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How can we possibly understand anything about God?

I’ve been trying to learn more about theology in general as well as Christianity in particular, and it seems common for philosophers to agree that God can do anything which doesn’t violate logic. He could sculpt a circle which is a quadrillion miles in diameter, but he couldn’t sculpt a circle with four sides because “a circle with four sides” is logically impossible, since that which has four sides is not a circle.

It is also often said of God that humans can only talk about him in terms of analogies. God is not literally jealous, loving, powerful and so on, it’s just that those are the closest human concepts that are analogies to God’s attributes.

We’re limited by our human minds, and it may just be that there are some things about God which we cannot fully understand, any more than an ant could hope to understand human psychology.

But the gap between an ant and a human is much smaller than the gap between a human and God. I don’t think an ant can meaningfully understand much about me at all, and I’m also struggling to see how I can meaningfully understand anything about God.

The common answer seems to be to have faith, but then how shall I know what to have faith in? There are a lot of people who have faith in things which are simply not true, and it seems at least conceivable to me that I might honestly try to navigate towards truth and be simply mistaken.

Is the Pope correct about God? What about Martin Luther? What about Marcion? What about Muhammad? Even from a starting point of perfect faith in God, it still seems that my understanding of him will be wildly different depending on which human philosophy I choose to follow, and given I cannot possibly grasp the divine directly it seems I have no way of knowing which way to navigate.

So, how can I know anything about God?

submitted by /u/TangoJavaTJ
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