Someone who encountered God asked Him: “How did you make all this universe?”
“I did not make it with words,” said God.
The assumption that everything can be rendered into words is a childish mistake made within a language game. If we cannot even put riding a bicycle fully into words, we certainly cannot describe God, whom we believe to be outside of or encompassing the universe. So what does all this talk of “God” actually convey? It muddies the water.
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” said Wittgenstein at the end of his first book. In his later period, however, he showed that the word God is not about a propositional claim to knowledge, but about the cultural game of the community that uses it. Indeed, anyone who uses this word with a bit of reflection would realize that they are harming God by doing so. For whoever claims to be the creator of the game ends up turning that creator into a toy.
God can mean the functioning of the universe, order, cause, source, motivation, scope, and hundreds of other things. It may even be an attempt to reflect an objective cosmological principle. Everyone—including those who speak of the gods of religions—will accept that the more this word is used, the more confused it becomes. Each individual imagines this abstract word differently and pulls it in a different direction.
So what should we do?
I, like many others, use “God” in conversations and texts—sometimes to fill a gap, sometimes to open a new perspective. The first way to compensate for this is to assume that we do not know and to use the term with caution. The second is what is called apophatic theology: attempting to evoke the concept by speaking of what it is not. The third compensation is to use the philosophical method—namely, to emphasize what we do not know and to engage in dialectic. The third method is the most respectful toward the God we believe in.
“God” through the philosophical method
Kierkegaard says that those who believe in God must abandon comfort and certainty and face reality. He implies that those who say “I believe” should put this claim to the test. To believe in God is to leap into uncertainty. Unfortunately, the concept of God has often been used as a safety device to feel secure. In philosophy, perhaps the greatest example of the impossibility of knowing God is Kant. For Kant, God is a projection that arises when reason collides with its own limits. When you position God as the power beyond this boundary, He ceases to be an “object of knowledge.” This does not make the believer a “knower”; rather, it turns them into a “traveler of wonder,” constantly reminded of the limits of their knowledge.
And yet, we still want to use “God”
Indeed, when we look at the cosmos, we cannot help but give it a name. Nature that renders us powerless, the passage from childhood to adulthood, decisions whose origins we do not know… In every event there are astonishing, unknown, and mysterious aspects. Although these may evoke God through intuition, we should try not to articulate the essence that lies beyond language. If it is to be articulated at all, we should do so fairly, by forming a discourse about how much we do not know. God cannot be an object of knowledge; we cannot pretend to know. Perhaps, as philosophers suggest, God can be an occasion for not-knowing. Anyone who truly believes in God—or who operationalizes this concept—should present unknowability as a sign of how we fail to know certain things. For no matter how we use it, this metaphysical essence within the language game should lead us not to knowledge and certainty, but to not-knowing and uncertainty.
