I recently watched one of the old Sherlock Holmes movies starring Jeremy Brett. In it, he made this statement:

"If you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

- Sherlock Holmes

About a week later I watched the new Star Trek movie. It was a very cool moment when, in a moment of mystery and confusion, Spock (the logical Vulcan) said, "If you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

I can't help but wondering if this argument might be of some use in philosophical discussions about God and reality. To be sure, we are constantly blinded by our preconceived ideas and prejudices about what we want reality to be. It is therefore easy for us to rule out what seems improbable to us because it is not what we hope for. I am therefore using the term 'improbable' to refer to what seems so to finite human perception.

I would argue that it is not possible to establish with reason and evidence that the existence of God is impossible. If it is true that questions about God are difficult to establish with absolute certainty due to his invisible nature and our limited knowledge, I believe that one can make a powerful and irrefutable argument that God is the most probable explanation of this world. I believe that if we exercised pure reason and observable evidence, we would find that Jesus Christ is indeed "the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14;6).