"The distinction must clearly be maintained. What God Himself does not bear witness to in your soul personally (not mystic-absolutely, but through the Scriptures) can never be known and confessed by you as Divine. Finite reasoning can never obtain the infinite as its result. If God then withdraws Himself, if in the soul of men He bear no more witness to the truth of His Word, men can no longer believe, and no apologetics, however brilliant, will ever be able to restore the blessing of faith in the Scripture. Faith, quickened by God Himself, is invincible; pseudo-faith, which rests merely upon reasoning, is devoid of all spiritual reality, so that it bursts like a soap-bubble as soon as the thread of your reasoning breaks."
Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920)
Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology (1894)
I am not sure any more can be added to this quote and commentary by Kuyper, yet here I go, humbly. The rot-at-root is human covetousness, the innate sin in us all, always ready to incite our psychology thus propensities and prerogatives then preferences to apply our truly unique and peculiar ability to reason as the final arbiter even upon those things obviously beyond mysterious and divine.
So we tempt ourselves while rightly, necessarily pursuing knowledge to theorize causal, logical possibilities, however also to imagine, to conjure what lies beyond the mysterious and divine "other" side of the Law of Gravity, beyond the mysterious and divine "other" side of laws governing atoms ergo protons, neutrons, electrons, and other small particles, and more.
In so doing, we covetously, presumptuously, arrogantly arrive to something that equally, exceedingly, even excessively requiring belief per grave lack of material evidence, yet claiming then insisting the same over time as foregone conclusions while dissing, ridiculing, as well slandering anything contrary. I must momentarily suspend my rambling in favor of the following excerpt from a book by mathematician and philosopher David Berlinski that I highly recommend, in addition to Isaac Newton's magnum opus and thesis Principia (1687)...
"If Newton's Principia has given the future of mathematical physics its characteristic shape, it has given the future its characteristic question as well. The Newtonian universe is a closed physical system. Whatever happens takes place as the result of casual interactions between material objects. There is nonetheless one aspect of the Newtonian world that is not explained by Newton's theory, and that is Newton's theory itself. The law of universal gravitation binds the world's far-flung particles into a coherent whole; but the law is itself transcendent. It cannot be given an explanation in material terms.
This is true as well for the equations governing electromagnetic field, Einstein's field equation for general relativity, and Schrödinger's wave equation in quantum mechanics. The laws of nature by which nature is explained are not themselves a part of nature. No physical theory predicts their existence nor explains their power. They exist beyond space and time; they gain purchase by an act of the imagination and not observation, they are the tantalizing traces in matter of an intelligence that has so far hidden itself in symbols. Efforts to explain the laws of nature in terms of still further laws of nature that explain themselves have been unavailing. They are what they are."
David Berlinski (1942-)
Newton's Gift (2000)
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Come let us Reason. Peace is always a Choice.
Study, Ponder, Labor, till last Breath.
Is 1:18 / Mt 5:9 / 2 Tm 2:15 / Cl 3:23
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