What Do we Know about God?

This uneasy feeling we have about God isn't hard to understand. We know life's not right, so either God messed up when he made this world or we messed up and God isn't making himself available to help us. The search for God has been working itself out for thousands of years. Has anyone ever found him?

Sure they have, or at least they claim they have - some experience of utter bliss that told them for sure that they'd made contact. Who could argue with that? Unless, of course, you want to know something for sure about him or you want to replicate the bliss experience yourself.

What exactly do we know about God? The choices are only two - we can know what we experience or we can know what he tells us. There is a difference. What we experience is internal and great for us, but it's a limited kind of knowing because we can't really share the knowledge. What God tells us, if he tells us anything, is more likely to be something the world can share.

But does he talk? Sure, there are people who claim to have heard messages from him. There are sacred Scriptures all over the place, but many of them contradict one another. There's the Bible, but how can we know that its vision of God and his world is actually going to help us make sense of him?

We could put the message to the test, dig into how accurate it is, look at its prophecies to see if they got fulfilled, and so on. But we might still end up disagreeing about whether or not it's trustworthy. The other way to test this message would be to look at it, see if it makes sense, see if it explains anything, see if gives us a believable answer to our deepest questions.

That's what I've tried to do in my book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Meaning of Everything. In this blog I'd like to spend some time exploring the Bible's vision of God himself. Who is he? What's he up to? How does he connect with us? What we know about God is too important an issue to ignore.