument on how to properly think about some of the more puzzling aspects of Biblical teaching, and chiefly on the mystery of the Trinity. As Lewis' points out, this isn't a definitive argument, but merely a supposition that places the seemingly impossible into a logical framework.
The preliminary proposition is this: For the sake of argument, God is omnipotent.
As an omnipotent being, God persists and moves in all dimensions. So, before we go further, consider this short film describing the 10 dimensions:
Lewis, in Mere Christianity, argues the Trinity in much the same fashion as this film describes the encounter between 2 dimensional and 3 dimensional beings. In Lewis' example he uses a group of 2 dimensional square beings in a 2 dimensional world who encounter a 3 dimensional cube being. While the Cube Being can present any of their 6 sides to the 2 dimensional beings, a 2 dimensional being, using the reasoning of a 2 dimensional universe, would view the new being as 6 separate beings.
In this same way Lewis' proposes the simple theory that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are the same being but their unity is in dimensions beyond our ability to easily comprehend. To us they are presented as three separate entities.
It's an interesting hypothesis, and in fact, if God is omnipotent, then it likely to be true since God couldn't truly reveal his whole self to us without presenting as many separate beings.
Back when I was an atheist, I was quick to make the argument of the impossibility of God, the Trinity, seeming contradictions, and so on, that all really boiled down to the inconceivability of God. It wasn't until really my late 20s that I started to realize that if I were to be able to look myself in the mirror as an atheist I would need to start challenging my own arguments rather than just playing gatekeeper to other arguments. I challenged myself back then to read counter arguments, and settled on CS Lewis and my first step since I found in my search that CS Lewis was a convert.
I've long believed that your best source of cogent arguments for an against any subject are from those people who converted to their current opinions in adulthood. Those who hold their beliefs their whole life tend to maintain the beliefs of a child, I find.
Anyway, my first book by CS Lewis was actually the book that was published posthumously, "Letters to Malcom, Chiefly on Prayer". In that book, Lewis explores the relationship between man and God in ways that, as an Atheist, I felt at home with, but he carried the argument beyond my stopping point into follow-on questions and answers that I found uncomfortable because I found them so compelling. I have reread the book recently, and wanted to address one point.
That brings me to the topic: Imagining God.
In Lewis' book "Mere Christianity", he makes an interesting argument on how to properly think about some of the more puzzling aspects of Biblical teaching, and chiefly on the mystery of the Trinity. As Lewis' points out, this isn't a definitive argument, but merely a supposition that places the seemingly impossible into a logical framework.
The preliminary proposition is this: For the sake of argument, God is omnipotent.
As an omnipotent being, God persists and moves in all dimensions. So, before we go further, consider this short film describing the 10 dimensions:
Lewis, in Mere Christianity, argues the Trinity in much the same fashion as this film describes the encounter between 2 dimensional and 3 dimensional beings. In Lewis' example he uses a group of 2 dimensional square beings in a 2 dimensional world who encounter a 3 dimensional cube being. While the Cube Being can present any of their 6 sides to the 2 dimensional beings, a 2 dimensional being, using the reasoning of a 2 dimensional universe, would view the new being as 6 separate beings.
In this same way Lewis' proposes the simple theory that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are the same being but their unity is in dimensions beyond our ability to easily comprehend. To us they are presented as three separate entities.
It's an interesting hypothesis, and in fact, if God is omnipotent, then it likely to be true since God couldn't truly reveal his whole self to us without presenting as many separate beings.
