God: Beyond Comprehension, Not Beyond Knowable

Incomprehensible doesn’t mean unknowable. Revelation and reason show us that God’s nature is the Good.

One of the classic skeptical moves is an appeal to total incomprehensibility: "If God is incomprehensible, we can’t say anything about Him — including that He is good. For all you know, He could just as easily be evil." But this argument fails on several levels.

 

Misunderstanding “Incomprehensible”

Christian theology has long affirmed God’s incomprehensibility — but not in the sense that nothing can be known about Him.

• It means that God is not exhaustively knowable because He is infinite and we are finite.

• But incomprehensible does not equal unknowable. We can know God truly even if not totally.

For example, we don’t comprehend the universe in full, but we can still know truths about it (e.g., gravity, atoms). Lack of exhaustive knowledge does not equal lack of real knowledge.

False Symmetry: Equal Chance of Good or Evil

The skeptic says: “Any incomprehensible being has an equal chance of being good or evil.” That’s false.

• If God exists as the ultimate ground of morality, then His nature is necessarily the Good — not a coin flip between good and evil.

• Evil is not an independent essence; it’s a corruption of the Good. So God, as necessary being, cannot be “evil,” any more than pure light can be “dark.”

So the “equal chance” claim confuses ontological necessity with moral arbitrariness.

Revelation Solves the Problem

Christianity doesn’t claim we figured God out on our own. It claims God has revealed Himself — in creation, conscience, Scripture, and ultimately in Christ.

• If God reveals Himself, then what we know is anchored in His self-disclosure, not our speculation.

• So the skeptic’s argument ignores the category of revelation, which is central to Christian thought.

At the end of the day, the skeptic’s claim is self-defeating. “Something you don’t know about God could refute what you think you know.” But the same could be said of anything. I don’t know everything about the universe, but that doesn’t mean I can’t know true things about gravity, mathematics, or logic. If total knowledge is required for real knowledge, then the skeptic himself knows nothing — which collapses into self-defeating skepticism.