Can Man Understand God? What Is Understanding?
Man cannot “understand” God because man is a finite being, rooted in space and time, whereas God is an infinite being, one whom space and time do not limit. Asking man to “understand” God is like asking your dog to understand mathematics. While the dog might be able to distinguish that two claps means “sit” and three claps means “lie down,” the dog cannot carry this “understanding” of numbers any further. It cannot learn calculus, or even basic addition and subtraction.
Man can gain some knowledge of God based on the things which He has left as evidences of Himself. I can understand reluctance to depend solely on the Bible for knowledge of God, especially if one is skeptical that there is a God. But there is much else to recommend a benevolent Supreme Being. Someone has said that it’s rather difficult to imagine flour, sugar, water, and oil suddenly whisking themselves up into a batter and depositing themselves into a cake pan. And, if you can bear with me quoting the Bible for a moment, there is a tremendous parallel between Genesis’s record that “the earth was without form, empty, and darkness covered the abyss” and the idea of the unformed universe swirling about before the Big Bang. The difference is that there is nothing to direct and organize the force of the Big Bang into light, dark, planets, stars, etc., whereas, with the creation account, God takes the formless matter that is swirling about and speaks what He wants it to do, and the matter does it. “Let there be light.” Could that not be the source of what science tells us was a huge explosion of matter?
Suppose I were an ant, walking along the surface of an unlit light bulb. And as I moseyed along, minding my own business, someone came along and switched on the lamp. Would it not seem to me as if the universe had just exploded with light? And would I be able to comprehend the enormous being that had effected this change in my little world? Certainly not. If a finger suddenly came down in front of me and lifted me from the burning surface of the bulb before I perished with the heat, I might catch a glimmer of this benevolent creature who could make light happen in an instant and who could save me from the dangers of it, but I would not “understand” that creature any more than a newborn infant understands that “mother” is the person who shoved him into this radically different world from the one to which he was accustomed, and that “mother” is now the one who feeds, diapers, comforts, and protects him. It is a knowledge, an understanding, into which the infant grows through experience and maturation.
Now suppose that I, the little ant, were deposited back onto my anthill and had to explain my wanderings to the queen. What would I tell her? “I was walking along and all of a sudden, everything flooded with light, as if something beneath my feet had exploded. And everything became unbearably hot—I thought I was going to die. But then a funny sort of gigantic stick came down and lifted me off of the burning thing, and set me down here. There is something out there that took care of me, when I was helpless. And it’s powerful! It made the world explode with light. But it’s gentle—it didn’t let me get hurt.” That would be the greatest extent of my ability as an ant to understand a person switching on a light and then rescuing me from death.
Understanding, then, on our human plane, is a faceted thing. I cannot understand God in the same way that I understand the workings of my car, because God is a being in a plane wholly removed from mine. I cannot understand a being that is not limited by time and space, because I am limited by time and space. But I can look at the world around me, examine it minutely, and come to the conclusion that there is, in fact, a benevolent Something that is both powerful enough to create order from chaos on a universal scale, yet is caring enough on a personal scale that “not a sparrow falls but He knows it.”
Thus, to reject God because you cannot understand or conceive of Him in the same way that you understand or conceive of your automobile is dangerous folly. It is like a newborn refusing to believe in “mother” because it cannot understand the words that she says to it or conceive of a being that is so much larger and more capable than itself. An infant does not really have the self awareness to say, “I have soiled my nappy and I am uncomfortable” or “I need to eat because my stomach is empty.” The infant knows only that it does not like whatever sensations it is encountering. An infant is limited by inexperience, lack of mobility, and lack of communication ability, yet it still understands, on some plane, that if it yells loudly enough, someone will come and correct whatever is discomfiting it. And its realm of understanding is utterly and completely limited by its helpless weakness. Could not humans, then, be infants in the realm of what we call “spiritual matters,” so that our weakness, our inexperience, and our inability to comprehend something so momentous render us unable to fully understand what it is that is wrong with us and do more than shriek in the hopes that Someone will hear and settle our discomfort?