God With Us: Part One

Last updated on: December 1, 2009 at 3:13 pm by Amy Julia Becker

God With Us: Part One 2009-12-01T15:13:00-05:00 Amy Julia Becker

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Two years ago, we had a group of seniors over for dinner to talk about science and religion. Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, an agnostic and an atheist, all sitting around our table together. It was a good conversation, but at the end of the night, they seemed to agree that it was impossible to know for sure whether God existed. They also, for the most part, agreed that it was impossible to know for sure if God didn’t exist. The agnostic said, “I used to think there was no God, but recently I’ve realized that I just can’t know.”

And then the atheist said, “Yeah, it’s like God would have to figure out a way to communicate with us if he wanted us to know about him. Like, if I wanted to communicate with an ant. That ant has no idea who I am or what I represent, and the ant has no way of figuring that out. But I know so much more than the ant. I could probably figure out a way to communicate with an ant, if I could figure out how to get some antenna and maybe become really small and…” You get the picture. What he was saying is that an ant will never have the brainpower to understand humans on human terms. But maybe a human would have the brainpower to understand and even communicate with an ant on ant terms.

That atheist student was giving an analogy that describes that big seminary term I brought up a few posts back: The Ontological Divide. When he talked about figuring out how to communicate with the ant, he was talking about bridging the ontological divide, and he was talking about how the ant can never bridge the gap between being an ant and being a human. If there is a God out there, we are like the ant. We have no way of knowing definitively, on our own, if God is out there and what God is like. But if God does indeed exist, then for us to know about it, God has to decide to demonstrate his existence and his character to us.

I read a quotation from St. Anselm of Canterbury a few days ago: “God is that greater than which cannot be thought.” We can’t think of God, but God could think of us.

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