threeness

 

A curious aspect of the assertion by believing Christians there that is one God, is their attendant assertion that there are three persons in the one God.

The three persons in the one God according to Christians are God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

A prayer attributed in Ireland to Saint Patrick invokes God as "the One in three, the Three in one."

If the one true God really is properly understood as three persons in one God, if the concept itself is not incoherent, we might also expect to find examples where one thing is three things in the reality we experience, that is to say in the reality God has created, ie physical obervable reality.

Such examples do exist.

There are three states of matter. Every material substance appears to potentially exist as solid, liquid and gas.

There are three notions inherent to many understandings of the human being. We are thought to be mind, body and spirit.

There are three dimensions to physical reality such as we conceive of it. These are height, width and depth.

We have three notions of what we call time, the past, the present and the future.

The late Nabeel Qureshi who became Christian, recalled being told at medical school when trying to understand a particular biochemical molecule: "You must think of it as three things at once."

The terrestrial environment on this planet consists of three existential media, and life can exist in all of them, ie in water, in air, and in the soil of the earth itself.

In religion we might note that there are three worldwide religions which have claimed there is one God, the Jewish faith, Christianity and Islam. 

Even science, which is occasionally hijacked by atheists styling themselves scientists, might be said to consist essentially of three disciplines in the one magisterial field of study, Biology, Chemistry and Physics.

God is telling us something.

But there is nothing without an act of faith.