A Question About God Is Also a Question About Knowing

A question about God is never asked from nowhere.

The word already arrives with language, culture, memory, doctrine, skepticism, imagery, experience, and inherited assumptions.

That does not make belief false.

It does not make disbelief false.

It means the question has an epistemological layer.

Werner Erhard has spoken about the difficulty of discussing being or God when conceptual models are mistaken for direct experience.

The useful point can be stated without deciding the metaphysics.

Before asking what God is, we can ask what we are already bringing to the word.

Is God being imagined as a person?

A cause?

A moral authority?

A presence?

A metaphor?

An impossibility?

A possibility?

A tradition's specific claim?

Different starting assumptions can produce arguments that sound like disagreements about reality while partly being disagreements about the question.

Epistemic humility does not require abandoning conviction.

It requires distinguishing conviction from the lens through which conviction became intelligible.

The question about God may remain open.

So can the question about how we know what we think we know about God.