@Jas3.1 I wonder if you'd care to pursue the issue raised by my answer to this question: philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/3252/…. Namely, you were curious about why I assert that we cannot, by definition of God, have any knowledge about God. I am curious as to how you would respond to my updated answer.

@philosodad It sounds like what you're saying is that God is (by definition) infinitely complex, infinitely intelligent, etc., and that man, in contrast, is as dumb as a doorknob and completely incapable of grasping anything about God, let alone making a statement about His nature.

I would have to disagree. I don't think that "Almighty" (having the ability to do what He wants) makes Him beyond comprehension. I would agree that we cannot know everything He knows, but I would not say that because He knows everything, we cannot know anything.

@Jas3.1 How can you make a positive statement about the motives of a being that much more complex than you are? Going to my Sims analogy, how could the robotic sims make a statement about my motives, or even comprehend the concept of "motive" from my point of view?

For the record, I do agree with you to an extent. I believe man is too simple and ignorant to discover anything about God. However, I do not believe that it is beyond God's ability to cause a person to know something about Him. (Granted, not everything - our brains are only 3 lbs for goodness sake.)

@philosodad If He revealed it, we could know it.

@Jas3.1 How? I can't "reveal" my philosophical ideas to worm because the worm is simply not equipped to understand them. Aren't we similarly handicapped in respect to God? What reason could we have to intuit that God did not reveal, for example, multiple religions for reasons that we simply do not fathom, simply because compared to God, we do not have the capacity to reason?

@philosodad My point is, if He is God - if He is Almighty - He is capable of causing a person to know something which would otherwise be impossible - including something about His nature.

@Jas3.1 Possibly. But once you posit the Almightyness, there is no way to fathom why he would reveal anything, including his nature, since we cannot fathom his nature. A worm can fathom that I cause it pain (part of my nature) but not that I fish.

@philosodad If you buy a puppy and raise it well, you can teach the dog that you are a reliable source of food, that you are gentle, that you will care for it when it gets injured, etc. Now, you are not God, and you did not create the dog, but even in an imperfect example like that it can be seen that a "greater intellect" can show something to a "lesser intellect"

@philosodad There is no way to fathom why He would reveal anything... unless He reveals this to you also!

@Jas3.1 That's one mammal to another, though. And most of my brain is similar to my dogs, he has feelings quite similar to mine, caused by quite similar chemicals in a quite similar system. Not so with humans and God!

@philosodad Yes, so how much more capable would the God who designed your brain be in revealing whatever He wished to reveal to you?

@Jas3.1 even then, you still can't fathom it. You can only fathom what is revealed, and as far as I can tell, never fathom why.

@philosodad If God revealed to you that He is love, and everything He does comes from His loving nature, then you could fathom why He does everything.

Are you familiar with apophatic vs. catophatic reasoning?

@Jas3.1 Sure. He can reveal what he wishes--I'll posit you that. But since I cannot fathom what "wish" means to a being that powerful, how can I fathom the motivation behind the revelation? To go back to my sims example, there is no reason to think he did not reveal both Islam and Christianity and Hinduism and Budhism and Nihilism for reasons of his own.

@Jas3.1 But what does "God is Love" mean, when we have no emotions that he would recognize as such?

@Jas3.1 no.

@Jas3.1 Because it seems to me that this statement implies that you can understand the emotional state of a being that is all powerful and all knowing, and since we can't understand what "emotion" would mean to such a being, I don't see how you could.

@philosodad This is a good question. First, would you agree that God could (theoretically) explain this to us in a way we could understand? Christians believe that God has revealed that He is love, that this is His motivation, and that He has even explained in detail what "love" is - in Scripture.

@Jas3.1 I would agree that God could explain what he meant to the extent that we could understand it. However, because he--theoretically--has created us in the limited for that he has (that is, we cannot know the position and velocity of a single particle of the universe, and he knows both things about all of them) I would not grant that there is any reason to suppose that he desires us to have a full understanding of any part of his nature.

@philosodad It depends on what you mean by "full understanding" of an aspect of His nature. Is it impossible to know that God is trustworthy? Or good? Or that He cannot lie? I don't think so.

@Jas3.1 God must be able to lie, or he is not all powerful. He may choose not too, but he must be capable of choosing to do so.

@philosodad Apophatic reasoning is based on statements of what "is not", while catophatic reasoning is based on statements of what "is". As an example, an apophatic statement would be "God cannot lie", while a catophatic statement would be "God always tells the truth." Both are useful, and in many cases, one is correct while the other is incorrect, but we often times tend to lean toward one or the other.

@philosodad If that is how you define "all-powerful" then the Christian God does not fit your definition of God - that's what I was getting at in my answer.

@Jas3.1 It seems like you are imposing arbitrary limits on God. What reason do you have for imposing this restriction?

