Improbable or Impossible: The Trinity

Many Muslim apologists say that the fact that the Trinity is hard to understand somehow means the Trinity is an absurd idea. I have also heard many claim that a tri-unity is absurd and makes no sense. Well, is this a valid claim? Can things that are hard to understand exist?

Yahweh's Composite Unity

Numerous passages in the Old and New Testaments point to the existence of more than one power/person that is equal to God. Deuteronomy 6:4, the famous Jewish Shema that declares “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one". Many skeptics use this verse to argue that the Trinity is an absurd idea that is foreign to Scripture, but is this the case? The Shema uses the Hebrew word Elohinu for "Our God," and it is written in a plural form. Echad is the word used to describe the oneness of God, but does this word mean complete unity? Numerous passages use the word echad in a composite form to describe a unity made up of more than one individual (Gen 1:15, 26, 2:24; Ezra 3:1, 2:64, to name a few areas where echad is used as a composite unity). Nowhere is the other Hebrew word Yechid used to describe God's oneness, and that word is used to describe absolute oneness.

The Trinity: Practical Analogy

Many say that God cannot be 3 persons in 1 being. This logic flows from the characteristics of our person, that of finite individuality. But is this a good and valid idea?

Can one thing be distinguished into different aspects? Can the Trinity exist as one being, with more than one person? There are a plethora of things in the physical world that can be looked at to get a better understanding of "3 Persons, 1 God". I want us to look at Electricity. I think it opens up a door into understanding the composite unity of the Trinity.

When we observe an Electric current at first, it looks as if it may be operating as one single agent. But as we look closer and observe the behavior of electricity, we see a tri-fold, composite operation. By examining the characteristics of electricity, we can distinguish three separate agents acting in one. Ohm's law states that current is proportional to the voltage and inversely proportional to resistance. Electricity has 3 attributes to its nature: Voltage/Electromotive Force, Amps/Current, and Ohms/Resistance. Voltage is the force that drives the current, current is the magnitude of electric charge, and the Ohm is the resistance or material for electricity to flow.

By taking this tri-fold operation into mind, we can easily see how one God that has 3 distinguishable Persons is in no way contradictory. God is one being, one essence, one God. But this One God has three distinguishable persons within Him. The trinity may be distinguished in 3 persons, but never can be separated as 1 God. Just as voltage, amps, and Ohms can be distinguished, but never separated, for the flow of electricity to be successful.

Voltage is not the same as Amperes, Amperes are not the same as the Ohm, and the Ohm is not the same as Voltage, but all inhibit Electricity. Sound familiar?

More Than One Person?

Christianity has the only real answer to what a being beyond personality would be like. All of us (who can admit it) feel and know about the great being behind all of this, and it must be beyond personal to have created us. The sad part is that many people, though they say they believe in a super-personal God, really only degrade Him to some impersonal force or "the universe."

C.S. Lewis helps put the puzzle together rather nicely in "Mere Christianity." In a three-dimensional world, you can move in three spatial directions (up/down, left/right, forward/backward; or simply X, Y, and Z). On one spatial dimension, you can only draw a single line. In two dimensions, you can create a figure out of more lines to create something like a triangle or square. In three dimensions, you can create what Lewis calls a "solid body," like a cube that is made out of those single-lined figures.

His point is that as you move to more real and complicated levels, you never suddenly 'lose' what you had before; you are granted more creative freedom with what you had before. So when we are speaking of a personal being in finite space-time, we can compare that to a second or first dimension. If we were to go into another higher (transcendent) existence, then it would be perfectly logical for this being to be made of multiple persons.

Just like the line in the first dimension (now multiple lines) forming a figure in the second dimension. Multiple persons construct one being, the Trinitarian God. That is the Christian claim, and it is the only realistic and non-degrading answer on the market.

Does Hard Understanding Rule Out Possible Existence?

To conclude this short article, I will cover this final issue. Does the fact that the trinity is hard to fully understand or describe rule out its possibility of actually existing?

There are many concepts and objects that we deal with every day that we do not fully understand, yet know they are logically concrete. Take a tesseract, for example, it is a cube existing in 4 spatial dimensions. This is an object we can not fully understand in 3-dimensional terms; all we can do is draw what its shadow would look like. Harkening back to our above discussion about adding dimensions to a drawing, it does not in any way rule out the existence of higher-dimensional shapes. The fact that we, existing and imagining in three dimensions, can imagine and grasp a four-dimensional object by observing its shadow left behind in three dimensions.

Think of walking in the sunlight, you exist in three spatial dimensions, but the shadow that the sun's light casts on the sidewalk appears to be a silhouette of your body superimposed on the concrete in two dimensions. When we take a four-dimensional cube and draw its shadow, we get the tesseract.

A drawing of a dimensional progression from a square (2d) to a tesseract (4d)

The fact that the trinity is a hard-to-understand concept does not in any way inhibit its plausibility of existence. The trinity is a logically stable idea, and no amount of Muslim apologist chanting can change that.