> > The thing about Christianity is that it does
> >not conform to worldly reasoning practices, as
> >faith never enters into the equation when reason
> >and logic are used to exclusion. Doesn't mean
> >reason and logic don't have their place, or that
> >faith is blind.
>
> If God created us, he gave us the tools of reason and logic for a purpose. . . . To then take those tools and throw them away at the very moment when they would help you the most is insanity.

Nor am I.

> > For whatever reason, God expects trust in Him
> >to come first, and the explanation follows.
> >First believe in him and trust him (faith) and
> >then the explanations that reason and logic can
> >confirm come afterward.
>
> This is simple recursion. To believe, you must first believe.

No: to know, you must first believe. What's more, you're neglecting the objects of these verbs, which breaks it out of the recursion. Recursion is not bad: recursive programming is the best way to solve certain problems. Recursion is only flawed when you get into an infinite loop over it; otherwise, it's simply cyclic. All learning is cyclic: even science operates in a (different) cycle.

It works more or less like this: have faith that one thing God asks us to believe is so; after deferring to God on the matter, he shows us how it is so, and that brings us in turn to some other aspect of faith. Repeat ad nauseum. After enough successful cycles, is it unreasonable to make a successive step with the faith that it, too, shall pan out? Hey, if it doesn't, you peel back a step anyway. Because logic and reason DO play a part in this.

> But maybe he has someone walk by with a jug of water right when you're most thirsty? Is that the kind of substantiation you're talking about?

No.

> If it is, then I have a much better explanation for that. It's called coincidence, and selective remembering.

I'm all about that. I even have a pretty lengthy forum post or two somewhere here about how billion-to-one coincidences, remarkable enough to remember, happen many times every day just by the law of averages: because there are skillions of things that *can* happen, and if one in a billion are so remarkable as to be memorable, that means an average of a skillion over a billion of them happen daily.

Nonetheless, God plays a role in my life that I cannot explain any other way. Nor, alas, can I particularly explain it to someone who doesn't already know. Explain your relationship with your mother to someone who grew up without one. I never had a sister: explain the essence of what that is like to me. Granted, these analogies are different: you can at least show me, incontrovertibly, that your mother and sisters exist. But this is close to what I'm trying to express. My life with Christ is not one characterized by wild coincidences. In one word, peace. I may be unhappy, confused, angry, hurt, whatever else, but amidst it all, there is peace in living an interactive life with God: praying and studying the Word and so forth. Yeah, I know you can come up with alternative explanations for that, too: I started out by saying this isn't something I can simply communicate to you. When all is said, I'm still the one with the personal experiences to account for.

> Sure, the Bible instructs me to read it another way. But then we're back at recursion. In order to believe in the Bible, I must first believe it when it says I have to read it this certain way in order to believe it.

This doesn't make sense at all, whether by faith *or* reason. If you are presented with a map of the world and asked to determine if it is an accurate map of the world, do you read the red lines as contours and blue lines as roads instead of vice versa, determine it is faulty, and discount it, all without having read the map's legend, on the grounds that the map's legend is part of the map?

What other way *can* you read anything other than by, as best you can determine, the terms under which it was written?

It's late and I'm tired, so I'm going to bail out at this point. We've covered the ground, and not for the first time.