@philosodad Did you read my answer, and the link to the Christian definition of "Almighty"?

@Jas3.1 But by your answer, God can lie, he just doesn't want to.

@philosodad God cannot lie because it is not in His nature to lie. I do not "start" with His "omnipotence" - I "start" with His nature, if that makes sense.

You appear to be taking the apophatic stance of "man cannot fathom God", while I am taking the catophatic stance of "man can fathom whatever God wants him to fathom about Himself." I actually think they are both true if we were to define them carefully.

@Jas3.1 Which goes back to the question of how you can know that lying is not in the nature of God, except by what he reveals? In which case, I could argue that all that you would know is that God, for reasons that are by definition beyond your ability to grasp, wants you to think he cannot lie.

@philosodad It's beyond my ability to grasp, unless God miraculously enables me to grasp it! Remember, He made us, so He is certainly able to "hard-wire" things into us, such as the ability to recognize good when we see it.

@Jas3.1 But this is an infinite regress. Whatever you grasp is a tiny fraction (and you can tell this by comparing what you can grasp vs. the total size of God) of whatever God would be. So clearly, based on what we can grasp, if there is a God, he cannot be revealing very much.

@Jas3.1 and the regress goes to: We only grasp what is revealed, and never grasp the reason it was revealed, or even what reason means to God. Or do you think there is a way out of that?

@philosodad First, I don't necessarily believe that because God is infinitely capable (omnipotence), infinitely wise (omniscience), and infinitely loving that this makes Him infinitely complex. In many ways, I feel His ways are far more straightforward than ours. I might be wrong, but I just wanted to clarify that I don't accept that leap in logic.

@philosodad With that said, I will agree that we cannot fully comprehend God.

@philosodad I will agree that we are trapped in an infinite regress if we never leave the realm of philosophy and logic. BUT, there is a way out if God reveals Himself to you.

@philosodad This is what many Christian apologists are desperately confused about: you cannot prove the God of the Bible to someone through clever arguments - the only way He can be "proven" is if He reveals Himself to a person. That's why I always encourage atheists: if you want to know if God exists, ask Him.

@Jas3.1 To be clear, I'm not asking you to prove God to me. That would be more or less futile. What I'm curious about is how it is even possible to square omniscience with omnibenevolence.

@philosodad do you mean "omnipotence"?

@Jas3.1 either one, really.

@philosodad To quote a smart fella named Jesus, "with God all things are possible" - that's about the sum of my argument

@Jas3.1 This seems like an odd thing to say. First, I'm not claiming that God is infinitely complex. I'm arguing that he must be sufficiently complex to meet the definition. The simple fact that God knows things that are impossible for man to know (for example, God knows which stars the atoms in my desk originated in) means that he is complex enough to be beyond all possible human comprehension.

@philosodad But for a more "philosophical" answer, it just depends on your definition of omnipotence, as I was saying in my post. If you think of omnipotence as "capable of doing anything - even the crazy things man can think up" then you're not describing the Christian God.

@philosodad I'm not sure I would accept that claim. You can understand how a computer works without knowing every bit of information stored in it.

For a loose definition of understand, yes. But I don't understand everything about the computer, and I can in fact discover--if I choose to--the location and meaning of every bit of information that the computer stores. If God cannot similarly discover the stellar origin of the atoms of carbon in my desk, he is not all knowing but merely lots knowing.

@Jas3.1 No, I mean capable of doing things which we freely accept that humans are capable of, such as choosing whether to lie or not to lie.

@philosodad Now that is an interesting thought. :) I'm not sure God is capable of anything a man is capable of. Weird, I know.

I'll have to think on that one...

@philosodad It's not a perfect analogy, of course (we're talking about GOD here!) but it serves my purpose; you can know some things about God - perhaps even how He works - without knowing everything that He knows.

At the very least, you could know some things about how God interacts with man.

@Jas3.1 Which takes us back to the infinite regress: You can only know what is revealed, you can never fathom why it might have been revealed if god didn't choose to reveal that. I'm simply taking the idea that we are at the mercy of God to it's logical conclusion.

@philosodad Yes, we are at the mercy of God, but there's no difference between the "what" and the "why" in the sense that He can reveal whatever He wants, even the "why", if that makes sense.

@Jas3.1 True, but lets take a case study: Mohammed, Jesus, and Buddha all claim divine inspiration (Jesus claims divine provenance as well). All three performed miracles to some extent. Yet they cannot all be right. How can we know that God didn't intereract with all of them?

@philosodad It depends on your Epistemology and what (if anything) God has revealed to you.

@Jas3.1 It doesn't, actually. He can only reveal what he chooses, never what he does not. So we can never know the why because we only know the what, even if the what includes a plausible enough why, it may not be the why. Besides, we cannot truly understand the why, because then we would understand God, which we can't.

