What do you believe that you can’t prove?

As a Trinitarian Christian, apart from special revelation, I cannot prove the existence of a Triune God who revealed himself as a man who is both deity and humanity (commonly known as hypostatic union). I am not saying that God as the supreme Being and designer cannot be proven (as Anthony Flew discovered), but what I do affirm is that the God revealed in Scriptures cannot be proven. He cannot be identified through empirical data alone. Though matters of archeology, sense perception, law of causality and so on can lead us to a proper understanding of general revelation, Scriptures alone can draw us to what is not known through these methods.

This morning the New York Times had a fascinating analysis of what current thought is in the world of physics, biology, psychology and so on. This is how the question was posed: What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?”This was the question posed to scientists, futurists and other creative thinkers by John Brockman, a literary agent and publisher of The Edge, a Web site devoted to science. The site asks a new question at the end of each year. Here are two excerpts from the responses, to be posted Tuesday at www.edge.org.
Professor David Meyers, Psychologist, Hope College; author, “Intuition”answers the same question saying the following: As a Christian monotheist, I start with two unproven axioms:

1. There is a God.

2. It’s not me (and it’s also not you).

Together, these axioms imply my surest conviction: that some of my beliefs (and yours) contain error. We are, from dust to dust, finite and fallible. We have dignity but not deity.

And that is why I further believe that we should

a) hold all our unproven beliefs with a certain tentativeness (except for this one!),

b) assess others’ ideas with open-minded skepticism, and

c) freely pursue truth aided by observation and experiment.

Richard Dawkins
Evolutionary biologist, Oxford University; author, “The Ancestor’s Tale”

I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all “design” anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

Philip Zimbardo
Psychologist, emeritus professor, Stanford; author, “Shyness”

I believe that the prison guards at the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, who worked the night shift in Tier 1A, where prisoners were physically and psychologically abused, had surrendered their free will and personal responsibility during these episodes of mayhem.

But I could not prove it in a court of law. These eight Army reservists were trapped in a unique situation in which the behavioral context came to dominate individual dispositions, values and morality to such an extent that they were transformed into mindless actors alienated from their normal sense of personal accountability for their actions – at that time and place.
See www.edge.org. for more quotes.