Comments on: Is God unknowable?

By: Pythagoras

Pythagoras — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 04:30:26 +0000

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.

By: Darren

Darren — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 20:06:53 +0000

Awesome Amy, small world eh? I agree that Tyndale is a great school. See you there next week, should be a fun class!

By: Amy

Amy — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 01:33:07 +0000

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

By: Darren

Darren — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 18:55:43 +0000

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 )

By: Enigman

Enigman — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 15:25:42 +0000

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?