Words are those remarkable instruments uniquely available to man, as far as we know. With them, thought and experience can be crystallized and exchanged not only between contemporary minds, but also among all generations of human minds. Ideas once encapsulated in these plastic verbal crystals become the inheritance of the ages and can form a part of the fund of human knowledge. We should select and use words, these simultaneous wings and fetters of our thoughts, with great care -- striving for precision where exactness is appropriate or for vagueness where impressions need be amorphous.

In the subject area associated with our ultimate beliefs we are quite literally at our wits end. Although the human brain is a remarkable instrument for receiving, analyzing and acting on information, it is naive to assume that it is the final stage in the evolutionary process that created it. We should be very wary of trusting its infant powers to make conclusions about ultimate issues -- especially if these conclusions involve the denial (or acceptance) of existences that obviously go beyond our present capabilities of comprehension.

Faced with issues that our power of reason is not sufficient to resolve, what course of action should we take? When Pascal was confronted by the problem of the existence of God, which reason alone could not prove either pro or con from evidence or philosophy, he proposed the reasoning gambler's approach: Suppose that God either exists or does not exist and suppose that I either believe or deny His existence; what are the outcomes in each case? If I deny God and, in truth, He does not exist or if I affirm God and He does exist, then I shall be satisfied in each case equally, so no criterion for choice is provided. However, if I believe in God and there is no God, I shall be disappointed, but my disappointment will have no eternal consequences; whereas, if I deny God and He does exist, then I have by my pride destroyed a relationship between myself and my Creator which could be of enormous consequence both to my present and eternal existence. Surely only an insane egotist could evaluate the consequences and continue to doubt God.

Whether or not we are satisfied with Pascal's "playing dice with God" approach, we should recognize that the wager illustrates that the consequences of decisions are as important as their logic. Pascal's wager, along with whatever other faults it may be guilty of, tends to emphasize the division of man and God. Those things which are understood and reasonable are man's province and God is all else -- the unknown (yet) or unknowable (if such a category is admitted).

A second approach to becoming more comfortable with the virtues of theism vs. atheism is really only an extension of the wager philosophy, but it is tinged with practical good sense. It involves the depressing psychology of finiteness. The worldview provided to modern man by some proponents of science can easily result in a mental state of futility and hopelessness. According to this view, the earth is merely a tiny cinder, slightly wet on the surface, at just the right distance from a stable, sub-average-size star so that randomizing processes are temporarily reversible in the slime film, which covers the cinder. This star revolves among several billion other stars in a relatively uncrowded edge of what turns out to be a larger than average galaxy among the many billion galaxies making up the observable universe. We are probably not the first or the last sentient germs to have evolved on similar cinders, but, for all practical purposes at the moment, we are utterly alone in a time and space so vast as to reduce our stature and life span to absurdities. We are, in the view of the so called realists, an evolutionary joke whose lives are meaningless not only as individuals but probably as a species also with little greater chance to leave a trace or impact on the rest of the universe than the trilobites or the dinosaurs.

So says science, according to those whose faith in science has replaced any more general faith. These believers accept the current interpretation of science, as they see it, and claim that man must accept his finitude and make the best of it. The paradox of this position is that finitude is accepted for all categories of phenomena except that which has concluded the necessity of finitude; i.e., the validity tester is man's mind -- or more precisely, one capability of man's mind: his still embryonic capacity to form a logically consistent world view based on the data of verifiable, sensory experience. Difficulties immediately arise when depending solely on reason as he window through which all of life's variety is filtered, for sensory experience itself reveals how rich and overwhelming the phenomena which surround us can be. Reason, applied honestly to the issue, must recognize the limitations of its ability to interpret. To abandon reason leads to one kind of insanity, but to trust reason (at our stage of evolution anyway) to provide ultimate insights into all possible phenomena is an insanity of another kind -- an unwillingness to recognize our own limitations -- the hubris of assuming our own Godhood!

Thus, faced with the unknown, we have responded either theistically by awarding the category to God or atheistically by a faith in its knowability that is unsupportable by reason. But using reason creatively rather than dogmatically, let us explore an alternative approach to the nature of reality. I think therefore I am says Descartes, but a precise biological definition of what constitutes this "I" for any one of us runs into difficulties. Where does any given molecule of oxygen become a part of me and cease being part of my environment? When does this protein, once associated with a cow, stop being bovine and start being me --at the slaughterhouse? --when I purchase the steak? --when I swallow it? --when it is broken into its parts (some of which are soon exhaled or excreted)? When incorporated temporarily into my musculature or my hair? In the world of ideas, my individuality is even more difficult to pin down. Are my thoughts merely the total thoughts of the people with whom I have conversed or the words I have read? Whose ideas have gone into forming my present understandings and opinions each transformed by each as they were apprehended and processed. Biologically I exist in, and as, a sea of molecules, mentally I exist in, and as, a sea of ideas. You and I are not static objects but dynamic processes, a cohesion of complex vortices that shape our molecular environment in a progression of forms possessing a recognizable continuity. I am also the agency through which this progression of molecular collections interacts with other similar forms in another hierarchy of phenomena involving structures of seminal ideas, the molecules of concepts. Participation in this latter phenomenon seems to be unique in degree to we humans. We enable the expression of life and thought. Other natural forms enable the expression of other characteristics: grass -- of photosynthesis, of food storage, of habitation, of soil formation, of cushioning for feet; mountains -- of the relief of tectonic strain, of barriers to wind and rain, of ecologies, of ski slopes, of high meadows.

And all these manifestations of reality are the ones suggested by our limited apprehension of the situation -- a view scaled to our dimensions in space and time. There surely are structures far too small or much too large for our minds to grasp, processes too fast or too slow for us to follow, and interrelations among phenomena too complex (or simple?) for us to recognize. What I am suggesting is not that God begins where our powers end, but that we (and all other structures, processes and interrelationships) enable the expression of a fundamental pattern, an underlying purpose, the ultimate reality that informs our universe and our behavior -- this basis of being comes close to revealing the true nature of God liberated both from the superstition of institutionalized theism and the uncritical conceit of scientific atheism.