@Jas3.1 Why couldn't God reveal to you that Mohammed was wrong and reveal the Koran to Mohammed anyway. His ways are mysterious, who are we to question or limit them?

@philosodad We can know the why if He reveals the why. The statement that "it may not be the why" doesn't apply if He has indeed revealed the why; in other words, it would have to be the why by the very nature of the topic we are discussing. We are discussing the possibility of God revealing, not the proof that He has revealed.

@philosodad Can we understand God? Yes; we can understand some things about God. No; we cannot fully comprehend Him. This goes back to the apophatic vs. catophatic discussion.

@Jas3.1 the problem is this: you want to limit god to being incapable of lying, yet you want to grant to got the capacity to reveal his intentions to beings that do not have intentions as a creature like God would understand the term. This doesn't make sense to me.

@philosodad Who are we to question or limit God's ways? We are in no position to question or limit God's ways. But this discussion of Mohammed vs. Jesus has jumped from theoretical possibility to practical discernment. They are different discussions altogether.

@Jas3.1 it does and it doesn't. It goes to my point that we cannot understand the why because, as humans, we are not capable of understanding what a God sized creature would consider motive.

@Jas3.1 Not really, because I am maintaining that there is no basis (not even revelation) for practical discernment to operate on.

@philosodad I don't follow. We do have intentions. The Christian God cannot lie, according to the Christian Scriptures, which were inspired by the Christian God Himself. Yes faith is a presupposition, but it's not my limit - it's His.

@philosodad That is one possibility, theoretically.

@Jas3.1 I would not think that we have intentions from God's point of view. Nor do we have feelings or thoughts. No feat that I am capable of performing would qualify as a thought to a being of that scale, no emotion that I feel would compare to its.

@Jas3.1 God himself puts his motives beyond our questioning or understanding in scripture (Job).

@philosodad That is an assumption. I'm not sure what it's based on, and I'm not sure whether I agree.

@philosodad I'm not sure that is accurate. Saying "who are you to question ME" to a slimy, lying, unfaithful backbiter is not necessarily the same as saying "you do not have the ability to comprehend anything about Me"

@Jas3.1 It's a logical conclusion. If God knows the history of every star, knows why everything that has ever happened anywhere happened, and knows every decision that I'll ever make, then I simply do not have thoughts in comparison.

@philosodad Why do you say that, though?

@philosodad I mean, I could see saying "my thoughts are miniscule in comparison" but not "I don't have thoughts"

@Jas3.1 that's putting himself beyond our understanding.

@philosodad He is responding to Job's pride by putting him in his place. He's essentially saying "who do you think you are to question me?" He is not saying "you do not have the ability to understand anything as being true about Me"

@Jas3.1 Because what I comprehend as a "thought" would be an utterly different order of thing. From my perspective, it is a thought, but from God's it would not be.

@philosodad I don't understand what you're saying. Why would God not consider your thought a "thought"?

@Jas3.1 That is an interpretation, but the words are pretty clear: God is listing the many things that he does know that Job cannot know, and therefore putting himself and his motives beyond Jobs comprehension.

@Jas3.1 In much the same way that I don't consider roaches to have "thoughts". They have neurons, but they don't philosophize. The difference between us and God is far, far greater than that between ourselves and roaches.

@philosodad There is nothing in that passage that indicates God's motives are beyond Job's comprehension - only that God knows more than Job and it is inappropriate for Job to question God. It was certainly possible for Job to trust God, knowing that He is good, but he did not, hence the rebuke.

@Jas3.1 That is one interpretation. I think, though, that something that is beyond question is beyond comprehension.

@philosodad If your 3-year-old runs into the street and you yell at them to come back and they stand there and argue with you, you might say something like what God said to Job: "don't question me! you're three years old! I know what's best for you! now get over here!" Now, after returning to you, you may very well explain to your child why it is bad to run into the street. "Don't question me" =/= "you are unable to comprehend"

@philosodad The point I want to make here is the same as the point I made in my answer: By your definition of God, and your (homespun) definition of "thoughts", then ok, I suppose you do not have thoughts in light of God's knowledge. However, this makes no sense from the Christian perspective (i.e. in light of the Christian God).

Anyway, my whole point is this: surely God is capable of revealing Himself to mankind - He is even capable of explaining some things about His nature. He is capable of causing people to comprehend those things He wants them to comprehend - even if it were otherwise impossible for them to grasp it. Christians believe (by faith) that God has done this in the Bible. Therefore, Christians take the claims of God in Scripture as truth. Such as, "God is love."

If that is difficult to understand in light of the SIMS, chalk it up to your 3 lb. brain being smaller than His!