#STRask - Should You Believe Things You Can’t Fully Comprehend?

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

Questions about whether you should believe things you can’t fully comprehend, whether it’s just an arbitrary escape hatch to say God doesn’t require a cause, and how to respond to an atheist who grounds objective morality in an objective rule or criteria.   Should one believe things they can’t fully comprehend, and if not, at what level of comprehension of certain biblical truth statements ought they begin believing? Why would God be immune to the infinite regress dilemma? It’s arbitrary to simply describe an object as needing no cause. It’s the escape hatch to a question you’ve been trapped by, but that doesn’t make it real or true. How would you respond to an atheist who defends the existence of objective morality by grounding it in an objective rule or criteria like “Do to others as you would want them to do to you”?

Welcome to the hashtag SDRS podcast from Stan to Reason. I'm Amy Hall, and with me is Greg Kokel. And today, Greg, we have some more philosophical-type questions. We'll see how many we get through. Hopefully it'll be more than one. We'll see how it goes. And this first one comes from Kevin. Should one believe things they cannot fully comprehend?

And if not, at what level of comprehension of certain biblical truth statements ought they begin believing? Well, let me take the first thing. The answer is yes, of course. In fact, I suspect that Kevin believes all kinds of things that he doesn't comprehend. unless he's an E.T. guy, I mean, trying to figure out computers and how it all works. I am amazed that I can put my finger on the screen and move a little dot around and influence the words on the page and cause things to change or I can hit a keystroke and how do it know what to do kind of thing. You know, I don't get that. And or I dictate into my phone with the microphone and it not only knows my, it records what I'm trying to say, but if there's a, if there's a homonym, it recognizes that gives me a choice of changing it.

Or if I have the wrong word and I erase the wrong word, it offers a new word that is fully within the context of the sentence I'm saying. It's like a thoughtful alternative. How did he know that? How did the computer know that? How does AI communicate with? How does my GPS on my phone talk to me normally about which turns to make in every single spot in the world in a normal voice? Okay. Do I believe all of those things?

Sure. There's happening right there and it's taking place. Do I understand it? Absolutely not. Zeros and ones. That's all I knew about that. And so, but I am justified. for a number of reasons in believing it's so.

Part of it, functionally, it works. It happens that way, okay? There are other things that I don't completely understand that science has deliverances on the nature of the atom, you know? I mean, somebody told me that actually is like a little center to that and then some little dots are buzzing around in different directions around that thing. You're kidding me. Don't ask me.

I don't know. Well, see, there you go. And I have reason to believe in electrons because people who know more about that have done the study. And then they've done predictive enterprises that accomplish ends in light of their view being accurate, you know. I'm looking at this desk here. And, you know, scientists say who know about this stuff that there's more space here than solid stuff. Looks solid to me, you know. But the point of making is there's a host of things that we don't understand.

understand, though we believe and act on with confidence because, and this is the key, because we have good reason to believe it so, even though we don't plumb the depths of it, okay? We trust in a reliable authority who's in a position to know those things, and we believe it because they say so. Now, this is true not just of scientific things. It's true in a host of things. history, geography, you know, current events, all kinds of things that are going on. And in the same thing, theologically, there are things about theology that are hard to comprehend.

There are people who have worked hard at thinking about it and put language, more precise language to it, so that it helps us to better understand it, be more precise. that makes more sense now, even though I believed it before, because I believe the authority, now I understand more about that. We get a lot of questions like that. Well, I believe the Bible, but it says this that makes no sense to me. Can you help us make sense? And sometimes we're able to do that. And it makes them feel more comfortable about trusting in that particular thing and in the

