Is God Empirically Quantifiable? Or...how not to find God by searching.

Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection?

It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do? Deeper than hell: what canst thou know?

Job 11

 

 

Indeed!  Can we find God by searching?  Is God empirically quantifiable?  Or is God a subjective experience of humanity?  Is this divine immanence something that we learn within our human society and personal experience?

 

Note that, in this passage from Job, it is the knowledge of the divine itself that is as high as heaven…and deeper than hell. Thus the rhetorical question, but one very worthy of consideration: What canst thou know?

 

What can we know?  This is not a question to be dismissed in a cavalier manner.  It is not intended to be answered by quoting other biblical passages as a propositional response.  To do so is to miss the point.  God is something not directly knowable, or even searchable, in the way we think of verifiable knowledge.  The book of Job is actually better at asking some intriguing questions than at providing pat answers. And Job 11 is just one group of those questions.

 

Yes, God is in heaven and, we now know, in hell too.  But there is something else as high as heaven and actually deeper than hell.  And that is the finding out of God.  God is found in our most sublime experiences of life.  God is found in our deepest tragedies of life.  We live and move in this divine immanence.  We live and move in connection with others.  I cannot “find out God” by direct search, by empirical enquiry.  There is no essence to distill nor double blind test to devise.  By whatever name, this presence in homo sapiens is a light that we all know.  God is light.  God is love.  Biblical quotations and allusions to a deeper truth and experience.

 

Whether it is Ursala Goodenough writing The Sacred Depths of Nature or John Calvin writing his Institutes of the Christian Religion or the new Bible translation Jesus and the Presence of Mystery or even Rumi dancing in his Sufi way toward divine contemplation, we are all feeling our way to both name and to describe this indwelling sense that we often feel. Even Richard Dawkins’ affection for his bumper sticker “Atheists for Jesus” reflects this same impulse. Sunsets radiating beauty; babies cooing in our arms; or knowing peace in the midst of a very tough situation: these are all part of that searching out of our sense of what the divine-human mystery might be.

 

But when we misapprehend a figure of speech, when we literally anthropomorphize the idea of God, then we have rendered ourselves incapable of finding the real presence of that which we so loudly proclaim and so fervently believe.  The result is evident around us: the strong need of so many to control others, to conform them to the anthropomorphized entity that they have so sincerely and so misguidedly created.