A God Beyond Belief

Within the Jewish/Christian/Islamic tradition a key text is that God created human beings in His own image. (Genesis 1:27) It is unlikely this means that God is a biped because humans are bipedal. Image here cannot mean physical image. Traditionally this has been interpreted to mean humans were created in God’s image, regarding their rationality. “God is incomprehensible” then amounts to the claim that human rationality fails in attempting to understand God. If so there is no sense in which a belief in the existence of God makes sense. If the concept of God is incomprehensible, then all beliefs about God are empty of cognitive content, i.e. are essentially meaningless. In the early twentieth century this was the view of the logical positivists. They believed that one could have emotional feelings about God, but not any true or false beliefs. The view that God is incomprehensible is then intellectually self-defeating.