Can we talk and think about God? Or is God completely beyond our comprehension? It may surprise you to learn that prominent philosophers and theologians have argued God is completely beyond the human intellect. That God cannot be so much as talked about or even understood. What reason is there to think such a thing? Why should we believe that God can’t even be spoken of?
Immanuel Kant famously argued in Critique of Pure Reason
that there are two worlds. There is the world of appearances, and then there is the world of reality. We humans have access only to the world of appearances. And God, if He exists, obviously exists in the world of reality. But if humans can only access the world of appearances, then they surely cannot access God [1]. Gordon Kaufman, the late Christian theologian, took a similar line of thinking. He argued that if God is the creator and the ultimate reality, then He is beyond our experience and so our human concepts cannot apply to Him.
Alvin Plantinga, in his book Knowledge and Christian Belief
, argued this kind of thinking has two very serious problems.
Absurdity
First, one thinks of the Bible as telling us about God. The Bible tells us what God is like and what He has done. But if our human concepts cannot apply to God, then nobody–not even Holy Scripture–can actually tell us about God. On this view, we can’t know that God hates sin, that Jesus is the son of God, or that God has created the universe; for we can only know these things if our concepts apply to God.
Consider a beautifully preached sermon of sin and redemption through the life and death of Jesus. If this view is correct, sermons like the one linked would be utterly misguided. Keller, the preacher, is undoubtedly convinced he’s revealing deep spiritual truths about God. But if this view is true, nothing like that is actually happening. Listeners, even less fortunately, would be delusional in thinking they were being talked to about the God of Christianity. In reality, nothing like that was being done.
Self-refuting
The second, more serious problem Plantinga cites is that this view is self-refuting. If it’s true, it’s false. He argues that if our concepts do not apply to God then we can’t make statements about God. However, notice that the statement “our concepts do not apply to God” is obviously a statement about God. If we can’t think about God, then we can’t say about Him that our human concepts don’t apply to Him. This view defeats itself.
It’d be like saying, “We know something about God and that something is that we don’t know anything about God.” We can’t have our cake and eat it too. Either we know something about God or we don’t. End of story.
Conclusion
Given that this view leads to absurdity and is self-refuting, the best thing to do is to reject it. No doubt there is reason to be cautious when it comes to God. We humans are limited in knowledge, of course we will never know everything there is to know about God. But that doesn’t mean God is completely beyond our comprehension. We can still know and learn extremely important things about Him.
