Why do Christians suspend logic when thinking about God?

The naive answer:

Christians don’t suspend logic. It is the non-Christians that don’t understand.

The problem with the naive answer:

There are dozens if not hundreds of simple logical deductions that Christians fail to follow when thinking about God.

The scholar’s answer:

Many Christian beliefs and ideas fail logically. As the religion evolved and produced its canon, The Bible, it failed to account for many logical inconsistencies that arise from some of its claims. It is probable that no religion that claims its God or gods are active in the world can survive logical scrutiny.

Here are a few examples of Christians suspending logic:

  • Events that should cast doubt upon their beliefs are used to strengthen their beliefs. When a tornado destroys a town and kills twenty people the survivors praise and thank God and his great mercy for sparing them; yet they think no ill of God for killing the twenty people and destroying the homes and belongings of so many people. They act as if some force greater than God sent the storm, but he was able to swoop in and save a few, but not all.
  • People pray to God to cure cancer in themselves and in those they love, but they don’t pray to God asking him to regrow lost limbs. Why? We know they answer. Christians assign to God, good outcomes that can’t be proven to come from God, but won’t ask God to perform an action that would truly be a miracle.
  • Christians believe that Jesus was born of a virgin. But it is more logical to accept that early Christians adopted the doctrine of virgin birth because that doctrine was common to many gods of the Roman empire and early Christians wanted their god to be just as special.
  • Christians fail to accept that the two different lineages provided for Jesus from his ancestor David implies that one of the lineages must be incorrect.
  • Christians fail to accept that Jesus must not have descended from King David because Jesus did not descend from Joseph, a man upon whom both lineages depend.
  • Some Christians believe the Earth is just 6,000 years old when the scientific facts we have from numerous disciplines and millions of reference points indicates the solar system is billions of years old, so is Earth, and humans have been evolving for millions of years.
  • It is more logical to believe that Lazarus was not truly dead than to believe that he, and others in the Bible, were brought back to life.
  • It is not logical to believe that the God of all people would only reveal Himself and his Word to one small group of people living in an age when it would be difficult to prove his miracles.
  • It is not logical to believe the world was covered in water sometime in the last ten thousand years when there is so much evidence to the contrary.
  • It is not logical to believe all the books in the Bible are perfect sacred canon when everyone agrees that humans decided which books to include in the Bible.

Logically, we can conclude that Christians reject the use of logic when facts and logic contradict their beliefs. Even Christians agree that Christianity is not logical and some truths must be accepted on faith.

Some references for further research: