• Is God Logical?

In my post, Is God Emotional,^<1> I concluded God does not have emotions. Some of my readers disagreed. Their comments led me to reassess my thoughts. Comparing logical thinking with emotions helped me understand both of them. Is God logical, emotional, or both?

Emotions, as we experience them, change over time. They move from happy to sad or angry, often in rapid succession. The Bible tells us God never changes, and that He exists outside of time (see Time, Modern Physics, and God^<2>.) Because of this many theologians have concluded that God has no emotions. Yet the Bible also describes God as angry sometimes and at other times delighted by His children.

In contrast, as far as I know, every theologian believes God is logical. Why the difference? Because logical thinking can reveal immutable, eternal truths. For example, 2+3=5, is eternally true. All of mathematics is the result of using logic in a particular way. It is eternally true. Perhaps mathematics is an attribute of God? I believe it reveals part of God's character.

Humans are both emotional and logical. Logic, perhaps, is fixed and independent of time. But, logical thinking is a process in time. Everything we do, or think, or say, requires time. For us the interplay between logical thinking and emotions is very close. Consider the following example.

Young Albert Einstein was a lowly patent clerk, with a passion for the Deep Mysteries of Physics.^<3> He had a sudden flash of insight. Could it be right? The idea excited him. He spent all of his spare time working on the mathematics of his idea. He tried to understand the strange results that came from his work. Finally, he carefully crafted a paper with details of his logical thinking. His special theory of relativity surprised the whole world.

I think this pattern is common, maybe even universal. Notice the emotions. Passion and excitement came first. Those emotions drove him to work out the logical details of his ideas.

Do emotions always come first, followed by creative work? Maybe there is a chicken and egg problem here. Einstein's flash of insight came after spending years studying physics. Maybe emotions and logic are so closely bound we cannot cleanly separate them.

I like the picture of mental health I read in The Whole–Brain Child, by Daniel Siegel and Tina Bryson. Imagine navigating a river in a canoe where one bank is emotions and the other is logic:

Whenever you're in the water, peacefully floating along in your canoe, you feel like you're generally in a good relationship with the world around you.
...
Sometimes, though, as you float along, you veer too close to one of the river's two banks. This causes different problems, depending on which bank you approach. One bank represents chaos, where you feel out of control. Instead of floating in the peaceful river, you are caught in the pull of tumultuous rapids, and confusion and turmoil rule the day.
...
the other bank presents its own dangers. It's the bank of rigidity, which is the opposite of chaos. As opposed to being out of control, rigidity is when you are imposing control on everything and everyone around you. You become completely unwilling to adapt, compromise, or negotiate.

Page 11 of [WholeBrain]The Whole-Brain Child by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson, 2012 publisher: Bantam Books

Are there times when we are completely stuck on one bank of the river without any access to the other bank? Logical thinking develops slowly in children, so it is easy for their emotional responses to overwhelm their logical thinking. Adults do stray towards one bank or the other sometimes and have trouble getting back into the middle of the stream. I see that happening in myself. But healthy adults are able to self correct.

Probably purely logical or purely emotional thinking does not exist. Maybe we have an emotional–logical spectrum instead of two distinct modes of thinking. Does that insight help us understand God? The Bible says:

So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

Genesis 1:27 [NRSV]New Revised Standard Version Bible by National Council of Churches USA, 1989

That gives us some justification for extending insights about ourselves to God. However, we were created in God's image, not the other way around. We are a faint echo of God, so we must be cautious in attributing our characteristics to God.

God created time, and created us to live inside time. That makes it difficult to understand His eternal perspective. C. S. Lewis explained it this way:

If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn. We come to the parts of the line one by one: we have to leave A behind before we get to B, and cannot reach C until we leave B behind. God, from above or outside or all round, contains the whole line, and sees it all.
...
We therefore imagine [the time Jesus was on Earth] is also a period in the history of God's own existence. But God has no history. He is too completely and utterly real to have one. For, of course, to have a history means losing part of your reality (because it has already slipped away into the past) and not yet having another part (because it is still in the future): in fact having nothing but the tiny little present, which has gone before you can speak about it. God forbid we should think God was like that. Even we may hope not to be always rationed in that way.

Pages 168—169 of [MereChristianity]Mere Christianity by Clive Staple Lewis, 1952 publisher: Harper Collins

We see Jesus' time on Earth imperfectly, at a distance of 2000 years. God sees it as part of the whole picture, His eternal now. Jesus, fully man and fully God, revealed His emotions to the people around Him, and therefore to us. Those emotions are part of God's now. From that perspective, God does have emotions.

The Bible attributes emotions to God in many places, for example:

They stir up strife, they lurk, they watch my steps. As they hoped to have my life, so repay them for their crime; in wrath cast down the peoples, O God! You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your record? Then my enemies will retreat in the day when I call. This I know, that God is for me.

Psalm 56:6—9 [NRSV]New Revised Standard Version Bible by National Council of Churches USA, 1989

The entire Biblical context helps us understand God. It tells us God has both emotions and logic. We live our lives navigating the emotional–logical stream, working best in the middle of that stream. Perhaps in God the emotional–logical spectrum is a single characteristic. He exists outside of time, so He does not navigate from one bank of the stream and then back. We may experience God as angry sometimes, and happy other times. That is our perspective, not something changing in God. He is constant, always loving us:

So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.

First John 4:16 [NRSV]New Revised Standard Version Bible by National Council of Churches USA, 1989

What do you think? Does this make sense to you? Let me know in the comments sections.