Just in case you were wondering, there was a delicious flaw in my previous post on this subject. That beautifully crafted flaw was, of course, a joke. And if you didn’t get the joke, well, that’s too bad; I feel sort of sorry for your obviously lacking sense of humour. Also sorry that you can’t read a blog with an ethic of at least a pinch of love. But the fact that I won’t dumb this whole thing down just because some ignorant cretin wanders off the internet and calls me an asshole is another issue for another time (or maybe never at all, hopefully).

The fact is, my logic was circular, and evidently so; I’ve admitted I was wrong in the past: that alone proves that I my axiom was false, because either I wasn’t right about being wrong, or I was right about being wrong. Either way, all Cretans are liars.

I find this problem crops up a lot not just in my little bursts of humour, but also amongst the secularist crowd, where this argument comes up a lot: “Well, I can’t prove that God exists with science, or any other discipline, so he must not.” It’s as full of holes as a soup strainer, of course, because it fails its own test. How can you prove, by science or any other discipline that God must be found by science or any other discipline to exist in, through, or outside of reality? You can’t. Most people, faced with this contradiction, merely become agnostic (which is like being agnostic about tsunamis until one hits your house: good luck Mr Denial).

But agnosticism is a hard line to toe. You can say that you just don’t know, but don’t you want to? At the end of the day, it all eventually comes back to what you pre-suppose the best way to true knowlege is. If you start from a purely materialistic, secularist standpoint (an assumption as circular as they come), you become an atheist. You’ve defined yourself into a corner.

The question should more legitimately be, “What is the way to find true knowlege?” In which case I’d tell you that the best way to find true knowlege is through Christian scriptures (also known as the Bible, a term I dislike, considering how it’s been so often co-opted as to be almost meaningless). The agnostic’s first instinct is to call that stand as circular as his, but the problem is that I agree. It is circular. It’s just a bigger circle. That’s the problem with logic: every bit of logic proceeds from somewhere to get somewhere. A lot of the from in our logic seems quite obvious to us until we start questioning why we can’t logically prove our starting point. We can’t even logically prove that we exist in the way we think we do, not even with the ubiquitous “I think therefore I am”. What does “am” mean? Even if you think, even if you are, what then? How do you get from there to “the universe is a concrete place of laws and physical interactions; there is nothing else”? It just doesn’t fit.

The fact of the matter is that it’s right to assume that one exists; one needs to assume it to function. It’s one of those things so basic to being that it needs no proof — it’s self-evident. There’s several things like that, one of which would be “God”, but I digress.

The point of all this is that the scriptures don’t need to be proved because they are the starting point for true knowlege. While philosophers were off figuring out they existed because they could think (brilliant job there, Descartes!), the answer was under their noses the whole time. Even if you’re not willing to admit to that, admit at least that the scriptures claim a sort of authority that human though cannot: that is, the authority of a divine Being who created this whole mess to begin with. Even on a purely assumptive level, without making a truth judgement, scripture has the edge.

When it goes past that level, everything else is icing on the cake. I don’t believe the scriptures because they are historically correct (though they are), or philosophically sound (though they are), or poinantly beautiful (though, again, they are). I believe scripture because it is true. And the testimony of scripture is enough in and of itself to function as the basis for rational though. That is to say, I only really know because I believe, a statement that stands in stark relief to the secularist idea that one must doubt, doubt, doubt, and doubt in order to know.

Circular, you say? Yes. But a circle based on the authority of God, not the foolishness of my own unaided intellect. It all comes back to scripture, no matter how hard one tries to evade it. It is true then, that some people expect to see in order to believe, but truer yet that in order to truly see, one must believe.

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