Is God unknowable?

[Betonhaus]

There seems to be a prevailing theory that the form and structure of God will forever be incomprehensible no matter how much our understanding of science and the universe advances. I don't consider that to be true. I recognize the Bible to be an metaphor to explain concepts that were poorly understood during the Bronze Age, but it shouldn't be an excuse to reject the new things we learn just because it doesn't make sense in the context of the Bible. For God's history is written on the bones of the earth and His laws are etched into the laws of physics and causality.

 

[Sprate Header]

Idk

 

[The Last Stand]

God is an omniscient being. Anything you'd need to know about God in a Christian context is in the Old and New Testament.

 

[Schwarzwald]

“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you”
-Werner Heisenberg

Your post exudes hubris, arrogance, and blasphemy. Humbling yourself before the Almighty and recognizing your place in relation to God is the most liberating action one can take. Learning the ways and workings of His wonderful universe is a gift bestowed upon man that should be encouraged and appreciated, but never forget how insignificant, yet simultaneously incredibly important each individual is to God and His plan.

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

The Bible isn't a book about science. There is absolutely nothing in the Bible that would (directly) lead to any kind of scientific discovery. Why would there be? Whose science would it even use? Until a hundred years or so ago, physicists scoffed at the idea that the universe had a beginning, now we're pretty sure it does. Science changes all the time, and it's entirely possible that we're still wrong about pretty much everything.

God is unknowable through science for the very simple reason that God isn't a physical entity or a natural phenomenon, and that's what science is limited to studying. Trying to find God with science is like trying to find music with a telescope.

Such a completely transcendent being WOULD be unknowable, except to the extent that it would choose to reveal itself to humanity. THAT is what the Bible is about.

 

[Strix454]

There seems to be a prevailing theory that the form and structure of God will forever be incomprehensible no matter how much our understanding of science and the universe advances. I don't consider that to be true. I recognize the Bible to be an metaphor to explain concepts that were poorly understood during the Bronze Age, but it shouldn't be an excuse to reject the new things we learn just because it doesn't make sense in the context of the Bible. For God's history is written on the bones of the earth and His laws are etched into the laws of physics and causality.

What I will say is that if you go far enough into science with an open mind, the less certain it all seems. There are clear limits to what we can know through physics. All our models seem like flawed approximations of things we can't actually understand or even model properly. Non-ironically, most of science ends up being itself a series of metaphors for things that we poorly understand.

The deeper we go into science with anything, the more the results end up being disappointments. For axiomatic logic, we end up at godel's incompleteness theorem. Most of the interesting problems in computer science turn out to be NP complete. Physics becomes probabilistic rather than certain. Finding the truth in math becomes increasing difficult as one goes on in it.

I dont know how one would discover the form and structure of God through science. All we can know through science is what our human senses are able to reveal and what we are able to record in terms of data from them. We are trapped by our brief lives, the speed of light, the fragile nature of our bodies and a large number of other things.

What is important in the bible is not understanding the exact technical process by which "the earth" was created, but rather than the human stories it tells and what it reveals to us about god through the stories. And even truely understanding the bible is a deeper question than it seems. One can get a first level understanding through English translations, but to go deep you eventually have to go into the Greek and old Hebrew texts in those languages. That is especially true of genesis.

 

[Screamer_2]

I'm very knowable.

 

[Little oak tree]

Trying to find God with science is like trying to find music with a telescope.

These are not real videos of space but you get what I mean.

“The time has come to realize that an interpretation of the universe—even a positivist one—remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter. The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man

 

[Otterly]

The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you”
-Werner Heisenberg

As a natural scientist, I agree with this. The older I get and the more we discover, the more you realise how little we know. Conciousness for example. No one has a clue. Plenty of nice sounding theories (using the popular definition rather then the scientific one) that are completely untestable and so not really hypotheses.
There’s a sense of wonder that comes with knowledge with humility. At the bottom of that glass lies the divine.
Is God Knowable? How could we even know if He is or not?

 

[Shidoen]

The arrogance of man knows no bounds and neither does the Lord’s love and fury.

 

[quackrock]

What even is a God, anyway?

 

[Betonhaus]

What even is a God, anyway?

I probably should've clarified, but that was the point of this thread. We did have valid and important discussion though.

If, for example, a multidimensional alien introduced itself to us and explained that it created our universe with a subspace computer or something and ocassonally interjected with us to influence our development; would it be a God? Even if it took the time to explain its nature to us and the nature of our creation in a way that we could work towards building ourselves up and creating our own universe or universes?

 

[quackrock]

I probably should've clarified, but that was the point of this thread. We did have valid and important discussion though.

If, for example, a multidimensional alien introduced itself to us and explained that it created our universe with a subspace computer or something and ocassonally interjected with us to influence our development; would it be a God? Even if it took the time to explain its nature to us and the nature of our creation in a way that we could work towards building ourselves up and creating our own universe or universes?

I suppose you'd want to ask it what its equivalent of God is, and hope it doesn't lie, and hope that if it does lie then its version of God steps in to correct the record. You'd have no way of knowing for sure in any case.

