In the beginning God created the heavens and the
earth (Genesis 1:1)
The entirety of the human experience is located within the parameters of space and time. All the thinking, doing and being humanity has ever done has occurred within its limits.
Without time it is impossible even to think! Every chain of the neurological impulses that constitute a thought is sequentially linked. That linear sequence is necessarily chronological.
Albert Einstein describes time as the mechanism that allows for the sequential rather than the simultaneous occurrence of events. These events in turn occur inescapably in the setting of space.
Space and time are an inseparable cosmic union known as “spacetime”. Our ideas about God are necessarily subject to the only ecosystem conceivable to us – the spacetime continuum and all its contents.
This ecosystem has rules, such as a necessary beginning for everything. This is because within this framework everything must have a beginning because the cosmos itself had a beginning, as the cosmologist Georges Lemaître confirmed.
Because this framework is all we know, we are prone to ask, “Does God not have a beginning?” As though He is subject to the rules of the construct He created.
The very first verse of the bible introduces a God who exists outside the bounds of this construct. He existed before the beginning. That is, the beginning of time. Indeed, He caused the sequential unfolding of cosmic events that time facilitates and measures.
The bible leaves arguments for or against the existence of God for the preoccupation and amusement of those so inclined. He merely introduces Himself as the one who predates the beginning, whose Being requires none of our permission.
This is mindboggling, considering what we have discussed about time.
This implies that God did and does precisely what seems impossible to us. That is to think, relate and even create, independent of time. We shouldn't be surprised. After all He is God!
This leads me to the conclusion that our capacity to reason will ultimately fail to lead us to the God of the bible precisely because our reasoning occurs unavoidably within the confines of a framework that God is exogenous to. That is the space-time continuum and all its 'laws'. These laws being merely the order that God decided to impose upon the universe.
This renders our quest for the true knowledge of God by means of our unaided intellects stillborn. To that end we are only capable of making gods in our own image, as we have done for time immemorial.
The God who inhabits eternity must reveal Himself to us. The revelation must occur in our essence or spirits, which then informs our emotions and intellects.
Our intellects allow us to make sense of the revelation and to articulate it. Through our emotions we feel the overwhelming grandeur of its profundity.
The revelation must necessarily stand up to the rigours of logic but that is usually not enough.
Our capacity for faith is necessary because ultimately, we must choose to embrace its contents as true, with faith itself being the originating, essential and sufficient evidence.
After all, even the most lucid evidence is not exempt from the ubiquitous spectre of willful doubt.
There is a sense in which we ultimately believe what we want to believe. To that end we always find whatever it is we are looking for, including as the case might be, the supposed non-existence of God.
This is particularly true if the biblical portrayal of our hearts is understood. Which is: our problem is not that we cannot conceive of the existence of God but that we are profoundly troubled by the implications of His existence and are therefore inclined to reject it.
In other words, our quest for personal sovereignty is well served by the proposition that God does not exist, to the point of framing and clinging to any narrative that is consistent with that preference, for no other reason than it being our preferred state of affairs.
The openness to believe, in turn, is the surrender of
that quest and is only possible through a self-authenticating dynamic that is
deeply personal and occurs through the initiative of the living God who seeks
genuine communication with His estranged offspring.
