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There are many things to think about in this world of ours: things that are beautiful, spectacular, ominous, frightening, many more, certainly, and, also, things that are impossible, that is, things that our reasoning tells us cannot be. They may be impossible for different reasons, but we cannot understand them. We are stuck with them. Impossible things. Here are three of them.

One is Zeno’s paradox, a contradiction between logic and experience. Another, a different kind,  is the conflict between ‘fixed fate and free will.’  A third is the nature of Jesus, divine and human. The three are contradictions but in different ways. They are, as traditionally accepted, impossible. But they are there.

First, Zeno’s paradox. You know about it. If Achilles and the turtle are lined up for a race and the turtle gets a head start, Zeno said that no matter how fast or how far they go Achilles will never catch the turtle. But you would think that if Achilles wanted to catch up to a turtle, he would. Experience is plain and clear. But the logic logic is indisputable. For Achilles to catch the turtle, he has to get half way to the turtle first, obviously, but while he is on his way to the halfway mark, the turtle has moved on so now there is a new halfway mark for Achilles to reach, but while he is moving on to that, the turtle has also moved on, and on and on and so on forever. Achilles is always arriving where the turtle has been. Achilles is always halfway there. Mathematicians may claim otherwise, but that doesn’t help me. My logic  says Achilles will never catch up. My experience contradicts. I  cannot reconcile the experience and the logic. The resolution of the two is an impossible thing.

Then there is the ‘fixed fate or free will’ issue, a different kind of puzzle. Suppose you are delivering a package to an address in a strange city. You are at an intersection and don’t know whether to turn left or right. Now the free will people will claim that you may decide what to do, to turn this way or that. It’s up to you. You can make a choice. Your will is free. No,  say the fixed fate people. The choice was not a choice at all. Rather it is the effect, the result, the consequence of what was going on in your head the moment before you turned left or right, and that, in turn, was fixed the moment before that and so on back to the first event ever, the ‘Big Bang.’ The determinist or naturalist looks back on a life of falling dominoes, seen or unseen, one after the other, all leading up to that intersection. (Look up Laplace.) The believer in free will, though,  also looks back on a lot of falling dominoes but at a sequence interrupted now and then by free choices that send the dominoes off in a different, unpredictable direction.  When you waited at that intersection, trying to decide which way to turn, your future was either open or closed, open to the free will believer, closed to the fixed fatalist. To know which, to know whether life is fixed or free is an impossible thing.

The third impossible thing is yet different than the first two, and of interest only to some people. There are those who say Jesus was human. He may have been a remarkable human, but human he was. That’s all.  Christians, however,  say that  at the same time He was divine.  Each view has its arguments. Jesus clearly was a human. He slept and ate and got tired, but in view of His life and death, His birth, the miracles, His teachings, His death and resurrection, it is hard to deny that Jesus was unique, divine, that He was, as He claimed, God. But If He was God, He was not man; If He was a man, He was not God. How then could He be man and God at the same time as so many believe? Consider the view of C.S. Lewis who said that when Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, He was either a liar, or a lunatic, or He really was the Son of God. Said Lewis, we know he was not a liar. He clearly was not a lunatic. Therefore, we must conclude that he was the Son of God. To understand that Jesus was God and man at the same time is an impossible thing. But it is.