Lent 2026: day 40 – is God is knowable or unknowable?

 For Marek

What can we say of God with certainty? That God is good, that God is love? Or, that because of God's ineffable nature, and because of the limitations of human reasoning and language, God is entirely unknowable? We humans seem destined never to understand God through our human reason, through logic, through scientific method. The metaphysical lies forever beyond our grasp.

What, though, of our physical world? Will we even get to understand that? This is has been the pursuit of science since the late 17th century. Since then, mankind has built up an ever-more complete grasp of the immutable laws that govern everything from the inner workings of an atom to an expanding Cosmos full of galaxies, and on the basis of that knowledge, had developed technologies that have vastly improved the quality of our lives.

While our scientific knowledge has grown exponentially, we are still a long way off from knowing it all.

In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking posits three possibilities for a grand unified theory of everything that will satisfy our ultimate curiosity about the Universe:

1. There is a theory of everything “which we will someday discover”.

2. There is no theory of everything, “just an infinite sequence of theories” that describe reality with ever-greater degrees of accuracy, but never ultimately ties up all the loose ends, much like Zeno's paradox of only ever getting halfway to your destination.

3. There is no theory of everything – “events cannot be predicted beyond a certain extent”. Hawking stops himself from going further and stating the possibility that the Universe might be fundamentally unknowable.

So I would add a fourth possibility: it is not for us, Homo sapiens, to ever come up with a workable theory of everything. Our brains are just too puny to get to grips with the complexity of an unfolding Universe. Not only is the metaphysical beyond our grasp, but the physical is too. Maybe Homo superior will get there, maybe not.

All that is certain to us is conscious experience and our intuitions relating from that experience. Gnosis. Knowledge through experience rather than knowledge through learning. The one thing I do know for sure is that I am conscious. Indeed, I am conscious of being conscious. This is the fundamental base substrate of my subjective reality. Aware of being aware, I am! 

"Are you a Trinitarian or a Unitarian?" "Do you believe in Transubstantiation or  Consubstantiation?" Thousands perished for replying with the 'wrong' answer. But ultimately, do nuances of dogma matter at all?  Does God even care what we understand God to be?

This is why I find religious fundamentalism of all sorts intolerable; fundamentalists proclaim certainty of that which by definition is unknowable. Divine inspiration can only take us so far. We can merely be aware that those who seek God are on a quest for knowledge that is ultimately doomed never to succeed. In this lifetime.

"Jesus said : "Let him who seeks cease not seeking until he finds"." – From the [Gnostic] Gospel of Thomas, 1:2.

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