I Can Know the Mind of God
I want to make it clear that God is a character in a series of books known as the Bible. He is a fictional character. With that in mind, Christians often fall back to the view that we can’t know the mind of God and that God works in mysterious ways. But this really isn’t the case no matter how we look at it.
For starters, we need to realize that we are talking about two possible characters both called, “God.” The first is the character as he is literally described in the actual Bible. This is a literary character that is described quite vividly in the book series. He is wrath, vengeance, love, hate, the creator of good and evil, etc. He says many things in the book series and does a great deal too. We can understand this character by what he says and does. In this way we can know his mind in the same way we can know the mind of Darth Vader or Voldemort.
The second character of God is for those who don’t take the Bible all that seriously. God is seen as a vague higher power entity. We can’t really use the Bible as a description for this God because those who hold to it barely reference the Bible at all. The Bible is seen as a poor attempt to describe the character in the context of the time. Still, we can understand this more vague character by analyzing that character’s characteristic.
For example, this God is described as all-powerful, all-knowledge, omnipresent, and in most cases all-loving. Given these characteristics, we can understand the mind of this character. Unfortunately for those who believe in this character, reality kind of disproves such a being’s existence. This is by the Problem of Evil continues to haunt Christians 2500 years later. But I digress.
He point is that we can know the mind of God. We are rational beings with an imagination. We can put ourselves in God’s shoes so to speak and we could have a pretty good idea how such a character would act. When religious believes say that we can’t know the mind of God, they are just being unimaginative. This seems particularly odd to me since they did after all imagine their entire religion. This crap that we can’t understand the mind of God is just an excuse for ignorance. It is a different type of God of the Gaps.
Related articles
- I Would Believe in God If… (arizonaatheist.blogspot.com)
- Christians Don’t Really Believe in God (dangeroustalk.net)
- A High Tolderance for Absurdity (new.exchristian.net)
Filed under: anti-intellectualism, god, image of god, Religion, Vague Higher Power, wwjd