Why No Religion Can Have the Whole Truth About God

We haven’t yet tackled the large question of whether God exists––though we will. First, though, I want to say that one of my really big reasons for writing about God is that it’s been clear to me for a long time that, if God exists, no single religion, or even any combination, could have the whole truth about God. God is infinite. If you don’t yet believe in God’s existence, take this as a statement about our conception of God. You don’t believe in Santa Claus’s existence either, I assume, but you’ll agree that when we talk about Santa Claus, we’re talking about someone who gives presents to children around the world at Christmas. And when we talk about God, we’re talking about a being who is infinite.

If there is such a being, then by definition, no matter how much we know about it, there is more to know. Even if everything we know about this being is true, which is itself questionable, as I’ll show in a moment, and even if we know a lot, we also know that what we know is an infinitely small amount of what there is to know. Think of the series of positive whole numbers, starting with 1, 2, 3, 4, .... This is an infinite series. No matter how high we count, we will never get to the highest number, because there’s always a number higher than that. In fact, there is an infinity of numbers higher than the biggest number we can come up with––the one after it, and the one after that, and the one after that....

So even if God revealed God’s self to a prophet or series of prophets who got the message with complete accuracy, and even if the revelation continued over years and generations, it would still be incomplete. That might not matter if the revelation/s imparted just the stuff we need to know about God. We’re finite beings, after all, and the stuff about God that’s relevant to us is overwhelmingly likely to be finite as well. So it’s possible that a finite revelation could be both true, and, in practical terms, complete. Or is it?

I don’t think so. Here’s why. Any revelation to human beings has to come through a human being––a human being with a certain physiology, heredity, temperament, language, culture, and experience. The revelation has to be filtered through all those, because there’s no other way to do it. Think about it. Let’s say God bypasses language altogether by putting an experience of what God wants to convey directly into a prophet’s mind. There are two problems here. First, the prophet’s mind is limited/finite because she’s human. So only so much, within a range of what’s experienceable, can be conveyed. I can’t have an experience I’m not capable of having, and neither can she. Let’s take care of that for now by deciding that what God wants to transmit can fit inside that range. But now comes the second problem. The prophet has to convey that experience to others. And that’s full of pitfalls.

First, she has to reduce it to language. Any language has only so much it can do to convey experience. Some languages have lots of words for love, some have only one. Some have a huge vocabulary for emotions, some don’t. Some can express delicate shades of moral goodness and its opposite, some are pretty crude in that area. Our prophet is stuck with the language she speaks, both in the sense that she’s limited in how to convey the message, and also that she’s limited in how she understands the message, because our language shapes our perceptions. People who speak languages with few color distinctions, or snow distinctions, actually don’t see the differences that people with richer vocabularies do. It’s not that their eyes are different from people’s with bigger vocabularies, but the differences their eyes see don’t register as “making a difference” with their minds, and so they ignore them.

So our prophet is bound to filter her non–verbal, direct revelation of God’s truth through her language. She can’t help it; there’s no other way to do it. In addition, she has associations with words that she’s acquired through her life, and that aren’t identical with other people’s, who have their own associations with, and understandings of words and language. So her choice of language may not convey the same meaning to a hearer or reader as it does to her. Anyone who has ever been a reader or a writer knows this problem. What seems crystal clear to the writer is murky to the reader––or clear to most readers, but not to all.

And the level of individual words is only the beginning of her troubles. She has an insight, direct from God, about God’s nature. She thinks of a metaphor to explain it: God loves us as a father loves his children. That may be a great metaphor, but it already filters the insight and thus, to at least some extent, distorts it. Another metaphor––say, God loves us as a lover loves his beloved––might have been just as accurate but different. And the accuracy of both depends on the culture––how fathers and lovers express love.

Even if God chooses to bypass these problems by dictation, as the intermediary Gabriel is said to have dictated the Koran to Mohammed, they can’t be avoided. God is stuck with the language the prophet speaks. And when the message is translated, or taken to an audience significantly different from the original one, or is several centuries old, and the language and culture have changed in the meanwhile––well, you see the problems.

And we haven’t mentioned an even bigger problem: religions are not the revelations of prophets. They are those revelations as understood by interpreters, codifiers, institutions, and hierarchies. Christianity is not Jesus. It’s the Gospels, Paul, and twenty centuries of church history. Etc., etc. Here, I don’t even think I need to argue that an error or two may creep in.

This discussion has been theoretical. In the world of real religions, it seems pretty clear that each has valuable insights, and each has parts that seem at least questionable. Christianity on love, Judaism on ethics, Buddhism on the problem of suffering, Taoism on non–action, to take just a few examples, strike most readers as conveying insights that are both true and important. And wouldn’t this make sense? If an infinite God does want to communicate with humans, or, put another way, if humans catch glimpses of God and of our place and purpose in the universe, doesn’t it seem plausible that these glimpses would occur through time and across space, that each would be different, and that each would be part of the truth but also contain distortions or important omissions? The Hindu story of the blind men and the elephant is probably the best parable about this, and is worth keeping in mind in any exploration of God.