Christian Philosophical Problems: Trinity
The Christian doctrine of the trinity comes pretty close to crossing the line into contradiction. In fact, Muslims sometimes say to Christians, “Three does not equal one.” Obviously, if Allah (God) is one, as the most fundamental tenet of Islam proclaims, he can’t possibly be three gods, as Christians seem to believe. The trinity is explicitly rejected by the Quran as a form of unbelief, akin to polytheism and it seems to fly in the face of the law of non-contradiction.
Surprisingly, while the word “trinity” is never used in the New Testament, the phrase “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” is used in Matthew 28:19, and the trinity is alluded to in 2 Corinthians 13:14, 1 Corinthians 12:4-5, Ephesians 4:4-6, 1 Peter 1:2, and Revelation 1:4-5. There is no doubt that the earliest Christians believed in God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, since new believers were to be baptized into the name—singular. The unity of God in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is present by inference at Jesus’s baptism, where Jesus is immersed, the Father speaks from heaven, endorsing Jesus as his Son, and the Holy Spirit descends on him in the form of a dove. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all raised Jesus from the dead, if we are to take the statements in Acts 2:24, 32, 3:15; John 10:17-18; and Romans 1:4, 8:11 seriously. So, there is no doubt from earliest days Christians believed in one God and yet the deity and distinctiveness of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Christians believe that God is one in being and yet three in persons.
Four Analogies for the trinity
Is this, as our Muslim friends believe, a simple contradiction? Or is there something else happening, more in the realm of paradox or mystery? I believe the latter.
Even in nature, we see examples of three in one, of trinities. The analogy of three states of matter sometimes is used to illustrate this. Although it’s not my favorite analogy for the trinity, it’s easy to understand: water, for example, can exist as solid (ice), liquid, and gas (steam). A weakness of this analogy is that the same water is not in all three states at the same time. Still, it shows that even in nature, the same substance can be in three different forms.
We human beings are little trinities, another analogy, since we are body, soul, and spirit (1 Thessalonians 5:23). I like this analogy because it illustrates unity and diversity. Since I am a trinity, I want to take care of my body, soul, and spirit. I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to any of them, because they are all me. A weakness of this analogy is that some people don’t believe that humans have a spirit or even a soul. There is no soul or mind, they believe, only chemical processes in the brain. Still, for some people this analogy is meaningful.
A third analogy for the divine trinity uses extra dimensions to show how our simple perceptions view God as three in one as an unsolvable paradox. I first encountered this analogy in Hugh Ross’s Beyond the Cosmos: What Recent Discoveries in Astronomy and Physics Reveal about the Nature of God. Perhaps inspired by Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 work of fiction Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Abbott, 1979), Ross attempted to solve many of Christianity’s difficult theological problems by appealing to God’s extra-dimensionality, that is his existence in more dimensions than the four we experience (three of space and one of time). Ross maintains that God operates in at least the eleven dimensions established by string theory, and probably many more (Ross, 1996, p. 77). We can’t really comprehend more dimensions than we experience, according to Ross, but we can imagine an existence in fewer. This is the basis of Abbott’s Flatland and makes for an intriguing thought experiment. Suppose, Ross suggests, we imagine Mr. and Mrs. Flat, who exist on the surface of a computer screen, in two dimensions (Ross, 1996, p. 75). Compared with us, they have many limitations, among them the inability to comprehend three dimensions of space. So, if I put a fingertip on the screen, they will think of the great and powerful Ed Wolfe as being roughly a circle. But if I put three fingertips on the screen, they will think that I am three circles. Little do they know, of course, how much bigger and more incomprehensible I really am. Yet I might limit the revelation of myself to either one or three fingertips, just to give them an idea of how vast I really am. Perhaps the doctrine of the trinity is something similar.
A final analogy, molecular resonance, is proposed by Nabeel Qureshi in Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus (2014). The book traces Qureshi’s difficult spiritual journey from Islam to Christianity. In the first part of the book, the author portrays his family as a happy, close-knit, and affectionate, Ahmadiyya Muslim household. In fact, the first part of the book easily could be seen as an apologetic for Islam. However, as Qureshi sought to know Allah more and more closely, he was disturbed to discover that he was being drawn more and more to the reality of Jesus. He was horrified to discover that, if he kept following the evidence, he would be drawn away from his close-knit, loving family, whom he adored and respected. He feared their rejection and dismay at the prospect that he would be drawn into a commitment to Jesus. The dedication of his book divulges just a bit of the pain he and his family endured through his journey:
The final barrier to Nabeel’s faith in Jesus was the Christian doctrine of the trinity: three cannot equal one. There is no God but Allah! Then one day in Organic Chemistry class, while Qureshi was preparing for the Medical College Admissions Test, he heard something that changed his entire perspective on the difficult Christian doctrine. The professor discussed three large diagrams depicting nitrates in black and white. The class was studying resonance, the configuration of electrons in certain molecules. The basic concept of resonance is easy enough to understand, even without a background in chemistry. Essentially, the building block of every physical object is an atom, a positively charged nucleus orbited by tiny, negatively charged electrons. Atoms bond to one another by sharing their electrons, forming a molecule. Different arrangements of the electrons in certain molecules are called “resonance structures.” Some molecules like water, have no resonance while others have three resonance structures or more, like the nitrate on the board.
Although the concept was easy enough to grasp, the reality proved to be baffling. The professor concluded her lesson by commenting, “These drawings are just the best way to represent resonance structures on paper, but it’s actually much more complicated. Technically, a molecule with resonance is every one of its structures at every point in time, yet no single one of its structures at any point in time” (Qureshi, 2014, p. 194).
Nabeel suddenly was convinced that God could be three and one at the same time. The final barrier to faith in Jesus for Nabeel was breached, and, despite the pain he and his family would experience, he followed the evidence and the truth he discovered. He became an outspoken Jesus follower.
While these analogies do not prove that the doctrine of the trinity is true, they do demonstrate that it is not necessarily contradictory, in fact is plausible. Christians believe that God is love, and so it makes perfect sense that God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have been in a loving relationship from eternity to eternity. That Jesus felt abandoned by the Father on the cross (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34) is all the more poignant. And that Jesus prayed on the night before he died that his followers would be one, as he and the Father were one (John 17:11), makes perfect sense. To the skeptic who might admit that God is a force or an intelligence but not personal, we might say that God is not less than a person; he is more than a person and yet is one being.
This article is first of four blog pieces on Christian beliefs that some skeptics consider to be philosophically problematic or even contradictory. It is an excerpt from my book Five Languages of Evidence: How to Speak about Reasons for Christianity in a Post-truth World. Not yet published; available upon request.
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