Bible in particular, or in general, I should say. And so this is what the ancients used to call, I'm trying to think of the phrase. I think it's faith leading to understanding, or how does that phrase go. There are certain things we believe by faith, meaning we trust the authority that we have come to be confident is reliable, scripture. It's not a leap of faith. It's a step of trust based on our confidence in the authority of the one making. this statement, that seems a little bit unusual to us. Okay. Now, so our faith is seeking understanding. That's the phrase, the ancient Jews faith seeking understanding. Again, it wasn't

a leap of faith. That's the way people take it. But rather, if the scripture says it, it's true. Now, do I understand it? No, but I'm going to try to. So the conviction is fixed because of the authority, the understanding comes upon reflection. And this is where we have the great people like Athanasius and Augustine and Anselm, who, and Aquinas, oh, those are all A's, who help us to understand faith-seeking. It was one of those guys who came up with that phrase, anyway, faith-seeking understanding. So I think for Kevin's point, of course, there's so much we don't understand, but we still have good reason to believe it's true. Yeah, so when you're asking at what level of comprehension of certain biblical truth statements ought they begin believing, it's important to remember just to put a finer point on what you've said, Greg, because everything you've said here, I agree with.

there's a difference between understanding what it says and understanding how it could be. So we can look at the text and we can say, here's what the text says. And an example would be the Trinity. Okay, the text says there is one God, the Father is God, the Son is God, Holy Spirit is God, and they're not each other. We can follow all of these things out and say, here's what it says. Now, do I understand how that all works? Well, no.

I mean, I think people have offered some helpful things that have helped me understand more than I did. But can I understand the words? Yes, absolutely. So I think we're obligated to, because of the trust that we had, that was a great point, because of the trust that we have in the authority of the text for reasons we didn't go into, then we can trust that it's so even if we can't understand how it can be. Another example of this would be Mary. So Mary... Let me pause just for a second. When it comes to the Trinity, though, our reflection tells us that the notion is not itself incoherent or contradictory.

Okay. There's massive mystery in it. One God, three centers of consciousness would be a way somebody has put it. But it's not contradictory. Now, if it was actually, in fact, contradictory, this would be a problem. Okay. So, but lacking contradiction and a proper understanding, the Trinity shows that we're not contradicting ourselves in it.

It still doesn't mean that we plumb the depths of it or even can conceptualize it well, effectively, even though we can state it accurately in terms of propositional fact. So an example of this, actually, another thing just occurred to me. We have two examples of the opposite, of people doing the opposite thing in this situation. one is Mary. So Mary, when she was told she would have a child, she says, well, how can this be since I have not known a man? And but the way she's asking, she understood what was said. She believed it, even though she didn't know how it could be. And that was fine. And it was fine for her to ask the question. And she received an answer and all this. Whereas I, is it, is it, is that I know. He did the opposite. So he's told his wife. going to have a baby. And he has, he, he doesn't believe it. Disbelieve. Because it's hard to believe. So you see the two opposite, opposite situations. If we have reason to think that this is what the text says, then we ought to believe it. And it's okay to ask questions and it's okay to try and work that out over time. But I think we are obligated to believe it. Okay, let's go to a question from

Stephen. Why would God be immune to the infinite regress dilemma? It's arbitrary to describe an object as needing no cause and then label it. It's the escape hatch to a question you've been trapped by, but that doesn't make it real or true. Well, yeah, that's true. Just because you have an escape hatch doesn't mean the escape hatch doesn't fall prey to the same objection that made you look for an escape hatch to begin with. And by the way, that particular point does apply to a number of other things. No life can happen here on this planet so impossible. Oh, it must be aliens. Well, you just kick the can down the road in that particular case. Here, I think you're facing something different. Remember, an infinite regress doesn't simply apply or doesn't apply

merely because you have an uncreated being, an eternal being. An infinite regress is a regress. Is a regress of steps. There's this step, then there's this step, then there's this step, okay? Well, who created him? Okay, then who created him? Who created him? Who created him? Who created him? And then you can say that forever. Or what caused this or what caused that or what caused the other thing, and then on down. So in order to to raise the question of the problem of an infinite regress that is a vicious regress, it's problematic for your view, then you have to, first of all, identify points for which there is no explanation other than an event prior to it that itself needs the explanation, all right? In the case of God, you don't have that circumstance because you have, like the universe, coming into existence, that needs an explanation, seems to me, just as the principle of sufficient reason.

for one, and secondly, cause and effect for another. And not only being, having a beginning, but being the kind of thing that's contingent on other things for its existence. And this is where the sufficient reason comes in. But when you have God, God, by definition, and you might say by definition, necessitated by the problem of infinite regress, otherwise, he is an uncaused being. He is the ground of being. He had no beginning.

