Dialogues Dialogue Two.About God 

Unknown. Yes, you are right, whatever question you take, you will certainly come to the question of God. Therefore, allow me to lay out before you everything that makes me an unbeliever. Perhaps many things here will not be directly related to the matter and will force us to deviate aside. But I don't know how to speak any other way.

Confessor. Speak without thinking about the form, I will try to understand you.

Unknown. First of all, I must tell you beforehand that I know all the scholastic proofs of the existence of God - I think there are seven of them - I know. Please don't bother to go through them again. I think that they have not yet made anyone believers, least of all those who composed them.

Confessor. Don't bother. In the question of God I shall use less of the logical method than in the question of immortality.

Unknown. So you don't want to prove, but to show the truth?

Confessor. Yes.

Unknown. I will try to consider it conscientiously. Until now, I have seen nothing in the teaching about God, except a fantastic fairy tale, in which, moreover, no one believes for a long time. When I met educated people who, by the way, lived in exactly the same way as all non-believers, and spoke about their faith, I involuntarily thought: are they really not pretending? Is it really possible to seriously believe in all these fables?

Confessor. Recognition of each other's unconditional sincerity is a necessary condition for our conversation.

Unknown. Yes, yes, of course. I have mentioned this thought only to illustrate how difficult it is for me to admit the possibility of faith. So, where to start? I will start with the secondary. You are an Orthodox priest and you are convinced that you know the truth. According to your truth, God is threefold in persons and one in essence. You believe in this God and consider any other faith to be a delusion. If I were to go from you to the mullah, he would speak to me about his one Allah and would also claim that he knows the truth and would consider your Trinitarian God to be a lie, completely inconsistent with the teaching of Mohammed. Then I would go to a Buddhist. He would tell me legends about the Buddha. And he would assert that he alone knows the truth. I'd come to a heathen. He would have named a few dozen of his gods to me, and would have asserted that he alone knew the truth. This multitude of all kinds of religions, often excluding each other and always asserting that only they have the truth, first of all makes us doubt that in any of them there is truth. Logic is powerless in matters of faith, and subjective certainty is obviously insufficient. After all, all the representatives of these different religions have the same subjective certainty, and yet they consider only their own truth to be true. In other words, it is only in their subjective states that they recognize objective significance.

Confessor. Your opinion is like if someone doubts the truth of scientific knowledge just because dozens of scientists express different views on each scientific issue. It is clear that one person is right. And for you, the scientific truth will be what corresponds to your understanding of this truth. Take, for example, the question of the origin of species. Has complete unanimity been achieved here? To this day, many people completely refute Darwin's theory. Many return to Lamarck. There are also neo-Lamarckians and neo-Darwinists. To this day, there are disputes in science about this basic question of biology. But you don't say, "Biology doesn't know the truth because different scientists think it's true."

Unknown. Yes, but there are issues in science that have been solved in the same way by everyone.

Confessor. They are also found in religion. All religions recognize the existence of God. Everyone recognizes God as the first cause of all things. Everyone recognizes the real connection of the divine power with man. Everyone recognizes that God demands the fulfillment of the moral law, everyone recognizes the invisible world besides the visible, everyone recognizes life after death. Therefore, one religion excludes the other not unconditionally. There is a grain of truth in every religion. But its fullness really lies in one, in the Christian one, inasmuch as it is revealed and preserved in the Orthodox Church.