This discussion is spurred by the question of a listener after an interview about my new book Pandemic of Lunacy: How to Think Clearly When Everyone Around You Seems Crazy in the podcast “Victor Davis Hanson, in His Own Words, with guest host Jack Fowler.”

Query:

I appreciate the discussion.  I might ask, however, about the “delusion that God is unknowable.”  The chat you had did not go into any real depth but rather deflected to some kind of “abstention from belief because who cares,” which is not at all the same question and does not raise anything like the same issues.  I am an Orthodox Christian and as far back as St. Justin Martyr, it has been a core Christian concept that God, in His essence, is in fact unknowable because we cannot rightly define what He is in Himself.  However, that only speaks to His transcendance.  He is also immanent and in that sense, He is entireely knowable.  ....  Now that Orthodoxy has begun to show in the West, this becomes an issue, but I don't see that this interview recognizes that.  Do you engage with that in any of your discussions?

Reply:

Yes, I do engage with that in the book, and you and I do not disagree.  What I criticize isn’t the idea that we cannot know God in His essence – we concur about that -- but the idea that we cannot know anything about Him at all.  We can know that God is, but not what He is in His transcendence.  Either you misheard me, or at some point my wording was careless, but your question is serious, and it deserves a serious answer.

We can actually know a lot of things about God:  For example, that He is real, that He is good, and that He is omnipotent.  Even someone who claims that God is such that we cannot know anything at all about Him must at least claim to know that much about Him.  So the agnostic is really claiming that we cannot know anyting else about Him. 

Indeed, as I argue in the book, to know God to be unknowable would be to know a great deal about Him.  First, one would have to know that even if He exists, He is infinitely remote, because otherwise one could not be so sure that knowledge about Him is so inaccessible.  Second, one would have to know that even if He exists, He is unconcerned with us, because otherwise one would expect Him to have provided us with the means to know about Him.  Finally, one would have to know that this hypothetical being is completely unlike the biblical portrayal of Him, because in that portrayal He does care and has already provided the means to know about Him.  So, in the end, the so-called agnostic must know quite a number of things about God, just to prop up his claim to be unable to know about Him. The problem is that, on his assumptions, each of these things is impossible to find out.

But I certainly don’t claim that in this life we can know God in His own Being.  You’re right to think we can’t, and on this point Catholics, Orthodox, and for that matter many Protestants, are in complete agreement.  The uncreated Creator is beyond our created minds.  Yes, in the next life the redeemed will enjoy the glory of the beatific vision, but in this life we have only glimmers, flashes, and reflections.

As St. Paul says, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.  Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.”

NEW STUFF

A new review of Pandemic of Lunacy has just been published in The American Spectator:

“A Texas Philosopher Takes On Relativism”