That's my final answer: we can't know. There may always be another level of God we can't sense, a higher-order omnipotence ruling over whatever being we perceive from our limited perspective as omnipotent.

 

[Otterly]

I probably should've clarified, but that was the point of this thread. We did have valid and important discussion though.

If, for example, a multidimensional alien introduced itself to us and explained that it created our universe with a subspace computer or something and ocassonally interjected with us to influence our development; would it be a God? Even if it took the time to explain its nature to us and the nature of our creation in a way that we could work towards building ourselves up and creating our own universe or universes?

that’s a bit like asking if you could fly would you jump off a bridge, or if we could change sex would trannies be ok.
A lot of what ifs, and we can’t, and there isn’t, so it’s a moot point. Any entity that is such as you describe would be knowable, but we don’t know that anything like that could exist any more than we can fly. The problem with the line of argument is that it forces a ‘yes, if..’ response in response to unrealistic or impossible conditions and then that usually get used as a wedge.
I believe the correct response is ‘if my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle’ where I come from
ETA: sounds a bit snarky and I don’t mean it like that. I’m just saying that you can posit any ‘what if’ amd get a yes answer

 

[Betonhaus]

that’s a bit like asking if you could fly would you jump off a bridge, or if we could change sex would trannies be ok.
A lot of what ifs, and we can’t, and there isn’t, so it’s a moot point. Any entity that is such as you describe would be knowable, but we don’t know that anything like that could exist any more than we can fly. The problem with the line of argument is that it forces a ‘yes, if..’ response in response to unrealistic or impossible conditions and then that usually get used as a wedge.
I believe the correct response is ‘if my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle’ where I come from
ETA: sounds a bit snarky and I don’t mean it like that. I’m just saying that you can posit any ‘what if’ amd get a yes answer

Yeah, that does sound like such a question falls into trolley problem nonsense.

 

[WhiskeyJack]

If, for example, a multidimensional alien introduced itself to us and explained that it created our universe with a subspace computer or something and ocassonally interjected with us to influence our development; would it be a God? Even if it took the time to explain its nature to us and the nature of our creation in a way that we could work towards building ourselves up and creating our own universe or universes?

Depends: did the multidimensional alien create itself? Or is it named "Nathan Brazil"?

 

[Fruttasecca]

Of course he is knowledgeable otherwise we wouldnt have testimony of his nature and will from the old prophets, Jesus himself and the apostles.

 

[Hyperbola]

The general question "is X unknowable?" seems to have 3 answers:
1. We don't know yet (more work required).
2. No. (We've figured it out)
3. Yes.

The problem with 3 is that if it were true, you couldn't know that. Seems like self contradiction rules that option out as a valid answer. (That says nothing about X though: If it's even around and available for study.)

The arrogance of man knows no bounds

Our drive to understand things isn't arrogance! And our minds are not impotent! It's just about the one thing we have going for us. Also just about the only thing so far that has "known no bounds" is the reach of the causal explanations that we've found.

(Are young birds figuring out that they can fly being "arrogant"? Is a kid riding a bicycle being "arrogant"? Defined that way, arrogance is a virtue, and the people trying to humble us are not our friends!)

 

[Positron]

Depends on what you mean by "know".

If you take the classical epistemological definition of "knowledge". i.e. by "know" you mean "making true, justified statements about God", then God is knowable. If by "know" you means what Philosophy of Science might call "understanding", i.e. using what you know as true about God to form theories about the properties of God, using your theory to explain God-related phenomena, and to predict how God acts the same way you predict how the weather might be tomorrow, then I will not say God is strictly "unknowable" (or rather "beyond understanding"), but I'd imagine this prospect is pretty dim.

I think the question "Is God knowable" is analogous to the question "Is a certain specific person knowable"? The difference is merely one of degree: I can reveal myself to you so you can know (epistemological sense) something about me, just as God can reveal Himself to people. However, God's revelations are much less comprehensible, and (some argue) much rarer. To reach an "understanding" of a person, knowing his drives and motivations, and use your theory of the person to figure out how he will react in a given situation, is a much harder feat. Now extrapolate the difficulty to God.

If, for example, a multidimensional alien introduced itself to us and explained that it created our universe with a subspace computer or something and occasionally interjected with us to influence our development; would it be a God? Even if it took the time to explain its nature to us and the nature of our creation in a way that we could work towards building ourselves up and creating our own universe or universes?

We can use what we know (epistemological sense) about God to decide whether said alien is God or not. Is said alien totally attuned to the affair of each and every person? Is said alien holds the welfare of the human being as very close to His heart, for example?

 

[SpergioLeonne]

My two cents are like this:

Time is a spacial dimension but we’re forced to treat it differently because it is where we hit our biological limits regarding perception. Whatever higher dimensions there may be than time, we’re completely incapable of perceiving and can only guess at through implication.

It’s pretty easy to draw a “3D” transparent cube and our minds will accept depth in an actually 2D image, but if I ask you to draw something “4D,” you won’t even know how to represent it.

God is described as omniscient, therefore absolutely capable to the point of designing all dimensions of which we may be unaware. By necessity, God exceeds us and we can’t know him if for no other reason than sheer complexity