How Do We Know?

One of the biggest questions man has ever had is "If there's a god, what kind of god is it?" This is not a question that I believe anyone will ever be able to answer definitively (in this life anyway). I am not going to discuss the assumption that there is a God; I am more interested in what kind of god this being is. From hereon out, I will refer to this being as "he" for simplicity's sake (it's faster to type "he" than "she") and I will capitalize "God" when using it as a title.

First of all, I must say that I stand within the Judeo-Christian tradition, and most of my views of God are therefore biased in that direction. I will try to stay as ecumenical as I can, but I will also try and be clear on what I believe.

The first place a Christian would probably look for information about God is the Bible. I believe this to be a good thing and a bad thing. The Bible is a written record of man's experience with the divine, and is therefore extremely valuable to our own understanding. Just like anything else, we all build off of the information gathered by others. As Newton said, he stood on the shoulders of giants. There are unreasonable methods of interpreting the Bible, however, and if one limits their understanding of God to strictly what the Bible states, I believe they are misunderstanding what the Bible is. Furthermore, if one believes that the Bible is God's revelation to man, and not man's understanding of God, then the descriptions of God would be interpreted as objective fact instead of culturally influenced subjective experiences of the writers. I believe the latter to be true, and the rest of this article will be from that standpoint.

How are we to understand the many descriptions of God given in the Bible? There are a few options of methodology that we can choose from. We can either assume that all of the descriptions are equally true, and meld them together to make one picture, or we can recognize that some descriptions cannot be as accurate as others, and hold certain pictures as closer to reality than others. Then there's the question of how literal we read the descriptions. When should we recognize anthropomorphisms and metaphors, and when should we accept the text as completely factual? These are all questions that must be taken into consideration.

How do we really know anything anyway? The only know things relationally. That may sound like a ridiculously simple statement, but it is important to realize that the only way we can understand anything is to relate it to something that we have experienced ourselves. For example, if there was somebody who didn't know what the color orange was, I could tell them to imagine yellow, then imagine red, and then tell them that orange was the color in between them, just like green is the color between yellow and blue. I could only describe it to them by using what they already knew. Now if you made that person blind from birth, there would be absolutely no way of describing to them what orange was, because they would have nothing to relate it to. Another example could be describing a picture to someone. If I was describing what a sunset looked like to somebody who had never even seen the sun, I could do so by describing the color, the size, brightness and shape of the sun, and then I could describe how it made other objects look. This would require the listener to understand colors and shapes. If I told them the sun was a half-circle, they could visualize a half-circle, and then if I told them it was brilliantly bright golden yellow, they could imagine a yellow half-circle and then the brightest light they had ever seen. All knowledge relational in this way.

So what does this have to do with God? Well, it has everything to do with how we understand God. If the only way we know anything is relationally, then the only way we can know God is relationally. For example, when you talk to somebody about an experience with the divine, what might they say? They might tell you that it was "calming" or that they felt a "strange warmth" or that they felt "excited." None of these terms completely capture the experience, but it helps the listener understand. The listener can relate to times he or she had been warm, calm, or excited. Furthermore, if one were to describe being "held" by God or "seen" by God, they would be speaking in anthropomorphic terms. Does God really "see" us? Does he have eyes? Does light bounce off of us and reflect into his pupils? Does the image appear on the back of his eyeball to be transferred to his brain by rods and cones and then interpreted by his brain to show him what he is looking at? Well, of course not; the idea is ludicrous. The whole idea that God "sees" us is the only way we know how to talk about his knowledge of our activity. It may be more appropriate to say that God "senses" us, but even there lies some tricky semantics. We sense things through our 5 senses, so it would be as if God had a 6th sense but skipped 1-5! What I am trying to say is that we have no idea how God works, and the only way we can try to understand is by making him human. The only way we can understand God is to make him in our image.

To further the point, I will discuss in brief the emotional attributions of God. What are these emotions? To name a few, anger, joy, sadness, regret, jealousy and love are human emotions that are biblically attributed to God. We follow the example of the biblical authors and also claim these descriptions as accurate. These, however, are anthropopathisms, the attribution of human emotions to nonhuman objects. It is well known that hormones and brain functions have much to do with our human emotions. How then are we to explain God having these same feelings? Does God have endorphins that trigger chain reactions in his brain? Does God have a limbic system? Does he have a hypothalamus, a cingulate cortex, or a hippocampi? How ridiculous. How can one feel emotions without hormones or chemicals or even a brain? We have no idea. What we can say is that God cannot possibly experience anything like what we experience in our finite mortal bodies. Whether or not he knows what it would feel like if he could, the fact remains that in his infinite state he does not feel like we do. How then can we explain anything he does, or further still, how can we know why he does anything? I suppose we couldn't.

It may seem like this is an argument for agnosticism, but I believe there is a vital difference between agnosticism and what I am saying. Agnosticism is the belief that one can never know whether or not there is a God. I believe there is a God; it is the inability to know as much as we think we may know about him that I am proposing.

I believe that it is extremely important for Christians (and other monotheists) to understand that there is no such thing as pure objectivity, only subjective attempts at objectivity. Any type of understanding that we (as humans) try to obtain of the divine will end in introspection. We will project ourselves onto God, and we will see what we want to see: ourselves.