This past weekend I was in Florida visiting my sister and her husband, so I got to listen to a different preacher on Sunday morning. At one point in his message, the pastor made a reference to the prevailing attitude in popular thought that all religions ultimately point to the same 'God' or divine reality -- they only differ in the particulars of expression, tradition and practice. To refute that claim, he contrasted Buddhism, which identifies the ultimate reality as "nothingness" [an imprecise and un-nuanced term, but fair enough], with Christianity, which points to God as an individual with distinct personal attributes. To suggest that these two religions are referring to the same thing, the pastor summarized, is sheer nonsense -- it is a *logical impossibility*.

That remark sparked a couple of thoughts in rapid succession:
1) "Hmm. The Buddhist might not agree with you there; a Buddhist might indeed accept that there is no contradiction in identifying the Christian God with the principle of nothingness. Strict logic cannot be properly applied within the Buddhist view."
2) "Okay, but surely even practitioners of Theravada Buddhism employ logic on a day-to-day basis. Any Buddhist on a panel of jurors would, for example, apply logic to determine that a defendant who was not at the scene of a murder could not have committed the crime. It isn't as though anything goes -- there's a place for logic, and logical arguments do have weight both in a Christian and a Buddhist framework."

Thinking over it some more, it begins to seem as though each religious system imposes a "ceiling" of sorts to the power and validity of logic. The Buddhist may dismiss as futile attempts to logically understand nirvana; this has also been the position of Christian theologians who reject efforts to mount "logical proofs" for God. In daily life, logic applies; it cannot however reach high enough to penetrate transcendence. (This is something I've recognized before, even thought about a bit, but not in these exact terms.)

Now, here's a question for whomever cares to join in: is this limitation on logic something that is:
a) intrinsic to logic, an inherent limitation of its powers, or
b) a case of humans projecting the limitations of our own capacity to think and understand onto logic, which itself is *not* limited, or
c) something else entirely? Is the whole issue a chimera?

Here's another question: if you believe in God, do you think that God is bound by the rules of logic, or transcends logical categories and rules, or imposes a self-limitation under which God, although free from logical constraints in essence, obeys logic when dealing with creation?

Here's my own 2 cents, as the question applies to the God of the Bible: God seems to follow logical rules rather than transcending them, yet those rules aren't "binding" on God in the sense of something external to his person. Rather, logic seems to be an expression of God's person, just as are love and righteousness. The way God presents his character in Scripture is quite logical in form: "I am this thing (good, just, active) and not that thing (wicked, capricious, enervate)." The way God expresses his own character "makes sense" in logical terms, because God includes logic as part of who he is. The ceiling we place on logical argument, I suppose, therefore reflects our own limited ability to understand, rather than the inability of logic in principle to illuminate God's being. (Of course, logic alone could not *entirely* define God for us, since God is many other things as well besides logic.)

This is a refreshing idea for me, since I've characteristically downplayed logic as an appropriate tool for religious exposition. Now I need to think about how to admit the power of logic without lending support to people like physicist Frank Tipler, known for making bold claims like "in order to survive, theology must become a subset of physics." (_The _Physics_of_Immortality_)

Iss "did I mention today is Vulcan Day?" achar