The I AM

My freshman year, I took a 9-unit class called SLE - Structured Liberal Education that was supposed to cover all the great classics of philosophy and literature, all the great shapers of thought and culture. We lived together, had classes in the lounge, talked philosophy over lunch, and watched and discussed movies once a week. What was most difficult about the program however, wasn't the finals (we were given twenty-four hours to write three essays). It was the heady and crazy things that were taught and praised that shook what I had believed to be true to the core. Logic and reason and skepticism ruled the day. Believing things just because you'd been taught them as a child -- big no-no. The director was a huge and intimidating Marxist Buddhist (and the A students were those who learned to think like Marxist Buddhists). One lecturer explained how the Bible was an inconsistent mishmash of several different texts and Middle Eastern origin myths, and criticized the Judeo-Christian God for removing the feminine from the act of creation.

Faced with this dizzying kaleidoscope of ideas , I put myself to a great task: to apply logic to everything and accept nothing to be true until logic proved it sound. I quickly realized 1) my brain is really quite feeble and not up to that task 2) plenty of brilliant minds had already tried to prove all the things I was trying to figure out 3) they came to lots of different conclusions 4) it got really really tiring. It took me longer to realize that it was not so foolish to accept things on faith and there are things that are beyond the reach of logic. Swinging my logical sword about trying to dissect every ideas, I was in mortal danger of decapitating myself.

Our use of logic, such as in Aquinas' proofs, seems to assume an objective world. It assumes an external reality untouched by subjectivity, that you can probe, knock about, and build on with measuring sticks and premises and theorems, that no matter what you think or anyone thinks, is firmly and stably out there. We approach the task of wielding logic on reality to find God as we might an archaeological dig. We sift through the bones, garbage heaps and crumbling buildings, and try to piece together the pottery shards and figure out what kind of person once lived here. We define reality as an objective world that
God deposits out there and walks away from, as something external to both ourselves and to God.

But what if true external reality is not objective at all? What if reality, what is REALLY real, is instead a subjective world, namely God's subjective? I don't mean that we're all in God's head. Or actually, come to think of it, maybe I do. If God is omniscient, if He knows everything, that would mean everything that is is contained within God's thoughts. Adam mentioned ideas I don't quite understand about time and quanta. In it, however, he postulated that God might be the One carrying the universe from one moment to the next, making things exist. If I understand Adam rightly, that would make God the Great Sustainer; the ultimate reality beyond the flashes we see of this world.

Maybe explaining it this way will make it clearer (or more confusing):


Figure 1
Descartes makes as his Premise Number One, the one knowable fact on which all other knowledge should be built, "I think, therefore I am." And with that foundation, he hopes to use logic to circumscribe the world and find God.

Can we ever prove the existence of God using just our thinking, our logic? For if the only one true premise on which all real knowledge can be based is instead GOD, the diagram would look like this.


Figure 2

If this is really how things are, our logic could not stand alone without God. To use only, "I think therefore I am," would only get us to broken pieces of truth, because the full explanation would lie with God. That is why it is impossible, I think, to produce an airtight absolutely convincing argument for the existence of God, using only our logic. We have seen, I think, how logic is fallible and sound logic can lead to multiple contradictory conclusions. It is because He is the only thing we can assume to be true. God is the only one who can stand alone, and exist without our logic, without us, without the world. He would still Be. He must be our first premise, the foundation of our knowledge. For Descartes' "I think therefore I am," we substitute He who declares "I AM that I AM." That is why true logic, true understanding, would really be thinking as God thinks.

How do we know what is true? How do we think rightly? How do we think the thoughts of God? We have to subject what seems apparent to us in this world (general revelation) with what God has actually declared to us to be true through His Word. It is only through that lens that we can find answers to the problem of evil, evolution, and other such conundrums.