Jots and Tittles

Yes, yes, I've been wasting time on YouTube again.  Only, I don't know that it's really such a waste.  Granted, I've spent plenty of time talking to people who can't hear me as they post videos on YouTube which create straw man arguments against Christianity and then, surprisingly enough, knock them down.  Gasp.

One person posted an argument against what he seems to think is a common argument in favor of Christianity.  The basic argument, as he describes it, is this: We, as human beings, are incapable of truly KNOWING anything - we do not know if we are brains in jars or whether our memories are true or whatever - therefore, reason and observation are just as faith-based as belief in God, and the two belief systems are equally rational.  He then proceeds to point out, quite rightly, that this argument is ridiculous.  Perhaps we do not know for certain that what we observe is real, or true, but we have no good evidence to doubt it.  Reason and observation are perfectly legitimate ways of understanding our world. 

What I find so frustrating about this argument is that it presupposes that there is NO rationality behind a belief in God.  Nothing could be further from the truth, and the fact that Christians (well-meaning, I am sure) seem so ready to admit that their beliefs are irrational drives me bonkers.  It's only giving the atheists one more reason to remain atheist - if even Christians deny the rationality of God, what in the world will make them think that God is real?  And it's not true at all.  There are hundreds of reasons for a rational person to believe in God - I certainly would not be a Christian without them.  Look at the historical accuracy of the Bible, for example - though many claims or events recorded in the Bible ave been proven true, none have ever been proven false.  Those that seemed to be false at one time were later confirmed by either outside references or archaeological evidence.  Or take the incredible complexity of life - doesn't it take a lot more faith to believe that coincidence after coincidence after coincidence should happen just so in order for life to arise than to believe that Someone was guiding it?  If the strong nuclear force had been just 1% stronger at the moment of the Big Bang, life would not have been possible.  Had it been 1% weaker, atoms could not even have formed.  And this seems like a coincidence?  Irrationality to the extreme!  There are arguments from morality that I have not even touched.  Oh, yes, there is plenty of evidence for God's existence, both in a general and in a specifically Christian sense.  It is quite a rational belief, thank you very much.

Another argument I came across was a lot more difficult for me.  Eventually I reached the conclusion that there is something that I just don't get, but let me explain his argument first.  He started with the common Christian claim that God is outside not only the physical world, but outside time itself.  Which is true, as far as I know, and perfectly orthodox, though I understand that there is some debate as to whether or not it is actually the case.  Suffice it to say, there is nothing in the Bible that forbids a belief that God is outside of time, and considering that he created everything else (and that the first day was not until he created something), I think it is perfectly Biblical and rational to assert that God is outside of time.

Now, he claims, time is a rather arbitrary thing. There is nothing intrinsic about it, it is simply a way in which we have chosen to divide up the moments we experience in some rational order.  Time, in other words, is a series or sequence of moments.  If you look at a photograph, or a scaled model, you have some of the dimensions of space (in a model, you have all of them, in a photo, you're missing one), but you do not have time.  Consequently, the objects in the photo or model, whether they represent living beings or not, are not sentient, because they are missing the dimension of time, and therefore cannot think.  In order to have a thought, he claims, you must have a beginning, a middle, and an end, which constitutes time.  There are no thoughts in a photograph.  Therefore, for God to be outside of time, he must not be sentient, or conscious, because he is unable to have a thought without a time in which to have it.

Okay, so, responding to that one is tricky.  I am tempted to say that, just because the way we think is limited by time, that does not mean that the only way in which a thought can be produced is within a time frame.  Which, now that it's there in front of me, doesn't sound quite so wrong as it had seemed in my head.  However, we have no way to know whether or not that is true. Hence the conclusion that there is something else that I just don't understand. 

I know that there is something else to thinking beyond just time.  I mean, in a movie, time passes, but it's an illusion.  An hour and a half might go by, but it is not as if the projections on the screen are thinking anything.  The actors might have been thinking something when they filmed it, but Gene Kelly is dead now, so it's not like he's still thinking those things every time you pop in Singin' in the Rain.  That's ridiculous.  Conversely, a computer moves through time, and it even does certain things at certain points in time which produce various results, it makes calculations, and so on; however, no one genuinely believes that it is sentient.  There are those individuals who believe that someday computers will attain sentience, but nobody believes my ThinkPad is going to actually think anything.

Since there are things which move through time and yet are not capable of thought, I believe it is legitimate to presume that the opposite may be true, and that it might be possible to not move through time and yet be capable of thought.  This is a difficult question to discuss since we simply do not have the requisite information.  We cannot stipulate what does or does not happen outside of time since none of us have ever BEEN outside of time and therefore cannot know if there is another way to have a thought which does not require the passage of time.  I can't even comprehend the absence of time in my life, and I suspect neither could this video poster.  Just because it is so far removed from the realm of our experience makes it impossible to draw any conclusions from it one way or the other.  I know that God exists, partially on rational grounds and partly on some gut instinct that reinforces my reason to such an extent that I cannot doubt it.  So there is some way in which he, being the infinite and eternal being he is, can probably have a thought outside of time.  I don't know what it is or how it works, but I can't see how I could be expected to understand the infinite from a finite perspective.

That's probably not a very reasonable perspective from an atheist perspective, and I certainly don't expect that argument to convince anyone who does not already believe in God, but there it is.  It's the best I can do at the moment.

And, I really ought to go send that book off, so I'm going to head to the post office. 

-Jaya-