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“god in a box”

Blaise Paschal (1623-1662), a French scientist and religious philosopher, wrote his “Pensees,” fragments, if not little gems presenting his view of the world. His thoughts trace the universal search for God as he cuts across doctrine and into the very heart of the moral problem. When I am tired or distracted, Paschal’s terse sentences can re-start my thinking. He wrote, “Two extremes: to exclude reason, to admit reason only.”
When you are considering God, his essence and actions, his very existence, do you exclude reason or do you admit reason only? For some people, the pursuit of God is wholly mystical. To think is to retard the search. For others, the pursuit of God is wholly rational. The only way to encounter God is through rationalism. Paschal is refreshingly biblical in his aphorism. God is essentially incomprehensible, yet he has revealed himself to us. His revelation in nature and in inspired word can be received and interpreted by use of reason. Nevertheless, some of the divine revelation defies reason and must be considered as a presentation of the divine Person above and beyond the human mind.
We use our minds to understand God, moving us to marvel. At the same time we use our minds to marvel at what we have discovered to be incomprehensible about God. Today I heard of a well-educated woman who confessed to have made her own god. You have heard of “god in a box,” haven’t you? How did God get there? What is the true value of “god in a box?”

Published in: Apologetics | on February 13th, 2007 |

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  1. On 2/14/2007 at 2:24 pm Andrew vonderLuft Said:

    You remind of some things in G.K. Chesterton, among them this:

    Logic and truth, as a matter of fact, have very little to do with each other. Logic is concerned merely with the fidelity and accuracy with which a certain process is performed, a process which can be performed with any materials, with any assumption. You can be as logical about griffins and basilisks as about sheep and pigs. On the assumption that a man has two ears, it is good logic that three men have six ears, but on the assumption that a man has four ears, it is equally good logic that three men have twelve. And the power of seeing how many ears the average man, as a fact, possesses, the power of counting a gentleman’s ears accurately and without mathematical confusion, is not a logical thing but a primary and direct experience, like a physical sense, like a religious vision. The power of counting ears may be limited by a blow on the head; it may be disturbed and even augmented by two bottles of champagne; but it cannot be affected by argument. Logic has again and again been expended, and expended most brilliantly and effectively, on things that do not exist at all. There is far more logic, more sustained consistency of the mind, in the science of heraldry than in the science of biology. There is more logic in Alice in Wonderland than in the Statute Book or the Blue Books. The relations of logic to truth depend, then, not upon its perfection as logic, but upon certain pre-logical faculties and certain pre-logical discoveries, upon the possession of those faculties, upon the power of making those discoveries. If a man starts with certain assumptions, he may be a good logician and a good citizen, a wise man, a successful figure. If he starts with certain other assumptions, he may be an equally good logician and a bankrupt, a criminal, a raving lunatic. Logic, then, is not necessarily an instrument for finding truth; on the contrary, truth is necessarily an instrument for using logic—for using it, that is, for the discovery of further truth and for the profit of humanity. Briefly, you can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

    ~ G. K. Chesterton (Daily News, Feb 25, 1905)
  2. On 2/15/2007 at 12:35 pm nathan lewis Said:

    Thank you, Andrew, for a brilliant quote. Wit is a tricky vehicle for truth, but a few have mastered its navigation - G.K. being one. Paschal was certainly not anti-reason. Here are a few additional aphorisms from his “Pensees,” to encourage us to employ our minds rationally in pursuit of truth:
    “Memory is necessary for all the operations of reason.”

    “There is an internal war in man between reason and the passions. If he had only the reason without passions…If he had only passions without reason… But having both, he cannot be without strife, being unable to be at peace with the one without being at war with the other. Thus he is always divided against, and opposed to himself.”

    “Faith indeed tells what the senses to not tell, but not the contrary to what they see. It is above them and not contrary to them.”

    “The last proceeding of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it. It is feeble if it does not see so far as to know this. But if natural things are beyond it, what will be said of the supernatural?”

    “If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have no mysterious and supernatural element. If we offend the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous.”
    nathan.

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