(The previous post by the same title is about computer stuff, but the principles are similar.)
You cannot prove God exists, and they cannot prove He doesn’t.
We who are spiritual are aliens to those who aren’t spiritual. They live in an entirely different world. This is merely an extension of all my rattling about epistemology; that fancy word does have very real-world consequences. If you choose to enter into a debate with the non-spiritual folks, you have already surrendered the very foundation of our existence as believers. They will most certainly not come over to where we stand to discuss this. They deny that there is anything outside their own realm of understanding.
Get comfortable with the idea that you will be labeled “elitist” when they are being kind and generous. When you set out to understand faith the way we do on this blog, it requires digging into a lot of obscure academic material. It’s not as if faith requires it, but all that stuff is required if you have any hope of explaining it in academic terms. You have to ready to explain that most debaters and non-believers are holding to a historical minority position. Only a tiny slice of humanity since whatever one imagines as “The Beginning” have ever held to the common assumptions of Western epistemology. All that stuff in the Bible takes place outside this tiny brief period of highly restricted reasoning.
Again, our reckoning includes theirs, but we consider theirs a primitive approach that ignores a vast wealth of intellectual treasure they exclude, if they are aware of it at all. We understand Western social mythology as part of much broader understanding of human existence. If someone from within that narrow range of intellect insists on engaging us in debate, we have to decline on the grounds they simply aren’t ready to take on our position because it’s outside their range. Unless they understand the Ancient Near Eastern epistemology, they don’t have any grounds for approaching our faith and the resulting belief statements.
In that sense, faith could never be “rational” because that would disembowel faith. Faith makes the most unreasonable demands because it is built on a far higher level of reasoning. It’s not that we don’t understand their position; we do. They cannot understand ours.
God and all our dealings with Him stand outside the human realm.
