[betty boop]

When we try to understand God we are going beyond ... our understanding of “the world.” The door to that understanding is Faith. It is normal to try to make things coherent within what we already know but when it comes to God, forget that. It is a whole new world that you can only understand through experience.... To prove God destroys that which you just proved, so why bother if that is your purpose. To understand God you MUST beg the question, but don’t let that bother you. Logic is of the natural, physical world, man’s world, but God is of the Spiritual world, within which the natural world exists. God is More.

Thank you oh so much for your wonderful insights, dear Mind-numbed Robot!

I particularly liked your observation that if we can "prove" the existence of God, then what we are testing wouldn't be God.

It's sort of analogous to the situation in which a biologist is trying to understand what life is. The "scientific" way to go about the problem would be to take a crittur down to its parts, then study them. But if this done, then of course, one is dealing with a non-living crittur — "You can't get there from here."

Or as the poet said [Blake]: We murder to dissect.

Life itself is not a direct observable. But one definitely knows when it is absent.

Thank you so very much for your outstanding essay/post!

[Mind-numbed Robot]

Thank you, BB. I always enjoy these threads and I appreciate your pinging me to them.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you both for your outstanding insights!

The Jewish mystics use the name Ayn Sof when speaking of God the Creator. Literally it means "no thing." And the point is that any word a person would use to describe God reduces his own concept of God to the word that he used.

Logic for instance is part of the creation, not a property of the Creator.