Now if the religious skeptic is right, we can know nothing about God. And if we can know nothing about God, how can we know God so well that we can know that he cannot be known? How can we know that God cannot and did not reveal himself—and perhaps even through human reason?
Interpretation
The quote questions the apparent paradox of knowing God while also believing that He is unknowable.
Peter Kreeft's quote explores the logical contradiction within the skepticism about God's knowability. It raises profound questions about how one can assert that God is unknowable, while simultaneously claiming to understand God well enough to affirm that He cannot be known. This challenges both skepticism and the rationale behind religious beliefs, suggesting a deeper engagement with the nature of divine revelation and human understanding.
In practice
In a debate about faith and reason, this quote can be used to illustrate the complexities of understanding the divine.
Trusting God's grace means trusting God's love for us rather than our love for God. [...] Therefore our prayers should consist mainly of rousing our awareness of God's love for us rather than trying to rouse God's awareness of our love for him, like the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18:26-29).
Remembering the facts of death and Heaven gives us an even more pressing reason to learn to pray: We do not have an infinite amount of time. We are one day nearer Home today than we ever were before. I guarantee you that after you die you will not say 'I spent too much time praying; I wish I had watched more TV instead.'
Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, "I am." We are ontological oxymorons.
The modern mind always tends to reduce the greater to the lesser rather than seeing the lesser as reflecting the greater.
Our soul, like Mary's body, is to receive God Himself if only we, like her, believe, consent and receive; if only we speak her truly magic word fiat, "let it be." It is the creative word, the word God used to create the universe.
Protestants believe that the sacraments are like ladders that God gave to us by which we can climb up to Him. Catholics believe that they are like ladders that God gave to Himself by which He climbs down to us.
I have wondered at times what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the US Congress.
God has wisely kept us in the dark concerning future events and reserved for himself the knowledge of them, that he may train us up in a dependence upon himself and a continued readiness for every event.
It all goes back and back," Tyrion thought, "to our mothers and fathers and theirs before them. We are puppets dancing on the strings of those who came before us, and one day our own children will take up our strings and dance in our steads.
You see, the outcome of the battle is unimportant. What matters is the chaos, and the slaughter.
They're animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility
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