Encyclopedia of Opinion

Question: Does God exist?
Position‹2 of 3›: We can't know whether God exists
Argument‹2 of 2: We cannot comprehend God

Knowledge of God’s existence is unattainable because evidence of God’s existence is unattainable.

The argument

There is a strong theistic tradition that holds that our ability to comprehend God is limited. Our concepts are derived from our experiences, and our experiences are of flawed and finite existence; we therefore lack the conceptual tools necessary to understand what God is really like. God is incomprehensible to us. According to this tradition, when we apply our human concepts to God, describing him in terms that we have derived from our experience of the world, we must take great care. For God is neither flawed nor finite, and so our standard categories of thought do not apply to him. When we say that God is good, for example, we must remember that divine goodness is not the same thing as human goodness. Because God’s being transcends our experiences of the mundane, he transcends our understanding, and we can describe him only in borrowed language which fails to accurately describe him. In stressing God’s incomprehensibility, the distance between his being and our categories of thought, this tradition gives ammunition to the agnostic. To the extent that God is beyond our understanding, knowledge of God is presumably also beyond our understanding. The greater the distance between God and that which we have known, the more difficult it will be to answer the question as to whether or not God exists. If God is truly incomprehensible, then how can we affirm either theism or atheism?

Context

Theists have often been content to say that we are unable to comprehend God, that his being transcends our mundane experiences and that our concepts, which are derived from such experiences, cannot be used to describe him. If true, then this might be thought to count in favour of agnosticism; if we cannot comprehend God, then how can we reason with any confidence concerning his existence?

Premises

[P1]A strong theistic tradition holds that God is incomprehensible: our concepts are derived from finite, flawed experience, so our standard categories of thought — even "goodness" — cannot accurately apply to a being that is neither flawed nor finite. [P2] If God's being transcends our understanding this way, then knowledge of God is likewise beyond us, and the greater that distance the harder it becomes to affirm either theism or atheism. [C] Because we cannot comprehend God, we can't know whether God exists.

Counter-arguments

The tradition being borrowed from reaches the opposite conclusion, and for a reason the argument does not answer. Apophatic and classical theologians distinguish between knowing that something exists and comprehending what it is: on their account the arguments for God's existence proceed from features of the world — that anything exists at all, that it is ordered — and conclude to a cause whose nature then remains beyond our concepts. Aquinas is the standard case, holding both that God's essence exceeds human understanding and that God's existence is demonstrable. If existence and essence come apart in this way, incomprehensibility of nature leaves the existence question open rather than unanswerable. The inference also generalises badly. Physics posits entities whose intrinsic nature is not available to intuition and whose properties resist the categories derived from ordinary experience, and this is not usually taken to make their existence unknowable. Knowing that something is there is routinely achievable through its effects while what it is remains obscure. There is a further instability in the conclusion. If the concept is truly incomprehensible — if our terms fail to apply at all — then it is unclear what proposition the agnostic is suspending judgement about. Radical incomprehensibility pushes toward the view that the sentence lacks determinate content, which is a different position from not knowing whether it is true, and one that would equally embarrass the theistic tradition the argument is drawing on. Finally, the position has better support elsewhere and does not need this. The evidential stalemate — arguments from contingency and fine-tuning on one side, the problem of evil and divine hiddenness on the other, none commanding assent — is the ordinary ground for agnosticism, and it does not require the strong claim that the subject is beyond thought.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The tradition invoked distinguishes knowing that something exists from comprehending what it is, and holds both — Aquinas is the standard case, maintaining that God's essence exceeds human concepts while God's existence is demonstrable — so the premise's own source denies the inference drawn from it. [Rejecting P2] Knowledge of existence is routinely obtained through effects while intrinsic nature remains obscure, as with entities in physics whose properties resist categories derived from ordinary experience; and if incomprehensibility were as complete as the premise requires, it would be unclear what proposition the agnostic suspends judgement about, which is a different position from not knowing whether it is true. [Rejecting C] The position also has ordinary support the argument does not use — the standoff between arguments from contingency and fine-tuning and those from evil and divine hiddenness — which yields agnosticism without the far stronger claim that the subject lies beyond thought.

Proponents cited

Thomas Henry Huxley
“I neither affirm nor deny the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing it, but, on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it.”
Bernard d'Espagnat
“It seems clear indeed that the power of conceptualization of the human being is superior to that of the dog and even of the monkey. So who tells us that man has reached the limit in this area? And if it is not so, who guarantees us that the bottom of things, which is not accessible to the dog, is ours? We thus arrive at the idea that if we are loath to see ourselves as existing alone we must take seriously the notion of a bottom of things: supremely real but, on the other hand, situated so far beyond the scope of our concepts, as well familiar than mathematical, that phenomena, both those we perceive and those that science describes, do not allow us to decipher it. On him they provide at best glimmers, and again, very uncertain. That's why I call it the real veiled.”
Brian green
“Thus, to seek space time in what is familiar to us in the most fundamental laws of Nature could be an attempt to appreciate Beethoven's Ninth Symphony only note by note, or the paintings of Monet brush by brush stroke. like these masterpieces of human expression, space-time as a whole might be so different from its parts that nothing like it would exist at the more fundamental level.”
Robert Ingersoll
“Is there a supernatural power—an arbitrary mind—an enthroned God—a supreme will that sways the tides and currents of the world—to which all causes bow? I do not deny. I do not know—but I do not believe.”