Hello, Readers.

When I finished my last post, I found a number of thoughts juggling in my head, so many that I was unsure what to write first. So, I have started several of those thoughts on paper, and will post them when they are polished.

I just read my first post. It is my pledge that in the future I will write the post, edit it, then let it sit for a day or two before I come back to finish edit and post it. Maybe some time away will give me distance and lead to thoughts that can be understood.

Some people view faith as a sacred part of "religion." It is the final answer to anyone who disagrees with their view of the natural or the supernatural. Like my myth of a world arranged to deceive me, their is no evidence that can be proof against that argument. We have fossilized remains of animals and plants that are nowhere to be found alive on earth today. By observing natural processes, we can make educated guesses of the age of most of these fossils. But some people, of all stripes of religious belief or unbelief, will not even consider those facts. I have heard people state that this was done by God to mislead those who should not be saved (isn't the point of John 3:16 that Jesus's love brought him to us to save all the world?); or that these fossils cannot be believed because they saw one skeleton in a museum and a card next to it that said it was reconstructed by use of only one bone (does this mean these people will believe the fossils when they see a complete skeleton found in situ?); or that we can't trust what God has created since He could have created this world 6,000 years ago and built in all these seemingly ancient processes to deceive us about the age (if He could have created our world 6,000 years ago, are you sure He did not create it 60 seconds ago, and given us a memory that makes us feel it was 6,000 years ago, or 13 billion years ago? Maybe because God does not deceive?).

I want to think with you about God and see what new insights you can give, or that I can work through. But in any such discussion, there must be some ground rules to keep it honest. Logic seems to be the first requirement. I think God agrees. "Come now, and let us reason together," Says the Lord,... . Is. 1:18. If Jehovah commanded the Israelites to reason together, He must be interested in our using reasoning skills today no less than in ancient times. "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever." Heb. 13:8.

Second, Aristotle's law of noncontradiction is the first basis of logic. It propounds that a statement regarding any thing in this world, or at least our four dimensions ( length, width, height and time) cannot be both true and false at the same time when all circumstances are the same.

An example. In a courtroom,we on the jury have listened to two witnesses who testified for either side. A car went off the road and rolled onto its roof, killing one person. The question is, who was driving, and therefor liable for the damages. The first witness said the person with the red shirt was not driving the car. The second witness is a police officer who responded, and said that he arrived, went to the left side of the car and pulled the person with the red shirt out of that side of the car. Even though the judge has ordered you not to come to any conclusions before hearing all of the evidence and not to discuss the case, at lunch you find that six jurors believe a police officer's word, and six jurors thought the other witness sounded better. But not one juror thought that both the witnesses were correct. On summation, the lawyer for the red shirt pointed out that the the left side of an overturned car is the passenger side. When put right side up, the left side becomes the right side, the passenger side. Red shirt was the passenger, and the jury voted in his favor. Belief in the law of noncontradiction led the lawyer to analyze the testimony more intensely.

But Aristotle's law must be tempered by Plato's analogy of a cave. Plato claimed that when it comes to observation of the world, we are like men chained in a cave such that we can see only the back wall. When a man passes the mouth of the cave, we see a shadow on that wall that has a shape influenced by the real man. But it cannot be the actual image of that man. So too with a tiger, a lion, a table or a car as they pass the mouth of the cave and cast their shadow. We are chained by our imperfect senses to only observe a partial outline of the real world. Modern scientific advances support Plato. Humans can only see a limited band of the electromagnetic spectrum. We now have machines that can help draw images of what is in the larger spectrum, but we are not sensing those radiations. We can only hear a limited range of vibrations. We smell with the nose but our sense of smell is 100 times less than a good dog.

When we are born, if we are normal, the computer inside our head begins writing programs that will determine how we view the world. But the programs are limited because our senses are limited. Saint Peter's Basilica in the Vatican is listed as having a diameter of 137 feet, +/-. I have been told that if you imagine a hydrogen atom at that size (in other words, a sphere with a diameter of 137 feet), the size and weight of the nucleus of the atom would be a speck of dust, small enough that it floats in the air directly in the middle of that atom. The electron would be another speck of dust racing around the edge of the sphere. My simple programs compare the relative hardness of things around me. Water is not hard, because I can put my hand right through it. Stone floors, on the other hand, do not give at all when I trip and fall on them. Now add to that program the information above. What is it that does not allow the huge spaces in my atoms to slip right through the huge spaces in the atoms of the floor? Do those specks of dust make enough of a difference to prevent my body from walking through a wall? Even in the water, I know my hands do not go through the atoms of the water, but rather run up against each other. That's why when I play canoe in the bath tub, the water sloshes back behind me, rather than lying still in the tub. The solution to the problem is the electromagnetic energy that binds the atom into a solid entity. The electromagnetic energy of my atoms push against the electromagnetic energy of the stone, and canceling each other out, neither allows invasion by each other.

We solve this possible contradiction by our fast faith that contradictions do not really exist. Another program we have written in our head says the world works according to some logic, or design, or program or whatever term you want to put in here. We learn more about the complexities of our world when we research and investigate the seeming contradictions. My daughter was given a test asking which would freeze first, boiling water or cool water when placed in ice cube trays in a freezer. We know boiling is an opposite of freezing, so my immediate answer is that the cool water will boil first. But if you place both trays in your fridge, you find that the tray with boiling water freezes first. My daughter explained that evaporation was the factor I did not consider. Even though I was deeply puzzled until the explanation, it never entered my mind to suddenly believe that the world was not ordered but was random chance, and boiling water was just a proof of that lack of controlling principles. Instead, I learned something more of that complexity. My faith in the logic of the cosmos was rewarded.

Yes, I have decided to have a faith that the world works in ordered, designed ways. If the world works according to logic, it is natural to me to seek the foundations of that order. I wished you a good day at the end of my last post. Of course, I know that any unit of time is not good or evil or bad or nice. What I meant was that I hoped your experiences for the remainder of the day would be good ones. I still hope it. Even in the event of the loss of dear family or friends or other reverses, believing that good does co-exist is a benefit of believing in an overriding logic. Accordingly, it is one of the first benefits of searching for Jehovah.