Interfaith Group

But notice what that question assumes. It acts as if the big questions of life -- Love, Beauty, God -- can be solved with the kind of answer you'd find in the back of a physics book. But Love is not a puzzle that can be "solved" with "evidence"; it is a reality that grows, in beauty and complexity, the longer you live with it.

Even worse, that way of asking the question presumes that God is something you can finally arrive at on the basis of "evidence." Besides the obvious fact that evidence can be misleading -- we tend to find only what we expect to see -- God is not something that comes at the end of a logical train of thought. Rather, my faith in God is my basic foundational assumption, the axiom that I start with when I do my logic. In fact, mathematicians remind us that all logical systems require starting assumptions. What you conclude, depends a lot on what you assume.

So what do I assume?

I assume we live in a real universe -- we're not in the Matrix, or figments in the imagination of some computer gamer.