When I bow my head to pray, do I actually believe in a good God? Who is looking kindly on me at that moment? And who will work things together for my good? Even though, when I look around at my own life and at the wider world, I don’t see any specific evidence of His presence.

I watch my mind work. I use it often like an instrument or dashboard to detect content striking my sensorium, like my senses are a screen showing the blips of data coming in through senses. I analyze these blips for patterns and act on this content in my most efficient and logical way.

But I know you feel how cold is that last paragraph? If my mind is a detector and processor of data as it strikes my sensorium, well, then, what even is prayer? And if God needs to strike my sensorium to be a part of my prayer, am I treating him like photons and sound waves?

I’m getting to this: to believe that God is good, that he hears and cares, is also an organ of knowledge. This belief overrules the dashboard mind, overlays it, over colors it, and stops it from the analysis it launches by default.

I still hate the traditional Q: “how do you know?” A: “By faith”. – exchange. I think I’m saying something more than that here, or maybe those people are deeper than I’ve realized.

To believe that God is good is not easy, because – let’s be frank – the world is full of evidence that He is gone. Man’s brutality to man and beasts is such a horror film it’s hard to picture in my mind the God who cares is overwatching this world of Auschwitz and slaughter houses. There really is only one theological problem, one and only one objection to the reality of the Creator, and that’s the inhumanity of man.