What Can We Know About God, Anyway?
There are few things more dispiriting to a gregarious theology/philosophy nerd than a conversation stopper. I get it, not everyone wants to explore these questions to their logical conclusion, just like not everyone wants to listen to that one kid we all know talk about dinosaurs all day, but oftentimes I am not even the one bringing it up. It is not my fault you dangled the hook with that delectable religious morsel like, “doesn’t the faith contradict science?” or “don’t Catholics just follow Tradition?” If I am in the right mood, I am going to bite.
You probably see the look in my eyes and maybe realize you got more than you bargained for, I get it. But then to turn around, just as we are getting going, and offer a conversation stopper like, “Well, we can’t really know anything about God anyway,” is just cruel. Not only is it cruel, you are insulting your own ability to reason.
This fallback, “We we can’t really know when it comes to God,” is all-too-common and can have a variety of origins. The “best” of these is a misguided humility that understands God’s transcendence (but how do we know God is transcendent?) and respects it. Unfortunately, this respect goes too far. While the Church affirms that we cannot fully comprehend God, that is, know everything, we can apprehend God, that is, know something.
However, most often, I suspect, this sentiment comes from a lack of personal engagement with the topic. One feels insecure in one’s own ignorance, and so projects that ignorance on to everyone as a way to both save-face and gain security. Another source may be the latent hyper-empiricism produced by the Enlightenment that stressed the importance of the empirical senses when it comes to knowledge to the point of undermining the intellectual senses.
The third origin of this “we-can’t-really-know” mentality when it comes to God, which is the most destructive and is related to the two previously mentioned origins in different ways, is a hyper-skepticism about religious knowledge. This may be due to “religious knowledge” not being empirical and therefore to some not “provable,” which would then lead to an indifference about engaging the subject at all. This hyper skepticism, of course, lacks self-reflection as it is not skeptical of its own skepticism and is self-defeating as it undermines its own ability to know that one can’t know.
However, this agnosticism is often pitted against the certainty of scientific knowledge, again, often because of its empirical confirmation. With my students I begin our unit on “God’s existence and essence” (No, I don’t tell them the title is redundant, they get to figure that out themselves) by having them share with me the best argument they have heard against God’s existence. A very common submission is that we cannot know God exists because we cannot see him. This is helpful because it tells me what deeper philosophical presuppositions need to be addressed before students can even engage seriously with Aquinas’s Five Ways (and his two objections, of course).
But circling back to this hyper-skepticism. What is so destructive about this mentality is not just that it often results in not believing in God, but that it actually undermines reason itself. It is noteworthy that the Church herself in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris, as well as St. Thomas Aquinas in ST I. Q 2. A 2., affirm vehemently the ability of reason to bring one to a knowledge of God’s existence. Hyper-skepticism acts as a type of fideism in its rejection of reason. In this case, however, it is a faith in the lack as opposed to a lack of faith.
Obviously, the most offensive thing about hyper-skepticism is that it is philosophically self-refuting. My own children will probably (hopefully) share at my funeral one day their memories of dad saying on the way to school, “We do not allow logical fallacies in this car!” to which my oldest son, a teenager, responded, “so, does that mean they are allowed in the other car?” The logical fallacy of hyper-skepticism is that it contradicts itself. If one cannot know anything, can one know that one has the inability to know?
The hyper-skeptic is faced with a difficult decision: either be skeptical about one’s own skepticism, thus refuting it, or be inconsistent in one’s philosophy. I realize this may not appear to be the most dire of consequences to one personally, but collectively it would prove disastrous, especially for a society that relies so heavily on knowledge and information to survive.
Ironically, the claim that we cannot really know anything about God assumes even greater knowledge than the one who is trying to find an answer. To say one “can’t” know something about a subject is claiming to know something actually quite bold about the subject. In fact, in order to know something as unknowable one would need near-omniscient level knowledge as one would need to have comprehensive knowledge of the nature of knowledge itself and know enough about the object to know that it does not fit.
Since there is this implicit assumption of empiricism and the physical sciences when it comes to knowledge, let’s think like scientists. When scientists conduct experiments, they assume a relationship of cause and effect. They assume that from observing effects we can come to know the existence and nature of a cause. Even when a cause has not been observed, one is still assumed. This is the same principle Aquinas puts forward in the Summa Theologiae, part I, question 2, article 2: “While an effect is better known to us than its cause, from the effect we proceed to the knowledge of the cause.”
No, we cannot know everything about God from this, but something is more than nothing. If you are confronted with a conversation stopper like, “Well, we can’t really know anything about God anyway?” ask, “Why not?” or better yet, “How do you know that?”
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