No-one has ever seen God...

Without any shadow of a doubt, my favourite verse in the Bible is this: "No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and [God's] love is made complete in us" (1 John 4:12). I love this verse because of its brutal honesty. No-one has ever seen God! In a day and age where “science” has become the bedrock for truth, this appears to be a reckless thing to say. It also appears to play into the very hands of those who want to deny God’s existence by asking for empirical proof. Unless you show me tangible evidence, some might say, I won’t accept God exists. Normally such evidence is grounded in the scientific method of requiring knowledge to be sense-based. So unless we can touch, taste, see, hear or smell something, it does not exist. Set up like this, "evidence" will always fail to prove the existence of that which lies beyond sensory experience. No wonder the absence of God screams at us in the modern world.

Yet such exacting demands for proof cannot be used to validate the certainty of empirical (or sense-based) knowledge. For instance, how do we prove the certainty of any knowledge we claim to have when logical gaps exist between perception and reality? For instance, are our thoughts being reliably transferred across the synaptic gaps in our brain? Stuff enters our mind via our senses, but how do we know our mind is doing a good job receiving this, sorting it, and then presenting it reliably within our own unique sphere of consciousness? Also, how can we be sure that we are each perceiving the same thing correctly? I cannot enter your sphere of consciousness to check that what you claim to know is the same as what I claim to know, we just presume it to be the case. Yet if knowledge is sense-based, how do we know that any mind is doing a good job processing its sense-based experiences correctly? In reality, we all live in a realm of uncertainty when it comes to knowledge. We cannot be sure that anyone is correctly perceiving anything. Thus the so-called "scientific method" for knowledge fails its own standards for verification, for none of us can claim to experience and know anything with any certainty unless we are unable to touch, taste, see, hear or smell things which reside outside our own sphere of consciousness. That we cannot do this means we are stuck inside the prison of our own mind! Who really knows anything?

"No-one has ever seen God", or for that matter, anything. We should be more honest about that, whether we believe in God's existence, or not. However, we also cannot leave it at that...