Edmund Schluessel wrote: "One of the great things about religious argument is that it's impossible to do logically. Faith, including lack of faith, is by its very nature contradictory to logic and therefore cannot be argued didactically." You have a definition of faith that is at base irrationalistic. But Christianity, in its most consistent form, holds that faith is not irrational, but rather, the only rational position at all. God necessarily exists, and men cannot understand anything unless they take his existence as the ground of every fact in the universe. To entertain arguments, on the basis of "evidence", is already to have given the game away. For no evidence can be properly understood by sinful human beings who imagine at the start that the facts they interpret have some independent existence apart from God. This is already to be in rebellion against God. The notion of logic or facts as not tethered in God's plan for the universe is inherently self-contradictory. Sinful man assumes that his logic is virtually legislative for the universe, so only that can exist which he can fit within his logic. At the same time, he admits that we can say nothing whatever about the beyond, that it is wholly unknowable. On the other hand, for those who are not in rebellion against God, who have ceased to set their intellects up as autonomous and determinative of what exists, who acknowledge themselves to be creatures of God and under his authority, every fact in the universe points to God's existence. Those, then, who argue against God and his Christ are like a little girl who slaps her father in the face. She can only do this because she is sitting on his lap. When you say that it is impossible to prove that God exists, you have virtually assumed that the Christian God does not exist. For the sort of God you are happy to admit is the sort of God who can comfortably exist in the realm of Chance -- who could "possibly" exist, whose existence could be reasonably doubted by human beings. You are obviously not thinking of the Christian God, whose thought is determinative of what can possibly exist, and whose existence cannot be reasonably doubted by human beings. You see, the Christian God makes prodigious claims. He says that he made you, and that you are his creature and subject to his authority. He says that you are to own up to this fact by giving him worship and obedience. He says, in effect, that the whole universe is his Estate, and that you are living on it. And his Estate is posted with gigantic signs indicating his ownership of it -- signs so clear that even those who drive by at 100 miles an hour cannot help but read them. And he further tells you that he has given a self-attesting and wholly authoritative book to humanity -- the biggest sign of all, as it were. And the whole thing, he says, is clear. Everyone already knows God and is without excuse, even if some, as part of their rebellion, enjoy claiming that he does not exist. That is why we call it "unbelief" rather than ignorance. Those who are neutral with respect to God and his word are already against him, he says. When Eve in Eden entertained Satan's claim that "you will not surely die," she was not being neutral. She was not just thinking about rebellion. She had already set herself up as something independent of God, capable of judging his word by some higher standard. To be neutral is to be God's enemy, to proclaim that he does not really own all of you. This means that when we reject God's claims to tell us how to behave, sexually and otherwise, we are in rebellion against God. When we say that nobody can know whether God exists, since it is a matter of "faith," we are in rebellion against God. When we claim that the beliefs of other religions are just as good as those of Christianity, we are in rebellion against God. Matt
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