March 25, 2023
What can we know about God? As the first cause and creator of the material universe, God is, by definition, transcendent, and as such, not observable as an object in our experience. Transcendence means the idea of God is necessarily an abstract concept and hard to get our heads around—if we could understand God as something in our experience, God wouldn’t be transcendent. There are parts of God that are necessarily outside our experience and any experience we ever could have and can only be understood, partially, by metaphors, using objects within our experience. We describe God as father, mother, son, savior, almighty, creator, spirit, wind, shepherd, king, and a thousand other familiar ideas, which can only hint at the full and true nature of God.
What it comes down to is this: at best, we can understand only bits and pieces of God, that are limited to partial manifestations of God within the material universe or what someone with knowledge of God tells us. God must be revealed to us.
Some attributes of God can be gleaned from observing and thinking about the world around us (general revelation or natural theology)—I believe God exists as a creator, because I cannot conceive of a universe without a first cause—but that is limited to generalities. I believe God is probably good based on the good I see in the world, but the doctrine of the Trinity would never occur to me, as it were, out of the blue.
Specifics must come from special revelation—God communicating directly to people. (That is, unless dogs can know the Lord. Cats clearly are demon spawn.) I have not had experiences that I can point to as direct communication from God or empirical observations of God’s presence. It’s not that I haven’t wanted to or haven’t tried, and I’ve had plenty of experiences that are consistent with a loving, good, and creative God. However, none of my experiences has compelled me to believe—I would have loved it if they had.
Many others claim to have had direct experiences of God in prayer, religious ritual, and miracles, and I’m not questioning that they have had these experiences. To accept those for myself as indirect evidence of the divine, however, I must first trust their witnesses as objectively true or sufficiently persuasive for me to believe. Christians have an entire library of testimony to the existence and nature of God in scripture, and to take that received tradition as evidence I must also trust those I received it from and its writers as reliable witnesses.
