God of Paradoxes

Monday 1/11/2016 5:59 AM

A number of years ago I was playing around with some numbers and discovered an interesting pattern. After collaborating with some of my former professors we eventually got an article published in Mathematics Teacher, a magazine published by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Adding the powers of a given number could generate the numbers I was playing with but the sums generated were infinite. As I studied them further I discovered that the infinite sums of positive numbers could equal a negative number, a counterintuitive result at best. However, these infinite sums behaved exactly like negative numbers and exhibited all of the properties of negative numbers, such as, the product of two negative numbers is a positive number. Modern string theory, with its embedded twenty-six dimensions, relies on this counterintuitive result: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ... = -1/12. The field of mathematics is rife with these kinds of paradoxes and many others that are even more bizarre.

Today I read an excerpt from Everything Belongs by Richard Rohr. He writes, “Religion has not tended to create seekers or searchers, has not tended to create honest humble people who trust that God is always beyond them. We aren’t focused on the great mystery. Religion has, rather, tended to create people who think they have God in their pockets, people with quick, easy, glib answers. That’s why so much of the West is understandably abandoning religion. People know the great mystery cannot be that simple and facile. If the great mystery is indeed the Great Mystery, it will lead us into paradox, into darkness, into journeys that never cease…. That is what prayer is about.” Modern Westerners do not like to live with paradox or questions that have no answers. We like things neatly tucked away into perfect fitting boxes and tied up the pretty strings and we like the God we worship to be the same.

The God revealed in the Bible is beyond our ability to comprehend. His way of doing things runs contrary to our way of thinking. Isaiah 55:8-9 says, “‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the Lord. ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.’” 1 Corinthians 1:25 says, “For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.” God choses to accomplish his will by working through people and through circumstances that we would never chose. It makes no logical sense from our perspective because we have a finite ability to comprehend and God is working with infinities, where, from a human perspective, weird things happen.

Perhaps that’s why belief in God is a matter of faith. There are no easy explanations for the things of God, no simple answers to the paradoxes we face every day. Those who want rational explanations for things that have none will always ridicule me for my belief in God. That is probably why Rohr suggests prayer is needed.