Hey it's this thread again.
I urge all Christians (and everyone else as well) to look deeply deeply at their beliefs of God and try to use logic to reason them out. However, when doing this, you must remember that we are dealing with an omniscient God whose knowledge and reasoning transcends anything we as humans (even the smartest scientists) are even able to understand.
And we've diverted from the OP topic within 3 pages I guess, but what was I expecting?
You've asked people to reason out their beliefs while working under the idea that they cannot understand their deity. What this effectively does if I engage in this kind of thinking is it provides me a cop-out answer to hard questions by just pointing to the fact that I have incomplete knowledge of the Universe and reasoning and using that as a basis to say that therefore I have a deep philosophical knowledge of the Universe. This is just lazy thinking while attempting to challenge my own notions and as a result I would have never really challenged myself.
This may not be what you meant. You may have meant for Christians to
really really challenge themselves honestly, given that you provided some theoretical conundrum for your faith. But I can tell you that I've heard this kind of thing before, this sort of apologetics, and I've spoken with people who have this same kind of attitude, and I can tell you that regardless of whatever your intention was in encouraging that assumption, all it really functionally does is either what I described above or it causes people to lose their trust in their faith. In the former case, it seems like a half-assed attempt at critically analyzing one's own beliefs because they were never really subject to change from the beginning. What would keep you from reasoning the existence of alien intelligence away as just a product of God's higher reasoning? Putting aside the fact that God's hyperomniscience is just assumed from the start, the entire process is unproductive and not really meaningful if you're not going to be honest with yourself. My point is that difficult questions don't result in "I don't know," it ends up being "I don't know so therefore the answer is something I already believe but that's only justifiable with supreme omniscience." This issue doesn't apply strictly to Christians, of course, but to all people who use their inability to come to conclusions as evidence of the validity of their faiths, and you can generalize this to just all people who are intellectually lazy (yes, atheists, pantheists, whatever else included; no one is automatically above the rules of the game, but this is beside my point).
The takeaway point I want to make here is that
I don't like your suggestion of operating under the assumption that God's reasons are simply too high of a philosophical level for humans to comprehend because it discourages intellectual honesty in this questions; it's unfairly tilted the "game" in your favor (if you are already a person of faith) so that you can't really "lose;" that is, you would in theory never be in a position to change your mind and so the endeavor of challenging oneself is pointless. Yes, I have experiences where my notions and philosophies are challenged as an atheist, but I cannot explain these things away as "oh, I know already that God doesn't exist/can't be known to exist or not exist anyway" and then ignore my cognitive dissonance (ideally speaking; sometimes you just don't have practical time to think about these things obviously). To remain absolutely intellectually honest, I have to work through to see whether claims are correct or not without bias, and since this can't really happen perfectly I have to do the best I can not to consciously alter perceptions, otherwise the game is broken from the start.
