Knowing God

Thou knowest the weight of the sun and the moon.

"Holy and Transcendent art Thou, our Creator and Preserver:

Thou knowest the weight of darkness and light.

"Holy and Transcendent art Thou, our Creator and Preserver:

Thou knowest the weights of air and of shadow."

Even the natural qualities which scientists deduce on the basis of experiments which the senses can grasp, and the inferences ratiocination draws therefrom, cannot be directly perceived. Radiowaves are in movement in all directions, everywhere, all the time, yet not seen. No place is free of the forces of gravitational attraction, yet the force is not material nor can particles of it be found for measurement.

The task and triumph of science is the study of the effects of invisible forces and the formulation of their inner laws of being and operation. 

Geology traces the formation of the strata in the earth's crust. With absolute certainty they inform us of the order of their formation over millions of years; and from their clines and anti-clines, their folds and outcroppings; tell us how the oceans came into being, how they spread, how the mountain chains were formed, how the continental plates have moved into their present positions. Yet no person now alive was there to witness any of these events about which they so confidently instruct us. And we believe them, without ourselves having seen any of it. 

Metaphysical concepts like beauty or love, hate and enmity, and knowledge possess a form of existence which cannot be perceived nor its nature determined nor its limits fixed. Yet we nonetheless recognise them as realities. A man is conscious of knowing, and of what he knows, and of his perceptions of truths which cannot be felt by the senses. Man is also conscious of himself within his person, though no other human can observe that self. It is only observation of actions which enables us to deduce that a personal will inspires them. 

Does the intangibility of these factors and the inscrutability of their qualities necessarily involve a denial of their existence? Atheists imagine that the existence of God must involve His occupying bodily space and time. They think that unless He possesses a set of limbs like themselves, His existence cannot be accepted. But these are the concepts of idolaters who set up temples with images. Since the eye of their mind and their reason is blind, they conclude that if a god exists, that deity must enjoy the same sort of existence as themselves, always within visual range. Further, since they feel that the most certain and accurate of their perceptions are those of the senses, they limit themselves to these, forgetting that problems of science and philosophy cannot be solved solely upon perception by the senses. Such a concept can only be misleading. Sense-perceptions alone cannot encompass the whole range of realities and of facts as they are made clear to us. The very eye which is our means of achieving certainty about some realities, is quite incapable of displaying other realities. Books of psychology have revealed a great deal to us on the subject of errors of sense-perception and have drawn our attention to a varied series of errors which the eye makes. They show us, in a kaleidoscope, moving pictures with waves of beauty and many changes, none of which has any independent reality but is due to the inbuilt errors of sight. Similarly, cinematographic films would not present a continuous picture to us were it not that the eye fails to distinguish the innumerable separate frames from each other, but sees them as one continuous picture in movement.