God Would Be An Atheist: The unknowable God

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If God is unknowable, how do we know if he exists?

Believers do not agree whether God is knowable. Most Christians say that he is - he made himself known to us as Jesus and even today we can experience him in our daily lives.

Some Christians, and most Jews and Muslims, say that God is beyond knowledge or understanding. The prophets talked with him, but the age of prophets has past. We can never personally experience God.

The unknowable god is a logical step in the evolution of religion. As our understanding of the physical world improved, so our concept of the gods changed. Their first incarnation was as spirits controlling the forces of nature. They then transformed into powerful beings on Olympus or in Valhalla, so close to us that we knew their every idiosyncrasy, jealousy and sexual dalliance.

Such gods still thrive in India, but elsewhere they have been replaced by a single deity who is less interested in the daily weather than in our long-term spiritual welfare. In temperament, however, he remained close to Zeus or Odin, displaying very human traits of anger, violence and obsession with sex. Only in Christianity did he continue to evolve, manifesting in Jesus as a loving, compassionate being.

Two thousand years later, it seems reasonable that our perception of God continues to change. As science demonstrates that God is no longer needed to explain the universe or our human existence, he becomes, for some believers, ever more distant and unknowable.

Chapter One: Defining God

Does God exist? Before we try to answer that question we need to have a clear idea of who or what God is. How do we describe God? What versions of God are on offer?

1.1: God, faith and religion
Do they need each other?

1.2: What is God?
God comes in several styles and models

1.3: Perception and reality
Is what we see what we get?

1.4: The evolving God
From prehistory to today

1.5: El, Yahweh et al
The Old Testament family of gods

1.6: Three's company
The Christian Trinity

1.7: Allah
Over to Islam

1.8: Majors and minors
Polytheism

1.9: The unknowable God
Is he there?

1.10: Your god or mine?
Made in our image

1.11: Summary

Finished this chapter? Move on to

Chapter Two
Problems with God

The real God – if such a thing exists – may be very different from the god portrayed by Jewish, Christian or Muslim scripture.

But whichever picture of God we look at - from the Bible and Koran to the images presented by other faiths and believers - we are confronted by problems. When examined closely, God's nature is so contradictory that it is unlikely, if not impossible, for him to exist.

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Unknowability also makes sense to believers who find a contradiction between the idea that God is perfect and the highly imperfect being who appears in scriptures like the Bible and Quran. Because he is perfect we cannot know him.

We are now faced with three options:
a. God is knowable. Scriptures are at least partially true and God has a personality     with human-like emotions. Believers can experiencehim directly.
b. God is unknowable. It is unclear how much, or how little, scriptures reveal of the     deity. God cannot be describe in human terms and believers cannot experience     him directly.
c. God does not exist. Scriptures confuse history with myth and imagination.     Believers experience not God but their longing for a deity.

The first option is the God of most Christians, somewhere between the angry Father of the Old Testament and the love personified in Jesus. It is the God of men and women who are certain not only that God exists but that they have a personal relationship with him.

The second option - God is unknowable - presents some problems. There is a contradiction for orthodox Judaism and Islam: these religions say that God is unknowable - but they are based on scriptures which both give a clear indication of God's personality and describe occasions when God has clearly made himself known to human beings. This idea - that God is both unknowable and revealed in literature - is contradictory; like the Christian Trinity uniting three personalities in one, it tries to reconcile opposite statements

An alternate vision of the unknowable God is the Deist version. This God is the most distant of all. He may have created the universe but now shows no interest in it or the human race. Or he is interested in his creation but he is beyond experience. Scripture is irrelevant. Faith creates itself and exists independent of God. And reason...? Well, that's what this website is looking at.

Those who reject the knowable God are standing before a closed door, wondering what, if anything, lies on the other side. There is no handle. They shake the door but it does not open. They knock on it and hear sometimes silence and sometimes echoes and wonder these responses mean.

Believers interpret those silences and echoes as proof that God awaits them. Others are more sceptical. The closed door says nothing; proof must be found elsewhere. At the end of the day, the question is remains: if God is unknowable, how do we know if he exists?

Next: Chapter One: Section 10
Your god or mine?

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If God existed, he would...

admire the beauty of a universe that he did not create

recognize that eternity is meaningless

deny both heaven and hell

disown all men and women who speak in his name

denounce the harm caused by religious "morality"

help the human race to thrive without him

If God existed, he would be an atheist.

What is the difference between science and faith?

science is certain of nothing and requires proof of everything

faith is certain of everything and requires proof of nothing

Which do you trust?

"I know there is no God"
or
"I believe there is no God"
???

Check the answer

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