God: Knowable or not Knowable?

It is possible to know God, but it is impossible to know if you know God.

If God is omnipotent, he can choose to have any one of us know him, to understand at least some part of his entity and his intentions and thus to enable a real relationship to exist.Unfortunately, we'd never know if we it was God we were interacting with or just ourselves...and there is no way to test the hypothesis in anyway to increase our confidence in our 'knowledge'.; our knowledge is unverifiable. We can quibble over whether this counts as 'knowing' someone - but I did warn that it was short and sweet, not a comprehensive epistemological critique of theology.

Did you see Message 8?

Excellent, excellent. I cannot refuse such a gentlemanly request. I will explain using the wonderful tool of analogy first.Imagine Joe, he has an accident and loses his memory. He has absolutely no recollection of any event before the accident. During the examination a psychiatrist asks him, "What is the name of the tallest mountain the world?".
"Mount Everest", Joe Responds.The psychiatrist would be completely reasonable to assume that Joe knows that name. Philosophers might quibble, but let's ignore them for the moment."Are you sure?", asks the Doctor
"Yes...I think so"
"What evidence do you remember that confirms this?"
"I...I can't think of any...I just...somehow, know it is Everest. Am I right?"So Joe knows the tallest mountain, but we can't really say that he knows he knows what the tallest mountain is. The Devil's philosopher is eager to have his say, so we'll let him."But Mod, Joe doesn't know that he knows something. We call this a belief not a piece of knowledge. That in this case he happened to be correct is merely incidental."Thanks DP, you have a point. However, in this particular instance the Doctor could reasonably assume that Joe didn't get the information out of his ass...and that somewhere in his brain the information "Everest" is stored in relationship with "Tallest mountain on planet". That he is not consciously aware of this is a problem for Joe but it doesn't detract from Joe's knowledge.Now, let's rewind the clock. This time imagine Abraham. Not the president, but the patriarch. God enters into a relationship with Abraham, makes promises and asks Abraham to make a big gesture to prove his trust in Him. God thinks about Abraham's predicament for a moment. Abraham knows God, there is no doubt about that (hush there DP) but Abraham doesn't know that he knows God. DP would say that Abraham only believes in God, but let's skip over DP again for the time being.Abraham knows God, from his perspective, and he is more sure than Joe is about his orological quiz. After all, Joe can't even remember why he knows Everest is the tallest mountain...he just does. But he must trust that he isn't going crazy because if he is - he's about to do something quite extreme and terrible. Though he is more sure than Joe right now, Abraham has limited ability to verify his knowledge/belief any further. He could ask God to do something highly improbable and specific in front of spectators...and in the Old Testament god was more or less obliging in this regard. However, nowadays it is accepted he is not so apparent and we are left with relying purely on revelation to guide us through. This is what I was speaking towards so we'll forget putting God to the test.Joe could get an answer from the psychiatrist, confirm it with multiple books, he could measure all the mountains in the world himself, or any other number of feats to help verify his knowledge. Abe does not have this, just the inner knowledge that God has indeed spoken to him.Finally and more directly to the original point, in his omnipotence God could instil knowledge of him into someone's brain/soul whatever. He could make sure that that person does not doubt that knowledge. However, just because the person doesn't doubt that they know that they know - that doesn't mean they actually do know that they know.Finally, God might try and instil the knowledge of knowing in the person - but person in question would not be able to tell the difference between actually knowing that they know and simply believing it to be true with 100% conviction.In short - knowledge that comes from "within" as it were, cannot be said to be knowledge unless we can verify that it is true. At any given point the conclusion might be reached that we are crazy (if hearing voices, seeing visions) or perhaps just misguided (if we feel it is true rather than see/hear it being declared). To verify something we cannot refer to the source (the internal) but to the external. We can never be sure we aren't mad (because the external gets to us via the internal - so to clumsily speak), but our madness must be very deep if every test in the external seems to confirm it.To conclude, a third party observer can only conclude that you know you know something if the thing you say you know is true. The third party can only know if it is true by looking for verification away from the source. If that is not a possibility we cannot say that we know that they know it, only that they believe it strongly. So the rhetorical question is: How could possibly know that it was God you were getting to know, and not a hallucination? It is rhetorical because there is no way to externally confirm it. I get this a lot. I can only modestly conclude from this evidence that I am best suited to serial killing. I am a white male in my 20s and I am apparently overqualified and underemployed. I'm a pretty good match up to that career - and I'm an atheist to boot and some people out there would certainly say that just ups my qualifications My full username is Modulous Prime, which works doubly well. Actually my real surname is very rare - so it is just begging for immortality by being associated with a groundbreaking philosophical worldview - though I'd prefer a lab method that goes towards curing cancer or something.Sorry for the small epic there. You can see why I opted for the short and sweet version. I don't lay claim to the argument being bullet proof either - it is not a line of thought that I've discussed a lot so I haven't found a good coherent way of expressing it. Please feel free to point out where you think I've slipped up

Well, it doesn't detract from my point. If the entity is able to do anything, that would necessarily include forging a relationship with a human and having that human know it.

I think you might have gotten something out of that that I didn't put into it; I am glad you were at least partially inspired by what I wrote though. I might be tempted to debate what each of us think it means - but I think we both already know that we don't agree on the conclusions and where we differ, so I'm happy to leave it at what 'meeting of the minds' we were able to achieve and not focus on any differences right now. Of course, if you'd like to debate it further, I'm happy to do so. We'd probably use different words, but you might be surprised to know that most atheists have similar feelings. Obviously they don't go as far as to say that the source of wonder reciprocates that feeling. I'll quote Hitchens on this since he nicely put it:

quote:

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It's innate in us to be overawed by certain moments, say, at evening on a mountaintop or sunset on the boundaries of the ocean. Or, in my case, looking through the Hubble telescope at those extraordinary pictures. We have a sense of awe and wonder at something beyond ourselves, and so we should, because our own lives are very transient and insignificant. That's the numinous, and there's enough wonder in the natural world without any resort to the supernatural being required.

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Thanks for the POTM by the way

If it is possible for a human to form a relationship with IT, then of course that would be another way for us to argue that the human 'knows' IT. Unfortunately, they still don't know they know it. They are still in the position of not being able to verify their knowledge so it could be easily argued that this is better described as a belief (in this case, a correct one).

I'm not sure how something can be true 'in someone's life'.

Oh sure, subjective things like taste are one thing in which our beliefs are true, but I'm talking truths about objective things. If we're talking about knowing a god which is a subjective entity then we're talking about a different entity than the one I was talking about.

The god I was referring to existed independently of us, and not as a result of us.

The proposition 'I like the taste of x' could be said to 'true in my life', but the taste of x is subjective. The x is objective. So, Cherry Garcia is objective to you, your liking of its flavour is subjective. Likewise with god, the god I describe exists objectively - whether you like it or not is a matter of subjective taste.

Correct. How does this god exist objectively? In much the same way Cherry Garcia does. It is an entity that exists independently of those that enjoy its taste.

That was basically my point, since verification is out, we cannot know we know anything about it and it might be better characterized as belief rather than knowledge.