Many Eastern religions make this claim about God. So do Muslims. Unfortunately it is incoherent.
To say God is unknowable is either a statement about God, or a statement about ourselves. If it is a statement about God it is an affirmation that he has no properties capable of being known. And yet having at least one property is what differentiates existence from non-existence. If God has no properties, then he doesn’t exist. If it is a statement about ourselves—our ability to know a God with specific properties—then it is self-refuting because the statement itself is a claim to know something about God: he is unknowable. If God was unknowable, we would not even be able to know that He was unknowable. This can be pointed out by asking, “How do you know God is unknowable if nothing can be known of God? Isn’t that something you know about him?”
Either way you look at it, that statement is incoherent.
Thinking to Believe 
July 29, 2007 at 2:27 pm
If God was unknowable, we would not even be able to know that He was unknowable. This can be pointed out by asking, “How do you know God is unknowable if nothing can be known of God? Isn’t that something you know about him?”
I’m not sure I agree.
I assert: the eye color of Saint Peter’s paternal grandfather is unknowable to us.
You respond: How do you know that his eye color is unknowable if nothing can be known about his eye color? Isn’t that something about his eye color?”
Should one say “the only thing that’s knowable about God is that his characteristics are unknowable”?
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July 30, 2007 at 11:15 am
Arthur,
I appreciate your thoughtful response. Let me respond in turn.
I don’t think your example of Peter’s gramp’s eye color is analogous to the claim being made about God. Remember, I said the claim can be a statement about God, or our own knowledge of God. If it is a statement about God, it means he has no properties to be known. In your analogy, if someone says “we can’t know Peter’s grandpa’s eye color,” do they mean to say that gramps didn’t have an eye color? No. They believe his eyes were an objective color. So it’s not analogous on that end.
If it is a statement about our own knowledge of God, it makes a claim to some specific attribute of God while denying that God’s objective attributes can be known (subjectively). In your analogy, if someone says “we can’t know Peter’s grandpa’s eye color,” are they claiming to know some specific attribute they say can’t be known? No. It’s not analogous on this end either because your assertion, unlike their assertion, is not self-contradictory. You are not claiming to know something that can’t be known. If you said, “No one can know the eye color of Peter’s gramps. I know it”, or “No one can know the eye color of Peter’s gramp’s brown eyes”, that would be analogous.
But there is another way in which your assertion differs from their’s that has to do with the difference between personal ignorance, and the impossibility of knowledge. Let me unpack it.
There is a big difference between claiming not to know anything about God, and claiming that it is impossible to know anything about God. [This distinction is similar to the two different types of atheists: those who say they don’t have any reason to believe God exists (weak atheists), and those who say they know God does not exist (strong atheists)]. In my post I am referring to those who claim it is impossible to know anything about God (strong “deniers”), not those who claim to know nothing of God personally (weak “deniers”).
Weak deniers only claim to have no personal knowledge (negative knowledge) of God’s attributes, but admit that in principle his attributes could be known, may be known by others, and may be known by themselves in the future. Strong deniers, however, say they know (positive knowledge) that in principle, we cannot know anything about God. Weak deniers are making claims about themselves as individuals, while strong deniers are making universal claims about knowledge.
The problem with strong deniers is that by affirming that as a matter of universal principle it is impossible to know anything about God is itself a claim to know something about him. How so? Being unknowable would be an attribute of this deity. To know this would be to know at least one attribute of God, which contradicts the idea that one cannot know anything about God. That’s why I don’t think your suggested rephrase will work. God’s unknowability would be a characteristic about God, so you can’t say his characteristics are unknowable. In essence you are saying, “We can’t know any characteristics about God. Here is one.”
My point may have been lost in all of that unpacking, so let me be explicit. Your assertion differs from the one I am discussing in that your assertion does not mean to say that Peter’s gramp’s eye color is unknowable in principle. Indeed, there are people who know what color of eyes he had. They just happen to be dead, and that knowledge is lost to us. We do not possess that knowledge, not because it is unknowable in principle, but because it is unknowable by historical fact. Since no one who knew his eyecolor wrote it down for us, we don’t know it. But if someone had written it down, we could have known it. That “could have” is very important, because strong deniers believe it is impossible for anyone, anytime to know anything about God. And unlike Peter’s gramps, God is not dead, so he can still reveal himself to us (tell us his eye color if you will). While there is a good practical reason we are prevented from knowing Peter’s gramp’s eye color, there is no good practical reason we are prevented from knowing at least some of God’s attributes.
Does this make sense to you?
Jason
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July 30, 2007 at 11:57 pm
How’s that Master’s Thesis progressing?
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August 1, 2007 at 10:58 am
It’s going well. Thanks for asking.
Arthur 😉
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