As I've mentioned before, I'm listening to a series of discourses by R.C. Sproul's on Contemporary Theology. In it, he is painting a picture as to how we have gotten to our current state of thinking in contemporary thought. In one section, he describes 4 points of crisis that brought about the disintegration of the classical synthesis of orthodoxy. These 4 points include the breakdown of church authority, the scientific conflict, what Sproul's calls the communication crisis, and what he calls the philosophical crisis.
He goes into great detail in all four points of crisis. The one I find most interesting - among all of them - is the philosophical crisis. He cites Immanuel Kant as a major player in creating difficultie's in understanding whether we can know God at all. Immanuel Kant said there were 2 realms of knowledge: the 'numinal' realm and the 'phenominal' realm. The phenominal realm was made up of the world in which science is concerned with and which can be observed by the senses. In the 'numinal' realm he placed 3 things: God, the self, and the essence. In short, what Kant was saying was that we cannot use normal tools of knowledge to gain an understanding of God - God and the "self" are inaccessible to theorhetical thought.
This got me thinking. Maybe we cannot 'grasp' God intellectually on our own. But what if God was able to make Himself known to us? Maybe we cannot cross the barrier Kant talked about intellectually from the 'phenomenal' realm to the 'numinal' realm, but can God?
I think so.
Paul, the New Testament writer, also seemed to think so. He talked quite a bit in the New Testament about the visible things of this world manifesting themselves in the invisible character of God. The Psalms also talk about this too. Psalm 19:1 says, "The heavens declare the glory of God."
And then the most important example of God crossing that barrier is Jesus. This goes against a "deistic philosophy" in which God is indifferent to what happens in His creation. God actually comes down to earth through the incarnate, in order for us to not only have eternal life, but for us to enter into a relationship with Him.
To me, it seems God has given us the tools to intellectually "discover" Him and has taken it upon Himself to make His existence known.
Blessings,
Joe
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Assuming there is a God, if He really wanted the people of the world to know of and acknowledge his existence then He as the all-powerful, all-knowing, creator should be able to make it blatantly and even painfully clear exactly who he is and what he does. And yet if that is the case and He really is trying to show us himself, then I would say that he has failed horribly. How is it that a being as powerful as we assume God to be can only give us extremely vague clues as to his existence? Furthermore, these "intellectual tools" that He has "Given" us are in a sense self-defeating since they can be used, I believe near equally, to create both believers and non-believers. It's as if God was an art teacher and as his students we sat in front of a canvas waiting for him to give us supplies, but he gives a brush and a torch. One tool to create art and another to destroy it. If these are the "tools" that have been given us, then it is a very sick game that our "Creator" is playing. Keep in mind that with these comments I'm being very general on purpose. I'm not singling out any one God from any one religion for a reason. That reason is, I believe, that if we keep this conversation of this topic in the context of one specific God and not just God in general then the disscussion is meaningless because we are then assuming that one particular God is the correct God and then all of our answers are already "given" to us in the ancient texts (Bible, Q'uran, etc.) and we are then not left to truly think freely since we our invediably bound by what one specific book says. Does that make sense?
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