One of the problems with the way we tend to do theology has to do with the way we think of something like the doctrine of the Trinity. As Donald Macleod says, “the church [sic] has always recognized that the doctrine of one God in three persons involved an element of mystery and even apparent contradiction.”

We are inclined then, to treat this doctrine as exceptional in that regard. Almost begrudging it because it seems to require us to abandon ‘rationality’. The reality is that it is only mysterious to the extent that it is unusual or unique in our experience, and it only appears contradictory to the extent that we view our ability to conceive as subsuming the whole of possible realities. There is no contradiction in the three and one, only that which goes beyond our other experiences of reality. The existence of God as trinity is hyper-real, a meta-reality, and to that extent no more exceptional, if more clearly exceptional than any other truth about God.

Paul Davies quoted in Macleod’s The Person of Christ gets at something like this when he says:

Of course, physicists, like everybody else, carry around mental models of atoms, light waves, the expanding universe, electrons, and so on, but the images are often widely inaccurate or misleading. In fact, it may be logically impossible for anyone to be able to accurately visualise certain physical systems, such as atoms, because they contain features that simply do not exist in the world of our experience.
Atom I would note that I don’t think the word ‘logically’ adds anything to his statement and hurts it in as much as it throws up one of those frustratingly ambiguous modernist qualifiers. Also, am I mistaken in thinking that people have looked at atoms through high powered microscopes? (I think I am mistaken. Alicia says molecules are as far as we’ve gotten. So scratch that point.) Still, the basic point about not being able to fully conceptualize a reality simply because it is not something you have experienced in a thorough way is good. And if it is true of such everyday realities as sub-atomic particle movement, and the transfer of energy, should we not expect it to be true of the very nature of the Creator of the universe?