Scepticism regarding the Nature of God

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Scepticism regarding the Nature of God

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Scepticism with regard to the existence of God is a well known phenomenon in the world of religion and metaphysics. While this has been the subject of thorough discussion, another form of scepticism, one which arises when the mind has reached insight into Divine existence, seems to have been given no similar attention. It is truly amazing to see how much men claim.

To know about God and with what certainty they claim to be able to distinguish the worship of God from idolatry. This is the more surprising, considering the stress on the 'otherness' of God, compared to all human concepts as well as the increasing acknowledgement of how immensely Infinity transcends the limits of finite human reason. Human reason may manage, by straining to the utmost, to just about grasp the existence of an Infinite Being, to just get a glimpse, form a faint idea that there is, and must be,existence beyond the limits of human understanding, as it becomes aware of its own limits; to attain some awareness of a form of existence transcending those limits; - the human mind has reasons to call this existence Divine. But, how men are able to reconcile the incomparable superiority of Divine existence and having very definite ideas about the nature and the will of God, remains not only unintelligible, but amounts to a real logical contradiction, even granting the assumption that the nature and the will of God has, to a limited extent, been revealed to them by God Himself. The concept of revelation implies that it conveys knowledge that is not available to the normal way of human reasoning.

On the other hand, God speaking to man presupposes the human faculty of receiving His message and its being adapted to the human mind. It is necessarily a human assertion that God has revealed himself to Man. How, then, can Man know that it is God who speaks to him - and not his own image of God?