And so there is no event that led to his existence that you have to ask, well, then what created him? And then what created that and what created that in the infinite regress? So if you have an uncreated creator, you just avoid that problem. And it's not arbitrary. It's not ad hoc. It's what's required. because if you are facing a vicious regress, you have no beginning point that you can, you can count on, and yet we're here, something must have been responsible for the coming into existence of the universe, and ultimately you have to find what, as Aristotle characterized it, the unmoved mover. And I think Aquinas developed arguments to this effect, too.

And I think there's a legitimacy to those arguments. So, properly understanding the nature of God, I think, allows us to circumvent this difficulty of the infinite regress. Now, he might be referring to an actual infinite, which Bill Craig and other philosophers have argued is impossible because it creates logical absurdities. I've never really been taken with that argument. but because it treats like infinity and eternity like a number, and it's not a number, it's a quality.

In any event, I think what can't be the case is you can't count to infinity. So you can't add up events and by successive addition of temporal events come to an eternal or an infinite amount of time. That's not going to happen. And so I think that is a problem. But God isn't an event, and it certainly is possible that God, and this is the way William and Craig argues, is that God existed timelessly up until the first act of creation, which was the first event, temporal event. And after that, God participates temporally in that which he's made. So I think that's adequate to circumvent this problem.

Yeah, I think the main point here for me is that Stephen asks, or he says it's arbitrary to describe an object as needing no cause. But the thing is we're not just arbitrarily saying it. This is something we are reasoning to, as you pointed out. We are reasoning to the truth that there has to be a self-existent being, a personal being who, made a choice to start something can't be a force because then the results would always exist. So we are reasoning to the conclusion that there is a self-existent being. And you mentioned Aristotle, right? So this is it's not just people reading the Bible. This is something we can just use our minds and see that it's so. So at this.

this point, we say, okay, this is who God is. He is that self-existent being. Now, if you say, no, God had a beginning, then whoever is the self-existent being is the God we're talking about. That's right. That's right. So no matter what, it's just not arbitrary. Yeah. And there's another argument that we've hinted at a little bit, the arguments first, the principle of sufficient reason. And basically, this is a principle that says whatever is has a reason for being. The reason for being is either in itself or because of something else. I mean, that seems pretty straightforward, okay? And this is a kind of cosmological argument

that doesn't require the universe to have come into existence. Even if the universe is eternal, it still is contingent. It's not something that's self-explanatory, all right? And so I'm trying to remember, you might remember the name of the philosopher offered this other...

Leibniz? Yeah, Leibniz. Thank you. And so this particular argument says the universe and everything we experience is contingent and therefore must owe its existence to something that's not contingent and is therefore the ground of being itself. And this is exactly how we understand God. It's a logical necessity.

And as you pointed out, it's not arbitrary. We're not just making this up as an escape hatch. There's a line of thinking that goes. And this line of, look at Leibniz, you know, he's long gone, and Aristotle's long, long gone, 400 years before Christ, that all of these great thinkers of Western civilization have seen this as a necessity. And this is why it's very difficult to find any major thinker in the last 2,500 years who did not understand the necessity of a prime mover. And on our website at STR.org, we have linked to a video from Reasonable Faith that explains the contingency argument. So if you look up the contingency argument or Leibniz on our website, you'll find this short. It's about five minutes. It's Bill Craig's organization. They say they do a great job. They got a bunch of those and they do great. Yeah. So there's one for the Kalam cosmological argument, and that's the every effect requires a cause.

Yeah. And then they have the contingency arguments, which is the every, everything requires an explanation that's contingent. Sufficient reason. Right. So I recommend that you check out those on our website. Okay, Greg. The next question comes from Adam. How would you respond to an atheist who defends the existence of objective morality by grounding it in an objective rule or criteria?

