God: Knowable or not Knowable?

In some recent posts (Message 15; Message 14) as well as all the posts on this page, Phat has brought up the issue of the "knowability of God", as it were. He asserts that God is knowable and that a relationship is possible between humans and God. I hereby challenge that assertion, for the following reasons:

1. To have a (meaningful) relationship with an entity, empathy is required.
   1. Empathy is the ability to see the world in the way someone else sees it.
2. To empathise with God would require us to see the world the way God does.
   1. To see the world the way God does would require us to have an equal understanding as God.
      1. To have an equal understanding to God would require that we either have Godly understanding, or
      2. Require God to decrease in Godliness to a point at which humans had an equal understanding.
   2. If humans increase to a Godly understanding, it would entail Godly understanding to supernaturally manipulate the world.
      1. This would remove God's specialness and just make Him another one among many (i.e., de-Godify Him).
   3. If God decreases in Godliness, then the characteristic that makes Him God (that is, His Godliness) would decrease to a human level.
      1. If God's Godliness decreases to a human level, then He simply becomes another one among many (i.e., it de-Godifies Him).
   4. To de-Godify God would be to make Him no longer God.
   5. We accept that there is, however, a God.
   6. Therefore we cannot have an understanding equal to God.
3. Since we cannot have an understanding equal to God, we cannot empathise with God.
   1. Since we cannot empathise with God, we cannot have a relationship with God.
   2. THEREFORE: We cannot have a relationship with God.

What do the folks around here think? Jon

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In considering the Origin of Species, it is quite conceivable that a naturalist... might come to the conclusion that each species had not been independently created, but had descended, like varieties, from other species. - Charles Darwin On the Origin of Species
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En el mundo hay multitud de idiomas, y cada uno tiene su propio significado. - I Corintios 14:10
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A devout people with its back to the wall can be pushed deeper and deeper into hardening religious nativism, in the end even preferring national suicide to religious compromise. - Colin Wells Sailing from Byzantium
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[Philosophy] stands behind everything. It is the loom behind the fabric, the place you arrive when you trace the threads back to their source. It is where you question everything you think you know and seek every truth to be had. - Archer Opterix [msg=-11,-316,210]

Thread copied to the God: Knowable or not Knowable? thread in the Faith and Belief forum, this copy of the thread has been closed.