> This doesn't jive with what I've heard at leats one Protestant Pastor say about Chrstianity. His claim was something to the effect that Chrstianity was different than all the other major religions, because all the other religions were based around the concept of "Man seeking God" while Christianity was the only one that had the central tenent of "God seeking Man."

Thanks for reading, even though you disagree. It is nice to know I am not always talking to a wall; and I appreciate your honest disagreement.

I disagree with this pastor, in the details. Though it is a tenet of Christianity that God has been seeking man over and over again, this tenet is not the central one, nor the one which distinguishes Christianity from other religions. For that, I would side with C.S. Lewis and say that the doctrine that differentiates Christianity from other religions is grace; God's grace is the central tenet of Christianity, and the whole reason for Jesus in the first place. God's seeking man is the practical consequence of His gracious love.

> So you're saying God really *wants* us to have little evidence, because he thinks it's better for us to believe without evidence? That's insane. How can I reconcile that with the fact that if he does exist and is the creator, God endowed me with the mental capacity to reason and understand, and that for everything *else* in the sphere of human existence, strong conviction without evidence is a *bad* thing? I'd sooner believe that there's tons of evidence and I'm just too stupid to see it.
>
> -- Dave

No, I am not saying that at all. I was somewhat ambiguous, perhaps, in what I wrote. My last point is meant to apply only to a very specific case, that of a person whom God knows will come to faith in Him; for such a person, God may choose to give less direct evidence of Himself, in order to strengthen their trust in Him alone, rather than experience of Him, and reward them later because of their greater faith. God wants to reward people, and I believe that the bible speaks of different kinds of rewards; for people God knows he can't lose on, He may test their faith more than He would others. But that is as far as it goes; this point certainly does not justify cases where the person does not come to faith in God. I believe that the rest of my argument gives at least some reason to believe that there could be a plausible explanation for God's relative hiddeness.

As to your other points, I can't fully agree. I agree that we have indeed been given intellect and reasoning, and that we should use these gifts. But it is ridiculous to trust in them overmuch, and, more importantly, it is crazy to believe that God would trust our intellects. God cannot, in the general case, assume that evidence of His existence would be understood. People have different levels of ability in reasoning, so for specific people, like myself, appeals to reason and experience may lead a person to God, for others, who cannot understand such evidence, the method is clearly inappropriate. For people more intelligent than I am, God could make available reasons and evidence that I simply could not comprehend or follow.

Furthermore, I disagree that for every other area it is bad to have strong convictions with lack of evidence. In fact, I think that most of the time, people live out their whole lives without direct evidence of most of the things they believe. Most of our knowledge comes from the testimony of others, which is sometimes trustworthy, and sometimes not. Though this is different in some cases, as we can point to the testimony of those who know the evidence for the belief in question, if we press further, the depth of our ignorance is revealed. We have already moved beyond the realm of direct evidence, into testimony; what if, for some of our beliefs, we do not know the evidence and could not understand it even if we did know? So many of our beliefs, I think, are like this. Further than that, even, is the area where people have only theories; we can believe some theory, say, of quantum mechanics, but who can really say that they understand the evidence for said theory? I realize that there are a great many greater physicists than I (most, in fact), but how many can claim to understand such a theory, fully, enough to claim evidence for it? Unfortunately for our reasoning ability, it is so limited that, for our most dearly held beliefs about existence, time, being, nature, and so on, most of us come to ultimate questions on the same ground, and our great intellects are no more use to us than anything else. So very much of what we believe, especially the beliefs that affect our lives most, have no basis in experience, or abstract reasoning, or even testimony of experts, assuming that there are experts. If you think about your most dearly held beliefs, unless you are extremely exceptional, i.e. unlike any other human being to walk the planet, you could no more point to experience, evidence, or reasoning that made your beliefs what they are than I, or any other human person, can. Sometimes these beliefs change, because of what we think is good evidence (usually sketchy), or good testimony (by someone who has little more idea than we do), or reasoning (a barely trustworthy friend at the best of times).

There is some evidence to suggest, by the way, that much of what human intelligence represents is the ability to ignore things; we do not come to know or decide because we explore all the options, but because we reject most of them unthinkingly. Just a theory though.

Fr" doesn't even want to get into string theory, or traversal of the infinite"um