For example, due to others as you would want them to do to you. Well, this is circular, and it's circular because he's presuming just because you have a criteria, you can state, make a statement that it's, that it's, that it is, in a certain sense, self-explanatory. It's self-grounding. This mistake happens a lot when people say, well, it's just obvious. It's just obvious what's right, or where are you getting your ideas? That's the way sometimes the question is put, and the question is really about grounding the origin of these moral obligations, not how we know them. So this is a confusion between the epistemological notion of knowing and the maybe metaphysical or ontological question of how it came to be, all right?

So we can know that the speed limit by our office here is 35 miles an hour, all right? Well, how do we know that? There's a sign, all right. But the sign isn't what gives the speed limit the authority. It just tells us what the speed limit is. Even though the sign is objective. Even though the sign itself is objective, that's the epistemic element, how we know. But if I put a sign up there and said 25 instead of 35,

Would people be obliged to obey it? No, because I don't have the proper authority, all right? And so the question then is, what is the proper authority for the speed limit? It's the government. The government grounds the limit, which is expressed for our knowledge through the sign. All right. Now, it's so interesting because on the way in, I was thinking about this very thing, driving into the studio, and I made a note of this.

So when you say to somebody, you advance some more. concept and people rebel. And here's what they often will say. Well, who are you to say? Right. Who are you to say? Who died and made you God? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Notice what's implicit in the statement. The challenge implies that somebody with proper authority has to make the command or else it doesn't need to be obeyed, all right? And you're not the person to make that command. So therefore, I could just dismiss you. But the implication is, the intuition there is that obligations are held between persons. Now, if I said, you got to go 45 miles an hour here. Well, actually, I just came down PCH. That's 45 miles to 50 miles an hour, supposedly. Not now. It's 25 because of all the destruction, right? It's 25.

They changed the speed limit. Who says, they say, and they enforce it, because there's the guy with the speed limit thing, the motorcycle cop, ready to pull people over, all right? So, So all of that comports with our basic understanding of how law works. Law is not just a precept. It's a precept that we're obliged to obey and we're obliged to a person who is at least in principle in a position to enforce the precept we're obliged to obey. If you just throw out, okay, love your neighbor as yourself, then I'm going to say, says who? Your grandma?

Why should I listen to that? I don't believe in that. I'm self-centered. I'm, you know, narcissistic. I'm going to do what feels good to me. That's my rule. Now, what's your principled argument against it? Well, that's not right.

Says who? It's a says-who kind of thing, morality. And if there is no one saying what we're supposed to do, then we have no obligation to do it. This is the problem with what's called moral platonism, which is the idea that morality exists as abstract objects like mercy and kindness and goodness or however you want to characterize it. These are just kind of abstract objects.

Well, by the way, if there are true abstract objects, then materialism is false, first off. Any appeal to that is the death knell to materialism. But secondly, those are just abstract objects, which the nature of abstract objects is they don't do anything. They're non-causal, all right? And they don't make anything happen. All right. So since the nature of morality is obligation, it's not just mercy or love, but be merciful. Be loving.

That's the obligation. So where is the obligation coming from? That's what is held between persons, okay? And it's not going to, it just, you can't connect the dots. It doesn't do the job. You have to have, you have to have a ground of morality, you have to have a standard, and you have to have a person who obliges us regarding that standard. And in this case, our case, they're one and the same.

The ground of morality is the character of God, and God as the person, then, can make moral demands on those under his authority, which is everybody. It all, pardon me, it all fits. We don't have to do all of these little, you know, hokey-pokey things, and you got one foot on the pier and the dock and one foot on the boat and balancing and pretty soon we're going to end up in the drink. No, this makes perfect sense the answer we offer. People don't want it because it makes them accountable in a tangible, concrete way, and that's what they don't want. You could put up all the objective speed limit signs you want, Greg. That doesn't make it – that doesn't ground any of them just because the limit itself is an objective number. Right.

So, yeah, that was a great explanation. I have nothing more to add than that. So thank you, Greg. That was great. Thank you, Adam and Stephen and Kevin. We appreciate hearing from you. Send us your question on X with the hashtag STR Ask. We look forward to hearing from you.

This is Amy Hall and Greg Kokel for Stand to Reason.