Imagine you've decided to visit a foreign city where you've never been before -- let us suppose someplace vast and
history-laden, but at the same time exotic and perhaps little known to you, such as
Bangalore or
Minas Gerias or
Sulawesi. So in preparation for this trip, you decide you must do some reading up on the place, and what you choose to read is.... an informational
postcard which was printed by the locality's ministry of tourism in 1961. That's it, a half-century old postcard. Now supposing that you, having read these few lines of material, are asked by another person to tell them, what is it really like in this place of which you've so briefly read? What are the
aspirations of its people, their
conflicts, their
problems, their
prohibitions? Would it not be downright dishonest for you to purport to know the answer to such questions based on the tiny proportion of information which you've undertaken to obtain, relative to all of the
possible information out there which a valid opinion ought to be formed from?
And what if this postcard was the only information available to you at all, or was representative of all of the quality of information available? What if no
website or
library had any report from any person who'd ever
been to that country and returned from it, but instead their information was generated by
philosophers speculating (without anything resembling a uniformity of
agreement between them) as to what this city and its denizens must be like? Hence the problem of having only a small portion of information available. And, absent a much fuller understanding obtained from other sources and experientially, we remain in no position to evaluate the correctness of even that portions of information which have been made available -- they may be biased, they may contain misprints or errors or outright falsifications.
But, naturally, God is not a city, for a city is terrestrial and finite; every existing city on Earth has a time of origin within the past few thousand years at the most; every one has finite boundaries, occupying no more than a speck on the crust of the world. It would be an understatement to observe that God, on the other hand, is substantially larger and older.
Many traditions hold that God is infinite along various dimensions; even if this is not so, there is no model of God which is not at least as old as our Universe itself, nor any model of an
omniscient God which is not at least as capacious as our Universe itself, and containing all
knowledge within our Universe.
But if God is infinite while human knowledge is finite, as it necessarily is, than human knowledge of God is a finite quantity
divided by infinity -- and the singular mathematical characteristic of any finite number divided by infinity is that it infinately approaches zero. Even the finite models of 'God,' it must be confessed, would likely still encompass all of the knowledge in our Universe, and would be so much so that finite human understanding of it would be nil, if at least not infinitely nil. Thus, any human knowledge of God is such an infinitessimal part that it is essentially nothing, and so is worth nothing. A human claim to 'know' anything about God even through all of the information available to humankind (every human compiler of such information similarly knowing 'nothing' about God) is infinitely less correct than one claiming to 'know' everything about a large and ancient and foreign city by reading an old postcard.
Nor is knowledge necessarily of any consistent quality. For example, were the anthropomorphized
spirit of
water itself to appear and hand you a photograph of a glass of tap water, it would be absurd to pretend to know all about all waters on Earth through that example. For, though it is an image of the form which is most easily obtained in one's own home, it is highly unrepresentative of the waters of the rivers and lakes, much less the vast and living salty seas and oceans of Earth. And if all the knowledge of water one has is a picture of a glass of tap water in hand, and the vague sense that there are billions and trillions more glasses worth out there in unknown conditions, then holder of that picture occupies no better a position to speak of the nature of all the world's water than one who holds nothing at all.
And so, whoever claims God to be infinite must concede that in their finite knowledge they know essentially nothing about God. And whoever claims God to be as old and as great as our Universe must know precious little more than that, proportionately. This is not a question of what about God is worth understanding, or what about God people believe they are supposed to know, for any knowledge claimed would really be none at all. Whoever is indeed willing to confess that God is infinite or incomprehensibly great, confesses in the same breath that they know and can ever know essentially
nothing about God. In which event, what business have they, or any man, to speak authoritatively of what God wants, or to seek to impose whatever they contend, with their infinitely miniscule pocket of knowledge, to be God's will?