Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of your earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember? Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.
How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Friday Flashback post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.
If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 16th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.
This was originally posted on September 16, 2017.
Faith Versus Reason
My blogging buddy, Jim, wrote a fascinating post today entitled “Why is it So Hard to Believe in God.” In addition to being a provocative post, he managed to get in the WordPress one-word prompt, “recreate,” when he wrote, “We cannot recreate the Big Bang, so we may never understand all of this, but we can believe that we do exist.” Well done, Jim.
In response to one of the comments on his post, Jim wrote, “I believe in logic and God makes sense to me….” I found that notion to be particularly interesting. I believe in logic, reason, and rationality, and it’s because of embracing those things that God makes no sense to me.
For purposes of this post, I’m going to consider “logic” and “reason” to be synonymous, although technically they aren’t. Reason is the capacity for consciously making sense of things, applying logic, establishing and verifying facts, and changing or justifying practices, institutions, and beliefs based on new or existing information.
That said, logic (or reason) is the antithesis of faith. It takes tremendous faith to believe that an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, supernatural being created everything that exists.
So the question I have for Jim, or for anyone who cares to weigh in is this. When it comes to belief in God, can logic and reason support that belief, or must one suspend logical and rational thought in favor of pure faith to believe in the existence of God as the creator of all things?
Please feel free to share your thoughts (or beliefs).
This, That, and the Other 
Inviting trouble!
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I do that upon occasion.
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Here’s one I wrote on this date two years ago:
https://theelephantstrunk.org/2020/09/16/i-wanna-rock/
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I’m an atheist, though I have no problem with believers as long as they don’t proselytize at me or try to run the country on woo from the bible. I see how having belief in the supernatural is helpful to some troubled people and I’m happy they found peace in their mind in this way…
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The key phrase is “as long as they don’t….”
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Yep!
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Specifically … to believe in the existence of God as the creator of all things?
Either way — the other being to not believe an Intelligent Presence did this — is going to take the suspension of an absolute dependence on logic. My perception is that reason is more dismissed by going the other way. (And this is not in service of any religion.)
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Here’s my reblog
https://pensitivity101.wordpress.com/2022/09/16/sunday-photo-fiction-sept-16-2018-2/
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Well said. Personally, I can’t wrap my head around the concept of infinity, therefore the idea of omnipotence is really out of my realm. Hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings though? Maybe. 🙂
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It depends on how you define logic and reason.
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Well I guess god means different things to different people. But for me, I donât use logic, but I do believe in something, or someone, a higher power, not god per say though. xoxo
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