Sun 13 May 2007
Is God unknowable?
Posted by Darren under Announcements , Apologetics , Epistemology , Faith , God , Naturalism , PhilosophySorry about the lack of posts lately. In the last two months, I've finished my last full semester for my masters at Tyndale and just got back from some tiring ministry training in British Columbia. Fun times, but very busy. The final course I'll be taking this summer (the last elective to complete my degree) will be Defending the Faith: Resurrection, taught by a leading scholar on the resurrection, Dr. Gary Habermas. Needless to say, I'm quite excited about taking the course!
Enough about me.
I was reading a magazine today where a man was asked "Is your religion truer than another?" Unsurprisingly, he replied "We'll never know that." Is this a reasonable statement? What does this really mean?
I'd like to first preface my comments by pointing out that if God exists, and religions have opposite views about God's nature, then necessarily one is "truer" than the others. If God exists He really possesses certain attributes, and therefore one of the descriptions given by one of those religions would match most closely to those attributes.
However, the real question lurking here is whether or not we can really know anything about God. "We'll never know that," the man says, indicating that he agrees God exists and possesses attributes, but doubts we can know those attributes, let alone know God personally. I've found that the majority of people I speak to about spiritual issues believe God exists. However, many of those same people claim we can't really know anything about God. Now, part of the source of this opinion is due to tolerance overindulgence, and people are just afraid of being branded "intolerant" for voicing their convictions regarding spiritual issues. That doesn't prove that the belief is wrong (genetic fallacy) but does suggest that people may not have considered the philosophical reasons for their claim.
The claim:
I've posted before about why it is deficient to apply the same methodology we use to study mundane things to studying God. That, I think, is an important and valid argument against the idea that we cannot "know" God, because most people making that claim are assuming (knowingly or not) entirely natural methodology.
But here's another thing to think about. If someone says we cannot know anything about God, ask why. As soon as a person tries to provide reasons by saying "Because God is …" their argument falls apart; it is self-refuting. Greg Koukl would say the argument "commits suicide". In order to defend the conclusion (that we can't know anything about God) the proponent must base their conclusion on what they claim to know about God!
Consider this analogy:
Fred: We can't know anything about Bob.
Jill: Why?
Fred: Because Bob lives alone in a house in the mountains with the windows painted black and never comes outside.
The problem with the argument should be obvious: Fred provides several facts he claims to know about Bob in order to try to prove we can't know anything about him!
Moreover, even the claim on its own without appeal to other information is self-refuting! The claim we can't know anything about God is itself making a claim to know something about God: That God is unknowable! It commits a fallacy similar to the liar paradox. So even if no further premises are expounded to support this conclusion (such as that God is infinite and therefore incomprehensible by our finite minds, a poor argument IMHO) the conclusion still fails because it self-destructs.
A much more reasonable position would be we can't know very much about God, but I think that even without appeal to special revelation (like a holy book for example), we can still know much about God via observation and reflection alone. (See "What about natural theology?") These are not ends unto themselves, but steps along the way. Faith is (at least in part) a journey and not just a destination; however, people who are searching should not be so intent upon gazing at the sky while they walk that they fail to see the yawning chasm lying just ahead.
11 Responses to “Is God unknowable?”
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June 4th, 2007 at 11:25 am
One reason why we might think that we could not know anything about God is our self-knowledge, our knowledge that we make mistakes, especially about things that are uncommon or unusual. E.g., whatever God is like, if He revealed some knowledge of Himself to us, we might still be justified in doubting it later (even if doubt at the time was impossible). Fleeting impressions that seemed important but no longer do so might not count as knowledge. In short, we might know enough about ourselves to know that we could not know anything about God this side of Heaven?
June 4th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
Enigman, I hear your argument. We can make mistakes, which can lead us to doubt what we know. But this same argument could be used against knowing anything:
1) All human beings make mistakes with regard to ___.
2) Therefore, we can't really know anything about ___.
Initially, I thought, "Isn't it a little bit arrogant to say I really *know* something about God? Wouldn't it be more humble to say that we can't really know anything for sure?" But then I thought, "Isn't it even more arrogant to say that no one, anywhere, ever, could ever really *know* something about God?"
This is, in a sense, an epistemological issue: How do we "know" things? My approach is that, even though we can make mistakes, we can really know things about God on the basis of rational, logical thought (verified by others so that we have checks and balances to protect against mistakes) accompanied by potentially other methods to learn about God which may not be appropriate for learning about other things. (ie, since no non-God (created thing) is God, it's inappropriate to restrict our investigation to only the same methods used to investigate non-God things)
IMHO, belief that we know something about God is appropriate if it can be rationally argued for and until it is otherwise disproved.
(BTW, I checked your blog, some fascinating stuff there, I'll have to read more when I have more time to kill
)
June 5th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
Hi Darren….I don't know you, but I was just internet searching to see if I could get some ideas of how to respond to an agnostic friend of mine who says that if there is a God, he doesn't understand how we could comprehend an infinite being. So I came upon your post (which I haven't read yet…) and saw the name Tyndale. Excellent school! …I go there myself (2nd year of my BA). Then I noticed you'll be taking the Habermas resurrection course….. so,I look forward to meeting you in class next week.
Now I'm going to look over what you wrote…. thanks for doing this
June 6th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
Awesome Amy, small world eh? I agree that Tyndale is a great school.
See you there next week, should be a fun class!
January 29th, 2012 at 12:30 am
I believe the position is that we cannot know God's essence (you will not see My face and live – we're not equipped to understand infinity, how is this a bad argument?), but we can with gnosis understand his manifestations. That's what leads us to concluded that God IS 'good', or that he's the 'creator'. But Aquinas himself stated that we have no idea what we mean when we say that God is 'creator', since all of our concepts our bound by time and space. Trying to conceive of God is bad news, because then we run the risk of reducing God to a product of our imagination.
Couldn't it also be the case that the only thing one can know about God's essence is that one can know nothing of God's essence? It may fall prey to the fallacy you mentioned above (not sure?), but regardless I think that it makes sense experientially. I don't care that it's incorrect on paper. Many mystics have insisted that God can't be known. Surely they're in the best position to make that claim?
I think you're taking 'God' a little too literally.
December 17th, 2013 at 5:20 pm
Most of whatever you articulate happens to be astonishingly accurate and it makes me wonder why I had not looked at this with this light previously. Your article really did switch the light on for me as far as this particular topic goes.
December 19th, 2013 at 7:30 pm
I do like the manner in which you have presented this challenge and it really does supply us some fodder for consideration. Anyway, thank you for this outstanding piece.
December 20th, 2013 at 12:58 am
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December 24th, 2013 at 9:41 pm
Nice read. I just passed this onto a friend who was doing some research on that. He actually bought me lunch because I found it for him! So let me rephrase: Thanks for lunch!