What do we know about God?

Home - Quora Link

I don’t know anything conclusively about God, despite believing in Him and in just about any believed descriptions of Him.

All I have are increasingly elaborate guesses about the nature of God. These guesses I feel are all at about the same level of epistemic certainty. I suppose you could call these guesses my beliefs.

I consider myself a Christian, and have no quarrel with the Triune nature of God as purported by Western Christianity. I also have no quarrel with the non-Triune nature of God as purported by Eastern Christians.

The basic problem here is encapsulated in the phrase “God is all things to all people.” You believing that God is a thing, and that belief being true, does not mean that someone else’s belief in the exact opposite is not also true. It’s impossible to place limits on God.

Any statement I make concerning the nature of God can also be construed as a statement saying that the opposite is not true. Such statements are not my intent, but they are inherent in both language and in most people’s understanding of how theirs and other people’s minds work.

For lesser things like apples and countries, this logical approach of definition might work. An apple is easily defined, as is a country. To define a thing, you state affirmatively not what that thing is, but rather what it isn’t. Physical things like apples and countries are easily defined in terms of space.

But God is not a physical thing, and is not anything like any of the other non-physical things we encounter in our daily lives. So you cannot arrive at a definition of God with an affirmative explanation of what God is not. We have to satisfy ourselves with affirmative statements of what God is instead, and those statements do not rule out alternative interpretations.

How do we parse through the morass of available information about what God is and what He does? My understanding is that you need to use the tools of logical coherency. Statements need not adhere to the standards of logic, they merely need to fit together with each other. We can judge religions and worldviews by their internal consistency, leaving out how consistent these ideas are with our ideas of truth and rationality.

Our primary source of information we have that makes affirmative declarations about God in a relatively coherent manner is the Bible. The Bible holds that God largely chooses not to interfere with our free will, except in the situation where God wants to teach us a lesson. This is an Abrahamic interpretation, as religions based on the Bible are called Abrahamic religions.

Looked at in this lens, we can examine God through ascribing intent and causation. If I become hungry, did God cause my hunger? No, God didn’t cause my hunger. Did I just limit God by saying He didn’t do something? No, the statement is internally consistent with the Abrahamic concept of free will. In fact, the reverse of that statement, that God caused me to get hungry, is inconsistent as God as portrayed in the Bible, who never compels without a lesson to teach, and there’s no lesson to be learned in ‘just’ hunger.

When looked at like this, you can see the foundations of the Jewish religion, though of course, Judaism is far more than the Old Testament. If you look at the New Testament and examine it, you see it builds on the Old Testament and adds some emphasis on particular moral ideas, and also a completely new idea, encompassed in the doctrine called “faith, not works.” This is the foundation of Christianity.

Taken all together, the collection of claims set out by a religion can be called the magisterium of that religion. This is what the Roman Catholic Church calls it, and it encompasses a vast space. The intent is to try to stay as relevant as possible to current peoples whilst paying proper respect for what got us there.

But religions evolve and grow. Both in a traditional, orthodox fashion, and a nontraditional one. When I was younger, I got involved in occult, alternative traditions and learned how to read and understand and make internal sense of these points of view.

Orthodoxy adheres to a certain standard, while alternative traditions broaden the scope. As vast as the Catholic magisterium is, that which is explored by nontraditional faiths is infinitely larger. They play in the same playground, but with different rules. Think about it this way, there’s a hundred different ways you can play soccer while still letting it be called soccer. This is orthodoxy. There’s a million different ways you can play a game with a soccer ball. This is an unorthodox use of soccer equipment. There’s billions of ways to play games.

I have no quarrel with any orthodoxy. I accept their claims of spiritual truth, that which is internally consistent.